Her hair was a disastrous mess of salt-tangled strands everywhere, one stubborn lock stuck to the corner of her mouth. She’d drooled on my shoulder at some point. My neck had that faint crick you only got from sleeping in one position too long because you refused to move the girl on top of you in case you woke her.
I’d never felt more content in my life.
The villa was making noise now. Soft, subtle, but there if you listened. A cupboard closing. A quiet curse in Italian. The hiss of the coffee machine. The muffled thump of someone shuffling through the living room.
We’d gone to bed late, sometime after one in the morning. My memories of the end of the night were a blur of sand and laughter, Ivy threatening to sedate Marco for real if he didn’t shut up, Lucy humming one line of a song and then clapping a hand over her mouth like she wasn’t allowed, Kimi being exactly as unnerved by the tide as he pretended not to be.
And Aurélie, curled into me and telling our group that she was terrified and marrying me anyway. Something in my chest gave that same painful little crack it had given on the beach, right behind my breastbone. The one that felt like a stress fracture finally deciding to heal.
I slid my hand down her spine, fingertips skating over warm, bare skin between her shoulders where the romper didn’t cover. She made a sleepy noise at the back of her throat, burrowing closer like I was a pillow and a life raft, all in one.
“Scale, mo chridhe,” I murmured, voice rough with sleep, my lips brushing her hairline. “Half-asleep edition.”
She hummed, barely conscious, the sound vibrating against my chest. “Nine,” she mumbled. “Nine and three-quarters because you’re warm.” She shifted just enough that her thigh slid over my hip. “And because I can feel you.”
I bit back a groan. My hand slid down the curve of her spine, over the small of her back, until my palm cupped the perfect heart-shape of her ass. Warm, soft, entirely mine. It was far too easy to picture how she’d feel if I rolled us, dragged her under me, pushed into her slow and lazy until she was sighing and sinking further into our bliss bubble. The image hit so hard my hips almost jerked.
Get a grip, Fraser.She just said she can feel you.
“Dangerous combination, mo chridhe,” I muttered into her hair. “We have sand in some very… x-rated places. I’m trying to be respectable.”
“You’re a terrible liar,” she whispered, her smile curling against my skin. “You wake up hard for me and then expect me not to brag?”
Something in me purred at that. Possessive, greedy bastard that I was.
I lay there for another minute, letting myself catalogue it all. The weight of her. The faint ache in my legs from the hike yesterday. The ghost of red wine on my tongue. The sting of scratches along my shoulders from where she had clung to me, drunk and stumbling back inside before we collapsed on the bed and fell asleep.
Eventually, the need to pee and the distant sound of Marco and Ivy bickering forced my hand.
“Auri,” I murmured, giving her hip a gentle squeeze. “If we don’t move soon, they’re going to eat all the carbs and blame us for their hangovers.”
She made an incoherent noise that sounded like both protest and agreement, then burrowed closer, nose pressing into mythroat. “Five more minutes,” she rasped. Her morning voice was wrecked, all gravel and French honey. “We’re on holiday.”
“Sexcation,” I corrected automatically. “And we smell like Naxos red and the beach.”
“And happiness,” she mumbled into my skin. “Don’t forget happiness.”
Christ.
I stroked my hand up her back, feeling each little knot of tension I’d started to unkink, and leaned down to kiss the crown of her head. “Come shower with me,” I said softly. “Rinse off the sand. Then we can go pretend to be responsible adults in front of our friends.”
Her lashes fluttered against my chest. “Hmm. Do I get to lean on you and let you do all the work?”
“You’re describing my ideal morning,” I said. “Come on, mo chridhe.”
It took effort, but I managed to untangle her from my body without dropping her on the floor. She sat up slowly, hair a halo of chaos, romper creased and hitched from sleep. The ring on her finger caught a stray shaft of light and flashed, obnoxious and perfect.
She looked at it for a second, the faintest smile tugging at her mouth, then looked at me.
“Hi,” she said, soft.
“Hi,” I echoed. “Come on, before they kill each other fighting for caffeine.”
She snorted and let me pull her to her feet.
The bathroom was cool tile and pale stone, the big walk-in shower taking up half the far wall. I turned the water on and let it run until steam curled in the air. Aurélie leaned against the counter, eyes half-closed, watching me like she was too tired to be subtle about it.
“You’re staring,” I said.
