Only much, much more intimate.
The water worked every aching muscle Diarmuid had introduced me to that afternoon. My calves. My shoulders. The hollow of my lower back. The space underneath my shoulder blades that I could never get to with a massage gun.
It moved with a knowing pressure, easing, then releasing, then easing again until every ache in my muscles melted away under its liquid fingers.
This was easily the best bath I’d ever taken in my life.
But it kept going.
Warm water slid between my thighs and lingered there, circling with slow, deliberate swirls before pushing into my cleft with an action I could only describe as soft laps.
Soft laps that made me feel funny. While thinking of the weight of my trainer’s body when he pressed me into that wall. And that mysterious bulge inside his stomach…
A soft moan fell from my mouth before I could stop it. The water felt so good. Not just soothing, but pleasurable.
I wanted more. I instinctively widened my legs, opening myself further to the water’s strange pressure as another helpless moan escaped from my lips.
“Are you enjoying your bath, Dorcas?”
I nearly jumped out of my skin when the smoke-and-glass voice sounded behind me.
“What are you doing in here?” I demanded, angrily bringing my knees up as I scrambled to cover my breasts with my hands.
“It might assuage you to know that our eye receptors do not work in the same manner as yours,” he answered in a tone I could only describe as “happy to advise.”
“We sense skin purely on a burn level. With or without clothing, we perceive you mostly as a living flame.”
“Wait, are you trying to say you’re basically blind?” I furrowed my forehead. “Like, you have snake vision, and can only see the heat I’m emitting.”
“We would not refer to it as blind,” Aengus-Diarmuid answered. “We perceive much more than you can with your relatively weak hominid eyes. But if it will ease your discomfort,we have brought a robe with which you may cover yourself, and we will not perceive you until you do so.”
It did make me feel better, actually. I turned around to find him standing directly behind me but a few feet away. He’d changed back into the gray linen buttonless shirt and wore what looked like the Pleistocene Era version of a leather messenger bag over one shoulder.
“For you.” He held out a fur robe with his glowing green eyes averted, if not closed.
It smelled like the reindeer I’d encountered during my research visit to the Norwegian wolves.
I took the fur robe from him but found myself much more curious than self-conscious as I put it on. “CanDrakkon close their eyes?”
“We can.” A small smile played on his lips, as if he’d been expecting the question. “However, we only do so when we take our daily slumber, as we have no need to constantly clean and lubricate them as your kind does. May we gaze upon your burn again, Dorcas?”
Something caught in my chest. That was kind of a dramatic way to term looking at me. Like poetry—but with snake vision.
The fated mate possibility pulsed like something living between us.
“Sure.” I managed to keep my voice level as his gaze returned to me. But I still had to crane my neck to meet it—and to point out, “You never answered my question.”
“About what kind of creature we are?” he asked.
I squinted, wondering if he was messing with me. “No, you answered that question before you kicked my peach emoji with all those drills. I mean, the one about why you came in here while I was bathing in the first place. I’m assuming it wasn’t only to give me a reindeer robe.”
“No, it was not,” he confirmed. “We thought you might be interested in learning how to eliminate without our assistance.”
I inwardly cringed at the “without our assistance” part. But… “I think that means you’re going to show me where the toilet is. Yes, do that, please!”
Fifteen very awkward minutes later,I was back in my jumpsuit and wishing I hadn’t asked. As it turned out, the lower two wall tubes were the toilet system, and I soon found out why my self-cleaning jumpsuit had bottom flaps in the front and the back.
What. The. Eggplant Emoji.
