happened?" In a heartbeat, Dylan was looming over her, frowning.
"Nothing." Just inches away from his hair-covered chest, she tried to appear composed. Her hand crept up to her throat, where her skin was smooth and his ... wasn't. "I just burned my leg on the bumper."
"Let me see." Before she could protest, he was kneeling beside her and touching her calf with his hands.
She quivered. "No!" She spun away from him, astonished by her immediate need to touch back. To smooth his tangled black hair and feel his rough beard against her hand. To touch the heavy muscles of his shoulder. To slide her palm beneath that chain around his neck and drag him up to her. Her skin flushed. She could see herself tracing that heart tattoo with her tongue, tasting his skin, his heat, his desire.
He rose to his feet and narrowed his eyes. "What the hell is wrong with you?"
She bit back a round of hysterical laughter. If he didn't know, then he wasn't suffering from the same case of instant lust that she was. "I'm going for a walk."
Setting his jaw, he hesitated, then shrugged. "This shouldn't take long. Don't go far."
She could hike all the way back to Hot Water and still not recover, she admitted to herself, so she didn't disobey him. After grabbing up a sturdy stick to scare off snakes, she headed along an animal trail through the scrub manzanita and oaks toward the brighter green cottonwoods promising the presence of water.
In the notch between two mild slopes, a stream trickled, its banks lined with young trees. Beneath the shade of their thirst-quenched branches, she spotted a flat-topped boulder on the opposite side of the creek. Insects hummed and blue-winged dragonflies zigzagged through the hot air. Kitty jumped the five-foot-wide stretch of creek to take a seat on her chosen boulder. With a sigh, she slipped out of her sandals, set them beside her, then dangled her feet in the cool inches of water.
She rested her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands. Sighing again, she wondered where this sudden sexual appetite had come from and how hard it was going to be to stuff it back where it belonged. Wherever that was.
It worried her that her newfound lust might be a previously untapped byproduct of the Wilder genes. Maybe she'd been wrong all along, and her predecessors had actually enjoyed their sexually free lifestyles instead of merely falling into them. Argh. A sudden ripening of latent concupiscence would blow her plans for conventionality right out of the water.
Except she'd sexually craved only one man. Dylan.
That thought didn't make her any happier.
"You went too damn far."
His deep voice intruding into her thoughts and privacy nearly sent her sliding into the water. She scrambled to stay on her rock and glared at him across the creek bed. "You almost gave me a heart attack," she said.
He acted as if he didn't hear her. He leaped off the muddy bank opposite her, then waded into the shallow water as if he wasn't aware of it. His hand was rough on her bare arm as he pulled her off the rock so she was standing in front of him, her wet toes to his wet boots.
His nostrils flared as he stared down at her. "I was calling your name, damn it." He gave her a tiny, controlled shake. "Why didn't you answer?"
Kitty swallowed. "I - I didn't hear you." As dangerous as he looked with his unshaven face and untamed hair, more disturbing was the something dark and desperate in his eyes. "Dylan, I'm sorry."
He dropped her arm and swung away from her. "You scared the shit out of me, okay?"
This was near where Alicia had disappeared, of course. And though he'd rescued those three children, there hadn't been a rescue for Bram's wife. The details of the tragic story were as indelibly etched on Kitty's mind as they were on that of anyone who had been around Hot Water that summer. With three terrified preschoolers clinging to him and no safe place to leave them, he had been forced to watch Alicia being dragged into these very hills.
Kitty's hand trembled as she reached toward him. "I'm sorry," she whispered again and stroked the pads of her fingertips down the warm, bare skin of his back.
He froze. Then he looked over his shoulder at her, his eyes intent. The water splashed as he slowly turned toward her, the cheery sound at odds