He lifted himself on his elbows, staring as she slid down his legs and dropped between his thighs. She bent forward and kissed her way along his upper leg, not unlike what he’d done to her earlier that day, except he had nowhere near the level of restraint she did. It had been so long since he’d been kissed so intimately that tiny explosions of anticipation and panic were skyrocketing through his brain—getting louder and more intense as she reached the straining length of his shaft.
“Francesca,” he gritted out, but she chuckled, the tremor of her mouth against the soft skin of his sac twisting him inside out. She drew her tongue up the length of him once, twice, teasing him with her mouth as she sighed out a gentle breath over his hyper-sensitized skin.
“I think…one thing more,” she said. Then she closed her mouth over him. Ari collapsed back, the sensations ripping through him a thousand times stronger than anything he could remember happening before, and he felt the climax build inside him as if he was seventeen not twenty-seven—not a full-grown man who could hold himself in check, for God’s sake. She plunged down over him again and drew all the way out, and his back fairly arched off the bed. At some point he began cursing—but in Garronois, his language skills deteriorating as Francesca finally took mercy on him. If mercy could be what you called it. She sheathed him and then, finally, with a slowness that nearly made him pass out with need, settled her beautiful body over him and slid home.
Ari’s eyes flashed open, and he’d not realized he’d had them closed. He blinked to see Francesca smiling down at him, her hair now fully down around her shoulders. When had that happened?
“Better?” she murmured, as she moved against him once, twice.
“Better,” he growled. But he clasped his hands to her hips, not to guide her but to hold her in place as he rolled her to the side, then onto her back.
She widened her eyes, then sighed as he pushed deep inside her. “Oh…” she sighed. He settled his mouth over hers, kissing her lips, her cheeks, then a soft, coursing line to where he could whisper in her ear.
“I think this is better still, though,” he said, and he filled her further, reveling in the way she tightened around him, slick and hot. “I want to be able to touch you, to kiss you.” He pulled back and stared at her, knowing he could gaze into those eyes a million more times and never tire of the passion he saw in their depths, the passion and rightness and truth. “I want to watch you while I make love to you, and learn every possible way to make you happy.”
Her eyes darkened at the intensity in his voice, which sent another surge of desire racing through him. Good. She should know he was serious. Francesca had become more than the woman who had rescued him from the sea of his own lost memories, the companion who’d supported him when he needed her most. At this point, she was his anchor and his rock, his beating heart. He didn’t fully know where she’d come from, but he knew where she belonged.
Which was with him.
“Is that a royal command?” she said as if he’d spoken this last thought out loud, her voice ever so slightly teasing.
He braced his hands on the bed, and leaned toward her again, knowing that nothing would ever feel so right as this.
“You better believe it,” he whispered.
16
Fran awoke in a rush, her sense of equilibrium once more shattered, her confusion paramount for a harrowing split second.
Then a warm arm shifted along her side, dropping to her belly to pull her close. Ari. Or Ryker. Or, it could be Conti for all she cared.
“Morning,” he murmured as she reached up to push back her hair. She and Ari were tangled together in a flurry of sheets, the pillows half-tumbled off the bed, but they might as well be in a theater, as strongly as her attention was drawn to the enormous screen in front of them. Not a screen, of course, a window.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she breathed, slipping out of Ari’s grasp and sitting upright.
The sky over the Aegean Sea was startling in its beauty. Rich, rolling pink clouds skidded through a gradually lightening sky, and the sun rising to the left, out of sight, sent beams of glittering wonder across the glassy sea. She grabbed up a sheet and wrapped it around herself as she moved toward the window, trying to see everywhere at once. From this vantage point the city itself looked like a fairytale construct, vehicles scooting down narrow alleyways, chimneys puffing out smoke from the bakeries lining the streets, even a few townspeople up and about—on their way to work, to the beach, or simply out for an early morning stroll.
She didn’t move as the bed creaked, Ari’s feet hitting the floor with a thud that was oddly reassuring, given the fantasy world in front of her. Without him in the room with her, she would have been unmoored. “It’s like this every morning?” she asked.
“Most mornings.” His voice was gruff, gravelly, and she realized—she’d never woken up with him before. Her entire understanding of the man was summed up in a few days of intense experiences, not a true foundation of who and what he was. The thought made her unduly melancholy and she was glad he also wasn’t looking at her as he came up to the window. “The sea changes more than you think it should, morning to morning. The city, it changes all the time. Buildings go up and come down, festivals and parades pop up in one part only to seemingly move overnight to another. It’s a never ending stream of change.” She could hear the happiness in his voice. “I don’t need to watch TV to get a fix on the pulse of the city, I simply need to watch. The world around us, it’s not so easy. But here, it’s different.”
“It’s certainly that.” Francesca leaned against him, surprised that with him near she felt less anxious, not more. Ordinarily she could never let anyone get too close, but Ari was different. He had lost his past and was focused on recovering it. He had no reason to care about hers.
His next words confirmed that. “You’ll want to go to your friends this morning, before the press conference—and before my mother gets her hooks into you. She’ll want every detail of the last few days you can spare, and it’s probably better that she knows none of them.” He squeezed her shoulders. “And you’ll be glad to know that we found Conti Goba.”
“Oh?” she glanced up to search his face. “Please tell me he’s not dead.”
“No. Nothing so alarming. But your comment about how those identities get fashioned, the ones that can be sold so easily and for such little money, it got me thinking. It had to have been stolen. Conti could have been injured, in jail.”
She nodded. “It’s a risk, but in a city where flashing credentials is done so frequently…”
“You have to have something to flash. But he’s in the hospital, as it happens.” He waved off her flare of alarm. “His wife is having a baby and they didn’t trust the local hospital in Makila. In the rush to get her to the hospital, Conti dropped his pack and everything went flying. When he realized he had his passport, his wife’s passport, birth certificates—they live in the country and didn’t know what would be required—he thought he had it all. It was only later that he realized what he was missing.” He shrugged. “But since he had the rest, he wasn’t worried. He simply assumed it was lost. Dimitri texted me early this morning that it had been returned to him, no one the wiser.”
“Good,” Fran nodded. “With any luck, you’ll never need false papers again.”
“True.” He winked at her. “Though if I do, I’ll know where to go to find them.”
He meant the seedy bar in the marina district, she knew he did, but his words still set her on edge. She lifted her hand, masking a feigned yawn. “I should go.”
