Just Once by Jill Marie Landis Page A

tie the horses to some of them, drag them to the river, and lash them together.”
    The man had no idea of how greatly his half-naked state aroused her. He tossed his shirt over a nearby bush and sat down cross-legged in the sandy soil near the fire. His leather pants were soaked; water oozed out of them as he bent his knees to accommodate his plate on his lap. Without looking up, Hunter began wolfing down bacon, scraping up the drippings with his biscuits and licking his fingers.
    Jemma’s mind raced. Until this very minute, she had thought of him as her guide and protector. He had to be a good ten years older than she, at least twenty-eight—
old
by her standards—but he was definitely a virile man. There was something awesome and frightening in that thought, something that set her nerves on edge. That same something made her tingle all over as she stared at his naked chest and the fire’s glow snaked over his bronze skin, gilding the tightly matted blond hair.
    Sister Augusta Aleria had definitely known what she was talking about.
    Her mouth had gone dry. She tried not to think about Hunter or his bare chest and busied herself with her own supper, filling the plate with thick, well-done bacon strips and biscuits, pouring them both cups of coffee from the metal pot by the fire. Although she tried to concentrate on the task at hand, she couldn’t keep herself from pondering what it would be like to deeply kiss a man, to touch him intimately, to lay her hand over his heart and feel his warm skin.
    She thought of the kiss he had given her in the Rotgut, remembered his soft lips and felt warm all over. It had been an experience she definitely wouldn’t mind having again.
    “What are you thinking about?” he said around a mouthful of food.
    “What? Oh.” She mumbled a soft, unladylike curse as coffee sloshed over the rim of her cup. “I was thinking about kissing,” Jemma said without thought.
    Hunter began choking, wheezing, and coughing so hard that she started to set down her tin and go over to pound him on the back, but he gasped in lungfuls of air and waved her back down.
    “I thought you said you were thinking about
kissing
.”
    “I did. I was.”
    He was rendered speechless. Then slowly, from the neck up, color began to creep toward his hairline. He glanced over at his sopping wet shirt where it hung on the bush.
    “Kissing,” he said softly, pondering the word as if he had never heard it before.
    In for a penny
, she thought, and plunged ahead. She was on an adventure and intended to experience as much as she could before it was over. Just last night she had almost killed a man. Kissing was a far less dangerous endeavor.
    “The nuns at the convent—”
    “In Algiers?”
    Her gaze quickly dropped to her plate. “Yes, anyway, the nuns at the convent spent inordinate hours talking about the various sins of the flesh. I suppose so we girls would know what to expect. And what to avoid. One nun in particular harped on kissing and … well, all the rest, so much that at times, it was all we could think about. Mortal sins, venial sins. Kissing that led to mortal sin. Kissing that was
more
than kissing.”
    “
More
than kissing?”
    “Kissing that led to
other things
.”
    “Other things?”
    He was holding his empty plate on his lap, his green eyes intense. His hair had dried some; the curls were lustrous. His expression was blank, either intentionally or because he was so shocked by the subject that he didn’t quite know what to make of her. Jemma suddenly felt like squirming under such close scrutiny.
    “You know,” she shrugged, gripping her plate. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “
Other things
.”
    “Things other than kissing?” He set the plate beside him in the sand warmed by the fire.
    “Yes. Intimate, unspeakable other things. Things a lady shouldn’t even think about, let alone discuss over supper.”
    “The
nuns
were versed at describing these other things?”
    She blinked. “Of