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“Candy. Lollies. Go.”
At last the kids were headed up the stairs and Beckett could refocus. Quinn had straightened the throw on the back of the couch and was now picking up the butterfly wings, telling him, “See you in a while, I guess.”
He said, “I’m sorry I told you to take off the wings, because I’m wishing you still had them on. Selfish of me, I know. Can’t help it.”
She stopped where she was. “I didn’t think you liked it. The costume. I realize it’s a bit incongruous. On me.”
“Are you joking?”
“Well, no.” She was starting to look cross. “You said, ‘Well, that’s a surprise.’ That’s not exactly, ‘I am smitten by your beauty as a pink butterfly, and I don’t think at all that you look ridiculous.’ Normally, I’m a witch.”
He grinned. “Yeah? Sorry. Iwassmitten, et cetera, though. If I promise to get Troy to bed in the next fifteen minutes, will you keep it on? The wings and all?”
“Yes,” she said. “I suppose.” And stopped looking quite so cross.
“If your feet hurt,” he remembered to say before taking the stairs two at a time, “you can take off the shoes.” A man had to make sacrifices.
* * *
It took him twelve minutes.
He knocked at the door of her bedroom, and when he got her soft answer, slipped inside. And locked the door.
Quinn turned from the closet. She’d been wearing earrings, thin silver hoops, and one of them was still in her ear, her hands on it.
She was wearing her butterfly wings.
She hadn’t taken off the shoes.
She asked, “Are the kids asleep?” and removed the earring. What was it about that simple act that got his engine revving? One of those things that said she was a woman, he guessed, because bloody hell, but it worked. Especially when she hung the earring carefully in its little rack, sighed, and ruffled her hair with her hand.
“Probably not,” he said. “And I don’t care. Did I really not tell you how pretty you look?”
“Well, no,” she said. “You didn’t.” She was starting to smile, though.
“You can take off the wings now,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, “I have your permission?”
“Don’t you want my permission?”
That was all, and the atmosphere changed. Her eyes went wide, and her mouth opened a little. The overhead light was off and only one bedside lamp lit, but he could see her expression well enough for that. In front of the mirror. In butterfly wings. Looking like she could flutter away.
She didn’t say anything. She just reached up and undid the straps holding the wings in place, then set them carefully in the corner. Which meant she was wearing the dress. And the long lacy gloves. And the shoes.
He took a step, and then he took another one, took her by the shoulders, and turned her gently around, then reached for the clasp of her thin silver chain necklace and unfastened it, careful with his oversized fingers on the fragile thing. He set it on the tallboy, then put his hands on her shoulders again and bent to kiss the back of her neck.
He felt as much as he heard her sucking in a breath as his lips brushed the fine, sensitive hairs at her nape, and he was reaching for the tiny tab on the black zip, holding it delicately between finger and thumb, and drawing it down her back.
Shadowed eyes staring at him in the mirror. Stretchy black fabric, soft as moleskin, under his hands as he pushed it off her shoulders, then pulled it slowly down over the swell of her bum. She lifted one black-shod foot, then the other, and kicked it away.
Bloodyhell.
* * *
She could have toldhim it was Lily’s dress and Lily’s lace gloves, but she’d bought the shoes. She could have told him that Lily had sold her the filmy stockings, light and fragile-strong as cobwebs, and the three-piece outfit that was everything else she had on. She could have told him that it was made by a company called For Love and Lemons, which was a stupid name, and that the whole thing had cost her almost four hundred dollars, which was obviously a sinful waste of money, with all the need in the world. But she only cared about the look in his eyes as he took in the nearly transparent pink bustier, all ribbons and straps and trimmed with tiny flowers, on which two of the pink-ribbon straps were falling down over her upper arms now that she didn’t have the dress holding them in place. And then there was the matching garter belt and, yes, the thong. All of them pink and pretty and transparent and flower-trimmed as can be.
He didn’t touch her for a long moment. He just looked. And then he sighed and ran his hands over her like he needed to do it. Slowly, watching in the mirror. His big hands touching those tied pink ribbons, then cupping her breasts, lifting them in the barely-there filmy covering, running his thumbs over her nipples, which hardened at his touch like they’d been waiting for it all night. Over her midriff, stroking the sides of her ribs where she was so sensitive, and down to the garter belt. His fingers on the ribbons of the garters where they snapped closed around the tops of the stockings.
