“What the hell is this?” She held up a small square of white paper.
Moreau, pretending to be calm even though his heart clanged behind his ribs, peered lazily up from his magazine. “I see you got my note.”
“You wrote me a love letter?” she asked, managing to sound angry, pleased, and incredulous all at once.
“It would seem that way,” he said, idly turning the page of his magazine. He was playing it cool, but he’d actually sweat for two and a half hours over the measly six sentences of that letter. He hoped she wouldn’t look in the trash can next to his desk where at least twenty-eight crumpled versions of the letter were hiding.
“‘Dearest Savannah’,” she read and Moreau’s stomach fumbled at hearing his words read back to him in her smooth, yet obviously irritated, voice. “‘How can I begin to describe what I feel for you? The bittersweet truth is that it is an impossible task. A task at which I will never succeed. But maybe that’s what makes this kind of feeling worth having, the fact that we try to describe it, fail, and try again. I will only be able to tell you this: what I feel for you is worth the trying and the failing. I will try and fail to describe this desire for you for as long as you will let me. Yours, Moreau’”
She shoved the note into the pocket of her joggers and crossed her arms over her chest.
“What the crap are you doing?” she demanded.
He tossed the magazine aside and mirrored her arms-crossed pose. “Exactly what I told you I would do.”
“You said you would try to convince me to be your girlfriend. I didn’t think that meant that you were going to…”
“Woo you?” he supplied helpfully.
“Woo me?” She strode over to the window and looked out, one hand dragging down her face. “Lord help us, Davy.” She turned around. “I don’t need to be wooed! I’m yours for the screwing!”
“Savannah, must we go over this again? I have no wish to simply screw y—”
His words cut off quite abruptly when she, standing safely across the room, peeled her tank top off of her body and tossed it aside.
“Savannah,” he said hoarsely as he got his first good look at her chest and stomach. Her generous breasts were covered in a sports-like bra, but it was sexy too. It was made of many straps that criss-crossed her shoulders and over her clavicles. And best—worst—of all, there was a keyhole cut out between her breasts, gifting him with a torturously delectable shot of her shadowed cleavage.
He would have liked to see the facial expression she was making right now, but he found he could not raise his eyes from her breasts. He was dimly aware of her thumbs hooking into the top of her joggers and slipping them to the ground. His eyes bottomed out on the triangle of black underwear that barely covered anything between her legs. The strings at her hips cut a high, classic line across her body. She looked like a pinup girl, like an eighties swimsuit model, like the kind of woman he used to fantasize about when he was thirteen and just learning how to get himself off.
She was absolutely unreal.
“This isn’t fair,” he murmured.
“You don’t play fair, I don’t play fair,” she countered, taking a few confident steps toward the bed. She stopped at his feet and put a hand on her chin, pretending to think hard. “I forget, you said we can fool around, right?”
He swallowed through a dry mouth and nodded. “But we cannot have sex unless you will commit to me and I to you.”
“Right,” she smirked, as if she was convinced she’d already won the battle. “Let’s just see how things go, shall we?”
With that, she planted her knees at the end of the bed, straddling his feet, and started a slow crawl up his body. He was too lost in the valley of her cleavage to fully register when she stopped at his hips, but then she was dropping her head and nuzzling his hardness through his shorts, pushing against him with her nose, heating him with her breath.
Yeah, if she did that for another second, he was going to throw this whole experience to the wind and do his royal best to make a million little Savannah’s.
He did the only thing he could think to do to preserve his sanity and laced his fingers through her hair. She hissed when he gently yanked her head back, exposing her neck and holding her away from the area of his body she’d just been torturing.
Moreau leaned forward and licked a fierce line up her neck. From her collarbone to the crest of her jaw. She hissed again and he watched her hips work against the air.
“Are you wet for me, Savannah?” he asked into her ear.
“Yes,” she spat, as irritated as she was turned on. “You know I am.”
“You want me?”
She tried to wiggle away, but he held her fast. “Yes.”
“You need me?”
“Screw you.”
He chuckled and let his tongue trace the shell of her ear. “I need you,” he told her. “I’ve needed you for years.”
“You can’t have me.”
He released her then and set her back so that she sat on her heels beside him. “No? That is a shame, Savannah. Especially when you obviously need release so badly.”
Her eyes flared. “You won’t give it to me? Fine. I’ll just have to do it myself. Don’t worry, I’ve gotten good at that over the years.”
Before he could stop her, she laid onto her back on the bed, perpendicular to him, her legs draped over his good leg, and she slid one of her lovely, perfect hands underneath the black triangle of her underwear.
Moreau felt noise and heat rise up inside him like a room flooding with water. Her fingers moved under her underwear and her hips started to make small circles. Her head was thrown back, but because she meant to torture him, she held his eyes. She wasn’t faking, he could tell for sure. Her eyes were dilated, her nipples pebbled against her bra, her hair fanned out.
She panted as her hand moved faster and faster, her jaw slack as her back started to rhythmically arch and release.
