Break the Sky (Spiral of Bliss Spin Off) (25 page)

I eyed it warily, as if it were a time bomb. What the hell was he writing in there? It wasn’t his black book or his
diary
, for lord’s sake. It certainly wasn’t a book of poetry. A guy who hadn’t liked school wouldn’t spend his time writing poetry or stories.

As tempted as I was to open the book, I turned when the microwave beeped. I made the coffee and returned to the bed, giving Archer a nudge with my knee.

“Wake up. I brought you coffee. Don’t expect this to happen again.”

He rolled over and yawned. “You mean the tornado or the incredibly hot fucking or you bringing me coffee?”

A tingle of heat washed through me, along with an undeniable pleasure that he’d found our fucking to be
incredibly hot
. Not that I’d had any doubts about that last night, especially with both of us so revved up.

“The coffee.” I handed him a cup and climbed onto the bed.

As he lowered his head to take a sip, I took advantage of his distraction to let my gaze wander over his perfect, muscled body, the rumpled mess of his thick hair, the planes of his face, his jaw dusted with whiskers.

He glanced up and caught me staring. I cleared my throat and gestured to his cup.

“Instant coffee is all I have,” I said. “Sorry. I know it tastes like dirt.”

Archer shrugged. “Well, it
was
ground.”

I laughed. A genuine amusement filled me, in marked contrast to the intensity of the previous night. He grinned and put his cup on the side table. He reached out to trail his fingers over my bare leg to the bottom of my foot.

“Know any bad jokes?” he asked.

“Probably. Some of my grad students are as juvenile as you are.”

He grabbed my ankle to keep my foot still so he could tickle it. I yelped and poked him in the shoulder until he released me.

“What does a wicked chicken lay?” I asked as he resumed skimming his fingers over my bare leg.

“No idea.”

“Deviled eggs.”

“Pretty bad,” he agreed. “What does Archer West lay?”

I rolled my eyes. “Kelsey March.”

“Mmm-hmm.” He pressed his lips to the top arch of my foot. “Hard and well.”

My body surged at the memory. “Indeed.”

He shot me a satisfied, very male smile.

Too much. Everything about him was
too much
. He was too big, too beautiful, too dangerous, too goddamned cute.

I hid my sudden disconcertion by pulling my leg away from him.

“Go dress,” I said. “We need to get on the road again. There’s a front moving north of here, which is good for us since we might catch another storm on the way back home.”

My heart suddenly clenched a little. I didn’t like the idea of going home after this insanely exhilarating time alone with Archer. I wanted to stay, to chase storms, and have wild, mind-blowing sex—with
spanking
, no less. I wanted to kiss him in thunderstorms and feel the heat in his eyes when he looked at me.

I didn’t want to go back to classrooms and my cramped little office, to the pressure of my tenure review and departmental bureaucracy. The very things I’d worked so hard for.

“Damn, woman.” Archer ran his fingers across my toes. “You have perfect feet. I need to study them more closely in those heels you wear.”

“Oh, god. You have a foot fetish?”

“I do now.” He stroked his forefinger over my instep, making me twitch in reaction.

Though I was thoroughly enjoying his attention and touch, I didn’t want him to know how ticklish I was. I pulled my foot away from him and tucked it underneath me. I reached out to rub the shifting wing on his upper arm. His skin was so warm and taut.

“I haven’t studied your tattoos closely either,” I remarked. “They’re beautiful.”

They were, too. Intricate and incredibly detailed, the wing spread from his right shoulder down to wrap around his biceps, the multi-colored feathers thick, the vanes holding them together both strong and delicate. The top of the wing curved over his shoulder into a rich pattern of flowers and silhouettes of two birds in flight. A cursive script flowed beneath them.

I peered at the letters, tracing them with my finger.
Fear is the mind-killer.

“Wow,” I said. “What’s that from?”

“Frank Herbert’s
Dune
.” He touched the tattoo. “I read the novel years ago. I remembered that line, especially when I was trying to get clean and stay out of trouble. I was scared all the time.”

A shadow fell over me at the reminder of his past. I couldn’t imagine him being scared of anything.

I glided my fingers over the pattern of flowers and two birds. His souvenirs of life.

“Is that when you got the tattoo?” I asked. “When you were in rehab?”

He nodded. “The quote, yeah. I had the wing done when I was twenty. Can’t remember why. Guess I just thought it was cool.”

