Out of This World

Chapter 5

Kellan’s view of things

Here’s the crazy thing: I’ve wanted to hold Rachel Wood in my arms for, oh, only my entire life.

No kidding.

Well, that’s not quite true. Half the time, I’ve wanted to strangle her.

But the other half of the time…

She entered kindergarten the same year as my sister. I’d sit outside during my second-grade recess and watch Rachel dance around on her tiptoes, like a little ballerina in high-top tennis shoes, and even way back then, something within me had fallen head over heels. Of course, that changed pretty quickly when she went on to torture me at every turn for the next two decades.

In fourth grade, she told her teacher that I called her a butthead (which I had) and got me sent home from school and my mouth washed out with soap. In seventh grade, right before my state championship baseball game, she sneaked into my locker and replaced my jock with her bra. Ever get stepped on by the catcher when you’re in a home run slide without your jock? Not a good time. In ninth grade, she told Cece Brodington that I kissed like a frog. (In all fairness, that one might have been true, too.)

In high school, she copied all my accounting and algebra work with regularity, but since she got me through the English and world history classes that were hell on Earth for me, I had no real recourse.

During those years, she began her lifelong lust-affair with badasses, and though I fantasized about being one of them, I couldn’t have been a badass even if I’d learned to smoke without choking. I just didn’t have it in me to be a jerk. But that was okay. I met a lot of girls who liked me just fine how I was.

Well, maybe not a lot.

Maybe not even many, but whatever.

We did kiss once, Rach and I, at my high school graduation. Dot made us do it so she could take a picture. Rachel rolled her eyes, but she leaned in and put her lips to mine for the briefest, most glorious second in history, and then she pulled away laughing.

I didn’t laugh.

Hell, I didn’t even breathe.

I went off to college after that, and I pretended to be relieved of her presence, but that was one big fat lie.

The entire time she was at UC Santa Barbara studying art and I was at San Diego State studying marine biology had been hell.

I still live in San Diego, but we get together for weekends now, and without the pressures of school, life is pretty damn good.

Of course, if Rachel would just realize that I’m her soul mate, then things might be great, but I figure I’m more likely to be the next man on the moon, so I don’t put a lot of stock in hope.

Besides, one thing I do have is her eternal friendship, which I’ve long ago talked myself into believing is enough.

Now here we are, stomping through the middle of the Alaska wilds, and she’s been hit by lightning-God!-and I think, I think, I’ve just caught her checking out my ass…

No doubt I dreamed that last part, but I didn’t dream her crawling up my body a few minutes ago as if she wanted to eat me alive. Nope, that had been real, because I pinched myself to make sure. I just tried to maintain after that. Not easy.

“Do you know where you’re going?” she asked. Her Capri jeans were filthy, and her ruffled pink top was wet from the rain and newly sheer because of it, though I was desperately trying not to notice that as she squeegeed water out of her hair.

Did I know where we were going?

Not so much, actually. When I wasn’t under water with the dolphins, I could get lost finding my way out of a paper bag, and we both knew it. Plus, I didn’t feel so hot myself. I looked around me at the woods, which had all but swallowed us whole. The trail was gone.

“I’ll figure it out.”

“How can you see?” she asked, and picked up my glasses, which had fallen to the ground. “I thought you were as blind as a bat without them.”

Yeah, I was. Always have been. I took them and stuck them in my pocket, because oddly enough, for the first time since kindergarten, I didn’t have to squint to see. No blurry edges, no fuzzy lines. Nothing but perfect clarity. Must be the air. “Not so blind right now.”

“Huh,” she said, looking at me, “that’s weird.”

No, what was weird was the trail she’d come in on had vanished into thin air. It’d been right here before the sudden and shockingly vicious downpour, but hell if there was any sight of it now.

“So do you know where we’re going or not?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“Just admit it. You don’t.”

“I do.”

She let out an unladylike snort. “What is it with men that they can’t admit when they’re lost?”

“What good would it do to admit it? It’s not like I can stop and ask for directions.”

“As if you would if you could.”

“I would!”

“Okay, big guy. Whatever you say.” She tossed her hair back, going to work squeezing water out of her pink, ruffled top. Her sheer, pink, ruffled top. Let’s not forget that part. She fisted both hands in the thin material, molding it to her body, as she watched the water drip off her.

And damn, though irritating as hell, the girl was beautiful. She had this curvy body that I knew drove her insane because it wasn’t model thin, and she had no idea how her curves could make a grown man beg for mercy. Coupled with her wildly wavy brown hair and melting chocolate eyes, she always made me want to beg for mercy, especially now, because her shirt was giving me some serious wet T-shirt fantasies.

