Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,188

of her insecurity. I appraised her new ensemble with a smile and commented, “Nice.”

She frowned, but her shoulders relaxed.

“No,” I insisted. “It looks good on you.”

Perhaps too casual a descriptor. With her wet hair looping in long seaweed tangles around her shoulders, and her face glowing in the moonlight, she looked more than good. The English language needed a word that meant something halfway between a goddess and a naiad.

“Thanks,” she murmured, and then she came to sit beside me, just as close as before. This time she sat cross-legged. Her knee touched my leg, a bright point of heat.

I gestured to the door, and then the room beneath us, where her father’s thoughts were still in a snarl.

“What was all that for?” I asked.

She smiled a tiny, smug smile. “Charlie thinks I’m sneaking out.”

“Ah.” I wondered how much my read of the evening with her father matched her own. “Why?”

She opened her eyes extra wide, feigning innocence. “Apparently, I look a little overexcited.”

Playing along with her joke, I placed my hand beneath her chin and gently lifted her face toward the moonlight as if to better examine it. However, touching her face put all jokes far out of my head.

“You look very warm, actually,” I murmured and, without stopping to think of every possible consequence, I leaned in and pressed my cheek against hers. My eyes closed of their own volition.

I breathed in her scent. Her skin blazed exquisitely against mine.

Her voice was husky when she spoke. “It seems to be…” She lost her voice for a moment, then cleared her throat and continued. “Much easier for you now. To be close to me.”

“Does it seem that way to you?”

I thought about this assumption as I let my nose skim along the edge of her jaw. The physical pain in my throat had never eased in the slightest, though it did nothing to take away from the pleasure of touching her. While parts of my mind were lost in the miracle of the moment, other parts had never stopped calibrating the actions of every muscle, monitoring every bodily reaction. It took up quite a bit of my mental capacity, in fact, but then, an immortal mind had a great deal of space to spare. This did not damage the moment, either.

I lifted her curtain of damp hair and then pressed my lips lightly against the impossibly soft skin just beneath her ear.

She took a shaky breath. “Much, much easier.”

“Hmm,” was my only comment. I was very much involved in the exploration of her moonlit throat.

“So I was wondering,” she began, but then fell silent when my fingers traced the fragile line of her collarbone. She took another unsteady breath.

“Yes?” I encouraged, my fingertips dipping into the hollow above the bone.

Her voice was higher and trembling as she asked, “Why is that, do you think?”

I chuckled. “Mind over matter.”

She leaned away from me and I froze, on guard at once. Had I crossed a line? Been inappropriate? She stared back at me, seeming just as surprised as I was. I waited for her to say something, but she just gazed at me with ocean-deep eyes. All the while, her heart fluttered so quickly that it sounded like she’d just run a marathon. Or was very frightened.

“Did I do something wrong?” I asked.

“No—the opposite.” Her lips curled into a smile. “You’re driving me crazy.”

A little shocked, I could only ask, “Really?”

Her heart was still thrumming away… not in fear, but in desire. Knowing this now sent the electric pulse in my own body into overdrive.

My answering smile was probably too wide.

Her grin grew to match mine. “Would you like a round of applause?”

Did she think I was so sure of myself? Could she not guess how entirely out of my wheelhouse all this was? There were many things I excelled at, most of them due to my extra-human abilities. I knew when I could be confident. This was not any of those times.

“I’m just… pleasantly surprised. In the last hundred years or so”—I paused and almost laughed at her somewhat smug reaction before I continued; she loved my honesty—“I never imagined anything like this.” Nothing close. “I didn’t believe I would ever find someone I wanted to be with in another way than my brothers and sisters.” Perhaps romance always seemed a slightly foolish thing to everyone until one actually fell into it. “And then to find, even though it’s all new to me, that I’m good at it—at being with