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She paused, hearing something in his voice that she had never heard before, something she had only sensed in him a few times in Australia. Those had been the times he had simply disappeared a day or so before returning with his familiar, ever-present smile.
“Go back to bed?” She slid the door closed behind her, enclosing them in the heated moisture of the shower.
His other arm rose, his hand bracing against the shower wall as he drew in a hard, deep breath.
“Why would I want to go back to bed?” She let her fingers trail down the tense muscles of his back. “What are you hiding from me, John?”
She knew parts of what he was hiding. He was hiding who he was, what he was. He was hiding the man he had been, not just the man he was.
“Maybe I’m trying to protect you.” His voice was a rough growl.
She stared at his profile. His eyes were closed, his thick, long lashes spiked from the water as he obviously fought for control.
“It’s too late to try to protect me,” she whispered as she leaned her head against his shoulder. “And protection isn’t what I want from you. It’s not what I need from you.”
Before she could finish, he moved. One arm snaked around her waist, jerking her in front of him before he pressed her back into the shower wall.
His expression was tight with lust, his gray eyes nearly black with it. The erection that pressed against her belly was steel-hard, iron-hot.
Water flowed around them now, washing between their bodies, over their shoulders, enclosing them in a heated world of hunger and need.
She reached out to the side of the shower cubicle, her fingers closing around the bottle of shower gel that sat on the narrow shelf.
“Don’t, Bailey.” His arm tightened around her back as she snagged the clean cloth hanging on a ring to the opposite side.
“Don’t what?” she asked as she felt his cock throb against her lower belly. “Don’t be here with you, John? Don’t touch you when you can feel everything you want or need slipping through your fingers? Or are you just too damned scared to reach out and touch it?”
She poured the soap onto the washrag, staring into his eyes as she worked up the lather. There was something tormented, something desperate in his gaze as he stared down at her.
“Don’t you want me, John?” she asked him then. “Did you ever truly want me?”
There was an edge of pain in her voice, a shadow of it haunting her gaze, as though she were asking not just about the present, but a past she couldn’t know that they shared.
John stared down at her, feeling the dark, overwhelming lust that rose inside him for this woman. It was a hunger, a need he had always had to force himself to combat. From that first meeting with her, from their first kiss, it had risen inside him like a fire he couldn’t control.
It had been like this before. There had been times in Australia that he’d had to simply walk away from her, to put distance between them as he fought the unfamiliar hunger that he couldn’t name and sure as hell didn’t understand.
It had grown worse, he admitted. Five years ago, it had been like an ache he couldn’t put a name to. It wasn’t an ache now; it was a tide rising inside him, filling every part of his senses and demanding more from him, from her, than he had ever expected.
Being someone else hadn’t helped. He had thought it would. He had believed that coming here as John Vincent rather than Trent Daylen—working with her on his terms, with the knowledge between them that when the mission was over, they were over—would ease the desperation inside him.
It hadn’t. In ways, he believed it had only made it worse. She looked at him as though she knew who he was, what he was, and he couldn’t allow her to ever know.
Tightening his arm around her he jerked her to him, felt her indrawn breath, and watched the excitement that lit her green eyes.
“You should have stayed in the bed,” he growled as he felt that hunger ripping through him.
“Why, so you could stay in control?” The rasp of the lathered cloth moved over his shoulder as her nipples stroked against his chest with every breath she took. They were silken fire against his chest, burning into his flesh with sensual destruction.
“Control can be a good thing.” He proved his point by pressing a thigh between hers and pressing it tight against the heated mound of her sex.
He could feel the heated slide of her slick juices, feel them searing his skin as she drew in a hard, deep breath.
Taking the cloth from her hand, he shoved it back into its ring, then caught her wrists, placing them in one hand and holding them over her head.
“What are you fighting, John?” she whispered. “Me? Or yourself?”
He stared at her, wondering himself what he had always been fighting, even though he knew. He had fought the bonding, the need, the hunger that he was trying to hide from now. The certainty that life without this woman wasn’t worth living.