“Men don’t ask for directions,” she scoffed, hands on her hips. “You’re just not programmed to admit when you need help.”

Beautiful and obnoxious. Did I mention obnoxious?

“Let’s just start walking, okay?” I said.

“Humph,” she said, and stomped past me.

It was wrong, I knew, but when she got pissy, it turned me on. I snagged her arm, pulling her back around, doing my best not to notice that whole sheer-shirt thing she had going on and the fact that she was very cold. Very cold.

Or turned on.

The thought that she might be was a huge distraction. “What did that last ‘humph’ mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, it’s something.”

She looked away. “I just thought you were worried about me, that’s all.”

“I am.”

She tossed back her wet hair, and sent me a mulish look. “If you’re so worried, you’d have…”

“What?”

“Offered to carry me or something,” she muttered.

I had visions of tossing her over my shoulder and stalking off with her to my cave like a caveman. Me Tarzan, you Jane. “Do you want me to carry you?”

“Of course not.”

Yeah, definitely pissy, which made me a whole lot relieved. After all, how hurt could she be if she was already back to her usual disagreeable self?

“I’m worried,” I promised. “Enough that I nearly had heart failure back there, all for you. Okay?”

“Okay.”

I reached my hand out to her and wiggled my fingers.

She looked at them.

She was beautiful, but what made her so irresistible, at least to me, was that she couldn’t hold a grudge. Not when we were kids and I did some stupid boy thing, or when we were teenagers and I did some even more stupid boy thing. And not now…

Truth was, at heart she was a happy-go-lucky soul, optimistic and hopeful. Staying mad just wasn’t in her genes, and she wrapped her fingers around mine. We looked at the growth and trees all around us, dripping from the oddly violent but short-lived downpour, and at my side, Rach shivered.

“It’s funny,” she said, craning her neck, her eyes apprehensive, “but I can’t even remember which way I came from. Everything looks so different.”

Looked different and felt different, though I wasn’t exactly sure how. It was hard to concentrate with her standing there, clothes wet and clinging to her every inch. And there were a lot of off-the-chart gorgeous inches on her. I was trying really hard not to notice, or at least, not to make it obvious, when a rustling sound came from the bushes just to our right.

Rachel latched onto me. “Kel.”

Pretending to be tough and secure, I held her against me-not exactly a hardship-and turned to face the alarming sound.

Axel crashed his way free of the bushes. “Hey, dudes. What’s shaking?”

Rachel pulled free. “How did you find us?” She shook her head. “Never mind. Just get us back to Hideaway.”

“Why, what happened?”

“Well, did you see that lightning?” she asked.

Axel scratched his head through his wool beanie. The tassels swung with his every movement. “Lightning? We don’t get much lightning here in Alaska. Now wind-we get a lot of that. One-hundred-mile-an-hour gusts that can knock a man flat on his ass.”

“You’re sure you didn’t see the lightning? Or hear the thunder?” she asked him incredulously. “It shook the earth like a huge quake.”

“I heard the rain, that’s it.” Axel peered into Rach’s eyes. “You been smoking or something?”

Rachel made a sound of annoyance and looked at me, the question in her eyes.

In answer, I shook my head. I had no idea how Axel could have missed the unmistakable thunder-and-lightning storm, brief as it’d been.

“Whoa,” Axel said, getting a good look at us.

“What?” I actually glanced behind us for the source of horror on his face, but to my great relief, I saw nothing.

“Dude, look,” Axel insisted, pointing at my chest. “You’re smoking.”

Rachel looked at me as well, and gasped. “I told you!”

I glanced down at myself. It was a little disconcerting to find it was true. I was smoking.

“We had a little incident,” I said.

“Sweet.”

Sweet?

“Listen,” Axel said, looking around us a little uneasily, “I think we should go back to the inn.”

“I agree,” Rachel said. “You lead the way.”

“Oh.” Axel eyeballed the landscape all around us. Then he stuck his hands into his pockets, and looked around some more. “Why, you lost or something?”

“Not technically,” I muttered.

Rachel shot me a look. “Yes, technically. We’re lost. L-O-S-T, lost.”

“No prob.” Axel scratched his chest, looking around as if he had all the time in the world.

I looked at Rachel. She looked right back. Was this really happening to us? Because it was getting hard to tell if this was real or just some crazy-ass nightmare.

“Axel?” Rachel prompted after a full moment of silence.

“Yeah?”

“Get us out of here?”

“Oh. Right.” He turned and began to walk, then stopped. “No, not this way,” he muttered to himself, and did an about-face. “This way. Yeah.”

