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CHAPTER SIX

The kiss ended almost as soon as it began.

He let go of her.

She let go of him.

Their eyes met.

Her heart thudded at what she saw in the depths of his.

Hunger. Desire. Sexual need so raw it was almost savage.

Would he reach for her again? Frame her face with his hands? Force her to hold still and accept the ravenous heat of his mouth?

Not that it would take much force.

Not that it would take any force.

She wanted—she wanted—

Unconsciously, she touched the tip of her tongue to the center of her bottom lip. His gaze followed the motion. A sound broke from his throat, something that was almost a growl, and then he swung away from her. He took a couple of deep breaths—she could tell by the rise and fall of his shoulders. Then he walked across the small clearing and bent to his pack.

“Sun’s almost down,” he said calmly. “Got to get that shelter up.”

The shelter? He was talking about something as mundane as a shelter after a mind-blowing once-in-a-lifetime kiss? Because it had been exactly that, and it wasn’t as if she had never been kissed before.

“I could use a hand, Bellini.”

She blinked.

He’d tied one end of a length of paracord around the trunk of one of the palm trees.

Okay.

One of two things had just happened.

She’d hallucinated. Or he’d kissed her, and now he was telling her that the kiss had been meaningless. Or she’d imagined it, which took her, full circle, back to the kiss having been a hallucination.

“Hey. I could use some help.”

There was a little tone of impatience there. Amazing. He kissed her until she was close to falling off the edge of the world and then he walked away, business as usual, and said he could use some help?

So could I, big boy.

Uh-oh. She was not a one-night-stand kind of female and yet—

And yet, if that kiss hadn’t ended when it did…

Alessandra blew out a long breath. Where was your studying-to-be-a-shrink big sister when you needed her?

Something, at least, had changed. Her lieutenant was still an edgy pain in the ass. A gorgeous pain in the ass, but he was at least asking her to do something useful.

She could think of a couple of things that would be useful, but not one of them involved putting up a shelter.

“Bellini? You deaf or something? You gonna give me a hand or not?”

Mamma mia! Was he going to feed her one-liners all night?