Page 27 of Honeyfires

"Thinking about the parking lot still?" I asked against her jaw.

"I've forgotten," she informed me breathlessly, legs wrapping around my waist, "that parking lots exist as a concept."

"Good." I got my mouth to her throat, found her pulse with my lips, and felt it hammering. "Let's see what else we can make you forget."

She gave directions to the bedroom in fragments between increasingly unreliable breaths. We managed the closed door together, which I chose to interpret as a good sign. I dropped her on the bed and followed her down, bracketing her small, lithe body with my tall, towering one.

She looked up at me—hair already spread across the pillow, lips swollen, chest rising and falling fast, eyes enormous and dark—and said, very softly, "Hi."

"Hi yourself." I braced above her, watching her face. "I need you to know something."

"What?"

"I'm going to tell you exactly what to do tonight," I said in the low register I didn't use in daylight. "And you're going to do it. And if it's ever too much—"

"Parachute." Immediate, clear.

"Parachute." I pressed my mouth to the corner of hers. "Good girl."

Her whole body shivered. Her hips pushed up against mine, almost involuntary, and I felt it everywhere.

I noted that response and saved the memory somewhere permanent.

She reached for my jacket. I let her work it off, helped with the second sleeve, and let her pull my shirt over my head. She went still.

Her gaze tracked slowly across my chest, my shoulders, the tattoos across my chest, climbing my arms and collarbone and throat, and she looked the way she'd looked in the library in the amber light—like she was doing primary research on something she intended to know completely.

"Vera," I said.

"Librarian organizing," she said faintly. "Give me a moment."

"Five seconds," I said. "Then I'm taking over."

She used all five, both palms pressing flat against my chest. Then I caught her wrists gently and guided them up, pressing them against the headboard.

"Keep them here," I said. "Unless I say otherwise."

She looked at me and tested it for exactly one breath.

Then her fingers curled against the headboard and stayed.

"Good." I pressed a kiss to the inside of her wrist, right on her pulse point, and felt it racing. "That's exactly right."

She exhaled like something in her had been released.

I sat back on my heels and just looked at her for a second—arms above her head, dress pooled around her hips, lips parted, watching me with those narrowed, lustful darkening eyes—and the sight of her arranged exactly where I'd put her made me clench in my belly, low and urgent.

"You're beautiful," I said. Not a line. Just true.

She flushed. "Petra—"

"That's not an invitation to argue." I reached for the zipper at the back of her dress. "May I?"

"Please."

The zipper came down. The dress came off. She reached back and unhooked her bra herself with one-handed, matter-of-fact efficiency, and the casual confidence of the gesture was somehow more disarming than anything self-conscious would have been. I pulled back to look at her.

Pale skin and soft curves and a constellation of freckles across her shoulders. The last of the afternoon light laying itself across her in gold bars through the curtains. A scrap of pink lace at her hips, irrelevant, but only for another thirty seconds.