Out of This World Read online

  She changed into a camisole, sans bra, and matching pj bottoms, thin and insubstantial enough that I could see she’d gone commando beneath.

  Seriously. She was going to kill me, and I was going to die with a hard-on. I could only hope they wouldn’t ask my mother to identify me.

  Finally, the lights went off in the main house. Rach pulled on a sweatshirt—mine—and out we went into the night.

  Damn, the nights were pitch-black here, and the first thing I did was stub my toe on the porch step. Hopping up and down, I swore the air blue, while Rach laughed breathlessly and bent down to try to see the damage.

  I looked at her crouched in front of me, in an extremely erotic position, and could only groan.

  “Is it broken?” she asked anxiously.

  “No.” I hauled her up. “Not broken. It’s just too bad my superpowers don’t extend to seeing in the dark.”

  “Mine do.” She bit her lower lip as she took me in from head to toe, stopping at one particular spot in the middle. “And, um, wow.”

  Yeah. Wow.

  We sneaked into the dark inn together. She led the way, clearly seeing with ease, while I felt like a bumbling idiot, still limping because of my toe. Having her warm, curvy body pressed up to mine didn’t help much either, and she seemed to know it. Every time I stumbled, she threw her arms around me, pressing her breasts into my ribs, holding on tight, until I began to wonder how long a male could have an erection and not die from DSB—deadly sperm buildup.

  In the kitchen, Rach went directly to the freezer and grabbed a handful of cookies. “For strength,” she said with utter seriousness.

  We moved through the living room, Rach pulling me to safety before I could fall over a big chair in the way. Past the living room we went, down the hallway.

  Rach stopped at a coat closet, then quietly opened the door and shoved me inside.

  “Um—” I started to say.

  “Shh.”

  She closed the door. In the dark, coats and sweaters brushed my face, and then Rach was plastered up against me.

  “I can’t see,” I whispered.

  “Scared?” she asked, sounding amused, and smelling like chocolate mint.

  “Rach, we don’t have time for this.”

  “For what?”

  For all the wicked things running through my head.

  “Silly man.” She pressed me through the coats and opened another door. Which is how I found myself in a small room just off the living room, facing a tiny, cramped desk, a row of metal filing cabinets and stacks of files everywhere—strewn haphazardly across the desk, on the floor, on top of the cabinets—basically everywhere but where they belonged.

  “Apparently Gertrude wasn’t so great with the paperwork,” Rachel said.

  “A hidden office.”

  Rachel smiled. “Suits Great-Great Aunt Gert, believe me. Where should we start?”

  Hard to say, given the state of things. “The file cabinets. Since the files all appear to be scattered out here, what’s in them?”

  She tried to open one, and couldn’t. “They’re locked.” Frowning, she concentrated on the first one, then blinked. “Kellan.”

  The tone of her voice alerted me, and I remembered what she’d found in the guest house: guns. “What do you see?”

  “Whiskey in the bottom drawer. Good to know,” she said softly. “And a laptop in this one.” She pointed to the next. “But that one? It’s got…cash. Lots of it.”

  “Well, isn’t that just fascinating.”

  “A bit, yeah. And the top one—” She gulped. “A pistol.”

  “Okay. Give me some room.”

  There wasn’t much room to be had in the small confines of the office, but she sat on the desk, while I pulled open the locked drawers with my new muscles, finding a laptop, a Blackberry, a gun and, indeed, a drawer full of cash.

  “Jackpot,” Rachel whispered, and put a hand to her head.

  “What? What is it?”

  “I feel weird.”

  I think my heart stopped. “Headache? Piercing pain?”

  She shook her head.

  “Dizziness?” I set everything down, and strode toward her, which took all of two steps. Putting my hands on her arms, I waited until she looked up. “Talk to me.”

  Her eyes shimmered brilliantly, and she shook her head. “I’m sorry. Not sick weird.”

  “What then?”

  “Hard to explain.”

  “Try.”

  Instead, she pulled me in for a hug and held on tightly. “An I-need-you weird.”

  Need me. That should not have meant so much. She was scared and had no idea what she was saying.

  “Am I making any sense at all?” she whispered.

  “No.”

  But Christ, she was. And unable to resist the pull of her see-all eyes or the tremor of her lush mouth, I compounded my errors and held onto her tightly.

  “This is nice,” she whispered. “But by ‘need you,’ I mean naked.”

  “Uh…”

  She squeezed her eyes shut, and if I wasn’t mistaken, she blushed. “Have you ever noticed that it’s always me coming onto you?” she whispered.

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes,” she said very quietly, looking…embarrassed?

  No. No, I didn’t want that. “Let’s fix that right now,” I said. Clearly I’d lost my mind, but she was right.

  How was it that I’d never even attempted to make a move on the most beautiful woman in the world? Oh, that’s right, because we’d never been on the same plane before, much less both yearning and burning.

  But there we were, on the same plane.

  Yearning and burning…

  I cupped her face and leaned in, watching her watch me as I touched my lips to hers, keeping it quiet and warm and intimate. And only when her eyes flickered did I kiss my way up her throat, making my way to the sensitive spot beneath her ear, then over her jaw, her scent and taste driving me wild, and by the time I got back to her mouth, she had her hands fisted in my hair and was helping.

  “No, let me,” I whispered.

  And she did.

  Chapter 15

  M y name is Rachel, my name is Rachel…I had to keep repeating this to myself as Kellan kissed me halfway to orgasmic bliss, because I’d discovered that if I didn’t repeat my own name when he had his mouth on me, I could actually forget it.

  That’s how good he kissed.

  We needed to get out of the office, obviously, before we were discovered, but the feel of his lips brushing my earlobe, then the sensitive skin beneath it, locked me into this weird place. Our close proximity, the dark, the danger…it all gathered together, like a cloak of intimacy, and I turned and put my face into the crook of his neck.

  How was it he always smelled so orgasmically good?

  Finally he pulled back, eyes so hot they were flaming, and breathing hard enough that he could have generated his own electricity. “Damn it, you are distracting.” Then he pulled his hands from me and shoved them both into his pockets, turning away to stare glumly at the file cabinet.

  “Do you really think…” I licked my lips and asked the question that had been haunting me. “Do you think this…animal magnetic attraction is just a part of the swap?”

  He was quiet for a moment. “I think your attraction to me is a result of what happened to us, yes.” He stood there, all tall, long and edgy, broad shoulders hunched, the muscles of his back rigid, tension coming off him in waves.

  I wanted to touch him, to turn him to face me, but something held me back. Maybe it was how quickly he assumed that what I felt for him wasn’t real.

  So instead, I opened the laptop and hit the power button. When the thing booted up, Kellan, apparently unable to help himself, turned around and came to join me.

  Just as he did, Marilee stuck her head in from the closet. “Sheee-it,” she muttered at the sight of us and what we were doing. “I should have known.”

  “You should have told.�€