Page 56 of Sexy as Sin
She did, but she sure didn’t want to. He made it as gentle as he could. “Hey. Do you really not know why I asked you not to come by last night?”
She really didn’t, clearly. And she wasn’t going to answer. He said, “I wasn’t busy, not any busier than usual, and I missed you like hell. I wanted to hear about what happened and what you found out, but more importantly, I wanted to see how you were doing, and I wanted you sleeping in my bed. But you sounded as exhausted as anybody I’ve ever heard, you so obviously needed to hang it up for the night, and I needed to help you do it. Clearly, I messed up on that, though.”
“I’m a chef,” she said. “Chefs don’t get tired. Chefs do the job.” Some more shakiness in her voice, and a little tremble in her hand.
One more try. “You’re a person, too. You’re a woman. I’m pretty damn crazy about you, in case you didn’t hear me say it before, and I’m not an asshole. I don’t care how many assholes you’ve known, I’m not one of them. The only way I could figure out to get you to lay all those obligations down and go to bed was to tell you to stay home, so I did. Is that clear enough for you?”
“Oh.” She picked up her burger, set it down, and, finally, picked up her wine instead. And, once again, she was starting to smile. “You could’ve told me that.”
He let her hand go and smiled back. “I see that. I’m telling you now. And as soon as you want to tell me the rest of it, I’m here to listen. I can’t exactly go anywhere. I have this broken leg. And I’m very, very good at solutions.”
“Mm.” She’d lost the fine-wire tension, and she was smiling for real. “You make it so easy to believe in rainbows and unicorns. Being with you is like dancing in my slip and my sparkly headband. You make me believe I’m Princess Ariel, or that I could be.”
“Good.” He tried to think of something else to say, but for once in his carefully polished life, couldn’t come up with a thing.
“Eat your burger,” she said. “I’m eating mine. Somebody cooked for me and cut me flowers, and that makes it a good night. I need a wee while here. My arms have gone all tingly. That’s either the aftereffects of mushroom poisoning, or it’s you. I think it’s you.”
She was all the way out of her comfort zone, he could tell. Which came from, odd as it seemed,beingcomforted. Having a man want to be her hero.
She needed time, though? He had time. Time to sit in the lingering warmth, eat a quiet dinner, listen to the most beautiful music a composer had ever written, watch the sky turn magical jewel colors, and let her feel it all. So that was what he did. The scent of the flowers he’d cut her mingled with all the others in this lush subtropical garden, the wine glowed red as rubies and tasted like sin, and when they finished dinner and the sky began to glow, he got up and said, “Let’s lie down and watch the show. If you shove one of those loungers on over here next to mine, I can hold your hand.”
She smiled at him with the kind of slow, knowing sweetness that made a man’s blood heat, and she didn’t talk about the dirty dishes, her schedule, or anything else. She just shoved the lounger over and climbed onto it. Now, he had his fingers threaded through hers and his thumb tracing patterns on her palm, while Kathleen Battle poured the mysterious, aching notes of Vangelis’sMythodeainto the night.
The clouds were lit to brilliant gold, with luminous pink showing around the edges, when the bats came.
They flew overhead like shadows, on and on, papering the sky with their black wings. Beside him, Willow sighed and shifted, and he said, “Yeah. That’s something.”
No candles for them tonight, just the glow of the sky and the half-circle that was the moon coming up on the horizon. Over the ocean, but he couldn’t worry about the ocean now, because the bats were still in the sky, and Willow was focusing on his hand.
He was turning her on with histhumb.He needed to see what else he could do. That was the last part of the deal tonight. He turned onto his good side, kept her hand in his, and pulled her over with his other hand on her shoulder, and she let him do it. His hand threaded through her curls, he held her other hand tight, and she sprawled over his body while he kissed her, slow and deep and easy, the rush of the bats faded away, and the music played on.
