Completely (New York 3)

“Good horsie,” she said in a raspy voice.

All Kal could think was that the way he felt about Rosemary wasn’t complicated.

It wasn’t stupid.

It was just a whole lot more than he’d bargained for.

—

Rosemary lay beside Kal, her body cooling, her heart full, and she didn’t pull his head to her chest to run her fingers through his hair, separating the short strands, learning the shapes of his skull with her hands, but she wanted to.

She wanted to stroke his hair.

She knew what it meant. She was no fool.

The light spilling through the doorway striped his skin dark and light, golden and brown. The fine hairs along his forearms glowed.

She didn’t reach out to touch them because he’d gone still, and she understood that this was another one of those tricky moments with Kal, a minefield she hadn’t a strategy for and could only creep carefully through.

She turned onto her side, though, to study him unobtrusively.

He had calluses across his palms from climbing, square fingernails, round muscular forearms. He had fine collarbones and smile lines at the corners of his eyes, and dark stubble now where he’d been clean-shaven this morning. She found no gray hair at his temples. She could see no tension in his body, though he felt tense beside her.

They’d been through a great deal in a short period of time.

Rosemary knew there were people who, if she asked them, would tell her the things she and Kal had been through had generated what she was feeling for him. Tragedy, danger, intense sexual attraction—all of them influenced brain chemistry.

Adrenaline and pheromones and serotonin had created a miasma of manufactured emotion.

These people would tell her that the intensity of her feelings would fade given time, leaving behind only the obvious obstacles to any kind of partnership.

He lived in New York. She had a cottage north of London, a daughter in Wisconsin. She had seven mountains to climb and a book to write, and she didn’t know what Kal wanted or what he intended to do in the years ahead.

So, yes. Perhaps those people would turn out to be correct.

That was fine.

For now, it was lovely to feel this way about someone again. She had never discounted the possibility, but she hadn’t gone in search of it, and she certainly hadn’t expected her journey to Nepal to carry her here, to the blooming beginning of love.

Kal turned onto his side, propping himself up on his elbow. “So.”

She repeated the word back. “So.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Yes?”

“I could be here when you wake up.”

“You could.”

“Or I could not be here.

”

“That’s the other possibility.”

“What do you want?” He smiled, but it wasn’t the smile she liked best from him. It was a question rather than an answer.