It was an exquisite haven of shade, for someone whose torso burned all over, utterly restful and open to the sea.
Léa wiggled over onto her back, her gaze skating down and up the length of him. She didn’t try to sit up.
Heat swelled in him, slow and steady. Oh, so she had liked that, had she? Being pushed down onto the bed?
They needed to take vacations more often. Who knew she had so many other moods than the ones at one in the morning and the ones on a lazy Monday afternoon?
Temper surged, unexpectedly, that deep well of anger that he kept accidentally tapping into, ever since he had come home to find her message. Married more than ten years, and yet he had barely had a chance to learn his own wife’s moods. I’m not doing this anymore, he thought suddenly, an abrupt about-face from his resolution of only moments before. When we get home, things are going to change.
I don’t care. We’ll face it. I’ll handle it. I’ll make her see there is something else to me.
He came down onto the bed above her, pulling her body lengthwise. Her eyes darkened, the gold gleaming in the brown like the shine of treasure in the depths of a cave. She didn’t say anything, but her lips parted, and her head turned to follow his movements, so that his access to that mouth was always easy.
His lips curved. She was in his favorite mood. Tempted. Tempted by him. He had learned it as a teenager, learned to push it, to build her temptation into something she couldn’t resist. Yes, I can make you see me again. Make you want me more than whatever the fuck you want on this island.
Slanting his body across the bedspread, so that none of it touched her, he wove his hands through her hair and kissed her.
She responded instantly, yielding and then hungry. “I’ve missed you,” she whispered, her hands tangling in his hair, shaping his head to her. “I’ve missed you. I don’t know what to do.”
What to do? That sounded as if there was some problem that—he started to lift his head, but she tightened her hold, pulling his mouth back into hers. And he forgot about her words for just a second, just one more moment, because she was letting him kiss her again, really kiss her, stretched out on her bed kiss her, and that meant everything would be fine, it had all been a false alarm, everything would be absolutely fine...
He sank himself into the kisses until she was wild with them, petting his head frantically, until the muscles of his arms ached with tension, but he held himself off her, touching her only with his mouth and his hands in her hair.
“Yes.” Her whisper was so soft only he could ever have heard it. A breath just for him. “Daniel...fuck my mouth.”
Hot pleasure surged through him. He loved it when he could make her talk like that. Mostly when he got home late—well, mostly she made a sleepy mumble, and he played with her hair and drew a finger down her back, and if that failed to lure her out of sleep, he let it go, completely incapable of forcing her awake for his own pleasure. Instead, he slipped an arm around her and nuzzled his face into her neck, letting the scent of her ease him off his adrenalin. In fact, once when she had changed shampoos, he had had to beg her to change back, so he could get to sleep.
But other than staying asleep, the next most likely reaction was drowsy, pliant, welcoming love-making, and God, but he loved that, too.
But once in a while, something dark and urgent rose up in her, freed by sleep, dreams, and the dark, and it drove him wild, although it made her blush in the mornings.
She had never let that dark, wild thing rise up in her in the daylight before.
Her fingers hurt his hair, pulling his mouth into hers urgently. “Fuck my mouth,” she murmured again, such sweet, hot begging.
So he did. Not touching anything but her head, her hair, he ravaged her with long hot strokes until she was shivering all over, making little hungry, yearning sounds that soothed seven days of tension out of him and replaced it with another kind of tension entirely. Triumphant, victor’s tension. She was his. She was still utterly his.
Her hands kept sliding down to his sunburned shoulders, a flinch of pain in the midst of pleasure, and he loved the guilty way she would suddenly realize and her hands would fly away from him. And come back to his hair, frantically shaping his head.
And then forget again.
“Here,” he said. “Let me help.” He took her hands and locked them, powerless, above her head, lifting himself to look down at that incredible view.
The bones and angles and curves of her, all twisting and shivering and melting with need. Trapped by him. All his.
He drew one hand down the length of her, delicately, tracing from collarbone straight over one nipple, all the way to the crease of her thigh, and she gasped and shivered.
He bent his head and whispered in her ear: “I’ll fuck you any way I like.”
She moaned, her wrists twisting in his hold. He bore them down into the bed, and her hips arched up instead, seeking his. Take me!
Yes, take her! his body shouted.
But, of course, he could control that, too. It was worth it, to control his body a little longer so he could savor the joy of controlling hers.
He wasn’t sure he had ever realized how much he could control hers. Always so hungry for her, he had never even tried.
It took one hell of a lot of arrogance to have a woman begging for you and not seize your chance before she changed her mind. She made him arrogant. In fact, every bit of arrogance he had came from his need for her and her pride in him.
But she had never before made him arrogant enough to make her beg. “I love you,” he whispered, cupping her sex.
“Daniel, please.” She opened her eyes. “I want to touch you.”
“I know.” He traced the lips of her sex with one thumb, watching her face. “I wanted to touch you yesterday. And the day before. And the whole time I was in Japan without you. And when I came back to find you missing, with nothing but a damn phone message and your own phone lying by your bed. I wanted to touch you, Léa.” His hand tightened on her wrists. “And I couldn’t.”
