Two Alone

She held up her hands. Like his, they had been ravaged by water, wind and cold. “Do these look like they’ve seen any lotion lately?”

His smiles were so rare that her heart melted beneath the one he flashed her now. Then, in what seemed like a reflexive gesture, he captured one of her hands and lightly kissed the backs of her fingers with lips made soft by shiny gloss.

His mustache tickled her fingers. And in a bizarre correlation that made absolutely no sense, it tickled the back of her throat as well. Her stomach executed a series of somersaults.

Suddenly realizing what he’d done, he dropped her hand. “I’ll use the razor in the morning.”

Rusty hadn’t wanted him to let go of her hand. In fact, she’d been tempted to turn it and cover his mustache and lips with her palm. She wanted to feel their caress in that vulnerable spot. Her heart was pounding so hard she had difficulty speaking. “Why not shave now?”

“There’s no mirror. With this much stubble, I’d lacerate myself.”

“I could shave you.”

For a moment neither of them said anything, only filled the narrow space between them with leaping arcs of sexual electricity. Rusty didn’t know where the impulse had sprung from. It had just popped up from nowhere and she’d acted on it before thinking—maybe because it had been days since they’d touched each other for any reason. She was feeling deprived. As the body gets hungry for a certain food when it needs the vitamins and minerals it contains, she’d unconsciously expressed her desire to touch him.

“All right.” Cooper’s permission was granted in a ragged voice.

Nervous, now that he had agreed to her suggestion, she clasped her hands at her waist. “Why...why don’t you sit over there by the fire. I’ll bring the stuff.”

“Okay.”

“Roll the collar of your shirt in and tuck a towel inside,” she said over her shoulder as she poured water from the kettle on the stove into a shallow bowl. She pulled a chair up close to his and set the bowl and razor on the seat. She also got her bar of soap from the shelf, and a spare towel.

“I’d better soak it first.” He dipped the extra towel into the bowl of hot water. “Ouch, damn,” he cursed when he tried to wring it out.

“It’s hot.”

“No foolin’?”

He juggled the scalding towel from one hand to the other before finally slapping it against the lower portion of his face, letting out a yelp when he did so. He held it there, although Rusty didn’t know how he could stand it.

“Doesn’t that burn?” Without removing the towel, he nodded solemnly. “You do it to soften the whiskers, right?” Again, he nodded. “I’ll try to work up a good lather.”

Tentatively she wet her hands in the bowl of hot water and picked up the cake of soap. Cooper watched her every move as she rubbed the soap between her hands until they were covered with honeysuckle-scented suds. The foam looked rich and creamy as she slid it between her palms. It oozed between her fingers, looking intensely sexy, although exactly why, he didn’t know.

“Whenever you’re ready,” she said, moving behind him.

Gradually Cooper lowered the towel. Just as gradually, Rusty raised her hands to his face. Gazing down at him from her position above and behind him, the planes and ridges of his face looked even more harsh, more pronounced. But there was a vulnerability to his eyelashes that gave her enough courage to lay her palms against his prickly cheeks.

She felt him tense up in reaction to her touch. She didn’t move her hands at first, but kept them still, resting lightly against his cheeks, while she waited to see if he was going to tell her that this wasn’t a good idea.

It was a given that it wasn’t a good idea.

She just wondered which one of them was going to admit it first and call a halt to the proceedings. But Cooper said nothing, and she didn’t want to stop, so she began to rotate her hands over his cheeks.

The sensation of that scratchy surface against her palms was enticing. She moved her hands to encompass more area and found that the bones of his jaw were just as chiseled and rigid to the touch as they looked. His square chin had a shallow indentation in its center. She slipped the edge of her fingernail into it, but didn’t investigate it nearly as long as she wanted to.

She ran her hands simultaneously down his throat, smoothing on the lather as she went. Her fingers glided over his Adam’s apple and toward the base of his neck, where she fe

lt his pulse pounding. Dragging her fingers back up his neck and over his chin again, she encountered his lower lip and, beyond it, the brush of his mustache.

She froze and drew in a quick, hopefully inaudible breath. “Sorry,” she murmured. Removing her hands, she dipped them in the water to rinse them off. She leaned forward and inspected her handiwork from another angle. There was a speck of soap on his lower lip and some bubbles clinging to several of the blond hairs in his mustache.

With her wet finger, she whisked away that speck from his lip, then rubbed her finger over his mustache until the bubbles disappeared.

A low sound emanated from him. Rusty froze, but her eyes flew to his. “Get on with it,” he growled.

With his face partially obscured by white foam, he shouldn’t have posed any threat. But his eyes were alight.