It had been gone—that freedom, that feeling—for a while now. And it wasn’t totally back. Phoebe wasn’t positive she’d ever totally get it back…but she knew, positively, that’s how she wanted to be for Fox. With Fox. With the man she loved.
“And you’ve got the temperature perfect,” she called out, and in that second, when she was blinking Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
water out of her eyes, she almost jumped to the ceiling…because there was Fox.
Right there. His eyes inches from her eyes. His mouth inches from her mouth. He was still wearing all his clothes, except for his boots. His work socks already looked heavier than cement, and the rest of his work clothes were molding to his body faster than glue.
“Most of us,” she said tactfully, “remove our clothes before taking a shower.”
“Don’t you mess with me, red.”
She sobered, softened. “I’m not messing with you.”
“This is a pretty brazen, bawdy thing for you to do. Stripping in front of me. Getting naked in front of me.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said regretfully.
“You could give a guy ideas. Bad ideas. Ideas like…that you know how delectably beautiful that body of yours is. Like…that you want me to notice how delectably beautiful that body of yours is—”
“Fox?”
“What?”
“This is what you’re going to be stuck with. A brazen, bawdy woman. Who likes to get naked. For her lover. Only for her lover. No one else.”
“Oh, I hope so,” he whispered, and then leaned down and took her mouth. It was a kiss that started out hard and firm and just got more tenacious. The pelting warm water couldn’t compete with this steam.
Her Fox, her crazy wonderful Fox, seemed to forget that he was standing there in all his clothes. He framed her face in his hands and kissed her and kept on kissing her, closed-eye kisses, tongue kisses, silver kisses, come-on kisses, claiming kisses.
She was still feeling nervous and worried. But maybe not quite as worried and nervous as she started out, because a competitive streak seemed to kick in.
She could do kisses.
In fact, she could do downright fabulous kisses. For the right man. And Fox was so totally the right man.
She made him suffer through an intensive repertoire. She tried whisper-soft kisses and ardent, take-me kisses. Wooing kisses and shy, silky kisses. Kisses involving tongues and teeth, and kisses that barely touched, only hinted at what the future might hold. Could hold. If he was a very, very good boy.
“Phoebe?” he gasped in a breath.
She took the chance to gasp in some air, too. “What?”
“We’re drowning.”
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
“That’s not the serious problem, Fox. You want to know the serious problem?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“You have all your clothes on. And that really is a problem that needs fixing immediately.”
“I’ll help,” he assured her, and there was a grin. A dark, intimate, wicked, pure, guy grin. The memory burst in her mind of how she’d first seen Fergus…so low, so sad, so unreachably angry and lost. It wasn’t her fault that that grin inspired her to huge, vast heights of risk. Getting wet clothes off a guy was no easy task…but she was up for it.
He was also definitely up for it, in every sense—particularly as she followed each loosened button with a kiss everywhere and anywhere she discovered bare skin. By the time she’d battled four shirt buttons, he was ripping off his belt, trying to tear off his jeans.
By then, the water in the pool had filled to knee height. Unfortunately, everything suddenly went kaflooey. His jeans were too soggy, too stuck to him, to pull off the rest of the way. He tried. She tried.
They bumped heads and staggered back, and both ended up sitting in the water with the waterfall exuberantly splashing water on both of them, and Fox, laughing, roared out, “Damnation. I needhelp! ”
“You think I’m not trying?” She’d started helplessly laughing, too, and between his sitting and bracing and her pulling, they managed to win the war with his pants.
“You’re not supposed to havefun when you’re this desperate,” he grumped.
But his laughing and grumping was what sealed his fate, she thought. And hers. Because the more they battled his pants, the more they laughed, the more they loved…the more she knew it was going to be all right with Fox. To be herself. Always. That this was the one man she could be with.
Fear melted away, not all at once, but in flashes of searing sensation…like when his teeth scraped the hollow of her shoulder. Like when his hands slid down her ribs, around her spine, onto her fanny, where he clenched his hands and drew her tight and hard against him. When she reached back to turn off the water—before the pool overflowed all over kingdom come—he could barely seem to give her that spare second before he reached for her again, too impatient and hungry to wait.
“I love you, red. Not just want you. Ilove you. Now. Tomorrow.”
“And I love you back,” she said fiercely.
“I meanlove. And you can take it to the bank, we’re going to love the sex. It’s going to be hot and wild and inventive for a long time.”
“You think?”
“I think. Because I trust you.” He lifted his head for just that moment, so she could see his eyes. So he could see hers.
And then he sank inside her, wrapping her legs tightly around his waist. Sunlight blazed through the skylight, shining gold on his shoulders, on his forehead. The water glistened on his skin like magic crystals. Night would have offered more concealment, more privacy, but this, Phoebe thought—sheknew
—was how she wanted to be with him. Naked, physically
