Turning Up the Heat (11 page)

Temper surged, unexpectedly, that deep well of anger that he kept accidentally tapping into, ever since he had come home to find her message. Married more than ten years, and yet he had barely had a chance to learn his own wife’s moods.
I’m not doing this anymore
, he thought suddenly, an abrupt about-face from his resolution of only moments before.
When we get home, things are going to change.

I don’t care. We’ll face it. I’ll handle it. I’ll
make
her see there is something else to me.

He came down onto the bed above her, pulling her body lengthwise. Her eyes darkened, the gold gleaming in the brown like the shine of treasure in the depths of a cave. She didn’t say anything, but her lips parted, and her head turned to follow his movements, so that his access to that mouth was always easy.

His lips curved. She was in his favorite mood. Tempted. Tempted by him. He had learned it as a teenager, learned to push it, to build her temptation into something she couldn’t resist.
Yes, I can make you see me again. Make you want me more than whatever the fuck you want on this island.

Slanting his body across the bedspread, so that none of it touched her, he wove his hands through her hair and kissed her.

She responded instantly, yielding and then hungry. “I’ve missed you,” she whispered, her hands tangling in his hair, shaping his head to her. “I’ve missed you. I don’t know what to do.”

What to do?
That sounded as if there was some problem that—he started to lift his head, but she tightened her hold, pulling his mouth back into hers. And he forgot about her words for just a second, just one more moment, because she was letting him kiss her again, really kiss her, stretched out on her bed kiss her, and that meant everything would be fine, it had all been a false alarm, everything would be absolutely fine...

He sank himself into the kisses until she was wild with them, petting his head frantically, until the muscles of his arms ached with tension, but he held himself off her, touching her only with his mouth and his hands in her hair.

“Yes.” Her whisper was so soft only he could ever have heard it. A breath just for him. “Daniel...fuck my mouth.”

Hot pleasure surged through him. He loved it when he could make her talk like that. Mostly when he got home late—well, mostly she made a sleepy mumble, and he played with her hair and drew a finger down her back, and if that failed to lure her out of sleep, he let it go, completely incapable of forcing her awake for his own pleasure. Instead, he slipped an arm around her and nuzzled his face into her neck, letting the scent of her ease him off his adrenalin. In fact, once when she had changed shampoos, he had had to beg her to change back, so he could get to sleep.

But other than staying asleep, the next most likely reaction was drowsy, pliant, welcoming love-making, and God, but he loved that, too.

But once in a while, something dark and urgent rose up in her, freed by sleep, dreams, and the dark, and it drove him wild, although it made her blush in the mornings.

She had never let that dark, wild thing rise up in her in the daylight before.

Her fingers hurt his hair, pulling his mouth into hers urgently. “Fuck my mouth,” she murmured again, such sweet, hot begging.

So he did. Not touching anything but her head, her hair, he ravaged her with long hot strokes until she was shivering all over, making little hungry, yearning sounds that soothed seven days of tension out of him and replaced it with another kind of tension entirely. Triumphant, victor’s tension. She was his. She was still utterly his.

Her hands kept sliding down to his sunburned shoulders, a flinch of pain in the midst of pleasure, and he loved the guilty way she would suddenly realize and her hands would fly away from him. And come back to his hair, frantically shaping his head.

And then forget again.

“Here,” he said. “Let me help.” He took her hands and locked them, powerless, above her head, lifting himself to look down at that incredible view.

The bones and angles and curves of her, all twisting and shivering and melting with need. Trapped by him. All his.

He drew one hand down the length of her, delicately, tracing from collarbone straight over one nipple, all the way to the crease of her thigh, and she gasped and shivered.

He bent his head and whispered in her ear: “I’ll fuck you any way I like.”

She moaned, her wrists twisting in his hold. He bore them down into the bed, and her hips arched up instead, seeking his.
Take me!

Yes, take her!
his body shouted.

But, of course, he could control that, too. It was worth it, to control his body a little longer so he could savor the joy of controlling hers.

He wasn’t sure he had ever realized how much he
could
control hers. Always so hungry for her, he had never even tried.

It took one hell of a lot of arrogance to have a woman begging for you and not seize your chance before she changed her mind. She made him arrogant. In fact, every bit of arrogance he had came from his need for her and her pride in him.

But she had never before made him arrogant enough to make her beg. “I love you,” he whispered, cupping her sex.

“Daniel, please.” She opened her eyes. “I want to touch you.”

“I know.” He traced the lips of her sex with one thumb, watching her face. “I wanted to touch you yesterday. And the day before. And the whole time I was in Japan without you. And when I came back to find you missing, with nothing but a damn phone message and your own phone lying by your bed. I wanted to touch you, Léa.” His hand tightened on her wrists. “And I couldn’t.”

“I didn’t mean”—His thumb slipped inside her, and she gasped and twisted, her words fracturing. “Coming here was nothing to do w”—

He drove one finger straight into her body, hard and deep, and she shut up on a gasp, her eyes going wide. “Yes, you’ve mentioned,” he said between his teeth, holding her speared there. “Several times. That it had nothing to do with me. Well, guess what, Léa.” As her surprised muscles figured out what they wanted to do with his finger and squeezed around it, he pulled it out—away from her sex entirely. Coming up her body to take one of her nipples and twist it very gently. “
This does.
”

Her head tossed restlessly, her mouth, her sex, her body all open and begging, everywhere. “Daniel.”

