Page 87 of Never Enough

Demon ignored the comment and headed out the door to find somewhere to rent a board.

“Was it something I said?” Nemo asked Steel teasingly.

Steel picked up one of the sets of jeep keys. “He did call her. She sent him to voicemail.”

“Eww. Ouch.” Nemo grimaced. “Cock-blocked by the cell phone.”

“You’re mean,” Gem said as she came down the stairs, Scheherazade alongside her.

Nemo almost combusted. She was wearing her little denim skirt again, but above it, she had on possibly the tiniest bikini top imaginable. Granted, she was small up top, but he was still caveman enough that he didn’t want anyone seeing her in it.

“How is making an observation mean?”

“It’s hard enough knowing you’re into someone, but they’re not into you. You don’t have to rub it in that she’s not interested.”

“Oh, she’s interested,” Steel corrected. “They just have shit to work through.”

“You meanhehas shit to work through. I doubt those were ibuprofen he was popping just now,” she huffed out.

“Nah, tiny, they likely were. When we’re on a project, he doesn’t take that shit.”

“He shouldn’t take it at all,” she grumbled. One look at Steel, and she huffed again. “I don’t care. It’s a crutch, and if he’d quit, he’d feel better.”

She headed back to the pool deck, Nemo’s eyes following her ass the whole way. He really wanted to sleep right now, but he supposed he could do that out at the pool just as easily as in the room. He watched her spread out onto a lounge chair while Scheherazade sniffed the perimeter.

“Hang out for five minutes while I change?” he asked Steel. “These two are balls-deep in their work. I want someone watching her at all times.”

Steel nodded.

Nemo raced up the stairs, threw on board shorts and a T-shirt, then padded back downstairs and out onto the deck with a wave of dismissal to Steel.

The dog was in a position of watchfulness at the foot of Gem’s chair. Nemo smiled. Scheherazade had taken an instant liking to the girl and spent most of her time following Gem around, even though Nemo hadn’t directly ordered her to. He stood behind Gem’s chair, gazing straight down at her head, then down the path of her cleavage to the front-closure top.

“I can hear you thinking, burglar boy,” she murmured, her voice sleepy as if she’d been dozing already.

He walked around the chair and sat sideways on the one next to hers. “You’re going to burn.”

Eyes still closed, she waved his comment away. “It’ll make me look more touristy. But if it makes you feel better, I put sunscreen on while I was upstairs.”

“Damn. I didn’t get to help,” he complained.

“If you helped, I wouldn’t be down here. I’d still be up there. Probably naked. Then again, my understanding is you don’t have sex in beds ever, so maybe I’d still be down here,” she teased.

Nemo leaned back in the chair. “Nope. Not since Valencia.”

He heard her head turn, so he turned his as well. Her head was pulled up from the chairback, and her eyes were open in her surprised look again.

“Even when I was a teenager, it was always somewhere odd, though not necessarily public. That was more of a post-Valencia thing.”

“You’ve never had sex in a bed with anyone except me?”

He turned his head back to look out at the pool, then closed his eyes as if settling in to nap himself. “Too intimate.”

The silence was long, but he didn’t hear her shift back to her relaxed position. Finally, he turned back toward her. “What?” he asked.

“But it wasn’t too intimate with me?”

Is that hope in her voice?

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