"Promise me."
"I promise."
"And no bracing. Keep your right hand on the pillow at all times. If you need to hold on to something, use your left."
"Dimitri."
"What?"
"Stop giving me safety instructions and kiss me."
The cocky smile returned, wider this time, and then his mouth was on hers and the conversation was over.
He kissed her slowly, which was its own kind of torture. Instead of the hard, urgent kisses of the morning, this was deliberate andthorough, his lips moving against hers with focused attention. He seemed to be cataloging every response, every sound, every shift of her body. His hand slid from her hip to the curve of her waist, and his thumb traced a line along the edge of her lowest rib that made her arch into him.
"Easy," he murmured against her mouth.
"I'm not a lab experiment. You don't need to control all the variables."
"I absolutely need to control the variables. That's how we get optimal results."
She laughed into the kiss, and he swallowed the sound, the laughter melting away as heat and urgency replaced levity. He continued his slow exploration with his free hand, learning her body even though he knew it already. Tonight, though, he was mapping it with new intent.
As his fingers pinched the hem of her T-shirt and he began to lift it, Mattie raised her arms, extending her left fully and lifting her right carefully.
The air hit her skin, and she shivered from the exposure. She was naked, and his eyes moved over her with an expression that made her feel like the most beautiful woman on the planet, scars and splint and all.
He leaned down and pressed his lips to the hollow of her throat, and whatever clever response she'd been preparing dissolved into a sound that was decidedly not verbal.
His mouth traced a path from her throat to her collarbone, and lower, and the deliberate slowness of it was killing her. Every kiss was deliberately placed, every touch gauged to producemaximum effect with minimum risk to her hand, and she understood now what he'd meant by mechanics. He had planned this.
Between clans and smoke signals and Petrov's sarcasm, Dimitri had spent the day working out exactly how to do this, step by step, angle by angle, mapping the path from clothed to undone with the same meticulous attention he applied to everything he did.
She found it so incredibly sexy.
It might not be every woman's cup of tea, but it was definitely hers. To Mattie, every time Dimitri flexed his beautiful brain it was the equivalent of what flexing well-defined biceps might be to another.
The realization made her want to laugh and cry and grab him with both hands, which she couldn't do, which was the entire point of his careful engineering.
"You planned this out," she accused him breathlessly.
He paused his downward trajectory and looked up at her. "Of course I did. I promised that I would. I'm a meticulous planner, and I don't improvise."
"Liar. You're improvising right now."
"I'm executing a flexible protocol with room for adaptive responses based on real-time feedback."
She looked at him from under lowered lashes. "That's the most arousing thing anyone has ever said to me."
He laughed, and the vibration of it against her skin made her squirm, which in turn made him tighten his grip on her hip,which made her gasp, which made his eyes darken in a way that told her the analytical scientist was losing ground to the savage within.
It was a little scary because she knew firsthand how brutal immortals could get, but she knew that even in the throes of passion, Dimitri would never hurt her.
"Mattie." His voice had dropped so low that it was a register she'd never heard from him before. It was rough, stripped of the careful control he usually maintained. "I need you to keep your hand on that pillow."
"It's on the pillow."
"Keep it there."
