Page 36 of Uncharted Desires

Shit, her arm. She was still bleeding to death, and he was thinking about screwing her on a cave floor.

“I’m such an idiot. Your arm.”

The moment hung between them, but her pain doused him like cold water.

West broke the silence by grabbing the backpack. “I found a first aid kit.”

“Whose bag is that?” she asked as she unwrapped her arm, inspecting her wound, unwilling to meet his eyes.

“Not sure. There were a bunch of sleeping cabins up on the top of the mountain.”

“What’s up there?”

“I think it’s some kind of drug operation.”

Her eyes went wide as she let the information sink in.

“What does that mean, exactly?”

West rubbed his face. He didn’t want to worry Kat and debated telling her about what he saw. They had stumbled upon an operation where the people in charge would do anything to protect it, including murder interlopers. They were not going to offer them a way home, but he caved, wanting to be open with her.

“It’s some off-grid cocaine operation, from the planting to the manufacturing. The farm has all the coca plants, but there is also a small factory up there as well, so it looks like they do it all on this island.”

“Fascinating.” Her eyes lit up with excitement.

“Fascinating?”

“Yeah,” she said animatedly. “We land on an island, and it has a full cocaine operation on it! It’s just fascinating, like a real-life true-crime documentary.”

He gave her an incredulous look. “Are you romanticizing our situation? These aren’t nice men. They will kill us if they find us; they don’t want word of their operation to get out.”

She bit her lip, and it instantly drew West to her mouth. He suddenly wished he had finished their kiss earlier.

“Nothing interesting ever happens to me,” she said, interrupting his thoughts.

“What do you mean? You are on tour around the world half the year.”

She frowned. “I know, and I fully appreciate the life I’ve lived, but it gets repetitive. Every day is sound check, sit around the tour buses waiting for the show, watch the opening acts, then do the show, maybe have a drink or two, and then go to sleep to do it all again the next day.”

“Sure, it’s repetitive, but think of all the cities we went out in. The cities we’ve explored and people we met.”

She glared at him. “You mean you and the male members of the band?”

He racked his memory. That couldn’t be right. He remembered the girls going to see the Alamo with them in Texas and basking on Waikiki Beach in Hawaii. “No, you did stuff with me.”

She shook her head. “Not the past few years. Lately, we’ve been left to our own devices, and since we were just your boring backing singers, without you, we had to pay for everything. That gets expensive for people who don’t have a ton of money. We usually just hung around the buses. So, I should have said ‘interesting things don’t happen to me lately’ if that makes you feel better.”

He ran his hand through his hair. He had a lot of making up to do to Kat for the past eight years. He’d wanted to keep their relationship professional, especially after taking advantage of her, but he shouldn’t have pushed her so far away. Not that she had made things easy.

But as he saw the stunning woman across from him, he wanted more than a professional or friendly relationship with her, and that should have scared the hell out of him. Yet, it didn’t. She still deserved so much more than a degenerate like him, but he was starting not to care.

When he’d left her in that hallway, it had been because Declan had reminded him that bandmate one-night stands were a bad idea. It had been on the tip of West’s tongue to tell Declan he was open to more than one night with Kat. It was that feeling, wanting something more with Kat, over anything Declan had said, that had had him running for the hills. He had put up a wall between them faster than she could blink.

He didn’t even know where to start. How would he tell her she made him feel things years ago, feelings he wasn’t ready for, so he pushed her away like an idiot? But now he just might be ready to face them.

Instead, all he said was, “I’m sorry, Kat, I didn’t realize you were so unhappy.”

“I wasn’t unhappy, it was just repetitive, especially as the partying got old. Some days we watched a lot of true crime or documentaries, and other days we did a little exploring. I loved my life, but now looking back, I’m thirty-two and have no purpose. I add no value to this world, and that’s just something I need to figure out.” Emotions played across her face, and West became angry at her words, because she did add value. “I’m not an idiot. We could be murdered, and I am aware of that. I just find the whole situation fascinating. That’s it.”