He scrubbed his face and looked at her over his fists warily, as if he wasn’t any more sure he could stand this than she was. She grabbed one of those fists, and his hand was cold as ice. “Kurt, come on.” She pulled him with all her strength, and he let her drag him through the house. The luxury style cabin featured a master bathroom with a great whirlpool bath, a view out over the valley, and a shower where she could turn on sprays all up and down the wall. His mother’s interior design was, of course, perfect. The quintessential luxury mountain look to which everyone should aspire.
Kai turned on the sprays, leaving Kurt to undress himself, but his fingers were too stiff, and he leaned back against the glass shower wall in defeat. Outside, through another of those great glass windows the cabin had in such plenty, the leaden afternoon was darkening further into night, and still only a few flakes of actual snow had fallen. Anger flicked suddenly through her, against Anne and her team to have been so pathetic as to let the threat of it scare them away and trap her and Kurt in this painful re-opening of wounds.
It would have been easier to undress a complete stranger and put him under the shower to save him from hypothermia than it was to strip her own former—well, in spirit former, despite the continued legal ties—husband. But she did it. Moving as fast as she could, while he stared down at her, motionless as more and more of his body was exposed. Yes, he was even harder, that rangy build of his pushed even more this past year until it left ripples of muscle on his abs. She could imagine him driving himself into utter physical exhaustion, evening after evening, rather than coming home to the house she had left empty.
The spray blasted against the shower wall behind him. She pushed at his jeans, her hands slipping inside them for purchase, grazing over his butt.
He was starting to shiver now, his skin icy to her touch. “Kurt, damn it. You should have come back inside. Or gotten in your car.”
“I was thinking,” he said. And God knew, he could think. He thought too much with that brilliant brain, sometimes, sank so deep into the problem about which he was thinking that he couldn’t get out.
She had always loved it. It had made her feel protective. As if she needed to take care of that brain of his, teach him the joys of sometimes just not thinking, of just wallowing in scents and tastes and textures and the laughter of the moment.
She got the jeans and briefs off, forcing them down those long legs. He had been running a lot, hadn’t he? The hard muscles of his thighs felt so good under her fingers, and it had been so long since she had touched them and—she couldn’t think about that.
She pushed him back into the shower, watching him flinch as the warm sprays hit him all over, and then he shivered into the water voluptuously, his face turning up, his body slowly unfurling from a tense knot of cold as the warmth sank into his muscles.
Muscles.
Water running over skin, tracing the strength and definition of shoulders, arms, chest, abs. Water relaxing every single one of those muscles, caressing him as no one else had caressed him for so long. It trailed down over his ribs, following a V of hair down, down. As soon as the first wash of water ran over his penis, it sprang up hard again, as if only the cold had kept it contained.
She wanted to run her hands everywhere the water ran, show that damn shower how to really warm Kurt up. That water had no idea what it was doing, and she—oh, she knew exactly what Kurt liked. How hard, how fast, how long. What kind of kisses drove him a little crazy, what she could do to him if she took her hand and rubbed firm but slow, slow, slow, down from his chest, over his abs, to—
She looked back up at his face to find him watching her.
Their eyes locked through the streaming water. Her heart beat very hard.
“Kai,” he said and leaned both forearms against the glass, looming over her while that clear pane kept them separate. Her heart seemed to thud in slow motion, that separation stretching out for all eternity, as if the glass would stay there forever, leaving two souls caught in longing. She wanted to go up on her tiptoes and kiss that glass, right where his mouth would meet hers.
She placed her hands against his forearms, through the pane, her own weight swaying onto them.
“Kai,” he said again, a question or a demand. Or just a statement of her existence right there, on the other side of the glass.
Eyes caught by his hazel—how she loved their secret color, those sweet, gorgeous eyes that had always been hers—she swayed onto her toes, her lips almost brushing the glass.
He reached around the glass, grabbed her wrist, and yanked her into the shower.
Water hit her, pounding into her face, soaking her clothes, her shoes. Kurt never did that—he was never careless, and only rough in the deepest throes of lovemaking, and even that, only after he had learned that sometimes she loved it when he was rough.
Yet now, he didn’t seem to give a damn that he had just ruined her shoes, that her clothes clung awkward and heavy to her. Catching her face between his hands, he lifted it up to him and kissed her, driving, hungry, starved, while the water sprayed all over them, streaming down their faces, spilling over their lips.