“I didn’t mean”—His thumb slipped inside her, and she gasped and twisted, her words fracturing. “Coming here was nothing to do w”—
He drove one finger straight into her body, hard and deep, and she shut up on a gasp, her eyes going wide. “Yes, you’ve mentioned,” he said between his teeth, holding her speared there. “Several times. That it had nothing to do with me. Well, guess what, Léa.” As her surprised muscles figured out what they wanted to do with his finger and squeezed around it, he pulled it out—away from her sex entirely. Coming up her body to take one of her nipples and twist it very gently. “This does.”
Her head tossed restlessly, her mouth, her sex, her body all open and begging, everywhere. “Daniel.”
“Yes, say my name.” He brought his mouth to her other nipple, pressing his thigh up between hers. “I want to be all you can think about, all you can do, all you can be.”
He lifted his head to emphasize the words and saw confusion flicker even through her arousal, tangle with it in her eyes. “But—you already are!” she protested desperately. “Daniel, I can’t—please don’t ask for more.”
What? But he couldn’t think about that now. He didn’t want to think about it. He wanted to make her his, over and over his again, like he had claimed her on the beach, like he had claimed her at the waterfall. Not like she had claimed him, which had left him feeling vulnerable and...vulnerable. Two full days later, he still could not grapple with the concept of Léa on her knees before him.
He was supposed to be her knight, and...he was supposed to be in control.
“Say my name,” he said between his teeth, shifting his hips between hers.
Her eyes caught his above her. And widened, hers very dark, hiding the gold. Her body stopped twisting in hunger, and one long gasp moved through it. “Daniel,” she said quietly and very firmly. Asserting her own claim.
Or accepting his.
And then suddenly her face lit in that o
ld delight in him, as if the sun rose and set on him, as if he was her world. As if she had remembered that. “I love you,” she whispered, her face so happy, and he was inside her before he even realized what he was doing.
A thrust so hard and so sudden that she gave a half-laugh and a gasp. Her smile dissolved, her eyes falling shut, and her muscles closed around him.
Yes.
He was home, he was where he belonged, nothing mattered more right now than her body taking him.
He realized he had released her wrists only when one of her hands jerked guiltily away from his sunburned back—he hadn’t even felt the pain. She slid both hands down to his butt and sank them in hard, as if to remind herself not to let them slide anywhere else.
Mmm. “Nice,” he breathed, leaning down closer to her, trying to keep watching her face, but his own focus kept shattering, dissolving, sinking back into his own body and her hold on him.
“You have to know I love you,” she breathed, her hands flexing into him, her thighs wrapping around him, her inner muscles squeezing, as if everything about her was a message. Putain, but he loved the way she communicated. “You have to.”
“I know it now.” Easing out and finding home again, always a home, always a welcome, always her body tightening, her hands gripping, her head tossing. “Like this.”
Her eyebrows flexed together, and her eyes opened again, but he slipped one hand under her hips to pull her into him closer, and her lashes fell back against her cheeks.
He leaned very low and close to her. “I know it all the time,” he whispered. “Léa. All the time.” It was what kept him going. What drove him to please her, even when that was the very thing that kept him so far from her so much. And what had thrown him into a flat panic when he had found her gone and realized she had been slipping through his fingers for months, like water he was trying too hard to hold. Panicked as if he literally would be wiped out of existence without that love.
A smile ghosted across her face and disappeared under her own arousal, her focus on sensation. Her lashes so heavy on her cheeks. He watched them flutter with each thrust, glorying in the way her fingers dug into his muscles.
He got lost in it, slipping his hand down between their bodies to make sure she was lost, too. “I love you,” he whispered. “I love you.” As they both came. His a hard dominant stamp of possession, and hers an utter yielding.
* * *
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The cool aloe slopped on his hot back, and he hissed and turned his head on his arms, offering her a sleepy smile. His chest and stomach hurt to lie on, too, but he hadn’t slept properly for a week, and he was entirely ready to doze off. Until the aloe woke him up again.
“You should have put some on last night,” Léa chided.
He hadn’t had any in his room. And anyway, he didn’t take care of himself much. Léa was the one who took care of him. Bandaged his wounds, kissed them, cooed over them. His mother had died young, and his father had been a good father, taking him camping and to the beach and spending time with him, but he had also been of the Tough it up, that’s life school.
The first time seventeen-year-old Léa had spotted a burn on his hand, clucked over it, and hauled out the BurnEase and the blue bandages chefs always used, he had thought he had died and gone to heaven. He had yielded all the care of himself over to her in giddy delight. She did it so much better, and it felt so much sweeter.
He fought the battles, and she healed the wounds. It worked for him.
A quick sudden spasm of that old knot he thought was loosened. Is it not working for her?
No, but everything was fine now. He just had to get to the bottom of what had made her disappear like that, so that he didn’t spend every future consulting trip with his stomach in knots, braced against that vast void-like terror of finding her not home again. He just wanted to make sure that would never, ever happen again. And then it would all be fine.
