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“Not likely,” he said, his voice soft and uncertain.
She wanted to ask him, What are we, Raintree? A couple? Coworkers who have sex on the side? Friends? But she didn’t want to ask questions she knew he didn’t have answers for. He kissed her under the shower’s spray, and his hands wandered. So did hers. She wanted him here and now, but there was no condom nearby, and she wasn’t about to let go of him, not yet. This felt too good, the spray of the water, Gideon’s mouth and his hands, and the way her body responded to both. It didn’t matter what they called themselves, not yet. Maybe one day it would matter, but for now, this was enough.
She closed her eyes while Gideon spread her legs and touched her intimately. She could have sworn a spark entered her body, teasing her, arousing her, fluttering through her like a little bolt of lightning. Maybe it did. At this point, nothing seemed impossible.
Her body began to quiver, she wanted Gideon so much.
Instead of leading her from the shower, he pressed his palm against her belly, low, where she felt empty and shuddery.
“I’m gonna cheat,” he whispered into her ear.
“Okay,” Hope whispered breathlessly, eyes closed as everything she had was focused on touch, and touch alone.
She cried out as the orgasm washed through her with an unexpected intensity, and if Gideon hadn’t been holding her up, she probably would have fallen to the shower floor. But he did hold her up. He held her wet, slick body against his, as release whipped through her like lightning.
As the orgasm faded, Gideon whispered, “Open your eyes.”
She did so, slowly. There was an odd glow in the shower, and it didn’t come from Gideon. It came from her. Her aura, a literal afterglow, danced along her skin with little sparks of electricity. Gideon’s eyes shone with a touch of green light, just a touch. The rest of the glow came from her.
He smiled. “Water is a great conductor.”
He had been tempted to take Hope in the shower, condom or no condom, but Emma’s frequent appearances and promises of coming soon had made him opt for another method, at least for now.
Besides, it wasn’t as if they were finished.
They dried one another with a fat gray towel, then walked toward the bedroom and the bed that awaited. Hope’s skin still glowed, but the luminescence was quickly fading. She didn’t have the power to keep the electricity fed, as he did.
He tossed her onto the bed, and she laughed as he crawled onto the mattress to join her. She stretched beneath him, naked and damp and touched with magic.
“So,” she said, reaching out to caress his face with gentle fingers. “What do girls normally say when you turn them into your own personal flashlights?”
He stroked her throat with the back of his hand. “I don’t know. I’ve never done it before.”
Her smile faded.
“I usually have to hide everything, remember?” He didn’t tell her that the glow was special, that she was different, that she was so unlike other women she stunned him.
Hope shifted her body, making herself more comfortable against him. There was something most definitely different about the way his naked flesh and hers came together, something he didn’t want to think about. He didn’t want to think with her. He wanted sex. A few laughs, maybe.
“Don’t hide anything from me,” she said.
It was such an unexpected and startling thought, that any woman could know everything about him and stay, that Gideon almost flinched. He couldn’t bare himself in every sense to anyone. Bare bodies, yes. Bare souls? Never.
He didn’t want to talk about anything beyond the physical, so he spread Hope’s thighs and stroked. She sighed and wrapped her fingers around him, gently, but not too gently. She caressed, and he closed his eyes and left everything behind to get lost in sensation. This was sex. It was good and right and powerful, but it was still only sex.
By the time he reached for the bedside drawer, neither of them were thinking about explanations for what this might be. It just was.
Sometimes a rabbit is just a rabbit.
ELEVEN
She should have been able to sleep like a baby, but that hadn’t happened. Not yet. Her mind was spinning with a thousand questions. When Hope became so restless that she began to worry about waking Gideon, she left him sleeping in his bed while she quietly roamed the half-dark bedroom.
Moonlight from the uncovered window and a hint of illumination from a night-light in the bathroom made it easy enough to see. Gideon was a bit of a minimalist, without a lot of unnecessary stuff in his house. There were family pictures on the walls here and there, but no flower arrangements or useless knickknacks on tabletops. She ran her hands over the dresser in his bedroom. Carelessly discarded on the surface was a ceramic dish for coins, a silk tie he’d dropped in a heap, a small piece of turquoise and what she recognized as another protection charm. She ran her fingers over the small silver charm attached to the slim leather cord. A week ago, if someone had told her that something so innocent and unimportant as a piece of silver could carry the power to protect, she never would have believed it. Now she knew that many of the things she’d once believed were wrong. She lifted the charm and placed it around her neck, where it lay close to the one Gideon had given her. Tabby was out there somewhere, and besides, her heart needed all the protection it could get at the moment. Was that kind of protection even possible? Or was it too late for her?
She grabbed a T-shirt Gideon had dropped onto a chair near the dresser, pulled it over her head and very quietly walked onto the deck that overlooked the Atlantic. The sound of the surf, together with the gentle light of the moon, soothed her, and she definitely needed soothing tonight.
It wasn’t like her to get deeply involved with anyone or anything so quickly. She studied all new enterprises from every angle before committing herself in any way. She always remained coldly and totally detached from any situation until she knew without doubt that a move was the right one. She’d been that way since the age of eleven, maybe even longer. She didn’t make rash decisions. Not anymore.
