“Get a room. Or a cave, or whatever, but my last meal—which was days ago by the way—is starting to come up.” Giya’s voice eased our heads apart.
Remo and I smiled at each other, and then we smiled at her. She winked as she tossed the apple between her hands.
“Shall we go back to our cave, Trifecta?”
His hushed proposition tightened every nerve ending in my body. “I could use another nap,” I said, bringing my eyes back onto his.
“A nap, huh?”
“Isn’t that what you had in mind?” I tried to slide down the column of his torso, but he braced his arms beneath me, keeping me in place.
“We’ll sleep. Eventually.”
I tightened my koala grip on him as his long strides ate up water and sand. Once we breached the arc ofpanemand aloe, Giya falling into step beside Remo, I asked him to put me down; he didn’t. He carried me through the jungle and over the threshold of the grotto as though I were his most delicate and prized possession. And perhaps I was, for he had certainly become mine.
42
Firsts
After Giya wished us a pleasantnapand vanished into the cave across from ours, Remo finally set me down and then proceeded to attack his damp locks, beautifully disheveling them. Even though a part of me found his distress both charming and fascinating, I clasped his fingers and towed them away.
“We don’t have to”—the hand I didn’t hold rose to his neck and rubbed the spot that had cleared of the bruise from thecupola—“do anything”—he cleared his throat—“you don’t want to.”
An onslaught of love—yes,love—rose in time with my smile. How could I not love this man who’d protected me fiercely before I’d become lawfully his to protect? “Although I’d terribly enjoy watching you try to make me do something I don’t want to, Farrow, right now, I’m in the mood to do many things.”
Shock and amusement stilled his distraught fingers, and then he squared his shoulders and laughed, the beautiful sound spooling over every stony crevasse, grain of sand, and cell inside my body.
“You are such a contradiction.” I rose up on tiptoe, kissed his birthmark, then drew him through the coiled passageway that led into our little haven before I lost my own nerve.
“A contradiction?”
“So smug and so shy.”
“Shy?”
Of course it wasn’t the smug part that gave him pause. “Yeah. Shy.”
He made a sound at the back of his throat, then smiled cockily and rolled the hem of his tattered Henley over the stacked bricks of his stomach. He shoved the fabric over his head and tossed it against the wall where it landed in a wet heap, and then he took my hands and set them on the hard planes of warm skin. “Still think I’m shy?”
I shook my head, trying to come up with something smart to say but failing spectacularly at the sight of so much whittled magnificence. I drew my fingertips into every dip and across each muscled hill. His nipples hardened under my tentative strokes, which had me leaning in and flicking one with my tongue, tasting brine, musk, man.
His eyes slid shut, and his breathing hitched. “Fuck, Amara . . . ”
“Is that your plan?”
Shock made his lids snap up.
My cheeks warmed. “I can’t believe I just said that.”
I tried to avert my eyes, but he trapped my face with his palms and forced my gaze up to his. The way he stared at me made me feel like a fly caught in a spider’s web. In a good way. I supposed that if I’d been a real fly, and he’d been a real spider, and his intentions were to eat me—
“I can’t decide if you look frightened or excited.” The raindrops of light seeping through the rock ceiling cast his intent expression in sharp relief.
Probably because I was a lot of both at that moment.
He skated his palms down my arms until he reached my wrists. Slowly, he raised them over my head. When his fingers settled on the hem of my sopping gray T-shirt, he asked, “May I?”
I gave a jerky nod.
