The image her mind conjured was so erotic that she felt moisture gather at her core, and since she wasn't wearing panties, Dimitri was going to smell her excitement.
With his immortal sense of smell, he could probably smell her even if she was fully clothed, but that didn't bother her. What bothered her was that every other immortal in their vicinity could smell her too.
She made a point never to think about anything naughty when the Eight came in for their daily shots.
But instead of the arousal that she expected to see, Dimitri stood and looked away. Then he looked back at her, and the way he rubbed the back of his neck for the third time in minutes was different than the other two.
Mattie's teasing confidence wavered. "What? Don't you like my idea?"
"No. I do. It's just—" He exhaled. "I've never done that before."
She stared at him.
"You've never done a sixty-nine?"
He shook his head.
Mattie's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. Of all the things she had expected to learn about Dimitri Volkov tonight, this had not been on the list. The man kissed like he'd been trained by professionals. The things he did with his devastatingly competent hands implied experience. These hands belonged to a man who knew his way around a woman's body.
"Did none of the women you've been with want to do it?"
Maybe Russians were not as adventurous in bed as Australians?
"That wasn't the issue." He looked away again. "I didn't want to do it with any of them. It was a level of intimacy that I didn't feel in my soul. My body would have no doubt enjoyed it, but for me, that's not enough. My brain and my heart need to be on board and in sync."
The confession hung in the air between them, fragile and honest and so completely Dimitri that Mattie's heart swelled withlove for him. The man who had survived a gulag, and who'd faced down immortal warriors with nothing but a syringe of neurotoxin and then his bare hands, had walls around intimacy that no woman before her had been able to breach.
The magnitude of that was not lost on her.
This brilliant, beautiful, stupidly noble man, who had held her at arm's length because he was afraid of hurting her hand, was sitting on their bed and confessing that he'd never been intimate enough with anyone to try the thing she was suggesting.
"Not that there were that many women," he added. "I don't have as much experience as you might think I have."
He sounded so sincere, so awkwardly honest, that her love for him swelled to such proportions that it felt as if it was going to burst out through her ribs.
She wanted to climb into his lap and kiss him until neither of them could think straight, but her hand wouldn't allow it, and besides, this moment deserved more than impulse.
"You could have fooled me," she said softly. "You're too good at this to have limited experience."
The cocky smile she loved emerged like sunlight through rain clouds. It transformed him from a brooding Russian scientist into someone who looked like he belonged on the cover of one of the romance novels she and her friends used to read before her abduction.
"I'm a quick study," he said.
"You are." She patted the bed beside her. "Come here."
He hesitated, his eyes searching hers to confirm the invitation.
She met his gaze and let him see everything. The wanting, the trust, her absolute certainty that she could be naked and scarred, broken-handed, and completely herself with him, and he would hold all of it with care.
"I mean it," she said. "Come here, Dimitri."
He came.
He stretched out beside her on the bed, propping himself on his elbow. The feel of his body along the length of hers was like a cocoon of warmth. His free hand came to rest on her hip, fingers curling into the hem of the T-shirt, and the contact sent a cascade of heat through her.
"We go slow," he said. "And if anything hurts your hand, you tell me immediately, and we stop."
"I will."