“Yes, say my name.” He brought his mouth to her other nipple, pressing his thigh up between hers. “I want to be all
you
can think about, all
you
can do, all
you
can be.”

He lifted his head to emphasize the words and saw confusion flicker even through her arousal, tangle with it in her eyes. “But—you already
are
!” she protested desperately. “Daniel, I can’t—please don’t ask for
more.
”

What?
But he couldn’t think about that now. He didn’t want to think about it. He wanted to make her his, over and over his again, like he had claimed her on the beach, like he had claimed her at the waterfall.
Not
like she had claimed him, which had left him feeling vulnerable and...vulnerable. Two full days later, he still could not grapple with the concept of Léa on her knees before him.

He was supposed to be
her
knight, and...he was supposed to be in control.

“
Say my name,
” he said between his teeth, shifting his hips between hers.

Her eyes caught his above her. And widened, hers very dark, hiding the gold. Her body stopped twisting in hunger, and one long gasp moved through it. “Daniel,” she said quietly and very firmly. Asserting her own claim.

Or accepting his.

And then suddenly her face lit in that old delight in him, as if the sun rose and set on him, as if he was her world. As if she had remembered that. “I love you,” she whispered, her face so happy, and he was inside her before he even realized what he was doing.

A thrust so hard and so sudden that she gave a half-laugh and a gasp. Her smile dissolved, her eyes falling shut, and her muscles closed around him.

Yes.

He was home, he was where he belonged,
nothing
mattered more right now than her body taking him.

He realized he had released her wrists only when one of her hands jerked guiltily away from his sunburned back—he hadn’t even felt the pain. She slid both hands down to his butt and sank them in hard, as if to remind herself not to let them slide anywhere else.

Mmm. “Nice,” he breathed, leaning down closer to her, trying to keep watching her face, but his own focus kept shattering, dissolving, sinking back into his own body and her hold on him.

“You have to know I love you,” she breathed, her hands flexing into him, her thighs wrapping around him, her inner muscles squeezing, as if everything about her was a message.
Putain
, but he loved the way she communicated. “You have to.”

“I know it
now.
” Easing out and finding home again, always a home, always a welcome, always her body tightening, her hands gripping, her head tossing. “Like this.”

Her eyebrows flexed together, and her eyes opened again, but he slipped one hand under her hips to pull her into him closer, and her lashes fell back against her cheeks.

He leaned very low and close to her. “I know it all the time,” he whispered. “Léa. All the time.” It was what kept him going. What drove him to please her, even when that was the very thing that kept him so far from her so much. And what had thrown him into a flat panic when he had found her gone and realized she had been slipping through his fingers for months, like water he was trying too hard to hold. Panicked as if he literally would be wiped out of existence without that love.

A smile ghosted across her face and disappeared under her own arousal, her focus on sensation. Her lashes so heavy on her cheeks. He watched them flutter with each thrust, glorying in the way her fingers dug into his muscles.

He got lost in it, slipping his hand down between their bodies to make sure she was lost, too. “I love you,” he whispered. “I love you.” As they both came. His a hard dominant stamp of possession, and hers an utter yielding.

* * *

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The cool aloe slopped on his hot back, and he hissed and turned his head on his arms, offering her a sleepy smile. His chest and stomach hurt to lie on, too, but he hadn’t slept properly for a week, and he was entirely ready to doze off. Until the aloe woke him up again.

“You should have put some on last night,” Léa chided.

He hadn’t had any in his room. And anyway, he didn’t take care of himself much. Léa was the one who took care of him. Bandaged his wounds, kissed them, cooed over them. His mother had died young, and his father had been a good father, taking him camping and to the beach and spending time with him, but he had also been of the
Tough it up, that’s life
school.

The first time seventeen-year-old Léa had spotted a burn on his hand, clucked over it, and hauled out the BurnEase and the blue bandages chefs always used, he had thought he had died and gone to heaven. He had yielded all the care of himself over to her in giddy delight. She did it so much better, and it felt so much sweeter.

He fought the battles, and she healed the wounds. It worked for him.

A quick sudden spasm of that old knot he thought was loosened.
Is it not working for her?

No, but everything was fine now. He just had to get to the bottom of what had made her disappear like that, so that he didn’t spend every future consulting trip with his stomach in knots, braced against that vast void-like terror of finding her not home again. He just wanted to make sure that would never, ever happen again. And then it would all be fine.

She was his. He had gotten her back, taken her completely. She was all his again.

At the gentle nudge of her hand, he rolled obediently over onto the big towel she had provided for that purpose, flinching as his sticky, painful back connected with it. And flinching again as the gooey stuff connected with his chest.
Putain
, but he hated that feeling. Still, the hand stroking it made it better. He loved Léa’s hands. They were so much smaller than his, because she was smaller, but when a man had a chance to hold one and play with it and really focus on it—as he did sometimes on plane trips, when he was tired of working, or on those lazy Monday afternoons—he could see how she had such long fingers for the size of her hands, capable and strong and delicate, too, hands to grip a paintbrush or a man, or help her brother and sister with their school projects, or make her siblings’ new apartments beautiful when they set out on their own, or set perfect tables when they were short-staffed, or any of the million things he had seen them do in the past twelve years.

His favorite thing for them to do was to grip a man, of course. He smiled and caressed a hand up her forearm to her elbow, the closest he could get to kissing one of her hands when it was covered with so much goo.