Only 03 - Only You

muttered.
    He laughed softly and let water from his hands trickle down the front of her camisole.
    “Some things are better when they’re shared,” Reno said in a husky voice.
    “Baths?” she asked sarcastically.
    “I don’t know. I’ve never shared one.”
    Eve looked surprised.
    “It’s true,” he said.
    “I believe you.”
    “Do you?”
    “Yes.”
    She shivered as water that was neither warm nor cold trickled down between her breasts.
    “Why?” he asked, curious.
    “You wouldn’t bother to lie to a slut.”
    Reno closed his eyes and grappled with the rage that stabbed him like black lightning, threatening to rip away his control.
    “I suggest,” he said distinctly, “that you never use that word again in my hearing.”
    “Why not? You’re so damned fond of the truth.”
    He opened his eyes. “Baiting me won’t make you feel better. I can guarantee it.”
    Eve made an involuntary sound and looked away. The grim shadows and raw fury she saw in his glance reminded her too much of her own seething turmoil. In any case, Reno was right. Baiting him hadn’t made Eve feel better. It had made her feel worse, on the breaking edge of her own control. She felt like biting and clawing and screaming. The depth of her own wildness was frightening.
    “And that’s all you’re doing,” Reno added. “Baiting me. We both know you’re not a slut.”
    Eve said nothing.
    The temptation to push Eve until she agreed with him nearly overwhelmed Reno, but he managed to keep his silence. Barely. He scooped up more water, letting it fall in sparkling liquid necklaces over Eve until her camisole and pantalets were drenched.
    Eve closed her eyes and pretended that she was washing herself beneath one of the barrel showers Don Lyon had rigged before his hands became too crippled for such things.
    The cool glide of the water down her body made her shiver, but not with cold. The day was too hot for that, and the sun’s heat was both absorbed and reflected by the high rock walls.
    Eve flinched at the first touch of Reno’s hands on her shoulders. He whispered her name unhappily. Through a screen of thick bronze eyelashes, she saw the painful line of Reno’s mouth.
    “I won’t hurt you,” he said with aching control. “I would never have hurt you the first time, if I had known.…”
    Eve’s breath came out in a long, ragged sigh. She nodded, believing him, for it was the simple truth. She had sensed that about Reno the instant he sat down at her table in Canyon City; despite his size, despite his strength, despite his lethal speed, he wasn’t the kind of man who enjoyed cruelty.
    “I know,” she said in a low voice. “It’s why I dealt cards to you. You weren’t what Slater and Raleigh King were.”
    Reno let out breath that he wasn’t aware of having held. He brushed his lips over Eve’s forehead in a soft caress that ended before she could be sure she had felt it at all.
    “Let me bathe you,” he said.
    She hesitated, then reached up to remove her camisole. Hands sleek with lather closed over her wrists, holding her gently.
    “Let me,” Reno said.
    She hesitated again.
    “I won’t take you,” he said. “Not unless you ask me to. I just want to make you…hurt less.”
    Unable to bear the intensity of Reno’s eyes, Eveclosed her own and nodded. For several moments she waited in an agony of suspense, but when Reno touched her, it was only to wash her face as gently as he had his nephew’s.
    Yet Eve didn’t feel like a baby. Reno’s touch made an almost painful pleasure course through her. She hadn’t known how sensitive her face was. The ritual of soaping and washing and rinsing made frissons of pleasure ripple over her.
    “Was that so bad?” Reno asked.
    Eve shook her head. A long tendril of hair floated free. Reno tucked it behind one ear.
    “How about this?” he asked.
    He bent and began tracing every clean curve of Eve’s ear with his tongue and then his teeth, biting with exquisite care, enjoying the ragged intake and breaking of her breath. When the tip of his tongue probed and tested, spiraling down, retreating, returning, caressing, she made an odd sound in her throat and clung to his arms for balance.
    Reno lifted his head and looked down into Eve’s wide, surprised eyes.
    “Is something wrong?” he whispered.
    “I…” She swallowed. “I never know what to expect from you.”
    “Your boyfriends must have been, er, unimaginative.”
    “I never had one, imaginative or