He hitched an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
“Hmm,” she said, stretching luxuriantly.
She lay on her back but was angled slightly toward him. He was lying on his side, propped on one elbow, extremely attentive to her nakedness, but seemingly blasé toward his own.
Of course he had no call to be self-conscious. He was lean and long limbed, muscled but not bulky, clouded with lovely brown hair in all the right places.
Against her, it all felt wonderful.
“Can you get drunk on sex?” she asked.
“I could get drunk on you.”
“I feel as though I’m on display.”
Drex gave her a lazy smile. “I’m feasting my eyes, all right.”
“Your tiger eyes.”
“Tiger eyes?”
“That’s what they remind me of.”
He leaned down and licked the slope of her breast. “Hear me purring?”
She laughed and sank her fingers into his unruly hair. “I heard you growling. Several times.” She pulled him toward her for a kiss. It was lazy, unhurried, and delicious.
When they finally broke apart, he resumed his position and continued his survey of her terrain by touching her nipple with his fingertip. “I’m going to have to coin some new adjectives to describe color.…” His caress had caused her nipple to tighten. “…and texture.”
His hand moved down the center of her torso, his fingers barely grazing her skin. When he reached her mound, he feathered the hair. “But some things defy description.”
“You don’t need descriptive words. You’re not a writer.”
“Hmm.” Preoccupied with what his fingers were doing, he said, “I may take it up just for the research.” He angled his head back and took her in, his gaze moving from her tousled hair to the tips of her toes. “You are gorgeous, Talia Shafer.”
“I was going to say the same about you.” She scrubbed his bristly jaw line with her knuckles, smoothed his sun-glinted eyebrows with her index finger, then trailed it down his cheek and dipped it into his dimple. He deepened it for her by smiling, and she laughed lightly.
It felt so good, so right to be with him like this, she was reluctant to bring into the open something that had been needling her. She reached for his hand and drew it up to the center of her chest, holding it between her breasts, but not provocatively. She traced the network of veins on the back of it. “Drex, what we just did was amazing.”
“On a scale of one to ten?”
She smiled, but he must have sensed that she wasn’t teasing, that what she had to say was serious, because he pulled the covers up over them before resettling beside her and intertwining their legs.
“I don’t want to spoil this,” she said. “But I must ask.”
He brows drew together. “What?”
“You talked tonight about Jasper playing an inside joke on you.”
“Something to let me know that he’d gotten the best of me.”
She shifted her gaze back to his hand and ran her finger along the ridge of his knuckles. “Did you sleep with his wife to get the best of him?”
He became so still that she feared she had ruined something precious, and that the memory she would be left with was of him being highly offended and storming from the bed, the suite, her life.
But after a ponderous silence, he said, “Look at me.” She did. He said, “No. Believe me, wanting you in my bed has been no joke, inside or otherwise. Mike, Gif, and I had words. They lectured me like maiden aunts about letting my dick do my thinking. They cited the conflict of interest this—” he said, sawing his hand between them, “—would create. You see the effect of all their wise counsel.”
He turned the hand she held against her chest and linked their fingers. “If I had wanted to use you to taunt Jasper, that’s what I would have done. Taunted. I would have let him think that we had slept together or planned to at our first opportunity.”