Jeopardy. Linda Howard
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the hell are you thinking?” he began in a tone of barely leashed violence, then cut himself off, staring at her face. His expression altered, his golden-brown eyes darkening.
“You’re bleeding,” he said harshly. He grabbed his handkerchief out of his pocket and pressed it to her chin. Despite the roughness of his tone, his touch was incredibly gentle. “You said you weren’t hurt.”
“I’m not.” She raised her trembling hand and took the handkerchief, dabbing it at her chin and mouth. There wasn’t much blood, and the bleeding seemed to have stopped. “I bit my lip,” she confessed. “Before you landed, I mean. To keep from screaming.”
He stared down at her with an expression like flint. “Why didn’t you just scream?”
“I didn’t want to distract you.” The trembling was growing worse by the second; she tried to hold herself steady, but every limb shook as if her bones had turned to gelatin.
He tilted up her face, staring down at her for a moment in the deepening twilight. He breathed a low, savage curse, then slowly leaned down and pressed his lips to her mouth. Despite the violence she sensed in him, the kiss was light, gentle, more of a salute than a kiss. She caught her breath, beguiled by the softness of his lips, the warm smell of his skin, the hint of his taste. She fisted her hands in his T-shirt, clinging to his strength, trying to sink into his warmth.
He lifted his head. “That’s for being so brave,” he murmured. “I couldn’t have asked for a better partner in a plane crash.”
“Landing,” she corrected shakily. “It was a landing.”
That earned her another soft kiss, this time on the temple. She made a strangled sound and leaned into him, a different sort of trembling beginning to take hold of her. He framed her face with his hands, his thumbs gently stroking the corners of her mouth as he studied her. She felt her lips tremble a little, but then, all of her was shaking. He touched the small sore spot her teeth had made in her lower lip; then he was kissing her again, and this time there was nothing gentle about it.
This kiss rocked her to her foundation. It was hungry, rough, deep. There were reasons why she shouldn’t respond to him, but she couldn’t think what they were. Instead, she gripped his wrists and went on tiptoe to slant her parted lips against his, opening her mouth for the thrust of his tongue. He tasted like man, and sex, a potent mixture that went to her head faster than hundred-proof whiskey. Heat bloomed in her loins and breasts, a desperate, needy heat that brought a low moan from her throat.
He wrapped one arm around her and pulled her against him, molding her to him from knee to breast while his kisses became even deeper, even harder. She locked her arms around his neck and arched into him, wanting the feel of his hard-muscled body against her with an urgency that swept away reason. Instinctively she pushed her hips against his, and the hard length of his erection bulged into the notch of her thighs. This time she cried out in want, in need, in a desire that burned through every cell of her body. His hand closed roughly around her breast, kneading, rubbing her nipple through the layers of blouse and bra, both easing and intensifying the ache that made them swell toward his touch.
Suddenly he jerked his head back. “I don’t believe this,” he muttered. Reaching up, he prised her arms from around his neck and set her away from him. He looked even more savage than he had a moment before, the veins standing out in his neck. “Stay here,” he barked. “Don’t move an inch. I have to check the plane.”
He left her standing there in the sand, in the growing twilight, suddenly cold all the way down to the bone. Deprived of his warmth, his strength, her legs slowly collapsed, and she sank to the ground.
* * *
CHANCE SWORE TO HIMSELF, steadily and with blistering heat, as he checked the plane for fuel leaks and other damage. He had deliberately made the landing rougher than necessary, and the plane had a reinforced landing gear as well as extra protection for the fuel lines and tank, but a smart pilot didn’t take anything for granted. He had to check the plane, had to stay in character.
He didn’t want to stay in character. He wanted to back her against one of those big boulders and lift her skirt. Damn! What was wrong with him? In the past fifteen years he’d held a lot of beautiful, deadly women in his arms, and even though he let his body respond, his mind had always remained cool. Sunny Miller wasn’t the most beautiful, not by a long shot; she was more gamine than goddess, with bright eyes that invited laughter rather than seduction. So why was he so hot to get into her pants?
“Why” didn’t matter, he angrily reminded himself. Okay, so his attraction to her was unexpected; it was an advantage, something to be used. He wouldn’t have to fake anything, which meant there was even less chance of her sensing anything off-kilter.
Danger heightened the emotions, destroying inhibitions. They had lived through a life-threatening situation together, they were alone and there was a definite physical attraction between them. He had arranged the first two circumstances; the third was a bonus. It was a textbook situation; studies in human nature had shown that, if a man and a woman were thrown together in a dangerous situation and they had only each other to rely on, they quickly formed both sexual and emotional bonds. Chance had the advantage, in that he knew the plane hadn’t been in any danger of crashing, and that they weren’t in a life-and-death situation. Sunny would think they were stranded, while he knew better. Whenever he signaled Zane, they would promptly be “rescued,” but he wouldn’t send that signal until Sunny took him into her confidence about her father.
Everything was under control. They weren’t even in Oregon, as he’d told her. They were in Nevada, in a narrow box canyon he and Zane had scouted out and selected because it was possible to land a plane in it, and, unless one had the equipment to scale vertical rock walls, impossible to escape. They weren’t close to any commercial flight pattern, he had disabled the transponder so no search plane would pick up a signal and they were far off their route. They wouldn’t be found.
Sunny was totally under his control; she just didn’t know it.
The growing dusk made it impossible to see very much, and it was obvious that if the plane was going to explode in flames, it would already have done so. Chance strode back to where Sunny was sitting on the ground, her knees pulled up and her arms wrapped around her legs, and that damn bag close by her side. She scrambled to her feet as he approached. “All clear?”
“All clear. No fuel leaks.”
“That’s good.” She managed a smile. “It wouldn’t do us any good for you to fix the fuel pump if there wasn’t any fuel left.”
“Sunny...if it’s a clogged line, I can fix it. If the fuel pump has gone out, I can’t.”
He decided to let her know right away that they might not be flying out of here in the morning.
She absorbed that in silence, rubbing her bare arms to ward off the chill of the desert air. The temperature dropped like a rock when the sun went down, which was one of the reasons he had chosen this site. They would have to share their body heat at night to survive.
He leaned down and hefted the bag, marveling anew at its weight, then took her arm to walk with her back to the plane. “I hope you have a coat in this damn bag, since you thought it was important enough to risk your life getting it,” he growled.
“A sweater,” she said absently, looking up at the crystal clear sky with its dusting of stars. The black walls of the canyon loomed on either side of them, making it obvious they were in a hole in the earth. A big hole, but still a hole. She shook herself, as if dragging her thoughts back to the problem at hand. “We’ll be all right,” she said. “I have some food, and—”
“Food? You’re carrying food in here?” He indicated the bag.
“Just some emergency stuff.”
Of all the things he’d expected, food was at the bottom of the list. Hell, food wasn’t even on the list. Why would a woman on an overnight trip put food in her suitcase?
They reached the plane,