Free A Wife in Time (Silhouette Desire) by Cathie Linz Page A

her. Susannah was a passionate woman. Voluptuous. When he’d just kissed her now, her full breasts had pressed against his chest like soft pillows and his hands had itched to cup them, to brush his thumbs over the nipples he could feel through the thin material of her nightgown....
    “Yellow fever,” Susannah demanded in an attention-grabbing voice. “When did they find a cure for it?”
    Pushing away his erotic thoughts, Kane switched mental gears and searched his memory. “While building the Panama Canal, I think.”
    “Yes, but what year?”
    “Damned if I know,” he said irritably, still ticked off by the way he’d reacted to her.
    “Then there’s no way I’m sleeping on the floor and risking getting bitten by a germ-infested mosquito!” she declared.
    “So you want to sleep with me?” he drawled.
    The knowing look in his eyes provoked her anger instead of her passion. “I find it only slightly less appealing than having yellow fever,” she retorted. “And I wouldn’t be sleeping with you.”
    “We’d be doing something else in this bed?”
    Kane was deliberately making things difficult for her and she was tempted to whack him with the twenty-pound pillow again. “We would be sharing the bed. That’s it. Nothing else. It’s big enough for both of us. And we could roll up this quilt and put it between us, it’s certainly too warm to use it for anything else.” She pounced on the quilt as if it were a long-lost possession.
    “Aren’t you a little overdressed for sleeping?” Kane mockingly inquired.
    “This is as undressed as I’m getting,” she stated coolly. The nightgown covered her practically from neck to ankles, and while she would have preferred the short silk chemise nightie packed in her suitcase back at the hotel, she didn’t have that option.
    “Do you plan on wearing your necklace to bed?” Kane asked.
    Looking down, she realized he was right. She was still wearing the garnet necklace originally belonging to her great-grandmother. In fact, she was still wearing all her jewelry.
    “Afraid I’m going to steal it?” he inquired dryly. “I can assure you that you don’t have anything I want.”
    Her look called him a liar.
    So he rephrased his observation. “Let me put it this way. You don’t have anything I care to take. Of course, if you’re giving anything away...”
    “You already got the only thing you’re getting from me. One candy bar!”
    “And a few saltines, not to mention two kisses.”
    “I’d rather you didn’t mention those kisses. And don’t repeat them, either,” she warned him with a chilly look, before removing her garnet jewelry set and stashing it in a quilted-silk holder she had in her purse. “You caught me off guard, otherwise you’d have been bent over and talking funny for a week. I do know how to protect myself, you know.”
    “I’m impressed,” he said in a voice that made her doubt he meant a word of it—although the look he was giving her did give the impression he was impressed, but not by her self-defense abilities. He was eyeing her as if trying to paint a mental picture of what she looked like under the concealing cotton of her nightgown.
    “I think we should be concentrating on what our next course of action will be regarding our situation,” she stated firmly.
    “You’re talking...quaintly again. And I thought we already decided what our next course of action would be—that you’re going to be sleeping with me.”
    She glared at him, but otherwise ignored his comment. “I was referring to Elsbeth. Clearly we need to find out more about her, since she’s the key to all of this. She’s the one who brought us back. Now we have to figure out why.”
    “I’m still having a hard time buying this time-travel thing,” Kane admitted.
    “Really? Don’t tell me you plan on walking into any more streetlamp poles,” she drawled.
    He didn’t look amused. “I’m hoping to wake up in the morning and find I’m back in my