Wild at Heart (Walk on the Wild Side #1) (24 page)

Making love
. That phrase had never made sense to him before. He’d always assumed it was a euphemism, a way for people to gloss over their basic animality with pretty words.

But he saw the difference now, the meaning behind the phrase. As the video played to its close, there was still no sound, but what he and Amber had said to one another was as clear to him as if a soundtrack were on full volume:
My Nick
, she’d said, and he’d answered her,
My Amber
.

Chapter Eleven

When Amber opened her door and found Nick standing there, she couldn’t read the expression on his face.

It was one she’d simply never seen him wear before, some mix of solemnity and excitement that wasn’t particularly Nick-like. His hands were jammed in his pockets, and he had a strange, jittery energy in his stance, and his rapid breathing and the way he made only fleeting eye contact before looking away over his shoulder—toward the mountain, maybe? Towards somebody else standing just out of view?

A ripple of nervousness went through her, too. Had he watched the video she’d given him? Or had he ignored it completely?

“What’s up?” she asked him, trying to sound relaxed and casual, though her insides were so quivery, a whole warren of wild rabbits might as well have been down there, scurrying for their holes at the sight of a wolf.

His eyebrows raised expectantly. “I need you to come with me.”

“Why?” Suddenly a new sort of anxiety washed over her. “Is something wrong? Did you hear from Jake and Ruby? Did they get into trouble up there on the mountain after all?”

“Jake and Ruby are fine, as far as I know.” He waved her out the door impatiently. “This is just something improvisatory, okay?”

“Improvisatory?” She stood her ground in the doorway, pointing down at the rumpled pajamas she was still wearing. “I’m not dressed for
improvisatory
, unless you were about to suggest a nap.” Her cheeks heated instantly. “That wasn’t meant to be suggestive, by the way.”

“Don’t worry about what you’re wearing,” he said. “Oh, except on your feet. You’ll need your boots. And hurry.”

“Boots? Will we be—mucking stables? Building a new footbridge?”

He didn’t take the bait. “Nope,” he said. And then he just crossed his arms over his chest and waited.

She wanted to ask him outright if he’d watched the video, but somehow she didn’t think he’d be acting this way if he had. He’d be more—
meditative
. Or angry at her, maybe. Or, if she were really lucky, romantic. This was none of those things. If she had to put a name to his mood, it would probably have to be
mischievous
.

She narrowed her eyes at him. “What if I don’t want to go out right now?”

Once again, his eyebrows arched, but this time it was superciliously. “Excuse me, but I’m pretty sure you
owe
me: one blind act of obedience, kiddo. I already did mine for you, in front of the cameras, no less—so you have to reciprocate. Right now, I might add.”

Their gazes locked for a moment, and all she could make out in his eyes was determination.

He didn’t look like he was going to back down.

She blew out a sigh. “I’ll get my boots.”

Two minutes later, she was following him up the main northern hiking path that led to both the high meadow and the swimming hole. He was charging on ahead of her, leaving her to scurry behind him as best she could.

“What’s going on, Nick?” she yelled to him. “I don’t like not knowing. It’s kind of freaking me out.”

“Too bad,” he called back. “You’re not the director this time.”

“So,
what
? Are you luring me up here to murder me and feed my body to the eagles?”

He stopped long enough to look back at her and roll his eyes. “Yes, Amber. That’s my plan, exactly. Our entire friendship and years of working together have been an elaborate ploy to trick you into becoming wild raptor food.”

“I knew it all along,” she said, and stuck her tongue out at him. And then she braced her thigh muscles and shot up the path past him, hip-checking him as she went. “Race you to the top!”

For once, he didn’t run after her. He just laughed. “What the hell are you doing? You don’t even know where we’re going.”

She skidded to a stop and turned, glaring, and put her hands on her hips. “Well, then, I guess you’ll just have to tell me, won’t you?”

“Sorry,” he said, his long legs quickly eating up the distance between them. “You’re at a distinct strategic disadvantage at the moment. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“I hate that.”

“I know you hate that,” he said, patting her on the back as he passed her again. “That’s partly why I’m enjoying myself so much.”

“You really are a jackass.”

“I know that, too. Don’t expect an argument from me.”

A few hundred feet farther up, he took the right-hand fork in the path. Ah, so the swimming hole was their most likely destination. Which didn’t actually help her very much, in terms of ferreting out his intentions.

Unless—he was thinking about her script. About what the characters did up at the swimming hole.
Shit
. The image of Jake and Ruby standing up there in their bathrobes flashed into her mind, and her whole central nervous system shifted into overdrive. Her insides did a queasy flip-flop, and her pulse tripped around like a drunken sorority girl in spike heels.

She didn’t dare think about it too much.

What if she was guessing completely wrong? There was a lot up here beyond the swimming hole, and even if the swimming hole
was
his destination, there were plenty of things hikers could do here besides strip down and bare their souls to one another.

Nick could, for example, be planning to tell her to jump into the icy cold water in her underwear, just so he could watch her squeal.

He might think it was what she deserved—pay-back for all the things she’d put him through in the past few days. Which was
quite a lot
now that she tallied it up: jumping his bones totally out of the blue in the meadow, having a complete emotional breakdown in his cabin the next night, making him freaking have
sex
with her in front of a row of cameras. And that wasn’t even mentioning the lightning and the hail storm and the attack of the sleazy paparazzi, which weren’t exactly her fault, but which wouldn’t have happened to him if she’d picked some nice safe private sound stage for a movie for once.

So she kept putting one foot in front of the other, trying to calm her racing heart, and followed him. Let herself trust him. Let herself trust his heart.

