“Fill me.” She drew his head down until their mouths met again. “Fill me.”
He could see her eyes, open now, dark and drenched. So he slipped inside her, was surrounded, welcomed. Then enfolded.
They moved together, a gentle rise and fall in an intimacy so complete it squeezed his heart. He laid his lips on hers again, would have sworn he breathed her soul.
And when she spoke his name, the tenderness shattered him.
She watched the night sky through the window over the bed. It was all so still she could almost believe there wasn’t a world out there. That there was nothing beyond this room, this bed, this man.
Maybe that was one of the purposes of sex. To isolate you, for a little while, from everything but yourself and your lover. To allow you to focus in on your body, its needs, the gratification that was physical and—if you were lucky in that lover—emotional as well.
Without those pockets of solitude and sensation, you might just go mad.
She’d used sex before Roarke, for the release, the physical snap. But she’d never known, or understood, the intimacy of the act before him, the complete surrender of self to another. She’d never experienced the emotional peace that followed until he’d loved her.
“I have things to say to you,” she said.
“All right.”
She shook her head. “In a little while.” If she stayed like this much longer, saturated with him, she’d forget there was a world out there, one she’d sworn to protect. “I’ve got to get up. Don’t much want to, but I have to.”
“You’re going to eat.”
She had to smile. He hadn’t finished taking care of her, she thought. He never finished. “I’m going to eat. In fact, I’ll get dinner for both of us.”
He lifted his head, and those eyes, those brilliant blue eyes, narrowed thoughtfully. “Will you?”
“Hey, pal, I can work a stupid AutoChef as well as the next guy.” She gave him a light slap on the ass. “Roll over.”
He complied. “Was it the sex or the soother?”
“Was what the sex or the soother?”
“That put you in a domestic frame of mind?”
“A smart mouth won’t get you dinner.”
Smart mouth or not, he figured he was probably getting pizza.
She hooked a robe out of her closet then, while he watched her with some surprise, took one out of his and brought it to him. “And a smart mouth isn’t always verbal. I can see sarcastic thoughts in your head.”
“Why don’t I shut up and get us some wine?”
“Why don’t you?”
He left her contemplating the AutoChef and opened the panel to the wine rack. He assumed she needed to keep busy, keep the nightmare at bay. Thinking pizza, he selected a bottle of chianti, opened it, and set it aside to breathe.
“You’ll be working tonight.”
“Yeah. I have to do some stuff. I’ve got Mira’s profile, and I want to walk through that again. Put together a progress report. I haven’t done any probabilities yet either. Plus I have to scan the eye banks, transplant facilities, that sort of thing. A time waster since he didn’t take them to sell them. But it’s got to be eliminated.”
She brought two plates over to the sitting area, set them down on the table.
“What’ve you got there?” he asked her.
“Food. What does it look like?”
He cocked his head. “It doesn’t look like pizza.”