Or maybe the more correct term was face to chest.
To give credit where it was due, he did have a very lovely chest. Well-defined, broad well-shaped shoulders, sun-brushed skin, nipples slightly puckered in the cold. He was the culmination of every woman's fantasy lover come true.
He was also bare-naked in twenty degree Fahrenheit temperature.
I couldn't help it. I just couldn't stop my eyes from going down, down, down, further down. Either the cold didn't affect him, or he was…truly not of this world.
Ignoring the way my face heated as though someone had placed a branding iron over it, I tried to act as though I saw naked men all the time.
"So, er, you would be Arjun, I suppose?" I asked, surreptitiously pinching myself on the arm. "A bit cold to be walking about in the buff, wouldn't you say?"
Not only was I completely deluded, but I was seeing mirages. Never mind that mirages were only seen in the desert, and the mirage was not an oasis but a positively gorgeous man.
His voice pitched lower than what I'd heard echo in the clearing before he…appeared. But in essentiality, it was the same person.
"The elements do not affect me as they affect you, Evelyn."
My name rolled over his tongue as if savoring the most expensive chocolate. I could have died happy; I was convinced that any woman would have felt the same.
But a jolting pain in the lower regions of my body, mostly in my frigid bum, brought me back to reality. I blinked. He still stood there, looking very male-like, despite the fact that ice started to frost on his shoulder-length, almost-white-blond hair.
Impossible. It couldn't be…. No, no, I was still seeing things and people who were not there…. What sort of person can merge with and out of a tree, for Pete's sake? Too many late-night, low-budget movies had finally taken their toll on me.
"Arjun?"
An exquisitely drawn brow quirked as he crossed his arms. "Yes?"
I reached out and realized that my hand shook so bad I was almost seeing double. But try as I might, I couldn't remain steady. I tried to tell myself it was because the temperature was rapidly falling, but deep inside I knew that was not the reason why I shook like a shell-shocked victim.
His skin warm against my cold, frozen fingers, I felt blood pumping through the body I could not longer deny…through the body I could no longer call a delusion.
This was real.
All of it.
I wasn't dreaming. This man before me, Arjun….
He wasn't an illusion, not a fancy my mind concocted on a cold winter night.
"Jesus bloody Christ!" I snatched my hand back, unable to lie to myself anymore. "You're real!"
He smiled at me, a slow widening of the crimson lips the same color as holly berries, and heat washed through my body, made me feel as though I'd suddenly stepped into a fire.
"Yes. I am real."
A wind blew through the clearing, turning my breath misty. He shivered, and I made up my mind.
Clearly, he wasn't human. There was just something about him that screamed otherworldly, but what that otherworld meant, I didn't know. Whatever the case, he felt the cold, maybe not as acutely as I felt it, but he felt it all the same.
I might've been struck dumb by a handsome man, but that didn't mean I was going to stay stupid and stand around like an idiot, gawking at him as if he'd sprouted four arms and six heads.
I always carried around a thick flannel blanket in the trunk of my car, although there'd never been any use for it. Well, it looked as though it was finally going to be of some sort of use now.
"Come on. I'm not going to have you show up, only to have you freeze to death on me."
I could have sworn he laughed silently at me, but as I proceeded to drag-prod him to my car, I couldn't help but wonder….
Who the hell was he?
No.
What the hell was he?
Because sure as the sun set and rose every day, I was willing to bet my life savings he was most definitely….
Not human.