Memories of the day and her brush with death came back to scare the hell out of him when he least expected it. He was pretty sure his insides were still a little numbed out about that.
“Where did you live before going off-the-grid?” Why hadn’t he thought to ask that before? Had he been holding back too?
“On a farm in Iowa.” She spun the bike pedal with her toe. “We grew corn and soybeans. The land was in the family for a couple hundred years. The farm barely paid for itself, but Dad had a store too, and Mom worked at a bank in town. They said moving here was the perfect way to get their priorities back in order.”
“And your brother?”
“They wanted to help him. I was twelve at the time and I didn’t ask a lot of questions.” She looked around the small business she’d managed to build in the middle of nowhere as if seeing it with new eyes. “Maybe I should have.”
They’d cut their two daughters off from the ability to ask questions or reach out for any help, any other way of thinking. The place might not call itself a cult, but unquestionably there had been a closed society, cultish mentality at play.
Was Sunny even able to just break away from that? Sure she’d been scared of him finding out about her brother when he first found her, but she hadn’t freaked out in the city when she was at his place. Looking back he knew now that she’d wanted to be at his apartment rather than base because of the intense proximity to the military. But she was comfortable enough there.
Seeing what she’d built here, with no help from the outside world, made him recognize how self-sufficient she was. What might she accomplish with the resources of the world he knew at hand?
He wasn’t ready to say all their obstacles were out of the way. But for tonight, it seemed he’d cleared away a few.
Above all, Sunny was alive. Thank God, she was still alive.
Wade extended an arm to her. “Let’s go up to your apartment.”
A spark lit in her eyes. “I can think of nothing better than forgetting about all the things we can’t change.” She placed her hand in his, her smile almost chasing away the shadows in her hazel eyes. “But I have a better idea than going to my apartment.”
Tugging him, she guided him toward the corridor, deeper down the hall, past the staircase leading to the second floor. Curious, he followed, his eyes gravitating to the sway of her hips, the swish of her ponytail, as she walked.
She unlocked and opened a door leading outside the log cabin. Turning, she clasped both his hands and pulled him out onto a huge deck overlooking… Holy crap.
The winding wood stairway with icicles led down to a bubbling pond of steaming waters. She’d told him the survival school sported a hot springs area, but he hadn’t envisioned anything like this. A privacy fence wrapped around, stopping at the slope of a mountain wall with a waterfall trickling down over two tiers of rock slab.
Sunny peeled off her sweater and tossed it over her shoulder onto the deck. Her ni**les went tight against her thin undershirt.
His jaw damn near fell there as well. “What are you doing?”
“Going skinny-dipping.” She tugged off one red high-top, then the other.
He eyed the mounds of snow around the edges. “You’re going to freeze to death before you make it into the water.”
“Not a chance.” She smiled at him with bold wickedness, the wind whipping her hair around her face. “Don’t tell me you’ve lived in Alaska all this time and you’ve never hung out in a hot tub naked to watch the northern lights?”
His gaze slid from nature’s hot tub to Sunny.
Best of all, the place was completely deserted. “Is that what we’re going to do? Watch a cosmic laser show?”
“Afterward, perhaps.”
“After what, exactly?” He stepped closer, closer still, until her hair brushed his chest. “I need to hear you spell it out.”
“Take your clothes off and join me. I’ll fill your ears full of exactly what I want.” She backed away, crooking her finger and making it clear that she had more in mind than lazing around. “It’s the least I can do for the man who saved my life today.”
Just like that, his body remembered the intense adrenaline surge that had accompanied that moment, the fear and fierceness that had charged through him after seeing her broken snowmobile in pieces at the bottom of the cliff.
Hunger for her, for this moment to celebrate surviving the day, had him reaching for her.
She made fast work of the buttons down his camo uniform and flung the top over the railing. “Take off your T-shirt.”
“You first.” He tugged her undershirt over her head, leaving her bared to the frigid air with only her purple jeans and red bra. Her ni**les beaded in the cold.
“You’re such a guy.” She yanked his T-shirt over his head, careful of his shoulder. “Has anyone checked your shoulder since you tangled with my dog and the car earlier?”