getting around whatever blocked the door was a mystery.
But water had a way of going where it wanted.
Take the Grand Canyon, for example.
“What would you say, then?”
His answer was curt. And unprintable.
Her mouth went dry. She backed down the wet steps.
He followed her and took the lantern from her fingers that had gone numb. “Don’t look like that.”
“Like what?” She wrapped her arms around herself. It was humid and warm in the cellar but she suddenly felt cold. How much water would the dirt absorb before it started to fill the cellar? “You just said nobody was here but us.”
“Not for a few days.”
She gaped. “A few days? So someone will find our bodies sooner or later?”
He set the lantern on the ground and put his arms around her. “You do have an imagination, don’t you?”
She nodded against his shoulder, breathing in the warm, comforting scent of him. “My teachers always told me that was a good thing. But this is not at all how I expected this day to go.”
“Me, either.” His hands slid down her spine. “We’ll get out of here before we’re reduced to bodies. The cellar has never flooded much more than ten, twelve inches before.”
The details were not a comfort. “I don’t know how to swim.”
“You’re not going to need to,” he promised.
She tilted her head back, looking up into his face. It really was a cussedly handsome one. From the cleft in his chin to the straight brows over his level gaze. “My mother will never forgive me for not giving her grandchildren.” Karen Lamonte had been going on about it ever since Ariana had broken off with Steven.
His eyebrows shot up and the corner of his lips lifted. “Pretty sure that’s not going to be decided here and now, sweetheart.”
She really didn’t know what was wrong with her. She’d never particularly been prone to panic before. But she’d also never found herself stuck in a storm cellar in a town nobody could seem to find except for those who actually lived there, in the company of a man who might or might not be another son of Gerald Robinson, but who definitely had an overwhelming appeal for her personally.
And focusing on Jayden was far preferable to thinking about what could happen if that water kept coming down the stairs.
“You have a scar,” she murmured inconsequentially and touched the faint white line above his eyebrow. “Right there.”
“Bar fight.” His lashes drooped and she knew instinctively that he was looking at her lips.
Without conscious thought, she moistened them. His fingertips were tracing her spine, setting off all manner of sensations inside her. “Are you, ah, in a lot of bar fights?”
“One or two. I stopped more of them.” He shifted slightly, pulling her in closer till her breasts were pressed against his chest. “I was an MP in the army.”
Her breasts were pressed against his chest. “MP?” Her voice was little more than a whisper.
“Military Police.” His head dropped toward hers. “Former badass Sergeant First Class Fortune at your service.” As he said the words his head lowered toward hers. His breath fanned her mouth as he said, “I’m going to kiss you, you know.”
Heat flushed through her veins, collecting in her center. Her head felt heavy as she looked up at him. Any hope of maintaining a professional distance had gotten washed away. “Former Sergeant, I sure hope so,” she breathed.
One of his hands left her back to slide along her jaw.
Her lips parted and she drew in a deep breath. She felt the way he went still when she slid her hands around his neck. His thumb brushed over her lower lip and she couldn’t help the soft sound that rose in her throat.
“Damn,” he murmured. And then his mouth found hers.
His kiss didn’t feel damned. If anything, his kiss felt glorious.
And if she was going to go in a storm cellar, at least she was going to go like this.
He lifted his head way too soon. His eyes were dark and unreadable in the dim lantern light, but the searching in them felt as real as the moisture leaching from his clothes into hers.
She pulled his head down. “If you’re going to kiss me,” she said as she caught his lower lip between hers and lightly tugged, “kiss me.”
He groaned, kissing her even more deeply. His hands traveled down her back, down her hips, her rear, pulling her up and into him. He was hard and her head whirled even more. All she wanted to do right then and there was twine herself around him and he seemed to know it because he yanked his mouth away from her and lifted her right off her feet.
“Put your legs around me.”
She didn’t need the request. She was already linking her boots behind him and wishing there weren’t two layers of denim between them. She couldn’t do anything about that at the moment, but she could do something about his shirt. She yanked it upward, hearing a few buttons scatter before he let out a low, groaning laugh and managed to pull it off his head.
She pressed her open mouth against his collarbone, tasting the moist, salty heat of his skin. He cradled her backside as he crouched down, finally lowering her onto the sleeping bag. One corner of her mind wondered if the thing was floating in water yet, but that didn’t stop her from reaching greedily between them for his belt.
He jerked and caught her hands in his, pinning them above her head against the sleeping bag.
“Don’t tell me you want me to stop.” In any other world, she’d have been shocked by her own boldness. But this wasn’t any other world. The only world that existed was contained in a flooding dirt cellar from which they had no way out. She angled her hips against his. “I can feel what you want.”
“Yeah?” His hair brushed her cheek as he kissed the side of her neck. “Does that mean I have to hurry?” His mouth burned along the curve of her shoulder. Over the thin strap of her camisole and down to where her achingly tight nipples pushed against the cotton fabric. “You’re not wearing a bra.”
Was there any point in explaining the built-in shelf bra? “Maybe you do need to hurry, if we’re going to be flooded in this cellar.”
“We’re not getting flooded,” he said again.
“How do you know?”
“Because I know.” Still holding her wrists above her head with one hand, he peeled down the top of her camisole with the other, until she felt his breath on her bare breasts. She was coming positively unglued, anticipating the brush of his mouth, the slide of his tongue—
But instead of tasting her, he lifted his head a little. “What is that?” He reached for the lantern, pulling it near so he could look more closely at her exposed breasts. “A butterfly?”
She groaned, twisting beneath him. “Yes, it’s a butterfly.” All of an inch big in pale pink and black, tattooed on the upper curve of her right breast when she’d been twenty-one. She still couldn’t free her hands, so she arched her back, rubbing her rigid nipples and the tattoo against his hard chest. “You were in the army, Sergeant Fortune. Surely you’ve seen tattoos before.” In the scheme of things, her little butterfly was hardly a record breaker. Neither was the floral curlicue on her left shoulder blade.
His teeth flashed. “Sweetheart, I’ve seen things that would turn your hair white.” He ducked his head and kissed the point of her shoulder. Then the butterfly.
Heat flowed under the surface of her tingling skin and she bit back a moan when his lips finally surrounded her nipple. Even though she twisted her wrists, halfheartedly