to come back as a dog, what breed would you want to be?”
He laughed, just as she’d hoped. Nic sipped her wine and hid her satisfied smile.
Gabe lay in the darkness and recalled another time when he’d attempted to sleep on a cold, hard floor on a bitter winter night. Then he’d had no quilts, no wine, no lovely woman sleeping an arm’s length away. It had been another world, another life. Literally.
John G. Callahan had been a State Department associate when he took a bullet on a public street in Sarajevo. Eastern European nutjobs who had a sub-rosa war going on with the CIA and other Western intelligence operations then spirited him away. A palsied doctor removed the bullet in an unhygienic hovel, and then when a ransom demand fell through, his captors sold him off to sadistic Croatian mafiosos who dumped him into an ancient mountain fortress that made the Count of Monte Cristo’s Château d’If look like a downtown Marriott.
On a basement floor in Eternity Springs, Colorado, Gabe’s lips twisted in a wry grin. That bare, bitter cold made tonight’s chill seem like a barefoot walk on a sandy beach in summertime.
What a strange evening this had been. Not only had he thought about his other lives—in Texas with his mom and family, then in Virginia with Jennifer and Matt—he’d talked about them. He’d been able to do it without choking up or breaking down. He rarely said Jen’s name. He almost never spoke of Matt. Tonight it had actually felt good to say their names.
What had happened to his lunchtime determination to remain on guard against the appeal of Eternity Springs?
It didn’t last past his hard-on. Apparently, having that particular part of his body demonstrate signs of life once again had put the whole notion of facing dragons back on the table.
Not that he was anywhere near ready to actually use the damned thing. Just because he was alive didn’t mean he got to live again.
Guilt remained a burden able to drag him down into the black abyss. Grief, on the other hand, didn’t weigh him down quite as much as it had just a few weeks ago. It still had the power to strike swiftly and savagely, but those instances occurred less often now and with weaker intensity than in the past. He figured this must be the natural grief-recovery process. Although the superstitious part of him wondered if Eternity Springs and its warmhearted citizens weren’t getting to him.
“Brrr,” Nic complained, her voice drifting across the darkness. “It’s so cold. Do you have a spare bearskin over there?”
An image of naked limbs on a bear skin rug flashed through his mind. He cleared his throat. “I thought you were asleep.”
“I dozed for a bit. My boots were killing me, so I took them off. Now my feet are cold, and that makes me uncomfortable and cranky.”
Gabe hesitated a moment before saying, “Well, we can’t have cranky. Scoot them over here. I’ll rub your feet for you.”
“God bless you, Gabe Callahan.”
She whipped her legs out from beneath her covers and set them in his lap. She wore thin trouser socks, and when he took her right foot between his hands, he sucked in a breath. “You have ice cubes for feet.”
“I told you so.”
He tugged off her sock and began rubbing her bare, freezing foot. While he tried to keep his touch clinical and his thoughts impersonal, he couldn’t help noticing her foot’s slender width, the graceful arch of her instep, the softness of her skin.
It was the most personal touch he’d shared with a woman in months, and damn his soul, he enjoyed it.
While he massaged her right foot, her left foot crept up and rested on his thigh, inches from his torso. Inches from his erection.
He should put her ice cubes right on his crotch, but he settled for the next best thing. He tugged his shirttail from his jeans and yanked her sock off her left foot. “Look, don’t take this personally. Consider it payback for doctoring my scratches that day.”
He took both her feet and tucked them against his belly, sucking in an audible breath. It truly was like putting ice on his stomach. “Whoa. Have you no circulation in your feet whatsoever?”
“Oh, you feel good, Callahan,” she purred. “How can you be so warm? Are you hiding a heater or something?”
A heater? Was that a come-on? Or was she just clueless? He wished he could see her expression to help him