His body turned hot with the exertion, beads of sweat dappling his brow, adorning his throat as he pulled back to look at her, to watch her, to make sure she understood what was happening to her and who was delivering it.
She fisted her hands in his shirt, realizing too late that he was still entirely clothed. Realizing that this wasn’t at all what she had imagined or intended or … oh!
She cried out, quickly muffled by the falling pressure of his lips as she rocked wildly against him, as her body exploded in a thousand incandescent colors, bathing the room in a light so blinding that she had no choice but to squeeze her eyes shut, to block it out as it washed down in a heavy fall of sensation.
“Claire,” he said, soft and thick against her mouth, dragging her hips closer as he followed her over, as he let her be the one to temper the cry this time, flooding her with the evidence of his satisfaction.
Still the movement did not stop. It only slowed. It slowed in agonizing, gradual decline until finally he shuddered and his grip eased, his fingers gone soft and slack over the bruising hold on her flesh.
For a long time, they did not move.
They did not speak.
They did not separate.
For a long time, they held together like this, as one.
CHAPTER 21
Freddy was still a little dazed in the aftermath of the encounter.
At some point, he must have pulled away from her, must have set himself to rights. By the time he returned to any semblance of time and place, he was already in the process of storing the dough like he hadn’t been interrupted at all.
Claire herself had settled into a chair near the site of their collision and was nibbling at one of the cooled, early hand pies he’d made, watching him with those big, brown eyes shining with something like wonder, following the motions of his tidying like she could not make sense of it. She’d drawn her legs up into the chair with her, her knees poking against the thin material of her night rail in peach-hued peaks.
She looked incredible like this, he thought. Her hair was tangled down her back and over her arms in thick, honey-colored coils. Her tiny little toes peeked out over the lip of the chair, dusted at their ends by the lacy hem.
When he took up a broom to handle the cherry pits they’d scattered over the ground, her gaze started to narrow.
“What are you doing?” she demanded, soft as a snake’s hiss.
“I …” He glanced up at her, a little puzzled by the question. “I’m cleaning up after myself?”
Her brow continued to furrow. “Why?”
He hesitated, a self-conscious little chuckle scraping at his throat. “Because I made a mess?”
“Hm,” she said, frowning.
He gestured with the top of the broom toward the pie she was eating. “I told you those ones are too tart.”
“They aren’t,” she replied with no little amount of defensiveness, licking her lips. “I like the tart ones.”
“I suppose you do,” he replied with a laugh, turning his back to her to find the dustpan. He could feel her gaze boring into his spine, right in the center of his ribs.
“Why couldn’t you sleep?” she asked after a moment, watching every move he made. “The trip was exhausting.”
He glanced up at her, remembering all at once the answer to that question, an annoyance flaring up in his chest that scraped oddly against the languid satisfaction of finally having found release here, with her.
“Why couldn’t you?” he returned, rather than answering.
“I woke up to the smell of the pie,” she said a little dreamily, tilting her head so that her hair spilled onto the table. “I had a craving.”
He paused, a little flash of heat giving a threatening stutter in his core. “A craving,” he repeated softly, glancing back at her. “For … pie?”
She returned the look, her eyelids still hooded, her lips red with cherry sauce. “For pie,” she confirmed with a flutter of her lashes. “What else?”
He tried not to groan. “Stop that unless you want to go back on the table,” he told her as firmly as he could manage.