He was utterly and completely transfixed. As if he were watching a witch work some ancient and intoxicating spell. He memorized the sight of her, the sweat gleaming gold on her skin, the pattern her hand made in her underwear, her breath breaking into the evening light. And back to her eyes, always back to her eyes.
As he stared, the tenor of her passion began to slowly augment. She’d started this as a way to tempt and punish him, to show him what he was missing out on, but the more intense their eye contact became, the more convinced he was that he was already an integral part of this sex act. It was her hand in her underwear, but it was his eyes holding her gaze.
She was losing herself in his eyes, he was sure of it. Utterly certain. He barely knew what to do with that information. It was as thrilling as it was terrifying to him.
Her breath came in staccato bursts as she started to tremble, her fingers moving urgently fast between her legs. Her free hand gripped hard at the sheets and he couldn’t help but slide his hand into hers.
Their palms slid together, the lamplight lighting their fingers from one side, he pivoted his hand and—there, perfection—their fingers laced. Her hand clamped down, her eyes went blind, her back arched hard and his name spilled from her lips.
“Moreau,” she whispered desperately as she came. She didn’t realize, but he did: She was saying his name as if she were begging the universe to let her have him.
She trembled through the aftershocks of her orgasm. For a moment, he worried that her irritated fierceness would return, that her bravado would have her slapping her clothes on and marching back to her room. But instead, she gifted him with something he would be eternally, deeply grateful for.
She showed him vulnerability.
Her eyes went soft and bewildered for just the flash of a second before she turned her face away from him, hiding her gaze. He’d never once known Geo to hide her gaze from anyone, and he knew that it was because what had just happened had rocked her as hard as it had rocked him. This right here was confirmation that she was affected. In his head, a
ten-man band marched a parade route. She wasn’t only sexually attracted to him. She was spiritually attracted to him as well, and she was just starting to find that out.
He moved and she stiffened, but he didn’t let that stop him. He gripped her around her knees and shoulders and dragged her across the bed. He pulled the covers over both of them, keeping his awkward splint away from where it might catch against her. At first, he pulled the covers up to her shoulders but then, in a moment of brilliance, he dragged the blanket all the way up over their heads.
The lamplight shined through the blue-checked comforter and drowned them in a safe little stuffy bubble. The space filled immediately with their breaths as he lay on his side and clamped her to him. She laid on her back and still had her head tilted away from him. He could make out the decadent curves of her body in the dim light but didn’t let the sight derail him.
He’d been charged with appealing to her sweetness and she’d just served it up on a platter. Knowing that she wouldn’t want compliments or platitudes right now, Moreau went a different route.
He lifted his hand and walked fingers up her stomach. She flinched, but didn’t brush him away. He watched his own hand, allowing her the privacy of not being observed for a moment. He made his fingers walk up to the bottom of her ribs and start doing the can can. His fingers did a box step, ballroom dancing across her stomach.
Her stomach hollowed and jumped with a laugh and seriously, he was prouder of making her laugh in that moment than he was of the Oscar that was on his shelf in his LA house.
He foxtrotted his two fingers up to the stretchy fabric of her bra and used the middle section as a trampoline. She laughed again and he moonwalked his fingers from one of her nipples to the other.
To his unending delight, she walked two fingers up over her breasts and joined his two fingers there. She pretended to kick his two fingers in the balls. They both laughed and Moreau took the opportunity to smooth his hand over her stomach. He laid the flat heat there and let her take from him whatever it was that she needed.
He kissed the ball of her shoulder over and over again, ruthlessly keeping each kiss more chaste than the last.
Finally, finally, she turned to face him.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“You seem to ask me this question a lot,” he noted and kept kissing her shoulder.
“I wonder it a lot.”
“I’m enjoying your company. And expressing gratitude for being party to the most erotic experience of my life.”
She rolled her eyes at him, but he knew it immediately to be a defense mechanism.
“I know why you did that,” Moreau told her, his lips moving in a friendly way over the skin of her shoulder and bicep.
“Oh, yeah?”
“You did it to tempt me into having sex with you.”
“You’re a regular Sherlock.”
He laughed. “But your plan has backfired.”
“Now you don’t want to have sex with me?”
He laughed again. “Now, I desperately want to have sex with you. Even more than before. But now I’m also even more determined to make you mine. You pleasuring yourself in front of me means that you have now peed on me.”
“What?!” She laughed and scowled and rolled to face him. They were nose to nose now and breath swamped up inside him at the intimacy of it. The blanket sealing them off from the world, her breath in his lungs, the light taste of her sweat on his tongue. He was off the deep end for her. “I was there, Davy. I definitely did not pee on you. No judgment if that’s your thing, but that’s gonna be something you’re really gonna have to talk me into.”
He laughed again. “No, my love. I simply mean that you marked your territory. You pleasured yourself in front of me and now I’m ruined for anyone else. I’m yours from now until I die.”