He kissed her until she was melting against him, until he had his hand under that nearly transparent white shirt and was confirming what he’d seen at first glance, when he’d been standing at her door. That she wasn’t wearing a bra. The faint shadow of her nipples had teased him all through dinner, and as he brushed his hand over one, it hardened under his touch. Like all she wanted was him, and she was trembling for the satisfaction only he could give her.
He said, “Willow,” and all she did was moan and rub into his hand.
He smiled. “Stand up and take off your clothes for me.”
The hard rush when she obeyed. Was there anything better than that? She stripped the white shirt slowly off her body until her hands were over her head, and then let it drop to the ground in a drift of soft fabric. She was standing in the green cotton shorts, then, her hand going to the snap. She unzipped slowly, and he watched the whole thing.
“Leave the thong,” he said. The sight of her wriggling her shorts down over her hips—surely that was something he’d never get tired of. They hit the ground, too, and she stepped out of them, one foot and then the other, kicked them aside, and shook her hair back like a woman who knew she was beautiful.
“Thong now,” he said. Maybe it was the wine, because he’d needed a couple more swallows for his dry mouth before he set the glass on the table beside him. Maybe it was the night, and maybe it was endless legs, slim hips, and a tiny white scrap of silk with her fingers hooked into the sides. And the sight of that scrap sliding down and off her pretty body.
He started to pull off his own shirt, and she said, “Oh, no. That’s my job.” She was kneeling carefully over him on the lounger, then, sliding his T-shirt up, stroking her hands over his chest, and saying, “Happy Valentine’s Day, Mr. Hunter.”
Her hair brushed over him as she bent to kiss him, and he slid his palms down her shoulders, her sides, until he had both of them around her bare ass. It fit perfectly in his palms, and when he stroked his fingers down to explore the sensitive spot at the back of her thighs, then up to her tailbone, rubbed her there, and finally drummed them, she shuddered, long and luxuriantly, kissed him deeper, and whispered, “I’m going to make you so happy tonight. Come in the house with me.”
She was already hitting him like a heart attack. If she made him much happier, she was probably going to kill him, but what the hell. He’d live dangerously. He got himself up to sitting, and she handed him his crutches, drank her wine down while he got himself upright, and said, “That’s lubrication, and I’m going to need it,” before she pulled his head down and kissed him again. After that, she turned and sashayed her way into the house like she knew he’d be following her. Slowing down, for once, and believing.
All the way down the shadowy hall and into the bedroom, where she didn’t turn on a light. She was pale as the moon in the darkness, and she turned, looked him over, and asked, “Can you stand up a while, if you prop yourself against the bed a bit?”
“Yeah.” His heart was beating hard, and she had him turned on like she had her hand on the electric switch. She smiled, got her hand on the zipper of his shorts, and eased them down his legs, and then she had her hand on him and was stroking him as if he were everything she wanted for Valentine’s Day. He knew that was how he felt about it, anyway. Flowers, hell.
“Hang on a sec,” she whispered into his ear, and he thought,What?He needed to get rid of these crutches so badly. He had nearly three weeks’ worth of frustration going here, and about a year’s worth of positions he needed to put her into and things he needed to do to her. And he couldn’t. It was torture.
He forgot that, though, because she was climbing onto the bed, then crawling across it, and the sight of Willow crawling, naked, was something that required his focus. She grabbed all the pillows, then lay crosswise on her back, her head nearly off the near side of the bed and her hips on two more, and he thought,OK. How does this work with a broken leg?Two pillows went under her hips, the others beneath her shoulders, and she leaned her head all the way back, looked at him upside-down, her corkscrews of hair falling toward the floor, smiled, and said, “It’s a bloody high bed, hey. Think somebody did that on purpose? I did a little online searching myself. Want to come hold my head?”
Oh, yeah. He did. Balancing on your crutches, he found, wasn’t one bit easy when you were buried halfway down a woman’s throat, and when she had one arm wrapped around your good thigh and the other one drifting over her own breasts. She couldn’t talk, because her mouth was full, but she was making some noise anyway, little satisfied sounds like she was loving it despite the awkward position, or because of it, and like all she wanted was for him to give her more.