“No.” I slid my forefinger over the feathers, almost feeling their combined strength and softness. “It was about freedom. Flying.”

He shrugged, studying me. “Why don’t you have any tattoos? Tough chick like you?”

“I don’t know.” I brought my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them. “I always wanted one, but I never knew what to get. Then when I started thinking about grad school, tattoos didn’t seem to fit with academics. Plus, they’re pretty permanent.”

“Not like blue hair, right?”

I nudged him with my foot again. “Go get dressed, or I’m driving.”

He shoved to his feet with a groan. “Can’t have that, now.”

After he went into the bathroom, I finished getting ready. I didn’t want to like this intimacy and silly teasing, but I did. Even if I couldn’t admit that I did, my heart was doing this crazy floating thing, which seemed to be lifting all the weight from me. I couldn’t ignore or suppress the feeling. I didn’t want to.

And of course that scared the crap out of me. I could take Archer’s heat and intensity, the challenges he issued, the sheer male power of him.

It was the other stuff I didn’t know what to do with. His laughter and warmth, the way he repaired a garden fence for my mother, his habit of opening doors for me, the fact that he’d cooked bacon after an insanely hot night. His almost casual use of the word
love
in reference to me.

Especially that.

And everything combined into one handsome, sexy man. It was far more than I’d bargained for. And I was beginning to think it was much more than I could take.

CHAPTER TWENTY

ARCHER

KELSEY WAS PRICKLY AND IRRITABLE MOST
of the drive back to Mirror Lake. She snapped at me for leaving candy wrappers on the floor of the van, grumbled about her lack of sleep, and bitched about the classes she had to teach tomorrow.

Because I knew exactly what her problem was, I let her complain. She’d been thrown off, catapulted outside the safe, little comfort zone she’d built for herself and tossed into the path of a tornado.

Now there was the adrenaline crash. And everything else. For one, she hadn’t expected me to get along with her mother. Hadn’t expected her mother to like me—not a rough guy with a lousy past and no future to speak of. She hadn’t expected to love the risks we’d taken, and she didn’t know how to deal with it.

I didn’t, either. I liked jumping dirt bikes, driving too fast, fighting. I’d spent most of my life doing risky, sometimes illegal things. But nothing compared to facing down a tornado with a storm girl and winning.

When we got back to Kelsey’s house, I helped her unload her stuff and drove the van back to the university. She needed time alone to decompress. So did I.

I went to the Meteorology department to leave the van keys for Colton. As I approached the building, a young, skinny guy wearing a wrinkled suit came through the front door. He hurried down the steps, glanced at me distractedly, and stopped.

“Oh, hey,” he said. “You’re Kelsey’s… uh, hitman.”

“Hitman?” It took me a second to remember this kid had been there the day I saw Kelsey in the quad. She’d snapped at both of us.

“Right,” I said. “Who are you?”

“Peter Danforth. I took some undergrad classes with Kelsey.”

He stuck out his hand. I shook it and started toward the building again.

“Colton just told me Kelsey went out to chase a storm,” Peter said, coming up beside me as if I wanted to have a conversation. “Did you go with her?”

“Yeah.” I slanted him a glance. “Why?”

“It just surprised everyone, you know? She’s always been so against going out on her own. She structured her role in the Spiral Project around the idea that she would do everything
but
work in the field. She’d just sit at a computer and assimilate the data.”

An image of Kelsey in a cramped office rose in my head, alongside a memory of her burning with excitement and adrenaline during the chase.

My chest tightened.

“Whatever she does, she’ll do it well,” I told Peter.

“So did you guys see anything?” Peter asked. “Colton said you did.”

“Yeah, she sent him the video. She got some great footage of a tornado.”

“Really? Where?”

“A field in eastern Kansas.” I pulled open the building door. “You can ask her about it.”

“I will, thanks. Good seeing you again.”

I nodded and went inside. I left Colton’s keys in his departmental mailbox before returning to the Butterfly House. After unpacking and showering, I dug my notebook out of my duffel.

I leafed through the pages, then sat down and did some more drawings. Not until my mother had sent me all my stuff in a cardboard box did I remember I’d spent a lot of my school days drawing in the margins of notebooks. And everything else—math papers, spelling tests, and science reports. Drawing was always easy.

