Before her lay the river, neither tame nor wild, neither broad nor narrow, bigger than a stream by night, although it looked smaller by day. Like a sparkling silver snake in the moonlight flooding the clearing, it wound its curvy way through the trees, dotted here and there with stones in various sizes and shrubs dipping dainty branches into the water.
It was beautiful, enchanting. Enchanted.
But what caught her eye was the half-naked figure of a man standing in the stream.
And not any man. It took her less than a second to identify Joshua with his tall, lean body and blonder than blond hair. He was only a few feet away from where she stood, half hidden between the trees. She could clearly make out his profile and what she saw made the fire core in her belly spread and stretch and beg to be let out.
He was standing in the water, to the middle of the stream, the wet currents lapping at his thighs like fingers wanting to caress him. She could discern tight black jeans hugging his legs and butt. Over the belt with the shining silver buckle, he was naked. His toned arms and chest sported just the right amount of muscle to make him look fit but not heavily muscled. The moonlight flattered him and made him look like a Norse river god. Water drops glistened on his pale skin. It was as white as paper against the backdrop of trees and night sky.
She gulped, unconsciously wetting her lips with her tongue.
This was a sight for sore eyes.
Joshua stood proud and straight, head raised high to the moon and stars. After a moment, he slowly raised his arms as though he were about to do a yoga exercise or as if there were a great weight attached to them. He lifted them up high above his head and she could see his hairless, sparkling, water-decorated chest rise and fall with deep, slow breaths.
Despite her aversion to water, everything inside her screamed at her to walk over and into the arms of this otherworldly creature that looked so damn fine and was surrounded by such a mysterious aura.
She had lifted one foot without knowing it when his next move froze her to the spot, jaw dropping.
He brought his arms down, scooped up two big handfuls of water and threw them into the air in a powerful movement. In the middle of righting himself, he whispered a word or phrase.
The water froze as surely as she had frozen a few feet away.
It took her a few seconds to realize it had turned from liquid to ice in the blink of an eye, a cascade of falling water arms and tiny drops reaching from his hands to the surface of the water. Like icicles growing from his fingers, the frozen water glinted in the moonlight, looking as hard and precious as diamonds. So did his body, still and regal in this quiet act of magic, white and glittering and almost translucent like an ice sculpture or a man of glass.
It took her breath away and made her feel light-headed the way only fire usually did.
So, she had been right, he was holding a core of ice inside him just as she was filled with fire. Or was this some trick? Her mind losing its track? A play of moonlight on cold water?
When she remembered to breathe, eyes never leaving the spectacle in front of her, his mouth moved in another whisper. With a startlingly sharp crack like a whip crashing through the air, the icicles exploded into a myriad shards of ice, now more like diamonds than before. He looked at his hands before he raised his head and turned it exactly to where she was standing, his grey-blue eyes piercing and icy.
“What do you think?” he asked, voice calm and assured as though he asked her opinion on a new gadget he wanted to buy.
Had he known all along that she was watching?
She could feel the heat rise in her cheeks and in her body. Why did he have to look so fine and annoy her so?
In an attempt to clear her head and win the upper hand, she asked coolly, “Are you expecting me to fall at your feet and worship you?”
He threw back his head and laughed, and was fascinated again.
In a few lightning quick steps, he had waded out of the water and come right up to her, stopping three feet away, dripping wet and smelling of river and forest. The cold he exuded was palpable, like so many tiny fingers brushing over her skin and making her shiver.
“Sounds like a brilliant idea,” he said, voice low and intimate, eyes sparkling.
She swallowed.
“Dream on,” she countered, angry because her voice shook ever so lightly, and unsettled by the stinging cold emanating from his statue-like body. In an effort to escape his hypnotizing eyes, she lowered her gaze. It came to rest on his firm, pale chest and the glistening water drops adorning his smooth skin like jewels. There was a sudden urge inside her to touch the tip of her finger against his chest to collect one icy drop or to touch her tongue to his wintry skin.
The fire inside her grew hotter and hotter despite the coldness seeping into her skin.
Once again, he made her snap out of her reverie.
“Are you asking me to dream of you?”
Her head snapped up, her mouth opened and closed like a fish out of the water. Damn this man! Did he have to turn her every word into something to his liking?
“Do you always misunderstand what people tell you?” she asked belligerently, her arms coming up and crossing in defense.
A half-grin tugged at his thin, bluish lips, once again turning him into a handsome rake.
“On the contrary. I always try and see behind the lies. I’ve learned to decipher what people want to express.”
How could he sound so full of himself?
She groaned.
“You’re darned smug, you know.”
The half-grin turned into a full grin, but he let it rest.
“You haven’t answered my question? What do you think?”
Felicia frowned.
