"Wow," she whispered finally, her voice dreamy. "I didn't know you had that in you, Captain."
He couldn't help it. He laughed. A real laugh, full and unexpected, rumbling from his chest.
"You're impossible."
"You love it."
He raised his head to look at her, still smiling, feeling lighter than he had in years. "You're not wrong."
She reached up to trace the line of his jaw with gentle fingers. "We should probably talk about what this means."
"We probably should." He kissed her forehead and slowly, regretfully, withdrew. "After."
"After what?"
"After I take you to bed properly and do that again. And again. And possibly again after that."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Edie's entire body hummed. She lay sprawled across Tarmek's formerly dining table and tried to remember how to form coherent thoughts.
It wasn't working.
Her brain had been reduced to a pleasant static, all higher functions temporarily offline while her nervous system catalogued the absolutely devastating things that had just happened to her. Things involving hands the size of dinner plates and a mouth that should come with warning labels and an intensity that had made her forget her own name somewhere around the third time he'd?—
Stop.
She needed to stop replaying it. She needed to gather the scattered pieces of her composure and reassemble them into something functional.
But God...
She'd had lovers before, scattered across various towns and temporary homes like breadcrumbs marking her wandering path. She'd had fun and passionate and experimental. She'd had disappointing and awkward and memorably terrible.
She had never had this.
He was still partially covering her, his massive frame propped on his forearms to avoid crushing her. His breathing was slowly evening out, but she could feel his heart pounding against her chest—a racing tempo that matched her own.
"You're thinking," he murmured.
"How can you tell?"
"Your face does this thing. Your eyebrows scrunch up."
"My eyebrows do not scrunch."
"They absolutely do." He brushed his thumb across her forehead, smoothing the alleged scrunch. "What are you thinking about?"
You. This. The fact that I may never recover.
"Nothing," she lied.
The corner of his mouth twitched. "Now who's the terrible liar?"
Fair point.
She turned her head to survey the damage. His shirt was hanging from a chair. Her tank top had somehow ended up draped over the fruit bowl and she couldn't even see her shorts or her underwear. The protein shake she'd stolen had pooled on the floor, creating what was sure to be an impressively sticky mess.
"We're going to have to clean that up," she said.
