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The third time they’d made love was just icing on the cake. Dessert, he thought with a flash of humor, remembering his statement to her earlier. He’d pulled Carly on top of him, leaving his hands free to toy with her breasts. The breasts he’d tried to ignore from day one—but had failed miserably at doing. He couldn’t really blame himself because her breasts were perfect. Absolutely perfect. They filled his hands as if they were made for him—just enough and not a fraction over. With silky nipples that tightened at the slightest touch.
And the way she’d moved on him? Should be a crime, he told himself with another stab of humor. He felt like a horse who’d been ridden hard and put away lathered. Drenched, in fact. But he wasn’t complaining.
Just thinking about it was making him hard again, and he tried to shift so he wasn’t touching her. Or rather, so she wasn’t touching him. It shouldn’t be possible. Yeah, it had been months since the last time he’d made love to a woman, but he was forty-one, not fourteen. He shouldn’t be popping up at the slightest provocation, but there it was. He tried to talk some sense into his body—three times should be plenty. His body wasn’t listening.
Carly stirred, and with her lips pressed against his chest she murmured something he couldn’t hear.
His arms tightened around her. “What did you say?” he whispered almost soundlessly, not wanting to wake her up if she wasn’t up already.
She stretched a little. Sighed with contentment. Then rubbed her cheek against his bare chest like a satisfied kitten and said, “Again?”
He chuckled softly. “Have pity on me, Carly.”
She snuggled closer to his body, which responded with a surge of desire that left him hard and aching. “I wasn’t asking for me,” she explained. “I was voicing the question your body seems to be asking.” Her hand slid down to stroke his already-aroused flesh. “Doesn’t feel as if you need pity. Feels as if you need tender, loving care.”
“You’re exhausted.”
“Mmm.” Her lips curved into a Mona Lisa smile.
She toyed lazily for long minutes, until the breath caught in Shane’s lungs. “God, Carly, stop. I can’t—”
“Yes, you can.” She raised her head to look at him, a challenge in her sparkling blue eyes. “Come on, Marine, oorah. You can do this.”
Whether it was the challenge, the US Marines battle cry or Carly’s clever hand—which was soon joined by her unbelievably talented lips—somehow he found he could after all. No condom needed.
* * *
Shane made it to the Senate floor when it convened at nine by going there directly instead of to his office first, as he usually did. He’d texted Dee-Dee from home—where he’d gone to shower and change clothes—to let her know he was running late, and had asked her to have his senior legislative assistant and legislative correspondent meet him on the Senate floor with the paperwork he needed. He knew he could count on Dee-Dee and she didn’t disappoint him—his aides were already there waiting for him when he arrived.
As was often the case, nothing much was happening on the Senate floor that morning, except a vote on a bill that was meaningless because the president would veto it and the Senate leadership didn’t have the votes to override that veto. Shane hated that kind of nonsense—grandstanding for the constituency at home—but he still voted because he wanted to go on the record as opposing the bill—he always voted his conscience.
The rest of the day passed in a whirl of committee and subcommittee hearings, a strategy lunch with the two other senators who were cosponsoring his domestic terrorism bill, meeting with a delegation—some of whom were constituents from his home state and needed to be handled with kid gloves—regarding the upcoming vote on the pipeline bill and a policy meeting with his staff that took up most of the afternoon.
But he found time to text Carly twice. The first was just three words—thank you again. He’d thanked her this morning when he’d left, of course, but he wanted her to know he was thinking of her, which he was. A lot. Everything he thought of saying seemed impossible to convey in a text, though, and he concluded his mother was right—texting might be great for some things, but it was a piss-poor way of communicating complex emotions.
