“Now,” he said. “Pinch your clit and let yourself come.”
His permission was all she needed to fall over the edge, and the tight pressure around her clit and her fingers inside made the waves keep rolling through her like he was pushing her down on a bed and taking her hard.
As she let up, the tiny tent around them drifted into her view. She whispered, “Did I make noise?”
He was leaning forward, his fists braced on his knees, and his eyes were ablaze with dark fire like anger. “No. You were utterly silent.”
“Oh, good. I thought—well, I was worried. Because I wouldn’t want to cause questions for you.”
He settled back on his heels, but his muscles wrapping his body were still taut as steel cables. “It won’t be a problem.”
The ripples of her orgasm ebbed.
Inside her mummy bag, she was stifling hot and sweating.
Maxence dried himself roughly with a towel like he was angry at his skin. He tossed it up by her ski suit at the rear of the tent and slipped inside his sleeping bag. He grabbed at the flashlight and clicked it off, filling the tent with darkness.
Questions ran through her head, whether he was mad at her or whether she shouldn’t have done that, but she didn’t ask them.
There was, however, one thing she did want to know.
“If it’s not a waterfall, what’s the real design of your tattoo?”
His voice was rough like he had been shouting. “It’s wings. Long feathers and strong hollow bones, but the feathers are black, and the bones have been snapped. Arthur’s design is of the broken wings of a fallen angel.”
Dree woke up the next morning after a long deep sleep that was truly refreshing. She was kind of embarrassed about how she had managed to get that deep sleep, but she felt a lot better that morning that she had for several days.
Hey, Paris had beenweeksago, and she’d had no privacy since.
Maxence was thoroughly casual toward her when she finally crawled out of the tent. If anything, he seemed to be a rerun of the kind gentleman he’d been acting like for the last few weeks.
There was just no deviation in his demeanor.
It was pretty impressive.
She almost wondered if she’d dreamed it.
As she sat on a warm rock holding her plate of eggs and fresh flatbread and began eating, Isaak looked up at her with a grin and said, “Happy Christmas.”
Dree forced herself to swallow the large bite of eggs in her mouth and said, “I lost track of what day it is. Is it Christmas?”
Alfonso said, “Christmas Eve. It’s December twenty-fourth. Father Booker will offer a Mass for us tomorrow morning because it is a holy day of obligation.” His voice was a little drier as he said, “It is fortunate for us that we have a priest along who can make sure none of us skip Mass, not even once,noteven a little.”
Father Booker paused his eating with a spoon in his mouth to glare at Alfonso with one raised eyebrow.
Dree laughed at him. “Guess we’re just lucky.”
After breakfast, they struck the camp and rode to the village’s possible site for the construction of the NICU micro-clinic, which was again unsuitable in several ways.
Isaak said a sheet of shale was running under the surface soil of the village, so the earth was unlikely to pass a perc test for the septic system. He also glared at the shadows of the mountains and noted that the entire town seemed a bit too new, which may have something to do with watermarks high on the rocks that may have indicated a recent flood.
Alfonso said, “None of these sites are perfect, but are some of them good enough?”
“No,” Isaak said. “All the sites have fatal flaws.”
“Then what are we supposed to do? We are perfecting the design for specialized incubators for premature babies, and we have premature babies being born in every area of Nepal. Why can’t we just save the lives of some premature babies by giving them access to incubators?”
Isaak said, “There’s a good chance that every ten years, this village and your incubator and your micro-clinic are going to be swept away by a flood. There hasn’t been a hundred-year flood in Nepal for a long time, so those high watermarks must mean that more common floods produce high-water marks in this region.”
