Yesterday, he devoured her. Today, he aligns himself with her slowly, almost mathematically, and she realizes it’s so he can go deeper. Take more. He’s savoring her like a banquet, every taste and texture.
She should have known how quickly and completely he would ruin her.
He breaks the kiss, pulling back to meet her eyes. “It’s a beautiful fantasy, Ripley, but the real world is waiting for us on the other side of these walls.”
“As long as we’re here, then,” she says. “Just for tonight.”
His eyes move over her face, taking in every piece of whatever he sees there.
“All right, then,” he says to himself as much as to her. “Tonight.”
25
July 6:
Fifty-Three Days Until the End of the Summer Excavation Season
Ripley’s never seen this look on James’s face before, though it must’ve been there under the surface—the hunger sharpened to the point of pain, like it’s both worse and better now that he’s had a taste.
He grips her neck, his fingers plunged into the base of her bun, his thumb at the corner of her jaw. Softly, he tilts her head back—not touching, just looking. He follows her lines and curves, his eyes glinting blue and green and gold as the angle of his gaze changes. Absently, he pulls his hand from hers to push up his glasses.
Ripley lets out a shaky exhalation. He wants toseeher.
“I want you to undo your hair,” he says in a harsh whisper. “Will you?”
She reaches for the elastic that secures her bun, lets her hair tumble free. Before she’s got the hair tie around her wrist, his fingers are in the strands, spreading them with a slow reverence.
In her imagination, those fingers are everywhere. Opening her. Showing him what’s soft and needy and hidden.
“It’s beautiful stuff, Ripley. I’m sorry, I know you don’t like that word, butfuck.” His thickened voice scrapes over the profanitylike a tongue over rock candy. “I want to…” He rubs a lock of hair between his fingers, winds it around his fist like a rope.
She’s going to pass out and he’s kissed her exactly once.
“I got it from my mom,” she says, a little dazed by the darkness in his eyes.
“No. It was always yours. And now it’s mine,” he says, bringing a fistful to his nose. He learns with his hands, this man—the shape of things, their texture, the lay of the shadows he’ll draw later. Under his eye, she feels beautiful and rare, worth preserving in strokes of bright color.
She realizes she’s put her hand to his ribs when his chest startles at her touch, filling in an eager movement that’s almost a gasp, then tightening on a wry breath of a laugh.
“Not there,” he says against her mouth, picking up her hand and interlacing their fingers.
“Oh, sorry. Bruise?” Little injuries happen all the time on the dig. She wants to see this one, to peel his shirt away and kiss it better.
“No,” he says, his face against her cheek. His fingers tremble between her own. “I meant not anywhere. Not yet. I want this to last.”
She’s not sure she can endure as long as him. James, it’s clear, can deny himself pleasure for years. He’s got one hand on her breast and the other inside the waistband of her skirt, tracing the dimples at the base of her spine. When he bites her ear and she makes a half-surprised, half-gasping littleOh!,he slows down and does it again, stays there until he’s learned everything about pressure and tongue and teeth.
These stolen hours will end sooner than they think. Still, she wants to try to wait for him. She wants to last as long as she can.
She knows she’ll be begging him to let her come long before he cracks.
She stretches her finger to stroke the bridge of his glasses. “I want to take these off when it’s time.”
A double curve blooms on his lips, and she wishes she could draw with anything near his level of skill. It’s not for a photograph, this expression. It can’t be seen by a lens, only through a living eye that leads to a heart that leads to a hand.
“You can take them,” he says, sliding his fingers out of her hair. “They’re mostly for distance vision anyway.” The brief, sure press of his thumb against her throat before he starts on the buttons of her blouse isn’t an accident, because nothing he does is an accident. Darkness blooms in her head, desire leaving her dizzy.
She presses down the urge to have all of him now. Instead, she reaches for his glasses, cherishing his small, tight breath as she touches his ears, loving the sweep of his eyelashes against his cheek and the almost shy dip of his chin as he lets her take them. She folds them deliberately, the way he would, and slides them into his breast pocket. He pushes her blouse off her shoulders, sweeping away her surface layer as worshipfully as a preservationist.
