“Um . . .” she started again. “Andre, maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”
“Csitri. Ainaak terád vigyázak.”
She frowned. When he spoke in his language—and she couldn’t understand a word of it and she was pretty good with languages—he sounded sexier than ever. His tone was pitched low and seemed to move over her skin in a caress. She really didn’t understand how a voice or tone could do that to her, but it did.
“I don’t understand what that means.”
“Csitri is”—he frowned—“little one. But affectionate.”
Teagan didn’t ever want to think of herself as “little,” but she liked the affectionate part and she couldn’t deny that beside him, she was on the smaller side. Okay, maybe beside most people, but still. “And the other part?”
“Ainaak terád vigyázak.” He mulled that over for a minute. “I have difficulty translating that properly, but it means you are in my care. Always in my care. I do not have the proper English words to convey the full meaning.”
He sounded distracted. She was totally okay with him being distracted. The healing warmth penetrated deeper, right into the muscles and tendons she’d strained. She could feel the difference already. She also preferred that he wasn’t paying close attention to her reaction to his touch.
The longer he was close to her, the more her breath stayed captured in her lungs. Even her thighs seemed to dance with fingers of desire moving up and down them from his voice alone. The heat between her legs increased and she felt her womb pulse and her feminine channel go damp with need.
It was beautiful. Perfect. Scary strong. Very intense. She’d gone from not being able to react physically to a man to wanting to turn her head and see if his mouth tasted as good as it looked. She also wanted to dance a little jig or something to celebrate that she wasn’t totally frigid.
His breath hitched. She felt the warmth on the nape of her neck as he swept her hair out of his way. The pulse in her throat jumped. Throbbed. She reached up and covered it because, just for a moment, she felt his mouth there, against her skin, his tongue sliding across her pulse. She knew it wasn’t real, because his mouth was close to the nape of her neck—she could feel his breath. Still, she captured the sensual feeling of his tongue over her pulse with the palm of her hand and just held it there, pressing it into her skin.
She hoped the memory burned deep so when she went to bed, she could take that with her and keep scary dreams of Armend at bay with Andre’s presence.
“I need your hand, sivamet.”
Even as he told her, he already had taken possession of it, so very gently. His touch was a caress, and it sent a shiver of awareness down her spine. He examined the raw fingers, smoothing them out in his palm. Her hand looked very small inside of his. The pads of his fingers stroked over the raw wounds. Her toes actually curled, and she felt her very core spasm and spill damp heat between her legs.
Teagan nearly jerked her hand free, but his fingers closed around hers and he brought them to his mouth before she could do a thing. She was so mesmerized, she stared at him over her shoulder as her fingers disappeared into the warm haven of his mouth. The reaction of her body was shocking. She could have sworn she had a mini-orgasm just from the sensation of his tongue stroking caresses over her fingers.
She couldn’t move. She should have—but she couldn’t. Her entire body was on fire and that was just . . . remarkable. She didn’t want the feeling to go away, yet at the same time, she didn’t want this strange bear of a man, so gentle and kind, to know what she was feeling.
Her hand tingled, and then grew warm. She felt his tongue slide over each individual finger a second and then third time. Each slow, sensual movement sent desire knifing through her body. It took a moment for her thought processes to kick in.
Her brain felt slow and sluggish, dazed and mesmerized by the lines carved so deep in his handsome face. His hooded eyes filled with concentration, the blue so deep and true, she’d never seen such a pure color on anyone. He had to be the most sensual man in the world, and she was alone in a cave with him.
There might be something to vacation flings after all. She’d never understood the concept. It seemed so wrong, sharing your body with a stranger and walking away. She wanted intimacy and emotion. A connection beyond physical. She wanted everything—or nothing—with a man. She’d accepted, a long time ago, when her body didn’t respond to anyone, she was going to have nothing.
She took a breath and let it out to calm her wildly beating heart and maybe get air to her brain so she could actually think. He removed her fingers from his mouth, although he did so reluctantly, slowly, as if he didn’t want to. He held her hand up for his inspection, turning her fingers first one way and then the other.
Teagan stared at her hand. There no sign of injury; the skin had completely healed over the raw wounds where she had torn them. She held her other hand up for comparison. Both hands had suffered the same fate when she’d slipped off the rock with her foot and tried to hold on.
She loved climbing, but she seemed to have thin skin. She didn’t develop the necessary callouses the way others did.
“How did you do that?”
Looking at him over her shoulder as she was doing, she saw him in profile, and his eyelashes were outrageously long. His mouth was perfection. His nose straight and his jaw strong. She liked the scruff on his jaw and the blue of his eyes. She could stare at him for eternity and that wouldn’t be long enough.