St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

stilled. “Of me?”
    She looked over her shoulder and deliberately moved her hips against his erection. “No.”
    “Good. I’d let you go if I had to, but…” He let out a long breath. “I want you, Carly.”
    “So that’s not a giant pickle in your pocket?” she asked wryly.
    “I’m not wearing any pockets. No clothes, either.”
    “Funny thing. Neither am I.”
    “That was your idea,” he said.
    “It was?”
    “Yeah. You decided you had to have a bath. At three A.M . You spent the next thirty minutes in the shower. Used up all the hot water and still didn’t get out until you were shivering.” He nuzzled against her nape. “Then you started for your bed wearing only a wet towel.”
    “Something must have happened on the way. This is your bed, not mine.”
    “You were cold and headed barefoot for a room that probably still has pieces of glass on the floor somewhere. Couldn’t have that happen, could we?”
    Carly smiled. She hadn’t wanted to sleep alone but hadn’t been up to being anyone’s sex kitten, not even Dan’s. He hadn’t pushed her. He’d just wrapped her up in a dry towel, put her in his bed, curled up around her to keep her warm…and she’d fallen asleep. Sometime during the night, she’d lost the towel.
    “Once we were in bed,” Dan said, tasting her warm neck, “I didn’t want you to feel underdressed, so I took off my clothes.”
    She murmured, savoring the feel of Dan’s body pressed against hers. She liked the faint roughness of his hair rubbing over her skin. She liked the smell of him.
    She couldn’t wait to taste him.
    The thought startled her. She’d never thought of herself as a particularly sensual person. She liked men, enjoyed the physical differences between the sexes, and had never found a man she couldn’t do without. But Dan sparked a hot kind of curiosity in her. She wanted to know what it would be like to have sex with him, what she would be like in his arms, if the heat pooling in her body would finally find release.
    “Now I remember,” she said lazily. “The hot water ran out and I was cold and then this electric blanket warmed me up.”
    “Electric blanket? Have I just been insulted?”
    “It was a really superior electric blanket.”
    He nipped her shoulder.
    “Hey, at that point I still was a cheeseburger short of a Happy Meal,” she pointed out. “I just assumed anything that warm had to plug into a wall socket.”
    She felt as much as heard Dan’s laughter.
    “So that’s why you wouldn’t kiss me,” he said. “You didn’t want a mouthful of flannel and wires.”
    “No, I just tasted too bad to share. Even those industrial-strength mints you bought for me weren’t enough to get rid of the taste in my mouth.” She grimaced. “I vaguely remember stuffing a mint under my tongue just before I fell asleep. Which explains it.”
    “Okay, you lost me. Which explains what?”
    She licked her lips and swallowed. Everything was in working order, including her salivary glands. “I don’t usually wake up tasting like a peppermint factory.”
    “Really?” He tipped her chin up and kissed her slowly, sampling the flavor. “Spearmint, actually. My favorite.”
    “You sure?”
    He kissed her again, loving the feel of tongue against tongue and his woody snug against her naked hips. “Oh, yeah. I’m sure.”
    “Not peppermint?” She watched him, her smoky golden eyes alive with teasing and something more, something hot.
    “Maybe I should taste again,” he said.
    Carly turned to face him fully. “Maybe you should.”
    He caught his breath at the feel of her breasts moving against him, her nipples hard and hungry.
    “You sure?” he asked, repeating her question.
    “Very sure. But I’m not taking anything, so we’ll have to be creative until we get to a drugstore.”
    “Creative.” His smile was like his kiss, slow and hot. “We’ll try that, too, but I bought condoms after the first time I saw you.”
    She blinked. “I must have looked real easy.”
    “You were fire and I was cold all the way to my core. I needed you so much I couldn’t breathe. I still do.”
    The look in his eyes and the catch in his voice sent heat through her in a liquid wave, preparing her body. She’d never been wanted the way Dan wanted her. Blindly she reached out to him, understanding in that moment that she needed him in the same way, no questions, no hesitation, just a certainty that burned through a lifetime of doubts.
    “I want you