She shivered with pleasure. After an intense day on her feet, controlling everything, there was perhaps nowhere on her body hungrier for touch than her back.
“Like that, sweetheart?” he murmured, broadening his strokes of her back to her shoulders, then tightening his hands on her shoulders as he thrust deep into her again. And deep again.
God, he felt good. She bit into her lip with the pleasure of it, shaking her head a little against her pillow as every texture, cotton sheets, skin, pressure inside and out, became delicious. He stroked down her arms, found her hands, and threaded his fingers with hers, locking her hands to the mattress. “And that?”
She nodded against the pillow.
“I have died and gone to heaven.” He thrust harder, his fingers tightening on hers. “Well…maybe not heaven, but somewhere a lot dirtier and more fun.”
“Don’t stop,” she whispered into the pillow.
“I tell you what, honey. I can’t promise not to stop. But I sure as hell promise you I’ll do it again.”
And, by God, he did.
The second time was in the shower, in this long, slow, mercilessly sensual stroking of water and helplessness, too much sensation everywhere, while he laughed low in his throat and lifted her and kissed her and manipulated her body every way he wanted to, until he finally pressed her wet against that wall, with the warm water pouring over both of them, took her mouth with his, and fucked her senseless.
Almost literally. She was limp and somnolent from exhausted pleasure as he carried her and a bundle of towels to the bed and stretched her out on it, patting her dry with a kind of possessive smugness. And it was 2:50 a.m. when she fell asleep.
***
In the dark room, Chase propped on his elbow a while, smiling as he watched her sleep. She’d turned away from him, and her blond hair spilled over the sheets and her back, her arm flung out to the edge, her knee drawn up. She wanted to take all the bed, didn’t she? It was hers.
He rolled onto his back, with one hand behind his head, and checked his watch. Three o’clock. The smile slowly faded. If Vi had been awake, she would have seen his face go faintly grim, inscrutable, a blank, lethal contemplation. In the dark, where no one could see, he looked like a hardened killer anticipating battle.
But, of course, if she had been awake, he wouldn’t have let her see that face.
Time to go.
He rolled out of bed smoothly and silently, dressing without a sound. Vi didn’t even move in her sleep. He pulled open the drawer of her nightstand. No paper. But there was a journal lying on top of the stand. He opened it, flipping past what seemed mostly menu ideas to a blank page. It was one of those expensive journals he hated to rip up, so he hesitated a moment over it, pen in hand, then smiled a little as he wrote quickly. He set her alarm clock on top of it to hold the journal open to the page, so that she would spot it when she turned that alarm off.
Then he strode out without looking back.
Chapter 7
“So how did your fishing expedition go?” Mark asked with a crisp edge to his words, as if they’d spent too long on a temperamental grill. Being team leader of a group of men like them who had been sitting still for far longer than their temperaments could handle was not for the faint of heart.
Chase leaned back in his chair, locked his hands behind his head, opened his mouth, closed it…and a great, beatific grin spread across his face.
“I’m going to kill him,” Jake informed Mark. “God damn it. I spent the whole fucking night on a roof in forty degree rain. Isn’t it July?” Half Irish and half God knew what—mountain lion, probably—Jake had golden red hair and skin that should currently be deeply relieved to find itself in a rainy climate. The dense layering of dust-toned freckles on his skin had pretty much left no non-freckled space, after the Middle East.
“I had to keep her distracted!” Chase said. “Her brain scrambled. You know.” He grinned, feeling so big he was going to explode any moment. Hell, she was fine. “Who wants to be the best man?”
From the doorway, Ian snorted. “No woman is dumb enough to marry you. She was just using you for sex.” There was a grain of truth to that which snuck under Chase’s skin. Special ops always did have more trouble getting a woman to marry them and stick with them through deployments than finding someone to have sex with.
“It’s true love,” Chase said loftily, instead of admitting that. “You’re just jealous.”