Rachel reached for my hand as we went to follow him, and pulled me close so that she could whisper in my ear. “Maybe you should take off your shirt.”

My stupid heart leaped. “What for?”

“So we can tear it into strips and tie pieces on branches to mark our way. Since our guide is as lost as we are.”

“We’re not lost.”

She sent me a baleful look. “We are so lost.”

Axel pointed to the bushes through which he’d come a moment ago. “There. Follow me.” And he vanished into them.

Now that my erection was gone, I had enough blood to operate my brain again. And I was able to think that we hadn’t ducked through a bush to get here.

“Yeah, not going in there,” Rachel said, staring at the bushes as she backed herself into me. “No way.”

“Why?”

“Axel?” she called out to the bush.

No response, and she wriggled closer to me, which wasn’t so good for my thinking capabilities.

“He’s gone already,” she said. “He thinks we’re right behind him.” Grabbing my hand, she pulled me after her at a speed that was shocking given I’d had no idea she could even move that fast. “Rach-”

“We’re going around the bushes,” she said, still gripping my hand as if it were a lifeline. “There are…things in those bushes. Spiders, and creepy crawlies, and more spiders.”

“Okaaay.”

“Axel!” she called out as we rounded the bushes.

I thought I heard him call back to us, and we followed his voice, but after a few twists and turns through the heavy growth with no sign of him, we stopped again.

Rach sagged against the closest tree for one brief beat before letting out a soft cry and straightening away from the trunk as if it were possessed.

But she was the possessed one.

“Oh my God.” Turning in a circle, she looked madly around the small clearing like a cornered animal, one hand over her mouth, her eyes wide and wild. “They’re everywhere!”

“What’s everywhere?”

“Creepy crawlies!”

“Rach?”

She shook her head violently, holding up a hand to hold me off.

Uh-oh. She’d cracked. She’d utterly lost it. I knew firsthand that she didn’t fall apart easily. She had an inner strength that got her through any hardship that came her way. I’d seen her struggle through a tough college curriculum while working full time to support herself; I’d seen her work like crazy to make it on her own in the art world; and I’d seen her go through the death of her father. She’d lived through them as she experienced everything else: with her spirit and strength intact.

But she was at her limit here. That, or she’d hit her head harder than she’d let on. Fearing that, I stepped toward her, but she backed away. “Hey. Hey, are you okay?”

“No. No, I’m not okay. There’s…things out here, Kel. Rabid raccoons and crazy squirrels and gigantic bugs and…” She clamped her mouth shut. Still wet, she shivered.

I took another step toward her, and she jerked.

“It’s just me,” I said in the voice I used with the dolphins when they were spooked. “Just me, Rach.”

Her gaze ran over my face, my body, and then she went beet red, squeezing her eyes tightly shut. “Yeah. It’s just that, well, it’s a lot more of you than you think.”

Huh? “Come on. We’ll go back.”

Her laugh sounded more than half-hysterical. “Yeah. How exactly?”

I reached out my hand for hers, tugging her close. “We’ll get back.”

“So you’re not lost?”

“Well…” I looked around. “Maybe just a little.”

“Oh God.”

“But I can get us unlost. Okay?”

“How about to L.A.? Can you get us back to L.A.?” she joked weakly, then stopped my heart when she snuggled against me, pressing her face to my throat.

God, I loved when she did that.

Unable to help myself, I banded my arms tightly around her. I might have buried my face in her hair and inhaled deeply, too, but no one had to know that part, because it was the story of my life: lusting and yearning after this woman who usually thought of me as something she might absently pat on the head and feed a cookie.

So instead, I just held her for as long as she wanted.

“Something’s really-” She broke off.

“Really what, Rach?”

“Wrong. Really, really wrong.”

Pulling back, I looked her in the face, feeling an underlying sense of anxiety brought on by her tone.

“You mean something more than all this?”

She resisted looking into my eyes. Instead, she tried to burrow in again, tighter this time, nearly strangling me in the process.

But that was fine with me, because there were better things than breathing. Like holding her. Her lips brushed my neck, her hair stabbing into my eyes, but I didn’t mind, because the silky strands smelled like honey and vanilla, and I could have smelled her all damn day long. Jeez, I was pretty far gone if I was noticing the scent of her hair over the thought of any injuries she might have sustained…

“I want to go back,” she whispered. “We can talk there.”

“Okay.” Besides, I wasn’t any happier than she was, out here, in the middle of nowhere, with killer lightning bolts. “Let’s go.”

And holding her hand, I started to lead the way.

If only I knew exactly which way that was.