Dark Ghost by Christine Feehan

vacation flings after all. She’d never understood the concept. It seemed so wrong, sharing your body with a stranger and walking away. She wanted intimacy and emotion. A connection beyond physical. She wanted everything – or nothing – with a man. She’d accepted, a long time ago, when her body didn’t respond to anyone, she was going to have nothing.
    She took a breath and let it out to calm her wildly beating heart and maybe get air to her brain so she could actually think. He removed her fingers from his mouth, although he did so reluctantly, slowly, as if he didn’t want to. He held her hand up for his inspection, turning her fingers first one way and then the other.
    Teagan stared at her hand. There no sign of injury; the skin had completely healed over the raw wounds where she had torn them. She held her other hand up for comparison. Both hands had suffered the same fate when she’d slipped off the rock with her foot and tried to hold on.
    She loved climbing, but she seemed to have thin skin. She didn’t develop the necessary callouses the way others did.
    “How did you do that?”
    Looking at him over her shoulder as she was doing, she saw him in profile, and his eyelashes were outrageously long. His mouth was perfection. His nose straight and his jaw strong. She liked the scruff on his jaw and the blue of his eyes. She could stare at him for eternity and that wouldn’t be long enough.
    “I have a healing agent in my saliva,” he said.
    “Wow. That’s awesome. Amazing. I can’t do that, but it would come in handy when I climb. Maybe I should take you along so you can heal my hands after I tear them up again.” The words tumbled over one another. She couldn’t help herself. He had possession of her other hand and once again he was inspecting the damage.
    Her stomach performed a slow somersault. A million butterflies took wing. Her feminine channel throbbed and pulsed. She stared at his face. God, he was just beautiful. The concentration gathered in his eyes as he focused completely on her injury was just plain sexy.
    Once again he brought her hand toward his mouth. She held her breath. Waiting. Needing the touch of his mouth. The velvet rasp of his tongue. Without warning his lashes lifted and he looked straight into her eyes. Instantly, she had the sensation of drowning. She lost her breath and allowed herself to fall.
    “Teagan.”
    Just her name. That was all he whispered. The tone of his voice was a caress. Fingers moved over her bare skin, down her back, tracing her spinal cord. She swore she felt a light touch, but he hadn’t moved. He hadn’t relinquished possession of her hand.
    She couldn’t look away from his eyes. The world was there. The entire world. Her mouth was suddenly dry, and she wanted desperately to touch him. Her palm itched with the need to run her hand over his heavy chest muscles.
    Even as he stared into her eyes, he brought her fingers to his mouth and sucked on them. His tongue curled around each finger separately. It did something to her insides. She melted until she was soft and boneless – until there was nothing but Andre and his eyes and mouth and the scent of him surrounding her.
    Teagan couldn’t have spoken if she wanted to. She was totally incapable of extracting her fingers from the heat of his mouth. It was so completely unlike her. She stared into his eyes and let herself just be with him. Connect to him. It was sexual – but so much more. She could live there with him. In that cave. A primitive world. Just as long as he was with her. It was crazy, but true.
    She knew she was in danger. She knew the danger was not just to her heart. This man could take her soul if she let him – and she would let him if she stayed much longer. She had no idea why, but she felt the truth of it with every cell in her body.

5
    T eagan both feared him and was totally enraptured by him. Andre had a very strong compulsion to pull her into his arms and hold her close. Her heart