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h on her tongue.
From stumbling verbiage, they were stunningly coherent in the language of pleasing each other.
The sound of the taps shutting off as the bath reached its high water mark had her pushing him away, had him lifting her over the rim and coming in after her. They sat side by side in the seductively temperate water that filled the circular expanse, not touching, hyper aware of each other.
“What now, Mace?”
“Laps.”
She moved to him, traced wet hands over his shoulders and down his arms, swelling with muscle, inert with strength. “It’s not that big.”
The grin he gave her was filthy, not a flavour you could ever wash out. It broke over her and made her shiver. “Oh my God.” Last night there’d been a joke like this, now it was her turn to fall in.
He was so hot he electrocuted her senses, turned them to a bubbling, scorching, steaming mess of need to have him inside her fast and hard. She was sick with it. She had no idea how he was containing himself. And then he didn’t.
He pulled her across his body and she shrieked when his tongue went to her breast and she understood what he had in mind, more sensual torture, laps that had her floating in a sea of desire and need. His plan was to destroy her, take her heart and shipwreck it against the rock of his body. They’d be no survivors; the coming together too storm-tossed, too violent in its lust-soaked glory.
She had to fight him to stay afloat, to keep her balance and take what she needed. She pushed him back, climbing his body to lick at his lips, digging her fingers into the guide rope of his spine, sucking his tongue thick into her mouth. He gave up, his teasing laugh stuttering, dying in his chest when she took him inside her in a cyclone of movement that rippled through them both, sending water cascading over the side of the bath to slap the floor.
In the shattered calm that followed, when he’d combed her hair and played his fingers along the edge of her ear, pinching it like before but without the sting, she lay in his arms and felt such bone soft pleasure, such weightless, effortless ease she must have slept. She came to with a start, his lips at her ear, with his arms around her, keeping her prisoner. She tried to get her feet flat but they were tangled with his.
“I’ve got you.”
She’d dreamed of bodies floating, debris and death, the sound of wailing women, the colour red and fire making her skin hot, her mouth dry.
“You were dreaming.”
She tried to push away from him. “So stupid. I could’ve drowned. I can’t just lay here.”
He let her go and she went to the other end of the bath, wishing she could cover herself from his gaze.
“I wouldn’t let you drown.”
“You don’t have to look out for me.” She pushed hair out of her eyes. What time was it? Time for him to go. Time for her to get on with her day. Too much time wasted. People died last night, died today, and she was lolling around in the bath with a man she’d picked up easy as reheating dinner.
“It was a bad dream.”
This was a bad dream. What on earth was she thinking? She should’ve let him stay in the foyer, in her office, in the spare room, anywhere but in her body again.
“I had you, baby.”
“Did you just call me baby?”
He stood up. “You heard.” He towered over her, his skin all flushed warm, not a single self-conscious twitch. He reached for a towel and held it out to her.
It wasn’t his fault she’d felt the sticky tentacles of panic, the nightmare; the temperature-controlled bath, the release and closeness she’d felt in his arms and knew to be a phantom thing, a ghost ship in her night.
She stood and walked into the bath sheet he held. “I’ll take baby over Princess Severe.”
He wrapped it around her and pulled her into his side. “I get your severe.” He lifted her over the edge of the bath. “It’s something you need to get you through the day.”
He’d seen too much of her, cached too much of her data. “We should be paying you more.”
He stepped out and picked up a second towel. “Not for what you have me do.”
“A job well beneath your skills, I suspect.” She rubbed the end of the towel over her hair. “If you could have any job what would it be?”
She watched him dry off. She could watch him move all day; the economy of him, the thoughtless elegance.