She was his. He had gotten her back, taken her completely. She was all his again.
At the gentle nudge of her hand, he rolled obediently over onto the big towel she had provided for that purpose, flinching as his sticky, painful back connected with it. And flinching again as the gooey stuff connected with his chest. Putain, but he hated that feeling. Still, the hand stroking it made it better. He loved Léa’s hands. They were so much smaller than his, because she was smaller, but when a man had a chance to hold one and play with it and really focus on it—as he did sometimes on plane trips, when he was tired of working, or on those lazy Monday afternoons—he could see how she had such long fingers for the size of her hands, capable and strong and delicate, too, hands to grip a paintbrush or a man, or help her brother and sister with their school projects, or make her siblings’ new apartments beautiful when they set out on their own, or set perfect tables when they were short-staffed, or any of the million things he had seen them do in the past twelve years.
His favorite thing for them to do was to grip a man, of course. He smiled and caressed a hand up her forearm to her elbow, the closest he could get to kissing one of her hands when it was covered with so much goo.
She sent him that shy smile of hers. It was funny how sometimes she could still be so shy with him. He liked it. But sometimes he wondered about it.
But then, part of him still felt profoundly shy with her, and he didn’t think she even guessed it. “Love you,” he murmured out loud, to cover even a hint of that shyness, which was not part of his I’ll-be-your-hero role, and her eyes brightened.
Yes, everything was just fine. He was the luckiest man in the damn world.
“To think if my father hadn’t insisted, I would have become a mechanic,” he murmured. “He was right about a lot of things, Papa.”
“A—mechanic?” Léa said in utter astonishment.
Had he never even mentioned that to her before? “Or stayed in school and studied, I don’t know, literature or something. He wanted me to do something practical. And once I picked the culinary apprenticeship, he wouldn’t let me quit.”
“You wanted to quit?”
Well, it was nice to know he had grown so much that she couldn’t believe in the smaller him. “It was tough, to be suddenly cut off from every single friend I had. You know—no nights, no weekends. And I had a good friend who was doing the mechanic training. And, I mean, I liked motorcycles and beautiful cars as much as the next teenager. I was only fifteen, Léa. But Papa—it’s not fair to say he wouldn’t let me quit. But he argued adamantly that a man didn’t quit when things were hard. He just worked harder, to turn what he did into something exceptional.”
Léa brought one sticky hand to her mouth, staring at him.
“So I did turn it into something exceptional.” He shrugged. And if he didn’t quit then, there was nothing else in life he was ever going to quit. As an only child whose mother was dead, his friends had been vitally important to him. The sudden isolation had been horrible. “And then I met you. And I knew my father had been right.” She had been worth the loss of all his other friends. She had been worth honing himself into a bright and shining star.
He was born to do that, really—driven, dominant, intense, perfectionist. To her yielding, sweet warmth. It had felt like the match made in heaven to him.
He had even felt perfect for her, too. He had, after all, the ideal career for the daughter of a three-star chef, a girl who had grown up thinking that making wonders out of food was the epitome of what a man could be.
“Literature, hunh.” She tilted her head. “I’m trying to imagine you as a professor.” Her head angled to the other side. “Or restoring some old car.”
He blinked and pushed himself up on one elbow, curiously. She didn’t seem turned off by either image.
As if he could have been whatever he wanted to be and still had her.
His insides seemed to whoosh out of him in some gasping freefall plunge into the surreal.
She smiled a little, at whatever images were playing in her head
. “You know, you look gorgeous no matter what you do,” she told him and slid off the bed to go wash her hands in the bathroom.
He stared after her, all bearings lost. The thought that she might have loved him still, if he had been a professor or a mechanic instead of a top chef—he couldn’t even process that. Possibly because he couldn’t imagine himself being either of those things anymore. Being a superstar chef was so completely and utterly all he was. Not a father, barely a husband, barely a son to his own father whom he saw so infrequently now, just a chef, chef, chef. So damn good at it. So unbearably, intensely good at it.
He lay back down on the bed, staring at the ceiling, and heard the shower run, briefly.
Hmm. He looked down his own body, realizing suddenly that they might need to have a discussion. Léa wasn’t on the pill. She had tried a couple different versions of it, long ago, and hated them, and he had hated them, too, the way they took his Léa’s moods and changed her into someone different. The first one, with her increased aggression and her decreased interest in sex, had driven him frantic, and the second one...the third time in three days that she burst into tears over something utterly stupid, he had begged her to stop using it. And since then, he had always taken responsibility for contraception, and if that was a little less sure of a method, well—they were married, and he supposed on his end he had always assumed that if an accident did occur, they would adjust to the consequences and that Léa would be a gloriously wonderful mother. And he would figure out a way to tell her that he couldn’t keep this pace anymore as a father, that he, too, deserved to spend time with his family.
None of which made him any less of a bastard to have ignored his responsibilities on this particular occasion. It hadn’t been a conscious decision, but he wasn’t a careless man, and he knew damn well what his subconscious had been trying to do.
Turning Up the Heat (A Novella in the Vie en Roses Series) Page 8