“I think you don’t give a damn what I think about your little display of magic. Seeing you’re so full of yourself, you shouldn’t need any affirmation.”
He looked at her intently.
“You’re right. I don’t ask others for their opinion, let alone need their approval. But what if I need yours? What if it does mean something to me what you have to say?”
His confident, cool, caressing voice carried so much meaning she found herself drawn in by it again.
Was he telling her that she and her opinion were important to him?
Should she reveal what she had thought and felt while staring at him?
Suddenly, she wanted to do just that. Heck, who else was there who possessed a crazy talent and who wanted to hear what she had to say? Who else was there to help her?
“If you want to know… It looked magnificent. And forbidden. And powerful and easy at the same time. When I watched you, I admired not only your so called special gift but I also wondered whether I couldn’t do a magic trick too. I felt the irresistible urge to let out the fire in me like you let the ice in you out. And it scared me and attracted me at the same time. Like… like you scare and attract me.”
There, it was out.
Summoning her courage, she looked into his face.
His eyes were shining a deep grey blue, full of an emotion she couldn’t place. She wondered what he thought about her admitting she was attracted to him and also feared him to some degree. No, not exactly feared him, but feared what he stood for.
“Thank you,” he said.
The cold around them vanished and she stopped shivering, on the outside as well as on the inside.
Abruptly, he broke eye contact, turned and walked a few steps to the side where he stooped down to pick up a white T-shirt. Not bothering to dry himself off, he put it on and stepped into a pair of white sneakers.
How could a man look so sexy putting a T-shirt on instead of removing it?
Her gaze travelled his body, lighting with temptation at the way the fabric molded against his wet torso, and appreciating the enticing way in which his soaked jeans fit his lower body like a second skin. Inside her belly, the volcano was too ready to erupt. The eruption got postponed when Joshua sat down on the rock where he had kept his clothes and patted the pl
ace beside him invitingly.
Her feet were moving before she realized it. She sat down further away than he had indicated, drew her knees in beneath her and was acutely aware that most of her legs had been visible and much of her skin was still exposed to the gaze he lingeringly drew over her. Going out in a skimpy red top didn’t seem such a good idea now, although she had to admit the way his icy eyes took her in made her proud.
Once more, she felt cold, unsure whether the night at the river bank was always chilly or whether it was the man beside her who was now staring at the water fixedly.
They sat in silence for several minutes, or at least for what felt like several minutes to her.
He broke the silence and had her full attention.
“You told me you were wishing you could do the same like me. Let me tell you one thing: You could. You can. I think you most probably already have and will definitely do so again.”
She stared at him before staring at the river again, absorbing the meaning of his statement.
The two memories that had caused her to leave home popped into her mind, proof that something living inside her could indeed leap out and cause magic, though what had happened struck her as a black, bad kind of magic. He meant to tell her he could turn water to ice at will and she could influence—or cause?—fire at will, didn’t he?
The implication shook her to the core, although somewhere deep inside she had always known.
Once again, she asked herself how much he knew about her and how much he merely projected his own life onto hers.
Her mind ran away from her and from rational reasoning and imagined conjuring up flames at the whisper of a word or radiating heat whenever she wanted, as though she could flip a switch inside her on and off.
It terrified her. And it fascinated her. It called to her.
“It’s all about control, Felicia,” Joshua continued, following his own train of thought and hitting the nail on the head for the umpteenth time.
When she had tamed her wild wishes and got over the way her heart skipped a beat when he said her name, she said, “I’ve been reading about self-control today.”
He turned to face her, a smile playing on his lips.
“You have? Great.”
He sounded satisfied and she wondered whether it was because he thought she had followed his order to read the damned book or because he believed it to be important that she informed herself about those possibilities.
“What did you learn?” he wanted to know, sounding like a teacher talking to a student.
She fixed her eyes on the river. It was much easier to talk seriously without having to look at his distant beauty and endure his knowing gaze.
“I don’t know. I’ve always considered control to play an important role in my life. There were… incidents in my childhood which scared my parents and caused problems for me. I was told over and over again to control myself. My words, my deeds, my thoughts, my feelings. For some time, I rebelled and didn’t listen, and things got worse. So, by the time I was out of high school, I finally accepted that control is the only way to have some sort of life and not end up in a lunatic asylum or on the streets.”
She paused and fought to keep her voice steady and uninflected. She was usually successful at sounding normal, it was part of her way of being in control. But being around Joshua attacked her wall of defense. When she stole a glance at him from the corner of her eye, she caught him staring at her, as he so often did, pale face a mask, resembling the finely chiseled features of a statue. It was unnerving and reassuring at the same to know he paid so much attention.
“Ever since, I thought I had managed self-control perfectly. I followed a certificate course, I got a job, I moved out of home. I lived.”
He interrupted her.
“You don’t sound too happy about this.”
