Free Taming the Prince by Elizabeth Bevarly Page A

contradictions she was, and about how very much he wanted to wake her up and make love to her right here.
    Whoa. Hold on thar, Babalooie. Make love? To Miss Pink Sweater? Was he crazy?
    It was the weirdest damned thing he’d ever thought. Here he was, in a situation that defied reality, his life hanging in the balance, and suddenly he wanted to make love to a woman he’d met only a couple of days ago. Certainly an immediate physical response to a woman wasn’t exactly uncharacteristic behavior for Shane. But it was unusual for him to want a woman with the vigor that he wanted Sara at that moment.
    He told himself he shouldn’t be surprised by the intensity of his response, and that it was the very nature of their bizarre circumstances that probably generated it. Hadn’t he read somewhere that being in a dangerous situation heightened a person’s awareness and created an artificial sort of intimacy with anyone else who might be caught up in the perilous doings? So of course he shouldn’t be surprised by his reaction to Sara right now. But he was. Even danger and peril shouldn’t make him feel this way about a woman. Especially a woman like her. Because, in spite of the steel and fire, she was much too decent and much too sweet for the kind of thoughts he was having about her.
    Even if she was lying about who she was.
    Oh, he didn’t doubt she was a student. She was much too…too…too studious not to be. But she for sure wasn’t majoring in English or home ec or library science, as he had originally supposed. Not unless it was a front for something else. He just wished he knew who and what she was and why she was misleading him.
    He shoved his fingers vigorously through his hair again, as if he were trying to literally push the troubling thoughts out of his brain. Man, he was tired. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d felt this exhausted, not even when he’d pulled a double shift hauling bricks after a day-long surfing tourney last year. He closed his eyes, thinking maybe if he just sat still enough, cleared his mind enough, he might fall into the same kind of deep slumber that Sara had fallen into.
    No sooner had the thought unrolled in his head, however, than he heard her stirring on the other side of the tiny room. When he opened his eyes again, in the weakening light of the flashlight, he saw her push herself into a sitting position. She groaned as she extended her arms outward and launched herself into a stout stretch, and Shane tried not to notice how the action thrust her breasts against the thin white cotton of her shirt, tried not to think about how the sound she made was so like the one a woman uttered when she was thoroughly—sexually—satisfied.
    For a moment, she seemed not to remember that he was there, probably didn’t even recall the details of her current predicament. She looked like a woman just waking from a long sleep, and Shane was reluctant to say anything to hurry her awareness. Hell, she deserved a few moments of forgetfulness when the reality to which she would finally awaken was so awful. So he only watched in silence as she pushed her arms over her head, then folded them behind her neck for another long stretch. The top button of her blouse freed itself when she did, revealing the merest hint of pale pink lace and ivory flesh beneath. And just like that,Shane went hard as a rock with his need to have her right now.
    Dammit. That was the last thing he needed right now.
    But he couldn’t take his eyes off of her as, with one final flexing of her fingers and one last lusty sigh, she eased herself out of her stretch. Slowly, she curled her legs behind herself and dropped her arms to her sides, leaning back on one hand as she settled the other in her lap. She rolled her head back and forth a time or two, then finally opened her eyes—her bewitching pale green eyes—and turned her gaze to Shane. Immediately, those eyes went wide, and he realized she had indeed, until that moment,