Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [847]
“Oh, this is so not good,” she muttered under her breath as she opened the door and walked in to be greeted by eager wolf dog kisses and much happy tail wagging. “I know, Luna, I know … I’m late. Sorry, baby. It’s been a long day for me, too. Come on, let’s go take care of you now.”
Alex busied herself with turning the dog loose in the back to pee while she prepared a bowl of food and fresh water. After Luna was back inside and gobbling her kibble, Alex stripped off her parka and clothes while she headed down the hallway to the bathroom for an overdue, but indulgently long and hot, shower.
The heated spray against her bare skin did nothing to quench the lingering heat of Kade’s kiss. She soaped up, trying to recall how long it had been since she’d let a man run his hands in slow appreciation over her naked body. How long had it been since she’d been intimate—truly intimate—with someone? The weak moment she’d spent with Zach a few weeks after her father died didn’t really count. That had been one night, a couple of hours, really. She’d been an emotional wreck and supposed she’d just needed someone to help her make it all go away, even for a short while.
Is that what she was doing with Kade? Was she latching on to him, manufacturing something between them that wasn’t really there—couldn’t possibly be there—because of the new trauma she was going through now?
Maybe that’s all this was, a temporary feeling of being left adrift and in search of safe harbor. Tonight Kade had told her she’d be safe with him. While part of her believed that—an instinctual, primal part of her—she also knew that the fire he stoked inside her with just a kiss felt anything but safe. She couldn’t help feeling that getting close to him might be the biggest risk she’d ever taken. He saw too much about her, knew too much. And tonight he made her feel too much.
Alex groaned as she leaned forward in the tight tub-and-shower combo, bracing her forearm against the slick tiles and resting her head against her arm as the hot water sluiced off her body. She closed her eyes and there was Kade. His chiseled, striking face. His bright, penetratingly intense eyes. The heat inside her was still there, heat that made her whisper his name as she reached down with her free hand to touch herself as him.
She relaxed into a blissful state of resignation, letting the hot water and steam and thoughts of him melt away everything else.
CHAPTER
Ten
Kade hung back in the darkness, watching from within a tight copse of spruce and pine some five hundred yards from where Skeeter Arnold’s fancy ride had taken him. Twenty-plus miles out of Harmony, situated near the base of a small mountain and a narrow tributary that spoked off the Koyukuk, the ten-acre patch of land and squat white buildings sat fenced in and gated by fifteen-foot-high steel links and coiled barbed wire. Security lights and cameras were mounted all around the place, and the pair of uniformed guards trying to keep warm in the shack out front were carrying military-grade assault rifles.
Kade might have guessed the friendly little spot to be a supermax prison, if not for the weathered metal sign bolted onto the gate that read in chipped black lettering: COLDSTREAM MINING COMPANY.
Outside in the yard, a group of workers were busy unloading various-size sealed crates from two large cargo containers parked near what appeared to be some kind of warehouse. Some crates were wheeled into the storage facility, while others were brought into the secured entrance of the mine itself.
Curiouser and curiouser, Kade thought, figuring the more than two hours Skeeter had been inside the main office building hadn’t been spent interviewing for a job.
Kade was more than eager to question