Around dinnertime, I texted Kelsey and told her I was coming over. When I arrived, she let me in without a word. Much as I loved the scotch-and-honey sound of her voice, I also liked the faintly annoyed look she gave me, her blue eyes sharp with that regal, take-no-prisoners expression. The one that had made me want to capture her.

“I’m working,” she said, gesturing to the kitchen. “Go get something to eat or drink, if you want.”

I tortured myself a little by watching her pick up a few folders from a chair. Her incredible breasts curved the front of her shirt, and jeans hugged her perfect ass. Long legs. Shiny hair. She was all woman. All mine.

Mine.

The word flared in my mind. I’d never had anything that was really mine. Even my family hadn’t been mine. But Kelsey… I would never think of her any other way.

My fists clenched. But after I left town, she’d be a free agent again. And though I’d told her we could have a hell of a good time together while I was here—and we were, more than I’d ever imagined possible—the thought of her with another guy made me want to slam my fists against a brick wall. Repeatedly.

I forced my fingers to unclench and went into the kitchen. I rummaged in the fridge and saw a carton of chocolate milk on the lower shelf.

I knew Kelsey had bought it for me. And stupid as the feeling was, I couldn’t help liking the idea that she’d been thinking about me while grocery shopping. God knew I couldn’t get her out of my mind, no matter what I was doing.

I didn’t have much time left. The Butterfly House was almost finished. I had maybe two weeks left of this candy-box town, pine trees, mountains, and crystal blue lake. Two weeks before I had to go back to the dry, desert heat and sand, the smell of gasoline, the fireball sun.

Two weeks left of Kelsey.

I opened the cabinet to find a glass, noticing the door was tilting off the hinges. I checked a few of the other cabinets for a toolbox but found none. I opened a door that I assumed led to the basement and went down the stairs. I fumbled for the light switch and turned it on.

I blinked at the sudden glare and stopped. The room looked like something out of a magazine. Pale blue walls lined with white shelves, a wide, marble-topped table sat in the center of the room, surrounded by high-backed, cushioned chairs. The shelves were stacked with folds of bright fabrics, rolls of satiny ribbons, baskets, and jars of beads and buttons.

“Archer?”

Kelsey’s voice broke me from my surprise.

“In the basement,” I called.

Her footsteps sounded on the stairs. “What are you doing down here?”

“Looking for a toolbox. One of your cabinet doors is off the hinges.” I turned to face her. She was watching me, her expression wary behind her glasses.

“I didn’t know you had a craft room,” I said.

She flushed. “No one does.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s a
craft room
.”

A strange feeling uncurled in my chest. Something warm and sort of soft. I approached her and reached out to run a few strands of her blue hair through my fingers. Her face was still pink.

“I like your craft room, storm girl,” I said. “I like you, too.”

“You mean you
like me
like me?” she asked. For the first time all day, she looked amused.

“Uh huh.” I lowered my head to brush my mouth against hers. “And I like that you make crafts. It must be the daredevil in you. Sharp scissors, hot glue guns, pins and needles. Dangerous stuff.”

The wariness eased from her expression as she laughed. “Or it’s the girl in me. I don’t like many people to know she still exists.”

“No way you can hide her from me.” I didn’t want her to. Didn’t want her to hide any part of herself from me. Even knowing I had to give her something in return didn’t change that desire one bit.

“What kind of stuff do you make?” I asked.

“Some jewelry and mixed-media collages. I have an online shop where I sell stuff. Mostly I make Ukrainian painted eggs, which my mother sells in her gift shop.”

“You mean all the eggs in her shop were yours?”

She nodded. “She’ll only stock eggs I paint. That’s why I wanted to visit her. I had to drop off a box of
pysanky
to restock her supply.”

“Can I see more of them?”

Kelsey hesitated before nodding. She took several baskets from under the table and handed me a bright, intricately decorated egg that felt light and fragile. It was painted a glossy black and wrapped with an incredible geometric pattern of red, gold, and green.

“Where did you learn to do this?” I asked, pulling the basket toward me so I could look at all the other eggs. In truth, I hadn’t paid much attention to the eggs in her mother’s shop. But now, knowing Kelsey had made them, I was kind of awed.

“My mother taught me when I was a kid,” Kelsey said. “We always painted them around Easter, though we also did them throughout the year as gifts. Even in my wilder days, I always liked sitting down to paint eggs with her.”

