Her breath hitched, skin tightened, and pulse spiked.
Her awareness narrowed to the breadth of his chest, the scent of sun-warmed leather and smoky, manly, musky scent, the thrum of his heart beneath her palms.
He was also having a visceral reaction to her, she noted as her experienced nursing observation skills kicked in.
His pupils flared, his exhalation deepened, muscles locking.
Jerking upright, she took a deep inhale.
‘Get it together,’ she muttered, more to herself than to him.
She stepped back, staring, instinct warring against reason, wondering whether to trust him or to run.
Still, where would she go in this godforsaken and uninhabited landscape?
Sheba hesitated, caught between impulse and necessity, her gaze sweeping the land as she weighed her options.
The wind scoured the beach in long, empty breaths.
It dragged fingers of sand over the dunes and bending sparse grasses on the higher knolls until they whispered against one another.
Far overhead, massive gull-like birds wheeled and cried, their calls echoing across the open sky with a haunting echo.
Beyond the rise and fall of desert mounds and scrub, there were no roads, no lights, no structures to anchor the eye.
Only raw land stretched long and narrow along the coast, abruptly severed by soaring clifftops and mountains unbroken all the way to the horizon.
No sign of other human life either, nor any promise of shelter.
Even if she twisted away from him and fled, there was nowhere to hide in this uninhabited sprawl of wind and stone.
His gaze held hers, as if he were following the calculation behind her eyes; then he shifted without a word and loped toward the wreckage.
There was no salvaging it.
Its engines lay torn open, its core fractured, with components scattered along the beach. He reached inside the broken hull, retrieved something, and returned.
She stared, stunned, as he retrieved her commtab.
He woke it with a flick of his thumb and scrolled through its interface before handing it to her.
The display glowed with a map, her destination marked clearly against the terrain: The Lattaya Medical Centre.
Her throat tightened.
‘We’re not even close,’ she whispered.
It appeared to be five hours on foot, at least for her, over unfamiliar ground.
‘Damn.’
That’s when he turned back to the skimmer and began unloading her bags.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked, hurrying after him.
He lifted a hand to stay her.
His intoxicating smoky musk washed over her again, grounding and disorienting in equal measure as she stood, almost helpless, the effects of her head bump ratcheting.
