Risky Business

slowly, with a long, lazy stretch. Keeping her eyes closed, Liz waited for the alarm to ring. It wasn’t often she felt so relaxed, even when waking, so she pampered herself and absorbed the luxury of doing nothing. In an hour, she mused, she’d be at the dive shop shifting through the day’s schedule. The glass bottom, she thought, frowning a little. Was she supposed to take it out? Odd that she couldn’t remember. Then with a start, it occurred to her that she didn’t remember because she didn’t know. She hadn’t handled the schedule in two days. And last night…
    She opened her eyes and looked into Jonas’s.
    “I could watch your mind wake up.” He bent over and kissed her. “Fascinating.”
    Liz closed her fingers over the sheet and tugged it a little higher. What was she supposed to say? She’d never spent the night with a man, never awoken with one. She cleared her throat and wondered if every man awoke as sexily disheveled as Jonas Sharpe. “How did you sleep?” she managed, and felt ridiculous.
    “Fine.” He smiled as he brushed her hair from her cheek with a fingertip. “And you?”
    “Fine.” Her fingers moved restlessly on the sheet until he closed his hands over them. His eyes were warm and heavy and made her heart pound.
    “It’s a little late to be nervous around me, Elizabeth.”
    “I’m not nervous.” But color rose to her cheeks when he pressed his lips to her naked shoulder.
    “Still, it’s rather flattering. If you’re nervous…” He turned his head so the tip of his tongue could toy with her ear. “Then you’re not unmoved. I wouldn’t like to think you felt casually about being with me—yet.”
    Was it possible to want so much this morning what she’d sated herself with the night before? She didn’t think it should be, and yet her body told her differently. She would, as she always did, listen to her intellect first. “It must be almost time to get up.” One hand firmly on the sheets, she rose on her elbows to look at the clock. “That’s not right.” She blinked and focused again. “It can’t be eight-fifteen.”
    “Why not?” He slipped a hand beneath the sheet and stroked her thigh.
    “Because.” His touch had her pulses speeding. “I always set it for six-fifteen.”
    Finding her a challenge, Jonas brushed light kisses over her shoulder, down her arm. “You didn’t set it last night.”
    “I always—” She cut herself off. It was hard enough to try to think when he was touching her, but when she remembered the night before, it was nearly impossible to understand why she had to think. Her mind hadn’t been on alarms and schedules and customers when her body had curled into Jonas’s to sleep. Her mind, as it was now, had been filled with him.
    “Always what?”
    She wished he wouldn’t distract her with fingertips slidinggently over her skin. She wished he could touch her everywhere at once. “I always wake up at six, whether I set it or not.”
    “You didn’t this time.” He laughed as he eased her back down. “I suppose I should be flattered again.”
    “Maybe I flatter you too much,” she murmured and started to shift away. He simply rolled her back to him. “I have to get up.”
    “No, you don’t.”
    “Jonas, I’m already late. I have to get to work.”
    Sunlight dappled over her face. He wanted to see it over the rest of her. “The only thing you have to do is make love with me.” He kissed her fingers, then slowly drew them from the sheet. “I’ll never get through the day without you.”
    “The boats—”
    “Are already out, I’m sure.” He cupped her breast, rubbing his thumb back and forth over the nipple. “Luis seems competent.”
    “He is. I haven’t been in for two days.”
    “One more won’t hurt.”
    Her body vibrated with need that slowly wound itself into her mind. Her arms came up to him, around him. “No, I guess it won’t.”
     
    She hadn’t stayed in bed until ten o’clock since she’d been a child. Liz felt as irresponsible as one as she started the coffee. True, Luis could handle the shop and the boats as well as she, but it wasn’t his job. It was hers. Here she was, brewing coffee at ten o’clock, with her body still warm from loving. Nothing had been the same since Jonas Sharpe had arrived on her doorstep.
    “It’s useless to give yourself a hard time for taking a morning off,” Jonas said from behind her.
    Liz popped bread into the toaster. “I suppose not, since I don’t