Page 27

I stood there with a faint sweet weight on the end of my nose. “You washed that brush for this.”

“I washed it for several things. That was only the first one.”

She was still laughing when I took the brush out of her fingers. I caught her chin, drew the bristles slowly across her lower lip from one corner to the other, and watched the laughter go out of her. She stood very still with her lips parted and the line of sauce shining on them, and I set the brush on the rim of the bowl and kissed it off her mouth.

She tasted of maple and chocolate, and beneath both was the taste I’d been thinking about since Thursday. In the workshop we’d had a lamp and a deadline looking over our shoulders. In my kitchen the only deadline was the clock on the stove, and I stopped looking at it. Goldie slid both hands up my chest and linked her fingers behind my neck, and I bent lower to meet her until she broke away, out of breath and smiling.

“Take your shirt off, Duncan,” she said, close enough that I felt the words more than heard them. “I’d like to see what I’ve been working next to all day.”

I pulled it over my head and dropped it on the stool beside her coat, and she flattened her palms against my chest and stayed there for a moment. She traced the edge of the ink where it crossed my shoulder with one fingertip and then with her lips, and I stood still and let her, because her attention was worth more than hurrying it. When she reached the center of my chest, I slid my hands under the hem of her sweater.

“Can I take this off you?”

“Please.” She lifted her arms.

I drew the sweater up and over her head and laid it on the stool with my shirt, well away from the bowl. She reached behind herself, unhooked her bra, and let it fall without covering herself or looking away. The pendant lights over the island turned her skin gold, and her breasts were full and soft and flushed pink across the top, her nipples drawn tight in the cooler air. I took my time looking, and she let me, with a small private smile that told me she knew exactly what she was doing to me.

“You’re staring,” she said.

“I’m making up for lost time.”

I folded a dish towel along the edge of the island so the countertop wouldn’t be cold, took her by the waist, and set her on it. She leaned back on her hands and watched me kneel for her boots. I unzipped each one and set it under the stool, and she lifted her hips so I could draw her jeans down her legs, and then the last of what she was wearing. A hair clip dropped out of her pocket as I draped the jeans over the stool. She caught it before it hit the floor, held it between her teeth, and gathered her curls onto the top of her head in two practiced turns.

I stepped out of my own boots, and she had my belt open in about four seconds, which made me wonder how much thought she’d given the matter. When she pushed my jeans down, I was already hard, and she looked up at me, wrapped her hand around my cock, and gave it one slow stroke that made me lose track of what I’d been about to say.

“Not yet,” I said finally, catching her wrist and kissing the inside of it. “You started this with a paintbrush, and I want to see it through. Lean back for me.”

“Is that an order?”

“Would you like it to be?”

“I might,” she said, leaning back on her elbows with a grin that told me she liked the idea.

I tested the sauce against my wrist one more time. It had cooled a little but was still warm, and I started at the hollow of her throat, drawing the brush down between her breasts in a slow line and then around one nipple in a wide, careful circle. She sucked in a breath at the warmth, and I followed the sauce with my mouth until she arched off the towel and pushed her fingers into my hair. I painted the other breast and gave it the same attention, then drew the brush down her ribs and across the curve of her stomach, licking the sauce away as I went.

Goldie lay back with one arm over her head, and when she spoke, her voice was already unsteady. “I love how thorough you are. I’d love it more if you were thorough somewhere else.”

I smiled against the curve of her hip. “I’m getting there.”

“Then get there faster.”

I laid a thin line of sauce along the crease of each thigh and another across the low swell below her navel, keeping it all on the outside and well away from anything it didn’t belong near, and followed it with my mouth. By the time I reached the soft skin high on her inner thigh, she had let her knees fall apart, her heels were hooked against the edge of the island, and she was breathing as if she’d been running. The island had been built for cooking and not for this, so I took a second towel from the drawer beside the stove, folded it on the tile, went to my knees, and lifted her legs over my shoulders.

“Tell me if I do anything you don’t like.”

“I will.” Her voice cracked on a laugh. “Very loudly.”

I started at the inside of her knee and worked slowly upward, tasting maple and salt and warm skin, until she was shifting under my hands and saying something that was nearly a plea. When I finally put my mouth on her, she said a word that wasn’t polite, and her thighs closed on either side of my ears. I licked her slowly at first, letting her feel every pass of my tongue, then added pressure at her clit until she was moving against my mouth.

“Right there,” she said. “Duncan, right there, just like that, don’t change anything.”

I didn’t. I kept the same pace and the same pressure, and when one of my hands slid up her stomach she took it in hers and held on. Her fingers locked in my hair, her thighs went rigid, and she came with a long, ragged cry that she made no effort to muffle. I stayed with her, easing the pressure by degrees until her legs loosened and she pushed at my head, laughing and out of breath.

“Okay.” Her chest was still rising and falling fast. “Give me a minute. I have to remember where the floor is.”

I rested my cheek against the inside of her knee and waited, more satisfied with myself than I’d been in years.

She didn’t need long. She pulled me up by the shoulders, slid off the island, and walked me backward until the edge of it pressed into the small of my back. Then she picked the brush up from the rim of the bowl.