Burned Deep (Burned 1)

Shifting, he slipped from the bed. My brow furrowed.

“Um, didn’t you just suggest we were about to go at it again?”

“It wasn’t so much a suggestion as a statement of fact,” he said. He was thick and hard.

My mouth watered.

I would never get over how fabulously built he was.

He lifted me into his arms and headed to the hallway.

“Where are we going now?” I asked in between nibbling his earlobe.

“My bedroom.”

“That wasn’t it?”

“No. I didn’t know how messy we might get with the oil, so I set up that room.”

“We could have gotten messier.”

He grunted in that animalistic way that sent zings through me. “The intention was the massage. You’re lucky I could contain myself enough to give it to you.”

“Oh, you definitely gave it to me,” I said in a flirty tone that was wholly uncharacteristic of me. Guess he brought out my fun side in addition to the naughty one.

“Nice to see you have a sense of humor.”

“You’re right.” It wasn’t as though I let it see the light of day all that often.

We entered another room—an even bigger one than the last. The mammoth rock-trimmed corner fireplace glowed. No candles or other light. Just the fire.

He set me on the edge of the bed and said, “I’ll be right back.”

As he vanished in the direction in which we’d just come, I suspected he went to blow out all the candles.

I stood and took in the more masculine room, decorated with deep-bronze silk drapes and a duvet. Large, distressed brown leather chairs and round wooden tables of varying heights. Books scattered everywhere, even stacked on the wood floor. No personal pictures, as was the case throughout the house, that I’d seen. But I did spy framed artwork on the walls. Several penciled schematics of famous vessels like the Titanic, the Hindenburg, and the Hughes H-4 Hercules—the Spruce Goose—which my dad had once taken me to see on display at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in Oregon, after it’d been moved from its previous Long Beach home.

I stole a peek at some of the authors of the hardbacks lying about. Tolkien, Browning, Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Dickens.

So Dane liked the classics. Classic literature, classic artwork—or modes of transportation, possibly. Historic, inspirational, intellectual things. That told me more about him than any photo snapped at the Grand Canyon could, I surmised.

I wondered if he liked Casablanca. Gone with the Wind. The Prince of Tides.

What sort of music did he listen to? I scanned the room, looking for an iPod speaker or other sound system. Nothing. I was curious to know if, given that he’d admitted to not having thought about adding tunes to our seductive rendezvous in the other room—when he’d gone to the trouble of scattering rose petals—he might prefer the sounds of nature. The creek, the wind, the thunder and lightning when we had it.

I found something very stimulating about that.

I sat on the bed as he returned. I slipped between the silky ecru sheets and he joined me.

“I took you for more of an absurdly high-count Egyptian cotton bedding sort,” I teased.

“That would be correct.”

I rubbed the lavish sateen between my fingers and thumb. “So … for me, again?”

He grinned. “Thought you’d like it.”

“I do.” The man didn’t miss a thing. Even the lack of music had been perfect, whether he’d known it or not. I might have missed all of his desire-roughened breaths with something playing too loudly in the background.