He knew it was a gamble to say something like this to her. It ran the risk of tossing up all her barriers and making her pull away from him. But instead, she merely groaned and buried her face in his pillow. “Davy, I should probably tell you that I’m not attracted to sensitive men.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah. I like ‘em strong and silent. The bigger the asshole, the more I’m down for the ride.”
“And how has that worked out for you in the past?”
She scowled. “Exactly the way I wanted it to.”
“And this isn’t working out the way you want it to?”
She didn’t answer that. She just leaned in and took a sip from his lips. He kissed her back for a few moments but when he didn’t trust himself to be able to keep it under control, he pulled back and rested his forehead against hers.
He blinked, their eyelashes brushing and she pulled a face.
“Did you just give me a fucking butterfly kiss?”
“And if I did?”
“Gag me.”
“Gladly. If only you agree to be my girlfriend, I will gag you every night of the week.”
That one really got her. She laughed hard and warmed his heart. “Never realized you were such a perv.”
“Yes. We have quite a bit to learn about one another.”
CHAPTER NINE
Ironically, it was Moreau who petitioned for a family day. This was ironic considering he was the only person in the bunker with zero family to his name.
“Rook, if what you are telling me is true, that there is a person after me who now knows where I am, then there is every chance that we will be locked into this bunker for weeks, months! Are you sure you want to deprive your team of seeing their loved ones for that long?”
It was Sequence who was faring the least well. He was missing Naomi, obviously, but Atlas and Cedric were also missing their partners. No. It was Brookie whom Sequence was truly missing. They’d all noticed recently. He was even more quiet than usual, his mind often a million miles away.
“You’re serious?” Rook seemed confused.
“Of course. It gives me no pleasure to be the source of so much seclusion for the members of my security team.”
“Moreau,” Rook said sternly, setting the weights down that he’d just been lifting. He and Moreau were in the gym of the bunker. Moreau sat backwards on one of the bench seats while Rook lifted. “The team knows the score. They all willingly signed up for this job.”
“They willingly signed up for this job before they had partners. Children. We won’t let anyone else in, we’ll all follow whatever protocols you want, of course, but I really think we need to allow families to visit.”
Rook considered it and Moreau could see just how tempted he really was. “It probably would have to be one by one, not all at once.”
“That’s great!”
“I’m not saying yes, okay? I’d have to figure out all the security aspects of it.”
“Sure.” Moreau nodded solemnly and then groaned when Atlas escorted Leary into the gym.
“Don’t look so excited to see me, sweetheart,” Leary called with a shit-eating grin on his face.
“Are his workouts really that hard?” Atlas asked.
Moreau lifted his eyebrows. “You have no idea.”
“I’m just trying to keep you in shape so that when you get that splint off in a week and a half you don’t put half a pound of pressure on your leg and keel over.”
“Can I sit in on the session?” Atlas asked. “I wanna try!”
Leary looked to Moreau and Moreau nodded.
Two hours later, Atlas and Moreau were freshly showered, slumped on the couch in the TV room, and barely breathing.
“What the hell happened to you two?” Geo asked as she came into the room.
Despite feeling like he’d just been pummeled with a sandbag, Moreau’s heart leapt at the sight of her. He hadn’t seen her since she’d snuck out of his room the night before, her clothes back in place and an unusually soft look in her eye.
The softness was gone, though, replaced with her usual unimpressed, sharp-eyed stare. He was glad. He enjoyed both vers
ions of Geo equally.
“Leary,” Atlas groaned. “Leary happened. What a psychopath.”
“Hey,” Moreau reminded him. “You’re the one who volunteered for that mess.”
“I didn’t think that Leary gained some sort of sick pleasure out of making me cry.”
Geo chuckled. “Any news on the leg?”
“Cast off next week, Leary says. He thinks it’ll only be a few weeks after that until I’m ready to jog and stuff.”
“Wow. That’s fast.”
“Yeah. He says maybe six months until I’m back in the shape that I was in.”
Something glazed over in her eyes and Moreau got the satisfied feeling that she was most likely picturing him fully recovered, in action-hero shape.
“You mean Mercury shape?” Atlas asked.
He was referring to the one and only superhero that Moreau had ever played. It had been a three-movie franchise that Moreau considered to be the biggest mistake of his career.
“God, no. Never again.”
“What?” Atlas asked, propping himself up. “Why? You were jacked in those movies.”
“Yes, and subsisting on half an undressed salad and a dry chicken breast a day. I’ve never been so hungry and thirsty in my life.”
“You had to dehydrate?” Geo asked, her brow furrowed, eyeing him from where she still leaned in the doorway.
“Yes. You can’t have that kind of muscle definition without being severely dehydrated. I was so woozy I could barely stand between takes.”
She frowned even further. “That sounds inhumane.”
He shrugged. “When you get paid what I got paid for those movies, you are signing up for all sorts of tortures. I understood what I was getting into. I just didn’t understand how much I would hate it. That was a turning point in my career, when I realized that I wanted to start to deviate from blockbusters.”
Moreau frowned. Shooting those movies had been the least happy times of his entire life. Followed closely by all the press tours he’d had to do.
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