But this time, she couldn't stop thinking about Gio. With his tan, his golden hair, and his feline grace, he was like a lion on two legs. No wonder his shift form had found him a ready host. She felt a brief regret; of course he should have whatever he wanted, but if only there was some way for him to keep his leonine second body, and the strength and power that went along with it. She couldn't imagine being without her jaguar, even when it was holding itself distant from her.
And right on the other side of the wall, Gio and all his leonine power might be taking a shower along with her ...
She tilted her head back into the weak spray and closed her eyes. She could all too easily picture water coursing down his chest, running over his shoulders, trickling across the biceps that she had seen just often enough to have built up vivid fantasies about. She ran her hands down her own lean body, imagining that the trailing, wet sensation was Gio's hands.
She slid her hand between her legs, still pretending that her own fingers, rough with gun calluses, were actually Gio's. His hands would be bigger, she thought, sure and strong, parting her slick folds.
She had enough practice at this to send herself over the edge quickly, but what shocked her was the effect on her of thinking of Gio. It was like supercharged masturbation; it was wanking with the afterburner kicked on. As soon as she touched herself, sparks danced up her spine. She was already wet and hot, and thinking of Gio fingering her, sliding a finger into her, made her knees go weak. She supported herself with one hand on the flimsy plastic wall of the shower, slipping her finger in and out, as water ran over her breasts and poured across her belly. Her lips parted and she imagined Gio's mouth on hers as his hands played with her, cupped her, rubbed her with deft strokes until her back arched and she came in shivering, electric waves.
As she was coming down slowly from the aftershocks, leaning on the side of the shower, her sensitive shifter hearing caught a soft tap at the door.
Max left the shower running for cover noise. She stepped out of it and wrapped a towel around herself, not bothering with drying off. The soft tap came again. She retrieved her gun from the tangle of her clothing and moved softly toward the door on bare, quiet feet.
She wrenched open the door and found herself face to face with Gio, golden in the morning sun.
"Oh," he said, startled. "Oh, uh—hi."
"Hi," Max said, equally shocked.
She stared up at him. Gio's hair curled on his shoulders, wet and wavy, darkened to the color of rich honey. Beneath his dusty gray jacket, his shoulders seemed almost to strain at it, as if his biceps were almost too big for the careful tailoring.
The sun bathed him in gold, catching him from the side and gilding his lashes and brows as if they were painted with gold dust. From this angle, the slanting light picked up a light gold scatter across his unshaven jaw, not so visible from the front, but looking pettable as peach fuzz.
Max was still loose-kneed and wobbly from her orgasm, her head full of images of Gio bending to kiss her, water cascading over his bare body, his hands teasing her until she rose in passion. Seeing the real Gio in front of her, looking gorgeous in the morning sun when she was already in a susceptible state, made it almost impossible not to sag forward and fall against his broad chest.
It didn't help that her jaguar's inner voice, while still nonverbal, could best be summed up as: POUNCE ON THAT!!
With a heroic effort, she resisted.
"Aren't you supposed to be watching I Was A Teenage Cultist over there?" she demanded. Reaching for a place to shove her gun, she discovered that her only option was to poke it into the top of the towel, which would be the opposite of helpful at the moment. She let her gun hand drop down to her bare thigh and found out in the process that the skimpy motel towel only covered her to just below the hips.
"I, um," Gio said eloquently, thus indicating that he had also noticed this about the towel. "Would you like to get dressed?" His gaze kept starting to slide southward and then wrenching up to her face.
"I'm fine," said Max, who was very much not fine. "Why are you here? Is something wrong?"
"No—no, I was just—" He cleared his throat and managed to recover some of his usual suave manner. "I'm too wound up to sleep. I wondered if you'd like to go out and find breakfast."
Max glanced toward the next-door room. "Think it's okay to leave him alone?"
"He's asleep and looks likely to sleep for a while. I don't think he'll notice I'm gone."
"Nnnnnmmmm—okay," Max said, and shut the door in his face.
Her jaguar, sadly:Pounce?
"No," Max said out loud. Then she hoped Gio hadn't heard that.
She turned off the shower, scrubbed herself with the scratchy towel and got dressed in a pair of clean jeans and a T-shirt with ROSWELL, NM and a picture of a flying saucer blazoned across the front. As soon as she looked at herself in the mirror, she had regrets, but she hadn't brought much for a change of clothes. She decided to look upon the alien T-shirt as a test of sorts. If Gio didn't find her breasts attractive when they had a Roswell gray plastered across them, then he was not the man for her, she told herself firmly.
She squeezed the water out of her hair and twisted it into a quick ponytail, then slapped a baseball cap with a Raiders logo over the top of it. She pulled out the tail of the shirt to hide her gun and grabbed her wallet. Good to go.
Gio was waiting for her patiently, lounging against the side of the motel. He even managed to look leonine and sexy doing that. When she came out, he smiled. "Any idea which way to go?"
"There's a coffee machine in the office. Let's get some of that first." Now that she had committed to staying up, she had regrets; her eyes felt gritty and the sun seemed much too bright. "I think I'm going to need the pick-me-up."
Coffee was the office's only amenity, along with a rack of cheap, sun-faded brochures from tourist attractions that were mostly non-local—the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Hoover Dam.
"Is there somewhere around here we could get breakfast?" she asked the clerk, who was idly filling out a questionnaire in a magazine while a TV played behind the plastic barrier at the desk.
