Page 28 of The Lightkeeper

“Was I sleeping?” I murmured, my brain still very foggy even if the gutting chill in my bones was gone.

“Not well,” he groused, his lips firm as he reached up and adjusted my glasses so they sat straighter on my nose.“How do you feel?”

Like a light switch, my body registered the hard stretch of him against me. The swell of his one arm under my neck, the other with his hand pinned to my hip. The rise and fall of his solid chest, a heartbeat still buried underneath all his prickly armor.

“Warmer.” Definitely warmer.

He grunted, looking unconvinced.

“I need to feel your forehead.” His strained voice sounded like he was preparing himself rather than me.

My eyes fluttered, watching his head drift toward mine. He was going to touch me… with his mouth. I shivered, anticipation sending goose bumps bubbling over my skin. It was all I wanted. To feel… to know… and then his lips touched down on my forehead.The slightest, most innocent touch, drove my inhale down to pierce the very depths of my lungs.Yet it was like a spark that set the whole of me on fire.

His lips were soft. In spite of everything else that was hard about him, including the harsh words that regularly left them,his lips were impossibly soft.And I wanted to feel them everywhere.

“Kit…” What did I say? How did I ask for that?How did I convince him?

He pulled back with a groan, like a little bit of him had fused to me in that touch.“You need to take some Tylenol.” His hand released my hip, and I tensed, clinging even tighter to him.

I’d studied countless organisms to recognize defense mechanisms when I saw them, and Kit’s were as obvious as the warning headlight in the lighthouse. But I wanted to know why they wereup around me. I wanted to know what possible danger he thought a plump, five-foot-one scientist who got excited over things callednudibranchescould pose.

“Aurora…” He wanted me to let him go.

“This is how a sea star traps its prey,” I blurted out, blinking up at my clammed-up prey.As if Kit Kinkade would ever be prey.I giggled at the thought. “It wraps its arms around the mussel, forces it to open up, and then pushes past the hard shell…”

“Aurora…” he said lowly, always using that warning tone with me.

My heart pumped faster. Just like in the bathroom, a warm ache pulsed low in my stomach, making me ache for whatever he had to give.

“Why didn’t you kiss me the other day?” I murmured, clinging to the kind of bravery that a fevered brain gave.

There was no danger in kissing me. No danger in exploring whatever it was that pulled us toward each other no matter how he tried to avoid it.

He jerked, his eyes flashing with the memory even as they lowered to my mouth and then rose again. “Because I don’t go around kissing strangers.”

“I’m not a stranger,” I muttered, offended. He called me a stranger while holding me to his side wearing nothing but his sweatshirt and my underwear.And supposedly I was the one delusional with fever…

Kit’s eyes glittered, his jaw steeled, and his brow set. “You should be.”

Should be… but wasn’t.

Something strong and aching thrummed between my legs. I shifted my hips ever-so-slightly closer to him, trying to ease the discomfort, and pressed my core closer to the bulk of his thigh. With just a little more of an angle, I could rub myself?—

His hand clamped on my waist, forbidding any more movement as he cursed, low and hoarse.“Dammit, Aurora.”

“I wanted you to kiss me,” I admitted so quietly that the sound of the rolling sea outside would’ve been enough to drown the words out if we weren’t so close. What if I never felt like this again? What if I never experienced theacheto kiss someone ever again? I hadn’t before now, so it was entirely possible.What if this was an irreproducible environment?

I had to know what happened. This was how I worked. Observation. Experimentation. Determination.Aurora plus Kit plus fever equaled…

“I still want you to kiss me.”

The sound that escaped his lips made me think I was torturing him with the question, and for a second, I thought I’d miscalculated. That, of course, the man who had enough willpower to not kiss bare breasts that were less than an inch from his mouth could reject the idea of a kiss with much more ease.

But then a noise came from his chest that I’d never heard before. I was familiar with Kit Kinkade’s dialect of grunts and groans of annoyance, frustration, and restraint… but this sound was something new. Something that came from somewhere I wasn’t sure even he knew existed, the way it made not just his chest but the whole of him quake.

“Aurora…”

“Will you kiss me now?”I breathed, suddenly needing his kiss more than anything in the world.“Just as an experiment, so I know. Please, Kit.”

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