Edge Walkers by Shannon Donnelly Read Free Book Online

tightened her throat, filled her chest. “There was an overload of the main circuit—a power surge that shouldn’t have happened. Do you think I could be unconscious and my mind’s making this up?”
    His mouth quirked. “I used to think this a fever dream. I wanted it to be that. Oh, and they aren’t dolls. Well, I guess they are, but not for Voodoo. Or...at least, not the way you think. It’s a memorial in a way and what they do here to give the dead and dying some prayer of peace, but you probably don’t want to hear about that right now, do you?”
    He sounded hopeful about that. Shivering, she took her coat. She wanted to burn it along with her most recent set of memories. But she hadn’t been lying about being cold. Gideon had taken care of the chill for a time, but the glow from her blood pumping hard was already slowing. Shrugging into the thin cotton, she pulled it tight.
    The gesture pulled something dark to Gideon’s eyes, made him look away. He bent, straightened with her shoe in one hand now. “Come on. You are cold.”
    He kept her shoe and took her wrist again, his long fingers circling her bones. She frowned at how his touch stirred something inside again. She tried to make that something she could analyze. But she remembered how there’d been a time when she’d never backed down from a dare, or from trouble, which had led to the tattoo on the inside of her thigh and that three-day motorcycle trip to El Paso that still wasn’t more than a haze. It was, however, hard to do without the need for touch. The years had taught her that as well.
    Gideon pulled her closer, and she leaned into him even though she told herself she could stand on her own. If he noticed the drag in her step as he walked her forward, he pretended otherwise. He kept tugging on her, so she went since her brain had checked out on any other bright ideas. But it came up with one and she choked on a strangled laugh that grief sharpened.
    Glancing at her, his head tipped. She shrugged, figured why not say what had popped into her head. “Just thinking—unsafe sex. Very unsafe.”
    His smile flashed, bright and unexpected, startled her into not moving for an instant. It vanished in the next breath and he said, “Everything here’s unsafe. Except—well, the water’s good. I can make sure of that.”
    And it was.
    He led her to a font in the shadows. A place that might have once been for blessings. Dipping his cupped hands into the water, he drank before offering his hands to her. God only knew where the stone bowl he’d given her had gone. She couldn’t remember. And she didn’t know why drinking sweet, cool water from his hands should be more erotic that what they’d just done. But it was.
    The touch of her lips to his skin, that faint taste of salt and him, jolted whatever was left of her brain, seared through her body. Far too intimate to put her mouth on the edge of his hand like this, but the water went down easy and filled her stomach. And Gideon looked like he was trying not to think about what her lips felt like on him as she drank from his fingers. Or maybe it was her touching the back of his hands to guide them to her mouth that blew his pupils wide with what looked like interest stirring.
    Her own sparked, a quick flash of heat over her skin, but she put her mind on other things. Being a military brat at least taught you about hitting life with your back straight and your eyed locked on the road ahead—the old man had drilled that into them before she and her brothers had gotten old enough to scatter like recruits to new assignments. That left her thinking again.
    Wiping the last drops of water from her mouth, she asked, “Can you help me get back home?”
    Turning, he stared at her. He moved slow, as if he’d aged a hundred years with that question. Uncupping his hands, he shook off the damp, looked away.
    She side-stepped, put herself in his view again. “Look, I don’t know where we are. But I do need you to