Delusion in Death (In Death 35)

If it came to it, she’d make sure he had an active part in exposing who and what in the agency played a part. Odds were, she mused, she wouldn’t have to make sure of anything, and he’d see to it himself.

They’d have different reasons, and his would be payback. Then again, that was its own form of justice.

“I want a shower before I get to it.” She walked toward the bath, stopped. Gave him a look and crooked her finger.

He lifted his brows. “Oh, really?”

“Up to you, ace, but in about thirty seconds, I’m going to be hot and wet. You’re going to want to finish getting out of that suit.”

A round of water sports might be just the thing, he decided, to take both of them away from the ugliness of the day for a time.

Life needed to be lived.

As he suspected, steam billowed through the wide opening of the glass-walled shower. She had every jet pumping, and brutally hot at that. He wondered it didn’t blister her skin.

But there she stood, long and sleek and glistening in the mists and the water, her face lifted, her short cap of hair glossy as a seal’s coat.

He stepped in behind her, winced at the boiling punch of the waterfall. A small price to pay, he thought as he wrapped his arms around her, nuzzled his lips at the curve of her neck.

“Knew I could count on you.” She hooked her arm around his neck, leaned back into him. “Feels good.”

“You do.” To prove it, he slid his hands up her body, glided them over her breasts. “I won’t speak of the lobster boil of the water.”

“We’re burning out toxins.”

“Is that the way of it?”

“That’s my story.” She turned, slippery and quick, to lock herself to him, to fix her mouth to his, drowning them both in the fast-rising flood of need.

His mind emptied but for her, the hungry mouth, the urgent press of her body. Steam rose up, swirled around them as he took his hands over all those lovely, familiar places. Made her gasp and moan and reach.

He spun her around, pressed her to the wall and gave himself the pleasure of her back. The line of it, the tough cut of muscle under smooth skin.

He tapped a tile then filled his hands with fragrant soap. Slowly at first, slowly running it over her in a slick foam. Back and shoulders, hips and thighs, belly and breasts, until her breath was deep and uneven, until the scent swirled like the steam.

Hands and mouth, only hands and mouth—still slow, lulling and seducing so his cop, his warrior, his wife trembled.

As did his own heart.

His fingers found her, teased, a featherlight torture.

Lost in him. Her hands fisted against the dripping wall as her system churned, yearned. She wanted to turn to him, take him in. Take him. But he’d trapped her, and used her, undid her.

Inch by inch he took her up, and held her, somehow held her back from that last reach so she quaked and writhed, steeped in pleasure, and just short of release.

“I can’t.”

“You can.” Once again he pressed his lips to the curve of her throat.

Release crawled through the madness of sensation. She couldn’t breathe without feeling. So much, so much. It rolled through her, a wave that built and built as it rose. Pleasure and relief blurred together, dizzying, glorious.

He turned her. She saw only the wild blue of his eyes, then his mouth was on hers again, ravaging, wrecking even as he drove into her.

Now the slap of wet flesh with the pounding drum of water, and the glory of mindless mating. He took her stroke by powerful stroke, stealing every thought, filling every void.

She fisted her hands in his hair, drew him back. She wanted his face in her eyes as well as her mind.

“You. Just you.”