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“My turn.”

“The sauce has cooled.”

“I watched how you tested it.” She dipped the brush, touched it to her wrist, and gave me a look of complete innocence. “I think I’ve got the technique.”

She painted a line down the center of my chest and a slow circle around each nipple, and the breath went out of me in a way that made her smile. The brush trailed down my stomach and across the tops of my thighs, light and warm, and she studied the sauce tangled in the hair on my chest with a small frown, as if it were a problem she intended to solve later. Then she lowered herself onto the folded towel, looked up at me, and held the brush a few inches from my cock.

“Still all right?”

“Better than all right.”

She drew the bristles along the length of me, and I put one hand flat on the island behind me to keep my balance. Her mouth followed. She licked the sauce away in long, unhurried strokes, then took me in and drew me deep, and I kept my other hand near the clip in her hair without guiding her, because she hadn’t asked me to. She hummed against me, low and content, and I felt the vibration all the way up my spine. I’d never seen anything as good as Goldie on her knees on my kitchen floor with a smear of caramel on her chin and her curls piled crookedly on her head, taking her time with me.

I let her go on until I was close enough that getting upstairs had become a theoretical goal.

“If you keep that up,” I said, my voice rougher than I’d meant it to be, “I’m not going to make it upstairs.”

She drew back and sat on her heels with her mouth flushed and glossy, looking so frankly satisfied that I almost laughed. Then she got to her feet, keeping one hand on me as she rose.

“That sounds like a promise. Before you keep it, I’m on the pill, and I got tested after my last relationship. All clear.” She kept her hand on me. “I’d like to feel you without a condom, if you’re comfortable with that.”

“I was tested at my last physical. All clear, and I haven’t been with anyone since.” I put my hands on her waist. “I want that too, if you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.” Her hand moved on me again, slow and deliberate, with her eyes on mine. “I want you upstairs.”

“Then lead the way.”

“Good. Because I’m sticky in some very inconvenient places, and I understand you have a shower.”

The clock on the stove said ten past seven. “We need to leave by seven-fifty,” I said.

“Then we have time to be thorough.” She smiled. “You’ve proven you’re good at that.”

I gathered our clothes off the stool and left the brownie, the bowl, and the rest of Nell’s sauce to fend for themselves. Goldie’s boots stayed under the stool. She went ahead of me up the stairs wearing nothing but a streak of caramel along one hip, and I reached the top mostly by not looking at it. The house was quiet in a way it almost never was, with no music coming from Sienna’s room and no door closing down the hall, and the only sounds were Goldie’s bare feet on the treads and the laugh she gave when she glanced back and caught me looking anyway.

My bedroom was at the end of the upstairs hall, with the bathroom opening off it. I’d rebuilt that bathroom three years ago, and the only thing I’d insisted on was a shower large enough for a man my size to turn around in. It had a tiled bench along the back wall and a glass door, and it turned out to be big enough for two. I laid our clothes over the chair by the window, turned on the water, and held my wrist under it.

“Is that going to be your new habit?” Goldie asked from the doorway.

“Probably.” The water was warm and steady, so I opened the glass door and stepped back to let her in.

Steam filled the glass as she stepped in ahead of me and tipped her face into the spray, careful to keep her piled curls out of it. I soaped my hands and washed the caramel from her skin with the flat of my palms, over her ribs and her stomach and down her thighs, while she braced her hands on my shoulders and watched the lather slide away down her legs. She took the soap from me and returned the favor, slowly and with an attention to detail I found hard to bear, and when she reached my chest she looked at the sauce still caught in the hair there and sighed.

“That’s going to take a while.”

“We have until seven-fifty,” I said, and kissed her.

I kissed her under the water until the soap and the clock stopped mattering, and backed her gently against the tile while she hooked one leg around mine. When she broke away, she turned in my arms, flattened her palms against the wall at shoulder height, and set her left foot on the bench. She looked back at me over her shoulder, with wet curls coming loose from the clip.

“Like this,” she said. “If that works for you.”

“It works.” I was more than a foot taller than she was, so I had to bend my knees to meet her, which was less of a hardship than it should have been.

I put one hand on her hip, guided myself against her, and pushed in slowly, a little at a time, until I was all the way inside and she was breathing in short, shaky bursts. She was so slick and tight around me that I had to stop and wait.

“Is this all right?”

“It’s very all right.” Her laugh shook through both of us. “Please move.”