If You Dare by Jessica Lemmon

heart ratcheted up at the sight of him anyway, her eyes automatically locking onto those talented lips of his.
    “Grab the Coleman.” His toneless voice snapped her out of her fantasy of being kissed again. “You’ve got to see this.”
    She forced her feet forward, lifting the lantern and taking it with her to the adjoining room. He extinguished the small flashlight in his hand when she stepped over the threshold. Holding the lantern high, she swept the light over every corner of the room before turning it on him.
    “I don’t see anything.”
    “Right.” He relieved her of the lantern, his fingers brushing her bare skin and sending a trail of fiery awareness licking up her arm. “Don’t you find that strange?”
    She started to answer, then realized he was referring more to the lack of broken dishes than the way his touch made her want to purr. Which he couldn’t possibly know about. Thank God .
    “No,” she answered belatedly. “I find it fantastic.” Somehow the idea she’d hallucinated the sound—that they both had—was more reassuring than the alternative. Ducking her head into the sand wasn’t her normal habit, but this place was far from normal. And if she had a prayer of not losing her marbles while stuck here, she’d do well to pretend everything was a-okay. They both would.
    He lapped the large kitchen one final time, his dark brows pinched. His boots stopped with a soft scuffing sound in front of her, then he lowered the lantern. She studied his brown eyes, choked by thick lashes, and his ink-colored hair tousled over his forehead in the yellowish light and remembered their first—and only—kiss. How he’d leaned in and taken her lips so confidently. She’d bet he did everything that way. Confidently. Thoroughly .
    “Did you hear me?” he asked.
    No. I was fantasizing about you. “Uh, sorry. Zoned out.”
    The side of his mouth kicked up, and Lily’s heart hammered into her ribs like machine-gun fire. “I asked if you wanted to go back to bed.” He waggled his eyebrows and tipped his head toward the living room. “With me.” He affected his best bad-boy rogue expression. Teasing her again.
    He seemed content to ignore whatever they’d heard. Good. She could work with that.
    She shook her head. “You’re impossible.”
    “You can’t get enough of me,” he said as he followed her to the living room.
    “You can’t get enough of yourself,” she grumbled over her shoulder, barely meaning it. She took her place back on the mattress.
    Marcus set the lantern aside and arranged his big body on the bed next to her. He was quiet, studying the boards covering the windows in the living room. “You know,” he said. “There are a lot of old trees out there. I’m thinking the wind caught a big limb and brought it down.” He braced his arms around his knees. “Lucky it didn’t come through the roof and kill us.”
    The sound they’d heard, as clearly as they both heard Marcus’s explanation now, was not a tree limb. Lily knew it. Marcus knew it. And she could see that he knew she knew it. But he was explaining it away, possibly for her benefit, and before her imagination could turn tail and run away with her on its heels.
    Back at base camp, the sound merely an echo in her memory, it was easier to believe a story about felled tree branches. So she let herself believe. Denial was a powerful, powerful tool, and she had no problem using it to her advantage.
    There was one thing she couldn’t deny, however. His insistence to return to the air mattress, to wait out the night with her. He was practically handing over what she had come here to win. Why not talk her into leaving? Why not create a panic and drag her from the house “for her own good”? Why would he sit here and…and… protect her when he had the most to lose?
    Unless…
    She gave him a coy smile. “I had no idea.”
    He still studied the windows. “What’s that?”
    “You’re a nice guy.”
    Marcus didn’t move