She turned just in time to see Elias drop the pack and start stripping like his clothes were on fire.
“Hey, what are you…” Understanding set in—a little late, granted, but it wasn’t like she’d ever seen anything like this before. “They’re hot springs?”
“Yep.” His grin was enormous, his eyes so bright, she knew exactly what he’d looked like as a child. “Come on.”
Without waiting for a second invitation, she got undressed and followed him into the water.
***
“I’m never leaving,” Leo groaned in a voice that Elias felt to the tip of his cock.
This place was pure magic. Oh, it might stink of sulfur, but everyone knew that was good for your skin. Being warm and clean now that they’d soaped up, soaking aching muscles, reclining beside the most beautiful woman he’d ever known… He’d take a little sulfur smell in exchange for those things any day.
She shifted, her leg brushed his, and he got impossibly harder, painfully so, though the pain was all relative, given that it felt good at the same time. So good to sit beside her, to watch her truly relax, easing lower and lower until her breasts no longer bobbed at the surface.
Which was a shame.
She moved again subtly, her hip connecting with his and staying there. He couldn’t complain. Could only luxuriate.
“Still hungry?” he finally worked up the energy to ask.
When she didn’t respond, he slitted his eyes and watched her turn, bringing their faces close enough to almost touch. Her sigh enveloped him like a siren’s call—beautiful, all-consuming, and impossible to deny.
And, hell, why should he?
With a slow inhale, he leaned in, put his nose to hers, and drank in that sigh, made it his like something he could take inside and hold forever.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“Don’t thank me, thank…”
She pulled back to give him hershut uplook and he amended his statement. “You’re welcome.” He turned forward, set his head back on the rock ledge, and smiled lazily up at the sky, uncaring as rain pelted his face.
“Ever see passenger jets fly over here?”
“Sometimes. Rarely, but sometimes.” He shut his eyes. “More often bush planes.”
“Not the same feeling.”
He glanced at her and then watched, transfixed. Her rain-slick face glowed from the barest of lights from above. It limned her elegant forehead, highlighted those cheekbones, already more sharply cut than when he’d first seen her, shone bright on the sweet curves of eyelids. She looked, in this liminal place, like something otherworldly, straight from his dreams. But the feel of her was pure, solid earth. Reality and fantasy in one.
Strange to see her still for once.
“What feeling?” he murmured, wishing he could touch her without breaking the spell.
“Of everything out there. Everything to see. All the people going places, traveling, cities, worlds… Other places to be.” She inhaled audibly, the exhale shaky. “Always wanted to be someplace else. Go farther, higher, faster, you know? Justgo.”
Which made this stillness all the more unexpected.
He met her eye and gave a tiny nod, though he didn’t truly understand. He didn’t thirst for the same things she did.
She snuffled out a laugh. “Always heard the story, growing up, about going to day care and watching the planes fly by. Apparently, the personnel carried me all the time.” She glanced his way, one side of her mouth lifted in a smile. “I was pretty darned cute.”
He pictured a tiny Leo, round-headed, with fat cheeks and those chubby baby thighs, big brown eyes playful and soulful in equal measures. Of course they carried her everywhere. He’d bet baby Leo’d had every adult she ever met wrapped around her fat little finger. “Sounds familiar.”
“That’s right. You think I’m cute.”
“You are. You’re also…” He couldn’t say it. Couldn’t open himself to her like that. “I meant the carrying you everywhere part.”
