“Look at me.”
“Iamlooking at you,Durchlauchtig. You’re just the same—”
To retreat farther from her, Dieter laid his head on the back of the couch and closed his eyes, and he put his hands on her waist to tumble her off of his thighs.
Closing his eyes was the mistake.
Touching her made him realize it.
Dieter’s eyes remembered Flicka as a silly kid or gawky teen, composed of stabbing elbows and heels, too-large teeth, and braided blond hair.
But for a year or longer, his body had been responding to the adult woman she was, following the perfume she trailed as she walked through the apartment they shared.
His heart rate picked up when her warmth neared him.
When he massaged her feet, he’d been allowing his hands to drift upward to her ankles and calves, stroking her soft skin, rather than just holding her feet so she wouldn’t nail him in the nuts when she found something funny and kicked.
Every morning before they left the apartment, she asked him, “How do I look?”
The last year or so, he’dlookedat her, his eyes following the swells and dips of her body and seeing the glowing light in her emerald green eyes, and he’d meant it when he said, “Beautiful,Durchlauchtig.”
His throat had closed sometimes, and those words had come out in a testosterone-laced growl.
He had not allowed himself to realize how physically he had been responding to her.
When his hands alighted on Flicka’s hips and stroked up to her waist, he traced the smooth, rounded hips of the woman on his lap.
He froze, unable to reconcile the womanly curves in his hands with the child in his mind.
Beside his ear, a woman’s alto voice whispered, “Make love to me.”
When Dieter opened his eyes, the world tilted under him like he was falling through airless space.
The woman hovering above him had a heart-shaped face, not tiny and child-like. Her emerald green eyes, tilted up at the outside corners, were almost unearthly in their beauty.
His hands found her slender waist.
She had a slim, hourglass figure, sweet and curving and soft in his hands.
He slid his hands over the swell of her hips to her soft thighs, mesmerized by her shape.
The stars above the Earth shifted in the dark sky.
The air was thinner as he gasped, forgetting how to breathe.
She lowered her face, her full lips nearing his.
“Durchlauchtig,”he begged her.
He wasn’t sure what he was begging for.
She brushed her lips across his in the lightest of kisses.
Her silken lips on his mouth broke his will.
Dieter’s hands slid up her arms. One hand cupped the back of her neck and pressed her lips closer.
He opened his mouth, and her tongue slid between his lips.
