That was just it, wasn’t it?
Hannahwasn’tthat girl. Not anymore.
“Sam,” she murmured again, her leg crooking higher so that her thigh rested precariously close to his throbbing cock.
He knew the kind of sleep she’d fallen into because he’d experienced it plenty of times himself. The body and brain had a way of shutting off after a harrowing experience.
If adrenaline was a stimulant, then the let-down that followed could only be described as the mother of all depressants.
He'd fallen asleep in huge transport planes that roared like freight trains and tumbled him around so much he may as well have been flying inside a clothes dryer. He’d gone full-on comatose in the bed of a pickup truck while it’d bumped eighty miles per hour down a dirt road in Egypt. And he’d once conked out in the middle of a sit-rep with his superiors. Just…head down on the conference table and lights out.
Heknewthis sleep was her body’s way of coping with the trauma and rebooting itself. And yet he couldn’t take having her sprawled atop him a second longer. He didn’t trust himself not to…
He stopped his thoughts in their tracks.
“Hannah.” Rubbing a hand over the small of her back, he did his level best not to notice the slight curvature that led to her plump ass.
Fuck! Why do I know her ass is plump?
Oh, right. Because when she’d been at BKI six months earlier, she’d been wearing a figure-hugging pair of jeans and he’d looked.
He hadn’t wanted to. He hadn’t even been aware he’d been doing it. But he’d looked.
And what he’d found was a plump, perfect, peach-shaped—
Double fuck!
“Hannah.” This time when he said her name he squeezed her hip.
“Mmm.” She grumped, turning her face more fully into his neck.
Her mouth was pressed against the skin over his pulse point. Her little tongue flicked out to lick her lips except the gesture caught him instead.
His dick flexed so hard he was amazed it didn’t lift her right out of the water.
“Hannah!” This time he slapped her ass.
“Wh-what happened?” She bolted upright to blink at him blearily as water sheeted off her shoulders and arms.
“You zonked.”
A line formed between her dark eyebrows. “I did?”
“Mmm.” He nodded. “And I’d love to let you sleep. But I’m turning into a prune.” He lifted his hand with his wrinkled fingertips as proof. “Plus, we gotta figure out what the hell is going on with you and the feds and this Red Square business.”
“Right.” She shook her head as if trying to jostle the cobwebs from her mind. Then she scrunched up her nose. “Holy fart-catching ass-monkeys, I’ve never had to pee so bad in my life.”
If he hadn’t been concentrating so hard on trying to tame his erection, he might’ve laughed. She’d always had a rare talent for coming up with colorful curses.
“That’s part of it,” he assured her.
“Part of what?”
“Nearly dying of hypothermia.” When she frowned her confusion, he explained. “When you get cold, the thermoreceptors in your skin tell your hypothalamus, which acts like the body’s thermostat, to get to work. One of the first things it does is tighten the blood vessels in your extremities. The basic tenet being a decrease in blood flow to your arms and legs means a decrease in systemic heat lossfromthose areas.”
She slow blinked twice. “What does that have to do with me needing to pee like a Russian racehorse?”
“Because of all that vasoconstriction, fluid gathers at your core. That causes your brain to go, ‘Hey, how’s about you get rid of some of that fluid by peeing?’”
