“So…am I right?”
I look up to find her staring at me. “Are you my therapist now?”
“Depends. Do you need one?”
“No. I’d like to think I’ve left that shit in the past. How about you?”
“I’m working on it.” She glides her hand over the surface of the water watching the wake it leaves behind. “Sometimes, I think…” She trails off staring at the dark water in front of her. “Maybe I’d like to disappear too.” She blinks, seems to snap out of her thoughts as if she just realized she’s given me more than she intended, and she flashes a sexy smile. “So you got me here, nearly naked…wet. What do you plan to do with me?”
“I’m going to show you how to disappear.”
She lifts her brows.
I step to her, my taller frame keeping my chest out of the water where she’s submerged to her shoulders. “Lie back.”
There’s a flicker of unease in her gaze.
“Do you trust me?”
“I don’t trust anyone.”
“Lie back.”
She studies my face and whatever she finds makes her eventually lift her feet. I put a hand on her lower back and another between her shoulder blades under the water, helping her stay afloat while she sinks her head into the water past her ears so that only her face remains above the water line.
“Take deep breaths in and breath out slowly, it’ll help you float.”
She does what I ask and once I’m convinced she’ll stay above water without my help I let her go.
“Close your eyes. Clear your mind. Listen to nothing but the sound of your own heartbeat.”
I watch as the tension in her expression slowly melts away then stand back and admire her pale, feminine form as she floats easily on the water. Moonlight dances across the water that slicks her flat belly and laps against her breasts. Her hair is a halo of golden tentacles making her look like a siren.
I was wrong.
A woman as potent as Emery is impossible to make disappear.
Emery
With my ears submerged into a watery silence, he removes the support of his hands and I remain floating weightlessly at the surface. In the quiet darkness with nothing but the sound of my pulse in my ears, I think this pool is a metaphor for my life. I’ve been treading water, thrashing in the proverbial tides without support. Then Theodore comes along and asks me to trust him, lifts my feet and lays me back. Suddenly those same waters seem calmer. Less threatening.
Is this what if feels like to let someone in?
I fall into a comfortable cocoon of stillness when I feel the gentle brush of fingertips against my collarbone. I suck in a breath and tense, feeling my legs begin to drop.
He lifts them again, supports them until I regain my float. “Focus. Don’t sink.”
With the loss of sight and sound my skin is a live wire as I wait for another brush of his fingers and anticipate where they’ll land next. My pulse quickens at the possibilities. In what I assume is purposeful torture, he waits for what feels like hours before I feel his barely-there touch brush the tops of my thighs.
“Focus on your breathing.” His voice sounds muffled and I take a deep breath just as he drags his fingertips to my knee and back up again. “You have the sweetest thighs.” His touch lingers on my inner thigh before moving higher to touch between my legs. “You’re so beautiful here.” He runs his finger back and forth over the cotton of my underwear and I struggle to keep a steady breath. He continues his feather-light torture up and around my bellybutton then between my breasts drawing tiny patterns on their swells. He moves to my lips, an airy touch I would’ve thought I imagined if I hadn’t felt the cool, hard press of his lip ring.
I tilt my chin, reaching for deeper contact, but he pulls back and leaves me breathless, wanting, and sinking.
My eyes open and I plant my feet and glare at the torturous bastard as he looks down at me with a knowing smirk. “You’re mean.”
He shrugs one colorful, muscled shoulder and backs away from me to the steps where he sits, trying hard to look unaffected. A shot of pure lust mixed with frustration lights up my blood and I cross to him, crawl over his body and straddle his hips. The press of his erection between my legs sends a gasp from my lips and a moan from his.
“This game is boring me,” I say as I slide my hands up his neck and into his hair.
“Funny.” He tilts his head, burning me alive with a heated gaze. “You don’t look bored.”
“What do I look like?”
“You look like you want to fuck.”
“You’re observant.”
He snakes a hand between us and softly grips my throat, holding me off from pressing against him. “Can’t.”
“So all this seduction in the pool was for nothing? You’re a lot of things Theodore Web, but I never thought you were a tease.” I move to push off his lap, gather my things and get the fuck out of here but his hold on my throat tightens, stilling me and sending lust through my body in a dizzying wave.
“House rule. No fucking in the pool.”
“Oh.”
The corner of his mouth ticks up on the side. “I’ll take you to my bed on one condition.”
His warm, powerful body beneath me, long, callused fingers at my throat, I’d say yes to any of his demands just for the chance to douse the flames raging inside me.
“Stay the night.”
Wait, he means all night? “And do what?”
His hand slips from my throat to cup and mold my breast. “I thought that part was obvious.”
I roll my eyes. “Yes, I mean after that.”
“We sleep.”
My eyebrows rise over what are sure to be wide eyes. “Sleep?”
“Yeah, Kitten. Fuck, sleep, and fuck again. Why
