BEAU
Lisa is trying to have a serious conversation with me.
She keeps opening her mouth, starting a sentence, and then I kiss her neck or drag my thumb across her hip bone. Whatever she was about to say dissolves into a breathless sigh. We've been lying here for maybe twenty minutes, tangled together in damp sheets, and my bear has never been this calm. So deeply satisfied, he's happy to just sit back and enjoy having her here.
"Beau, we need to talk about this. We're…"
My mouth finds the spot below her ear, and she loses the rest of the sentence.
Her fingers curl against my chest, nails grazing my skin, caught between pushing me away and pulling me closer. "Stop doing that."
The way she says it though, tells me the exact opposite, that she never wants me to stop, and I'm perfectly happy to comply.
I chuckle against her. "Doing what?" My lips move down her throat, licking the salt off her silky soft skin.
"Distracting me."
Her scent is so strong in the air now, her desire, that I can practically taste it on my tongue. I want more. All I can think of is taking her again.
"We can talk tomorrow." My hand settles on her bare hip, and her pulse kicks up under my thumb.
"No, not tomorrow. Not when you have god only knows what planned for today." She pushes up on one elbow, pointing to the far wall where Van and Tripp are sleeping in the room next door. Or, unless they have earplugs, probably not sleeping after the show we put on. Lisa looks down at me, wavy red hair falling around her face in a messy tangle. "I don't understand what this is."
"Neither do I."
Although that's not strictly true. I have a strong suspicion. Reaching up, I tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, and she catches my hand, holding it against her cheek.
"Then talk to me, Beau." Her eyes drop, uncertainty creeping in, and I can't stand it.
I kiss her shoulder, the bite mark on her breast, then nuzzle her neck and take her lips with mine once more, gentle and tender this time, instead of bold and demanding.
"I need to know if you meant any of what you said, or whether that was just..." She gestures at the bed, the sheets, the mark on the wall from the headboard. "The heat of the moment."
The honest answer to that question is sitting right on my chest, a weight I'm not sure what to do with. How can I tell her what I am, what I think is going on here? What if she doesn't accept it, accept me?
She pulled away before for a lot less.
Lisa sits up, pulling the sheet across her chest. "Does this mean you… forgive me, for ruining everything before?"
"Of course, I do." I don't even need to think about that. "But I guess…" Shit, I'm no good at this. "There's other stuff I want to tell you, but…"
Rolling away, I stare up at the ceiling, the words refusing to come. She won't accept me. She might even be afraid of me. Unable to bear the thought, the need to move takes over, and I go to sit up.
Lisa shoves the blankets to the side, throwing one leg across my thighs to straddle me, and pins me back down against the mattress.
I'm so distracted by how perfect her dusky nipples look against her pale skin, while feeling the weight of them in my hands, that I barely notice when she leans over the side of the bed and rummages in her backpack. I'm more focussed on my disappointment at not being able to play with her nipples anymore rather than what she's doing, so that when she sits back up, it takes me a second to realise there's a pair of handcuffs dangling from her finger.
Without a word, she takes my wrist and clicks the first cuff into place, threading the chain through the headboard slats before catching my other hand and securing it.
"Cute," I say, tugging on them gently. The metal is cold against my skin, and my bear tenses despite knowing we can escape easily. But she's looking at me with those blue eyes, and I'm not going anywhere, not until I see where she's going with this.
"There." She settles back on my hips, hands on my chest. "Now you can't distract me or run away."
My fingers curl around the slats above my head. "I hope this isn't how you interrogate all your suspects, or we'll have to have a serious chat before you go back to work."
Even though it's a joke, the picture it conjures in my mind isn't nice, and a ludicrous surge of jealousy rises inside me. I shift, tugging on the restraints again.
Lisa regards me, naked, her glorious body on display, palms pressed flat over my heart, and she must be able to feel how hard it's beating. "Did you mean it, Beau? What you said before. That you want me to be yours."
