Page 91 of Her Player

Orgasming together.

Shivering together.

My legs gave out first.

I didn’t even feel it happen. One second I was braced against the countertop and the next my knees simply stopped working and I was going down and Rhett’s arm was already there, already catching me, hauling me back against his chest before the bathroom floor had any say in the matter.

“Whoa,” he said. Not alarmed. Just present.

I laughed. It came out broken and breathless and completely undignified and I did not care even a little bit. I laughed into his shoulder while my legs dangled uselessly and the bathroom mirror fogged over and somewhere in the house a clock ticked and the rest of the world just kept going without us.

He held me up. Both arms locked around my waist, my back to his chest, his chin dropping to the top of my head. He wasn’t laughing. He was just holding me the way he held everything, like he’d already decided and the deciding was done and now this was just what it was.

I caught my breath in stages.

The bathroom was wrecked. Every surface had evidence of us. The mirror still had our handprints on it. The floor was a disaster. My heels were somewhere in the bedroom. I was going to need to call a housekeeper in the morning and I was going to be absolutely incapable of looking the woman in the eye.

“You okay?” Rhett asked against my hair.

“My legs stopped working.”

“Yeah, I noticed.”

“That’s your fault.”

“I’m aware.” He pressed his lips to the side of my head. “I’ll take full responsibility.”

I turned in his arms, my legs coming back online just enough to hold me. He looked wrecked too, which was deeply satisfying. Sweat-damp and disheveled and breathing harder than he probably wanted to admit, with that particular look on his face that I was only just learning to read. Not smug. Not triumphant. Just settled. Like a man who had arrived somewhere he intended to stay.

“Shower,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“You’re carrying me.”

He didn’t argue. He just picked me up.

Before somehow, some way, Rhett moved us into my shower together.

Just so he could hold me under the hot stream of water that sprayed from the pathetic showerhead I had yet to change out.

“Hmm,” Rhett said as he reached up and tightened it a bit, “we need to change that out.”

I made a mental note to have James call the contractor in the morning. The fact that it had been on my to-do list for six months and I kept deprioritizing it was, frankly, embarrassing.

I just sank against him, allowing him to prop me up while he fiddled with the showerhead. Somehow he got the water pressure to come out just a tad better, and I sighed with relief as he battered against my back.

“There we go,” he said, his voice much lighter and less animalistic. Though his low notes still rattled my ribcage. “Now, where were we?”

“Still no,” I said.

He chuckled. The sound of it moved through his chest and into mine and I felt it the way I felt everything with him, more than I expected to, deeper than I had room for.

I pressed my face against him and breathed.

The water was hot and the room was steamed and outside the window Las Vegas was doing whatever Las Vegas did at this hour, loud and lit up and completely indifferent to the fact that something had changed permanently between us. I’d said it three times in the dark with his hands on my skin and my voice gone raw and I hadn’t meant to say it any of those times, not planned it, not prepared for it, it had just come out of me the way things did when you finally stopped holding them back.

I wasn’t afraid of it.