[disappointed ash gray]
Gone, gone, gone,moaned a monster.Gone forever!
She loved us, and you sent her away,screeched a monster.
What have you done?!roared a monster.
“I’ve kept Fenella Kim from finding out what we are, that’s what I’ve done,” Carter whispered. “Now shut up!”
The monsters kept on wailing and screaming and snarling and flashing all the way back to the boat. He was surprised by how attached they’d gotten to the little dragonette in such a short time, and even more surprised by how attached he had. She had been an unexpected bit of color and joy in this dismal swamp, and now she was gone and he’d never see her again.
It was a choice he’d had to make.
He regretted it already.
Chapter 5
Fen pretendedshe was doing a tea bath treatment at a luxury spa. A fancy Korean spa where you could spend all day bathing in pools of assorted temperatures, then lie down in darkened rooms with floors of smooth heated stones or warm sand. Mud baths were a real thing. Why not tea-on-top, mud-on-bottom baths?
I am relaxing in an expensive luxury spa,she told herself.The tannins in this exquisite imported tea are tightening my pores and AAAAAAHHH!
She gulped back the shriek that tried to burst from her throat as a bullfrog’s goggle eyes unexpectedly popped up from the dark water an inch from her body. Unlike Carter, she was not afraid of frogs. She liked frogs. Frogs were cute. Maybe her imaginary spa even featured frog baths.
All the same, she decided that she was done with her spa.
As she squeezed water out of her hair and wiped it off her skin, she wondered how Carter was getting on with his frog bath. As annoyed as she’d been over his incredible exploding radio, not to mention the condescending remarks with the subtext about her not being a genius inventor like him, she’d enjoyed his enthusiasm over the pawpaws. For a while there, she’d actually liked him.
She wondered how he’d clean up. She’d seen photos and video of him in his natural environment, the boardroom or the workshop, but he wasn’t in a suit now. Right now, unless the frogs had scared him off, he was naked.
Carter naked…
Her imagination obligingly put together her personal observations, like his well-muscled thighs and long eyelashes and the injuries he’d collected along the way, into a complete package. (His package is part of the package, she thought with a giggle.) She could see him in her mind’s eye, standing in the black water (but only up to his ankles), dripping wet and fully nude.
Droplets hung in his wet black hair and dotted his tanned skin like tiny diamonds. The muscles of his shoulders and forearms and chest and back gleamed as if they’d been oiled. His eyes were deep green with hints of brown, reflecting the lush foliage around him. The expression on his face was one she hadn’t seen in a depressingly long time, that of naked lust for her, and only her. She could seeeverydetail of his body in an imaginary surround-sound but for vision, his fine ass and his perfectly proportioned, fully erect, rock hard—
“Fenella?”
That was Real Carter, not Imaginary Carter. She knew because his voice wasn’t rough and deep with uncontrollable passion, but sharp with annoyance… or was that worry?
“I’m fine!” Fen called. “I’ll be there in a minute!”
“Take your time!” he called back. “Enjoy the bullfrogs.”
She dressed in her soaking wet clothes—ugh, that was horrible—and put on her wet shoes, wondering all the while what had gotten into her. Not that she never had random sexual fantasies, she had random fantasies about pretty much everything, but Carter Howe was a new one. She’d never particularly had a thing about sleeping with the enemy, not even in her own imagination.
Fen picked her way across the island, half-expecting it to wobble beneath her feet even though they’d poked this one thoroughly to make sure it was solid. The air had cooled off and her wet clothes made her feel chilled.
And there was Actual Carter.
They stopped and stared at each other. Like her, he had washed his clothes and then put them back on wet. She’d assumed he would, but she hadn’t accounted for what that would look like.
Forget Naked Wet Carter, it was Clothed Wet Carter that was really something. And forget wet T-shirt contests too, because he proved that wet button-down shirts were where it was at. The fine fabric was absolutely transparent and clung to him in a way that accentuated every sculptural bit of his body. His wet shirt made her notice parts of his body that she might not have paid proper attention to if he’d been shirtless, like his elegantly arched collarbones or the sexy little dips above and below them. She wanted to run her fingers along them.
And his hair, shelikedhis hair wet. He’d tried to smooth it back but it was already drying and coming loose, with locks hanging around his face, beaded with water exactly like she’d imagined. She thought of licking off that water and gave an involuntary shiver.
“You’re cold.” His voice was oddly husky and deep. He swallowed, cleared his throat, and said, “I’ll make a fire.”
She was relieved that he apparently hadn’t noticed her staring at him. Maybe it had just been for a second, and had only felt like a long time.
