Wild Men of Alaska 01 - Impact

there in the freezing sleet. Hello. Her fingers jumped away, and she swallowed. “Uh . . . you’re going to have to zip up your pants.”
    “I can’t,” he said. Was there laughter in his tone? “Not one-handed. If you hold onto the crotch, I can pull up the zipper.”
    “I’m not grabbing your crotch.” Fire flamed in her cheeks. She wasn’t cold anymore. “Your jeans are too small to zip up anyway.” Oh God, had she pointed that out? She wanted to die.
    “It’s the crotch talk.” His words didn’t have laughter in them now. She recognized that tone. It jumpstarted areas of her body she tho ught had been put on the shelf.
    “Listen. I’m not touching that. You’ll just have to leave your pants unzipped until ... things are back down to size.”
    “Things haven’t been down to size since I first saw you in the airport.” His nostrils flared, and he took a step closer to her.
    She backed up, her shoulder bumping into the top of the seat hanging above her. “Not my problem.”
    “The hell it isn’t.” He reached out with his good arm and hauled her against him, making sure she felt exactly how she affected him. “Do you have any idea how hard it’s been not touching you?”
    “This isn’t good for your arm.”
    “I’m feeling no pain in my arm. But there’s a serious ache farther south.”
    “Skip—”
    “Just let it happen, Wren.”
    He leaned down, paused as he looked into her eyes, and then kissed her softly, his lips a perfect fit over hers.
    She shuddered and leaned into him. This was like coming home. Oh, how she missed this. Being held by him, loved by him. The rich earthy scent of rugged outdoors, cool ocean breezes, with a hint of salmon berries infused her lungs as she breathed in his essence. How did he smell the same after so long?
    The heat of him seduced her closer. He groaned and breached past the seam of her lips, his tongue hot and devastating as he deepened the kiss. He pulled her into his hardness, ground against her and groaned again. His breath became choppy, his fingers digging into her hip as though he needed to be part of her.
    Blood surged in her veins, and she became a dizzy. Her breath caught as his hand slid up and under her sweatshirt, bypassing her layers, and finding her skin.
    Heat, delicious heat infused her body, killing any chill she had left. She wanted to feel that heat everywhere. Get naked with him and—
    Wait a minute. What the hell were they doing? His shirt was wet against her front. He was kissing her, more like devouring her, and they hadn’t seen each other in five years.
    Her hands came up and pushed against his chest, creating a little space to break the kiss. “We can’t.”
    He met her eyes, his unfocused, clouded with desire. “Yes, we can.” He leaned in to kiss her again. She pushed harder against him. His eyes narrowed and cleared a bit as he took a moment to study her. “It’s the dude, isn’t it?”
    “Dude?”
    “The contractor dude you’ve been seeing.”
    Stunned, she relaxed her hands until the words connected in her muddled brain. “Contractor? You mean Christopher?”
    “Yeah, him.”
    She pushed out of Skip’s hold. “How do you know about Christopher?”
    “I know a lot of things about you.”
    “H-have you—” No, he couldn’t. He wouldn’t. “Have you had me under surveillance?”
    He looked guilty as hell.
    “For-for how long?” She slapped his good arm when he didn’t answer her right away.
    “Since you were released from jail.” He shrugged his shoulder as though her slap had stung. “Actually, the whole time you were in jail too.”
    “You’ve been spying on me for the last five years?”
    “When you say it like that, yeah, it sounds really bad.”
    “It is bad. It’s restraining order bad. Why? Why would you do that?”
    “I sent you to jail—”
    “No, you didn’t. It was my fault. My consequences. I broke the law.”
    He took a step toward her. “Wren, it killed me to send you there. I had to know that you were all right.”
    “So, what, you’ve kept tabs on me since I was released to make sure I wasn’t using again?”
    “No. Yes. Kinda.” He shut his eyes and rubbed the back of his neck. “Shit. This is all coming out wrong. I had to give you space to work through your rehab, get clean, stay sober. But I had to know you were okay. I couldn’t lose hope.”
    “Hope?”
    “That someday we could be together again. Then you started taking up with the contractor dude,