Page 38 of Hunting for her Heart
“Goodnight, my angel,” he says, his eyes dropping to my lips, making my heart flutter.
“Goodnight, Hawk,” I whisper back before dropping my gaze and resting my head against his chest.
A very large part of me wants him to kiss me, but fear holds me back. Fear of what? I don’t know, but fear nonetheless.
I close my eyes and let the warmth and safety of his body send me into the best sleep of my life.
Chapter Thirteen
Willow
Iwake in the morning with a start, forgetting where I am for a moment. I must make some sort of noise because Ronan looks over from where he’s sitting by the fire, taking his turn to stand guard.
He pushes to his feet and walks over to me as I turn to glance up at the giant man holding me. My eyebrows rise in surprise when I see it’s Bo, who appears to be asleep. Hawk is now sleeping on the ground beside me, and I realize they must have rotated positions several times in the night.
Ronan squats down in front of me, his single large leaf seeming to barely cover him. My hand twitches with a strange urge to reach out and push it aside, desperate to see what he’s hiding behind there.
“Do you need to relieve yourself?” he asks quietly, thankfully not commenting on where I was staring. His question makes me aware that I do, in fact, have a very pressing need right now. I nod, and he reaches down to grab me under the arms and lift me to my feet.
Bo stirs, his eyes opening slowly until he seesme standing. He jumps to his feet, on alert. “What’s happened?” he asks in alarm.
“Nothing. It’s morning, and I need to take Willow out to relieve herself.”
“We’ll all come,” Hawk says as he sits up and stretches his arms.
Glancing at our clothes, I realize we didn’t consider the fact that if we put them back on, they are just going to get wet when we go back through the waterfall.
“Don’t worry about that for now,” Ronan says, seeing where my gaze is. “We’ll come back here right after we’re done.”
“Maybe we should take everything now,” Bo suggests. “We wanted to go searching for a crate, right? And we need to start searching for the charm,” he says, glancing between Ronan and Hawk.
Ronan nods, then looks over at the waterfall as if assessing it for a weakness. They tell me to wait as they start packing up all our clothing and shoving it into their bags. Except for their sandals, which won’t fit.
They are doing so much to help me; I wish I could do something for them. Thinking about what Bo just said, I wonder if I can help them find the object that will save their island. I hadn’t realized it would be in this forest, but now that I think back, I recall something about a forest in the prophecy, so that must mean they believe it’s here somewhere.
Wanting to help, I ask. “What does it look like? The charm?”
“We have no idea. That prophecy is the only clue we have,” Bo explains.
“It’s pretty vague,” I say in thought.
“I wondered if it could be some sort of rare flower,” Hawk says, surprising me. “It’s fragile and could break easily.”
“But how would we ever know which one is the right one?” I ask.
“I’m not sure,” he says with a shrug. “I always assumed we’ll know it when we see it.”
He and Bo lift their filled bags above their heads as they step into the water and find a spot where the water appears to be falling the slowest. It’s not quite a gap in the falls, but the closest to it, and if they move through fast enough, our stuff might not get too wet.
Ronan squats down in front of me as he instructs, “Climb on.” It takes me a second to pull my gaze away from his backside. Once again, I have the strange urge to touch it. Never in my life have I thought about a man’s butt before yesterday.
I wrap my arms around his neck, my legs around his waist as he moves into the water and swims toward the falls. “Hold your breath,” he tells me before he takes us through.
Hawk and Bo are climbing out of the pond, but Ronan stops halfway to them when he can stand. “Loosen your grip,” he says, placing his hands on mine. He somehow manages to quickly spin around to face me, and my legs re-tighten around him, but this time, I’m pressed right up against his front.
I inhale sharply as I take in his wet black hair, dripping down to his shoulders and trailing down his chest to where our bodies meet. His green eyes bore into me as he presses his lips tightly together.
“We should wash the poultice off now,” he says as his eyes trail down my body, leaving my skin feeling heated in its wake.
