“Are you okay, Anne?”
She shook her head. Then corrected herself. “I mean, yes, I’m fine. Sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Darius cursed. “If you want to go, I don’t blame you.”
No, she thought. She didn’t want to leave. Even though Bruce should have taught her a lesson about trusting strangers… she had to stay with this man who stood before her. In fact, being here with him now was… important.
And besides, Darius had almost died tonight, and she had almost died two nights ago. Life was so very fragile, and that made a person not want to waste time.
“Let’s get you over to the bed,” she countered in a husky voice. “I’ll take care of everything.”
* * *
Funny how his back didn’t bother him much anymore. And not because it had completely healed up already.
It turned out all he needed as a painkiller was the prospect of Anne’s hands on his bare skin.
As Darius stretched out faceup on the king-sized bed, it was a damn miracle. He couldn’t feel anything of the agony that had nearly left him passing out down on the kitchen floor—and this was even after he allowed the full weight of his torso to sink into the mattress.
But was she sure she wanted to do this?
Tilting to the side, he looked through the open door into the bathroom. The female he was so desperate for was at the sink, running water until it grew warm, getting towels and soap, finding a bowl somehow. From time to time, the mirror caught her reflection, and what he saw in her face made him want to kick his own ass. She seemed way too tired to do anything other than curl up in her own bed and sleep for twelve hours straight. She was determined, however, and maybe it didn’t reflect well on his character, but the idea that she was actually going to touch him?
Well, he was seriously disinclined to argue with her agenda.
And on that note—even though nothing seriously sexual was going to happen, not at all, not when she was running a hot hand towel down his naked chest, nope, nope, nope—he shut the door out into the hall with his mind. Then he willed the overhead light off and flared up the lamp on the inlaid bureau across the way. If the night had been a couple of degrees colder, he would have lit the fireplace on a mental cue as well.
Except he’d kind of had it with flames this evening, and even more… he hated what he was keeping from Anne. He really did.
Running a hand down his face again, he thought back to Vishous’s vision. The brother was positively eerie with the prognostication stuff, but fortunately, at least when it came to tonight, he’d been wrong. Darius hadn’t died. Almost, but ultimately, no.
They’d both most certainly seen the sun, though. That second floor set of fireworks had been an explosion and a half.
So Vishous had been wrong. Sure it hadn’t been raining, but… maybe the vision had served its purpose. Thanks to what the brother had seen, V had been primed to do the saving thing, catching Darius and carrying him after he’d gotten his boot stuck in that hole—which was kind of ironic, all things considered, given that Darius had gone out there in the first place to make sure the other fighter made it out alive.
Then again, he supposed that was the interconnected nature of fate, everyone’s individual choices, and if-this-then-that’s, colliding in a way that only felt random to the participants in their separate timelines. Destiny, if you believed in the Creator’s master plan, provided that the sum of events wasn’t chaotic at all. On the contrary, everyone’s billiard balls were set up precisely in a triangle, and the stroke of the cue was done by a world-class player who knew which pockets would receive which rolls.
Everything was inevitable. Even free will—
“So I found a porcelain bowl in there.” Anne came out of the bathroom. “It was full of wax fruit—I hope Fritz doesn’t mind that I emptied it out? And God, do you smell this soap? It’s like a garden—there was French writing on the wrapper. It’s all so fancy in this house.”
Anne was talking fast while she came across to the bed, and he couldn’t decide whether she was nervous or just truly fascinated by everything she was discovering under his roof.
His boss’s roof.
Fuck.
As she put the basin down on the bedside table, he took a deep breath and wished that Fritz stocked the house with unscented soap: Even though he was glad she liked the perfume, in order to catch her scent, he had to sort through the flowers of it all.
“You’re on your back,” she said with disapproval.
“I’m feeling a lot better.”
“That doctor is a miracle worker.”
When she sat down on the mattress, her eyes went to his bare chest, and as they lingered on his pecs, he thought… yup, he was suddenly feeling much, much better.
“Your boss has nice towels.” She took a small one and dipped it in the warm water, then wrung the thing out. “These are so soft.”
When she put the washcloth on his upper arm, he closed his eyes and tried to keep the erotic shudder to himself—
“Sorry, am I hurting you?”
He captured her wrist as she went to remove the cloth.
“No, please. Don’t stop.”
As the words came out of his mouth, something told him he was going to be saying them a lot. If she’d let him.
“Okay,” she whispered.
Anne was impossibly gentle as she went back and forth to the bowl, the little towel warm as she stroked it over his biceps, his skin cooling when she returned to the soapy water to rinse things out. As she moved up to the base of his throat, he found himself arching back and offering her his vein—and her lack of response to the instinctual movement was a reminder of the reality that he refused to dwell on.
By the time she started with his pecs, his lungs really were burning, and speaking of s’mores, he had totally forgotten all about his back. Then again, he was obsessed with her face. He focused on her eyes, her lips, her neck, partially because in the soft light, she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen… mostly because the sight of her hand upon his flesh would have sent him right over the edge—and he was already in a debate with his dumb handle.
He didn’t want her to know how aroused he was, but things below the waist were getting harder to hide. The good news? As the essential thickening at the center of his hips intensified, at least she seemed too absorbed in not dripping water on the bed’s coverings or the floor to notice.
Or maybe her preoccupation was deliberate. He couldn’t tell.
With a quick jerk of the hand, he pulled the drop of the duvet over his pelvis, just as Anne stretched across to his other arm—and yes, he could have moved toward her to help her reach that biceps, that forearm… but then he would have missed the sensation of her leaning on his chest—
Without any conscious thought, he captured her wrist again.
It was not to stop her.
On the contrary, it was to…
As her eyes met his, he knew that he had crossed a line, but he couldn’t help it. And he asked her, without speaking, the question that was tingling in the air between them.
In reply, her stare dropped to his mouth… and she answered him in the same way, silently. Intensely.
And it was a yes.
“I don’t want to waste time,” she said hoarsely. “And I’m done with having no horizon.”