She sighed.
“That’s because I’m not. During the past few months, things have been slipping out of my grasp. And now I realize why. It’s because I haven’t lived up to now. I’m not in control, and I’m not myself. It’s been one big lie.”
Felicia shouted the last sentence and had to take a couple of deep breaths to keep herself from revealing more than she wanted or making an emotional wreck of herself in front of this man, who was still a stranger in so many ways.
He laid a firm, cold hand with hard, slender fingers on her bare knee, making her jump and move away, regretting it that same instant.
The place where his hand had rested so briefly tingled with sensation, and somewhere inside, the fire was screaming for more.
Did he think her prude now? Suspicious? Too scared for her own good? How did her reaction from now match the way she had allowed him to kiss her in the library?
There was no change in his tone when Joshua said calmly, “I think the kind of control you were encouraged to exercise and the kind of control the book hints at are two ends of a spectrum. One is about burying the undesirable and ignoring the monster. The other is about recognizing, acknowledging and taming or at least shaping what can’t and shouldn’t be ignored. If you repress something, it’s still there. We can’t live like ostriches, sticking their head under the earth whenever they sense danger. We have to permit the other part of ourselves to live, but rein it in and keep it on a leash, so it won’t run away and get us into trouble.”
She liked the metaphors he used and the way he said “we” instead of “one” or “you”. And yet, he didn’t sound as if he meant “we”. He sounded as if he already knew everything, and behaved correctly, and expected her to follow like a sectarian would follow their leader.
The wild and lonely part inside her rebelled against him being the teacher and adviser and role model.
“You make it sound so easy,” she scoffed.
“It isn’t,” he answered.
“It never was for me and it won’t be for you. But it’s not impossible, either. I’m the living proof.”
There was evident pride in his voice.
She couldn’t help herself, she had to daunt him.
“What, so you weren’t born a perfect ice god always in control?”
The look he shot her this time was deadly.
In a fluid movement, he got up, bent down, picked up a stone and threw it into the water. With his back to her and his voice icy, he said, “If you refuse to take me seriously, this is useless.”
“You mean, if I refuse to accept your authority and patronizing behavior?” she shot back.
He turned around and stalked over to her, cold radiating in waves off him, automatically causing the heat inside her to step up a notch and radiate from her skin too.
“Clearly I am in a better position of the two of us to have authority and to be listened to, am I not?”
He looked dangerous in his quiet anger. Did he have a power complex?
Stopping herself short before she could back away, she stood up straighter and stuck her pointy chin out.
“Didn’t you talk about me and you revealing ourselves to each other? The only thing I can see happening so far is you revealing your magic and expecting me to listen to you whenever I am about to reveal a part of myself.”
A battle between ice and fire was raging in the few inches of air between their bodies, their gazes dueling with each other, his a wintry, whitish blue and hers an amber brown glowing with orange sparks.
“And didn’t I tell you to trust me? And that I’d know when the time is right for you?”
She swallowed her hasty, harsh reply back down.
He did. And deep down inside, she could feel she wasn’t ready yet. He must have read the truth in her eyes because a satisfied smile flickered across his face.
Joshua took a last step closer until there wasn’t more than an inch or two of space between them and she could feel her heat and his coldness warring with each other, testing the boundaries for a chance to leap and attack—or to leap and dance.
When he lowered face, her breath hitched and her pulse starte
d racing. Inside her belly, the fire arms shot higher and higher, wanting the kiss surely about to happen.
“Don’t,” she whispered, despite the aching desire to feel their connection again.
Stopping a hair’s breadth before her face, he whispered back, “Why?”
His breath smelled as minty and cool as the man himself. It brushed over her trembling lips, stoking the fire.
Struggling to put her conflicting feelings into words, she blurted out, “You’ll get burned.”
A purely masculine, dangerous grin tugged at his lips which were so enticingly close she could almost taste them.
“What if I enjoy playing with fire?” he asked, voice deep and low and full of promise.
A shiver coursed through her body. Before she could make up her mind what to answer, he had bridged the last inch and his mouth lay claim to hers.
She could swear there was a hiss of sparks, of fire released and meeting a wall of ice. His mouth felt so heavenly against her that she wanted to lean into him and make the kiss last longer. Thought was impossible, there was only sensation and the want—the need—for more.
One of his hands wound around the back of her neck and drew her face up to deepen the kiss that was dripping with passion. She closed her eyes and allowed herself to feel and enjoy for a second. When the combined cold of his lips and his fingers against her sensitive skin grew ever more intense, she automatically increased the heat inside her.
With a sound low in his throat, Joshua pressed his lips even firmer against hers for a fleeting instant, before drawing back as if indeed burnt.
After a chuckle, he said in a hoarse voice, “You are hot.”
Chapter 6