“Home.”
I picture the Georgetown house and the Malibu beach cottage I’ve never seen. Neither one appeals. The idea of leaving this camp right now scares me.
Just thinking of the outside world turns my sweat cold.
“Lamé’s cottage, right?” He looks over his shoulder at the kinksters who’ve dispersed since our grand finale, and leans close. “I’m takin’ care of you.”
“Oh.” I suddenly get it. “Aftercare.” Not the urgent coupling I’d pictured. As if I could manage anything close to an urgent coupling right now. I swear that lashing and orgasm was the most exhausting thing I’ve ever lived through—and I didn’t have to actually do anything.
He frowns and keeps walking.
The air out here’s slightly cooler than in the hangar, and fresher. It clears my head. “I can walk,” I tell him.
“I know.”
“So, put me down.”
“Would you just…” He glances at my face, then forward again. “Let me do this?”
Oh. Okay. Rather than answer, I slide my head back into the crook between his jaw and his shoulder, and snuggle in tight. Slowly, I relax. Close my eyes. Listen to the night noises—cicadas and music and voices. Laughter, moaning, the crack of a whip.
I’m floating. Warm. Cocooned. Held and… “I love it here.”
His step hitches slightly before moving on with a grunt. “You mean camp.”
“I love the people. They’re so…happy. Free. Real. Sonice.”
His steps are steady, but the heartbeat under my hand’s picking up speed. Or it’s my imagination. He’s probably tired from carrying me. I open my mouth to tell him to put me down when he responds.
“It’s a good place.”
A dozen more steps, slightly uphill. The swish of grass. A door slams close by.
“I know you don’t want me here,” I whisper, shocked to feel tears spring to my eyes. He stops moving. “I know it’s special to you and I’ve blasted in like a—”
“Stay.” The word hovers in the air between us. He starts walking again. “You should stay.”
I smile against his throat, burrow deeper, and then nip him.
He stumbles, with a muttered, “Fuck,” and clamps one hand tighter around me. “Don’t do that again.”
For a moment, I feel chastised. Why are my instincts so wrong? Why am I always messing up and making him… Under my hand, his chest expands, his breathing faster than before. I turn, nuzzle his pulse point, lick him, concentrate on his heartbeat. He likes it, I realize. Likes the teasing, the contact.
Slowly, I pull my lips back and scrape my teeth there—more than a tease now. A threat. “Or what?”
A growl rises up from deep inside his rib cage. It’s a call my body responds to before I’ve recognized it for what it is.
“Or I’ll make you stop.”
Oh, wow. That did it.
Turned my resting nerves way up, taking my pulse from its languorous, post climactic meandering to a racing thump that he probably feels through the bottom of his feet.
“How?”
“Baby, you don’t want to know,” he says.
Foolish, foolish man. It’s like he hasn’t even met me.
