Hide and Seek - Lara Adrian Page 0,4
Except that time she’d been smiling and happy, wearing a strapless, pale peach bridesmaid dress and high-heeled sandals, not shuddering and breathless in a sodden, leaf-littered T-shirt and jeans, and leather flats caked with mud.
On that other night, she’d waited for him there on the couch with the jacket from his dress blues draped over her shoulders, her soft, light-brown hair swept up off her neck in some kind of complicated bun that they’d wrecked moments later in his bed.
At the memory of it, Duarte’s skin got a bit too tight, too warm.
Lisa hadn’t aged in the least since he saw her last. She was waterlogged and pale from cold and exhaustion, but damn if the sight of her didn’t kick his heartbeat up a gear.
He wanted to dismiss the sudden hammer of his pulse as leftover adrenaline from the thought of an intruder skulking up his mountainside. Or that it was just his old Marine protector instincts firing to life after learning something had scared her enough to send her racing off into the night to find him.
Anything to keep from admitting that five years and a hundred bad twists of fate later, he still couldn’t look at this woman without feeling an unwanted surge of possessiveness and need.
Which was a bad idea for many reasons, then and now. Especially now.
Duarte closed the cabinet and walked out with the towels in hand. She swiveled her head toward him, her hazel gaze hesitant, uncertain. She’d come all this way, but the look on her face said she was having serious second thoughts. No doubt, she couldn’t escape the recollection of the night they had spent here together either.
Nor the morning afterward, when daylight brought them back to their senses—back to reality—and they’d parted with a shared awkward, unspoken regret. The last they’d seen of each other in all this time.
God, how scared and desperate did she have to be, to come looking for him, of all people?
Had it been anyone else on his property tonight, he would have sent them right back down the mountain. At the business end of his pistol, if need be.
He should probably get rid of her as quickly as possible, too, but he couldn’t even think about doing that until he knew she was okay.
And not until she told him what was going on with Kyle.
Duarte set the towels on the arm of the couch as he approached her. “How’s your ankle?”
She nodded. “It’s fine. Just a minor sprain at most.” Her teeth chattered as she spoke. “Like I told you outside, it’s nothing.”
He grunted and held out his hand to her. “Stand up, but keep your weight off it. You can hang on to me while I help you out of that wet jacket.”
She obeyed, her hands warm on his shoulders as she let him pull the jacket off one of her arms, then the other. She wore a small backpack, which felt almost as soaked as the rest of her. He took it off and set it down on the couch beside her.
Dressed in a business-casual gray button-down and black pants, Lisa was quiet as he wrapped her in one towel, then dried some of the rain from her hair with the other.
Duarte worked robotically, the way he would if he was in the field taking care of a wounded comrade. Except this wasn’t a fellow Marine.
Against his will, he registered the vanilla scent of her warming skin and the sweet smell of her wet, honey-brown hair. He tried like hell to stifle his awareness of her, but his body’s reaction was faster than his reason.
And shit, wasn’t that always the case when he was near Lisa?
Duarte cleared his throat. Definitely not the time or place to be reacquainting himself with her curves and her scent, or his instinctual response to having her so close to him again.
He put the towel aside and eased her back to a seat on the couch. “Tell me what happened.” His voice was a dry growl in his throat. “You said you talked to Kyle today?”
Lisa shook her head. “I’ve only seen and talked to him once in the past three years. Until I got his text today.”
She reached into her backpack and took out her cell phone. Turning it on, she handed it over.
Duarte read the one-word text message and frowned. What the hell?
The text was troubling, but that didn’t mean it was from her brother. It could have come from anyone. It could be a