When she heard the rushing water of the creeks that fed the swimming hole, a mix of fright and hope started rising in her veins. Nick was heading straight towards it. Soon, so much adrenaline was coursing through her, her vision went a little blurry.

He stopped beside a huge granite boulder that stood close to the edge of the pool.

It was a gorgeous place, greener than ever after yesterday’s storm, with mountains ringing the horizon and the rain-swollen creeks cascading down courses of smaller rocks, frothing and white as ocean waves. The sky was huge and brilliant blue and open, and the breeze had the smell of fertile soil and wet pine.

“Okay,” she said, her voice breathy and trembling slightly. “What now?”

Nick looked at her for a long moment, appraisingly, his face giving nothing away—but his eyes lit with a spark of something, that mischievous energy again. And maybe something else as well. A little fear on his part, too? A little trepidation?

The whole surface of her skin seemed to be rippling with it, too.

Nick nodded once, slowly, deliberately, as though he were deciding something for himself, or maybe trying to convince himself of the right course of action. He blew out a breath. Squared his shoulders and clenched his fists. Inhaled again.

Crazy possibilities were flying through her head: he was about to recite poetry, he was going to tell her he was secretly a transvestite and just didn’t feel safe sharing that with her until now, he
was
going to kill her and feed her to the eagles. Anything seemed possible.

“Amber Wakeling,” he said, in a strangely formal voice. “We need to take off our clothes.”

She couldn’t help it—she laughed.

It was pure nerves that caused her outburst, but the exasperated look she got from Nick made her apologize profusely. “I’m sorry, Nicky,” she said. “I just—I wasn’t quite prepared for that.” She waved her hands in surrender. “I don’t think it’s funny, actually, not at all. Honestly, I’m scared to death right now.”

“Oh,” he said, looking slightly mollified. “Well, so am I.”

“So—you’re serious about taking off our clothes?”

“Completely serious. I knew when I read your script for this film that there was something special in that scene. Something that moved me. And I just didn’t realize until it was almost too late that part of the reason it meant so much to me was that it cut straight to the heart of what’s between us. What’s always been between us. That somehow neither of us figured out, in all this time we’ve spent together.”

Her chest heaved with the rush of feeling going through her. “I know,” she said. “Hell, I wrote the damn script, and I didn’t even make the connection. Not until Ruby and Jake were acting it out in front of us.”

Nick nodded. She could see the throbbing pulse at the base of his neck, and she realized all this wasn’t easy for him, either.

She unzipped her sweat jacket and let it fall to the ground. Her fingers went straight to the buttons of her plaid shirt next, going from the bottom up. Mirroring her, Nick took hold of the hem of his t-shirt and lifted it, exposing his hard abdomen, the muscles of his chest, his heavy collarbones, his shoulders. She got a little lost in looking at him, actually, and had to hurry with the last few buttons and her bra to catch up.

Boots were next. A little unlacing and yanking at the heels, and they clunked to the ground.

Then it was pants. Hers were easy—pajama bottoms slipped down in mere seconds. Nick had the harder task this time, having to undo his button-fly and then shove heavy denim down considerably longer legs than hers. Also stronger, broader legs, with a peppering of black hair. And truly amazing thigh grooves and fascinating ripples of muscle just above the knee, and gorgeous hard bulges at the calves.

Damn
.

When the jeans were off, he wore nothing but his boxers, and she wore nothing but panties. Early sunlight gleamed on their bare skin and the warm breeze licked them, making her nipples pebble. She saw Nick glance at them, and run his tongue across his lower lip. His cock was already swelling the front of his boxers, barely trapped by the elastic waist, forming a thick bulge slanting off to the right.

She tried not to stare. But she felt herself go hot between her thighs, and felt the slick wetness start to pool there.

“Jesus,” he said suddenly, pointing to her hip. “You really did get a nasty bruise.”

She glanced down—she had a big purple blotch where her hip had hit that stone when she slipped on the ice yesterday. She hadn’t even been feeling it. “It’s okay,” she said. “What about you? Any bruises from the hail?”

He turned obligingly, and
ouch
, across his back were half a dozen plum-colored circles, each about the size of a nickel. “How does it look?”

“Heroic,” she said, smiling at him as he turned back. “So now we’ve shown each other our war wounds. What next?”

“I think you had the right idea in your script. Clothes come off, all the barriers come down. Nothing for the next hour but naked, honest truth. And we keep our distance from each other, like your characters agreed to, okay?”

“Okay,” she said. Of course, her characters hadn’t held out very long on that promise. And she wasn’t sure she and Nick would be able to, either. “Underwear off, too?”

He hesitated half a second. “I’m not entirely sure that’s going to help us keep to our agreement, but—in the spirit of the enterprise, I guess we’d better.”

“On purely philosophical grounds.”

“Yes. For integrity.”

“Integrity.” And with shaking hands, she slid her panties down over her hips and let them slide down her legs. She kicked them aside and stood there, facing Nick, utterly naked.

He pushed down his boxers and kicked them off, too, his erection now springing to full attention, hard and dark and looking almost painfully engorged.

They both did their best to ignore it.

“So,” she said, trembling. “You want to go first?”

“I probably should,” he said. “Um, okay. So, I—I watched the video.”

“You did?” She felt her spirits rise instantly.

“Yeah. I didn’t want to. But I thought I owed it to you.”

“Oh.”
Owing
it to her didn’t seem particularly promising.

He seemed to have noticed her falling expression, and he hurried to say more. “But I’m—I’m glad I did.” He heaved a sigh and ran his fingers fitfully through the dark waves of his hair. “Amber, I’ve been a total idiot. I can’t even explain myself. I don’t know why I didn’t see things more clearly. You should know, long before that first morning up in the high meadow, I wanted you. Wanted you more than you can imagine. Dreamed of you all the time.”