"I'm not going anywhere." Lex's arm tightened around her.
"Stay the night. I don't want to wake up alone."
Lex pressed her lips against Mara's hair. "I'll stay."
Mara's breathing deepened. Her body relaxed against Lex's. Within minutes, she was asleep, naked and vulnerable and trusting in Lex's arms, and Lex lay in the dim hotel room with the city lights filtering through the curtains and Goldie's quiet breathing from the other bed and held the woman she was falling in love with. Outside, Boston hummed with its midnight traffic and its sirens and its perpetual electric restlessness, and Lex lay in the warm dark and did not sleep for a long time because she didn't want to miss a second of it.
17
Warmth. Weight. Mara surfaced from sleep in layers, each one peeling back to reveal another sensation. Clean skin and hotel cotton. And underneath both, a warmth her body recognized before her brain did.
Lex.
She opened her eyes. The hotel room was dim, the heavy curtains filtering the morning light into a soft, golden haze. The bedside clock read 6:47 a.m. The sheets were tangled and half off the bed, and Mara was lying on her side, naked, and beside her, equally naked, Lex Landry was asleep.
Mara's lungs emptied.
Lex was on her stomach, one arm tucked under the pillow, the other stretched across the mattress toward Mara. Her dark hair was spread across the white pillowcase in thick, messy waves. Her face was turned toward Mara, relaxed in sleep in a way it never was when she was awake. The sharpness was gone. The cockiness, the defiance, the deliberate provocation. In sleep, Lex looked young. Not vulnerable, exactly. Lex was too solid for vulnerability, too built, too dense with muscle and ink and the physical evidence of a life spent competing. But softer. Herlips were slightly parted. Her eyelashes were dark against her cheeks. The tattoos on her arms and shoulders looked different in the morning light, the ink warm rather than stark, the intricate patterns flowing with the curves of her body.
Mara stared. She couldn't help it. She stared at the broad line of Lex's shoulders, at the defined muscles of her back tapering to her waist, at the dimples above her hips where the sheet had slipped to expose the upper curve of her backside. She stared at the hand stretched across the mattress, the strong fingers and short nails and the small scar on the knuckle of her index finger that Mara had noticed weeks ago and never asked about. She stared and felt a hunger that was not just sexual, though it was that too, intensely that. A hunger to know this woman completely. Every scar. Every tattoo. Every morning face and every sleeping sound and every unguarded expression.
What am I doing?
The question rose up from the disciplined, professional part of her brain that had been running the show for twenty years, the part that tracked schedules and managed rosters and maintained boundaries with the rigid discipline of a military operation. That part of her was standing in the corner of the room with its arms crossed, demanding an explanation.
She didn't have one. Or rather, she had one that the disciplined part of her would never accept: she was happy. Genuinely, terrifyingly, bone-deep happy in a way she hadn't been in so long she'd forgotten the feeling had a name. And the source of that happiness was sleeping beside her with a tattoo of a compass rose on her shoulder blade and a small scar on her knuckle and the taste of Mara’s sex still on her lips.
She knew what she was doing. She was lying naked in a hotel bed in Boston next to her twenty-eight-year-old player after a night where that player had given her three orgasms with her mouth and held her while she cried and whisperedI'm not going anywhereinto her hair until she fell asleep. She was doing the one thing she'd sworn she would never do again, and she was terrified, and she could not bring herself to regret a single second of it.
Lex's eyes opened. Dark brown, warm, immediately focused on Mara's face. A slow smile spread across her lips, unguarded and genuine and disarming.
"Hi."
"Hi." Mara's voice was hoarse from last night. From the crying. From the sounds Lex had drawn out of her, the sounds she'd made against Lex's mouth and into the pillow and against Lex's shoulder afterward when the trembling had subsided and quiet tenderness had taken its place. She cleared her throat. "You're still here."
"I told you I would be." Lex's smile widened. She shifted onto her side, facing Mara, the sheet falling to her waist. From the other bed, Goldie's tail began thumping against the mattress, her golden head rising at the sound of their voices, but she seemed content to observe rather than intervene. Goldie had been reading their moods since the first day Lex walked into the office. Some things stayed consistent. Her body was on full display in the morning light: the broad chest, the small breasts, the defined abs, the line of dark hair trailing below her navel. She looked relaxed and confident and painfully attractive, and Mara's body, already awake and already wanting, responded with an immediacy that made her face heat.
"How did you sleep?" Lex's thumb drew a slow circle on Mara's hip bone.
"Better than I have in weeks."
"Good.”
Lex rolled toward her. Her hand found Mara's hip under the sheets, warm palm against bare skin, and she pulled Mara closer. Their bodies pressed together, skin against skin, the heat of Lex's stomach against Mara's. Lex kissed her, slow and thorough, morning-tasting and unhurried, and Mara melted into it with a helplessness that she'd stopped fighting.
Lex's thigh pressed between Mara's legs and the contact was electric. Mara's hips shifted on their own, seeking pressure, and Lex made a low, pleased sound against her mouth.
"Did you enjoy last night?" Lex murmured between kisses.
"You know I did."
"Tell me what you want this morning."
Mara's face burned. The directness of the question, the casual authority of it, the assumption that Mara would answer. Six weeks ago she would have deflected, shut down, retreated behind a professional wall. Now the wall was rubble and Lex was here in the wreckage, asking what she wanted sexually, and the answer was so clear and so desperate it came out before Mara could qualify it.
"Your fingers. I want your fingers inside me. I need you to fuck me.”
The words came out raw and exposed and Mara's face burned at her own directness. Two weeks ago she couldn't have said that sentence to another human being. A week ago she could barely think it. But Lex had changed her, had unlocked a vocabulary of want that Mara was learning to speak for the first time, and the look on Lex's face when she heard them, the darkening of those already dark eyes, the sharp intake of breath, was worth every ounce of vulnerability it cost to say them.