She picked up a blue-and-gold egg and studied the pattern. “She developed arthritis in her hands and couldn’t do the work anymore, but even now she still gives me ideas and suggestions. Or direct orders.”

I could well imagine her mother issuing orders. Nice as Mrs. March had been, I sensed the same core of steel in her that Kelsey had.

“How do you do it?” I asked, nodding to the egg.

“It’s a special technique using wax and dye.” She dug around in a box and produced a tool that had a wooden rod and a metal tip. “This is called a
kistka.
You use it to apply the wax pattern, and then dye the egg. The parts of the egg that aren’t covered by wax end up colored.”

“Show me.”

“You’ll find it pretty boring.”

“Nothing you do is boring to me.”

She glanced at me, one eyebrow lifting. “Not even if I start talking about data assimilation?”

“Not even then. Especially not if you do it while standing in front of me wearing a sexy suit and holding a pointer.”

“Dream on, baby.”

“I will.”

Kelsey smiled and opened a box filled with dye-stained jars. “Okay, you asked for it. If I show you the technique, you have to paint one of the eggs, too.”

I looked at my ugly, callused hands that I used to turn socket wrenches. “I’ll break it in two seconds.”

“Not if you’re careful, you won’t.”

“I’m never careful.”

Kelsey looked up. Something crossed her expression that I couldn’t define.

“Archer,” she said. “You’re always careful with me.”

A blade twisted inside me. I wasn’t careful with her. I was too rough, too demanding, too greedy. I’d started this whole thing because I’d wanted to make her lose control, to admit she was wrong, even to break her a little. Being
careful
had never entered my mind.

And I’d known she’d respond with fire and lightning. I knew she could take it, that she wanted it, that she’d beg for more. I’d give her more too, as much as I could, push myself to the edge right along with her.

Hell, we’d challenged a tornado together. I was more alive now than I’d been in years.

Her blue eyes. I didn’t want to drown in them. I wanted to live in them.

The blade twisted harder. I pulled my gaze from hers.

“Where do we start?” I asked.

She showed me how to get the supplies organized—making the dyes, cleaning the hollow duck eggs, sketching a pattern with a pencil. She lit a candle and demonstrated how to melt beeswax into the funnel of the
kistka
before using different styluses to trace the pattern with wax.

“Why the nice, cozy secret room?” I asked her as we sat at the table, each of us concentrating on drawing wax lines.

“It’s comfortable.” Kelsey shrugged, looking faintly embarrassed again. “I like to come down here, put on some music, maybe have a glass of wine. I wanted a place where I could shut everything else out and just be… I don’t know. Quiet. Alone.”

“You’re not alone now.”

Our gazes met across the table, a crackle of energy lighting the air. I wasn’t alone, either. For the first time in a very long time. Maybe for the first time ever.

Kelsey picked up another stylus and drew it over the surface of the egg.

“I’ll be alone when you leave,” she said.

I was
this close
to telling her I didn’t have to leave. But I did have to.

I was no fool. I’d wanted to make Kelsey admit she was wrong about me, but she was in a class of her own. One that was way above me. A place I’d never belong.

A drop of hot wax fell from the stylus onto my egg. The pattern smeared.

“I’m messing this up,” I said.

Kelsey came around to my side of the table. “You might have overfilled the
kistka
with wax. You can get that off with some wax remover. Hold it in your palm for a sec.”

She poured the remover onto a tissue and took my hand, pulling the egg closer to her. She dabbed at the wax and used a cotton swab to clean it off the pattern. She’d taken off her glasses to do the detail work, and I could see the individual strands of her thick eyelashes.

I watched her face, the crease of concentration between her eyebrows, the way the blue locks of her hair fell over her forehead, the fine-grained silk of her skin. She had a tiny beauty mark just under her left eye, small as the head of a pin. I inhaled her scent of almond milk and honey. Her lips were full, and without lipstick they were a pale pink like the inside of a seashell.

So goddamned beautiful. A fierce, sexy, brilliant woman who loved to chase storms and disappeared into her secret craft room to paint eggs when the world closed in on her.

She glanced up and caught me staring.

“What?” she asked defensively.

I slipped my other hand under her chin and lifted her face to mine. Her breath caught, and her lips parted. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever kissed her gently. She sparked my lust so powerfully that most of the time I just wanted to grab her and crush my mouth against hers. To get inside her as fast and hard as I could.