Much later, Amaryllis joined him, swimming with him, and he appreciated the sight of her in a small bikini he’d talked her into buying and wearing when they were alone. She wasn’t that girl who showed off her body, but for him, she did. The children were gone, and no one was around but the two of them and the royal blue triangle was cut to curve right up her cheeks, revealing how perfectly shaped she was, riding the center and curving downward and low on her hips. He loved looking at her from the back just to see that view.
Then there was the delicious side view she gave him. He loved her generous breasts. She had them and he could look at them all day. More than once, in the hospital, when he thought he might go insane with phantom pain and itching, she had suddenly given him something else to think about, revealing the sexiest bra beneath her top, all lace with her nipples peeking through at him. Because she was actually very modest, and he knew what it cost her, he appreciated it all the more. He also bought into the distraction more.
She’d let him buy that top, nothing really but strings, beautiful royal blue rolled cord to frame her rounded breasts, with a tiny scrap of material barely managing to cover her nipples. When she was wet from the pool, the way she was now, she might as well not be wearing a thing. She looked like a wild temptress rising out of the water and turning to wade toward him with her deep-sea blue eyes and that beautiful, generous mouth of hers. He was a lucky man and he knew it.
He reached out and caught her by the straps of her top and pulled her into him. She immediately looked at their surroundings.
“We’re completely alone, Amaryllis. I wouldn’t want another man looking at you. Trap is in his lab, which means Cayenne is as well. Everyone else has gone home. It’s us and this pool. I can turn the lights off.” He made the suggestion gently. He wasn’t going to push it one way or the other. He was a little more adventurous than she was, but if she wasn’t comfortable, he was fine with taking what they had indoors. Everything they did was beautiful and sexy to him.
“I would very much like you to turn the lights off,” she agreed, even as she shrugged her shoulders and one strap slid down.
His breath caught in his throat. That small movement had taken those cords right off that round curve, so her nipple stood out starkly, begging for attention. He couldn’t help himself. He had to touch her, his thumb strumming her nipple gently before he forced himself to turn away, climb the stairs and hit the light switch, plunging them into darkness.
The pool itself was still lit with a dim, opalescent light. That light quickly turned to a pinkish, almost radiant light spilling upward from beneath the water. Amaryllis looked down at the light display and then up at him, laughing.
Malichai laughed. “That’s so Trap. He’ll probably have unicorns galloping on the bottom of the pool before Drusilla is two.”
“It is beautiful,” she pointed out.
“You’re beautiful,” he corrected, dipping his head, his mouth finding her bare breast while he removed the little complicated corded bikini top. Her breast was cool from the water, but full and sexy, her nipple a tight, responsive bud in his mouth.
He tugged with his teeth and rolled with his tongue, using his fingers on her other breast. He loved waking up to her. Loved going to bed with her. She made him laugh all the time. Amaryllis was so perfect for him. When she had her mouth on his cock, it was pure heaven. No one could take him there like she could. When he was moving in her body, her tight sheath clamped down around him like a silken fist, she could take him all the way to paradise.
There in the water, he wrapped his arm around her waist and lifted her, as he untied the cord at her hips and let her bikini bottom float away. She immediately wrapped her legs around his waist, tilting her hips to his eagerly. He loved that about her as well. She might not go for public displays of affection the way some of the other women did, but she never said no to him. She was always ready for him, looking for ways to be with him.
Then he was moving in her and there was nothing in his mind but Amaryllis and the way she made him feel. That heat bursting through him. The fire she brought, burning him from the inside out. The love that ran through the lust and beauty of their coming together any way he took her. Water splashed around them. He heard her soft little cries, that music she made that seemed to add to the flames licking over his skin joining them together.
Then they were soaring together in the way they seemed to do so easily. He could barely breathe with loving her. When the world returned and he was aware of the night and the stars and the changing lights around them, that it wasn’t Amaryllis’s magic dazzling his eyes, he let himself just feel how much he loved her. He held her there in the pool for a long time. She didn’t move, her arms around him, not asking a single question, not demanding he let her go, just holding him the way he was her, content to let the ever-changing lights play over them as Malichai came down from his Amaryllis high.
Eventually he brushed kisses against her neck. “I told Trap we’d meet him in the lab.”
“You have to find my suit. It floated off somewhere and I’ve got to shower and get dressed.”
“You don’t want the kids to find little scraps of cloth at the bottom of the pool tomorrow?” he teased.
She flashed a grin at him and walked up the stairs naked. He watched her go the entire way because Amaryllis naked was a sight to behold.
“Whitney, you are so full of shit,” Trap snapped. “There are thirty-two billion base pairs in the genome of an axolotl salamander and scientists in Vienna, Heidelberg and Dresden were the first to actually completely map out the genome, which will be a huge leap forward for limb regeneration in humans, but we’re not there yet. You weren’t the first to map that out, they did. I’m not sending you Malichai to experiment on. It isn’t happening because if you tell one lie, everything else is built on that lie, which means you’re full of absolute shit.”
“Do you really think I’d use one of my very few GhostWalkers as my first human experiments in limb regeneration?” Whitney demanded. “You think so much of yourself, Dawkins. You always have. You’re depriving Malichai of his own leg, one of bone and tissue, one completely regenerated, because you don’t think it’s possible because you can’t do it.”
Malichai was tired of the argument between Trap and Whitney. It seemed like it went on day in and day out, but this was the first time it alarmed him. This was the first time Whitney had made references to experimenting on other humans—and when he experimented on human beings it was always on young girls or women. He believed they were inferior, and their only value was to science.
“Whitney.” Trap sounded interested now. “When Sergej Nowoshilow was speaking expressly about having the map for complicated structures such as limbs to be regrown, such as human legs, it was noted that the human PAX3 gene, which is essential during muscular and neural growth, is missing, with the axolotl PAX7 taking its place.”
“Which makes sense since a salamander needs its own stem cells and we need our own stem cells. You’re splitting hairs, Trap,” Whitney said. It was shocking that he referred to Trap by his first name rather than as Dawkins. “I’m telling you, I can get Malichai to regenerate his own leg, without scarring. His own tissue, muscular and neural growth.”