But she’d already dropped away into sleep, and didn’t answer.
3
She hovered just under the surface of sleep with strange little dreams winding through, braiding together, then fading off like ribbons of smoke.
Despite the misty parade of dreams, more odd than disturbing, she felt warm and secure and content.
So when Roarke shifted away, she edged over, holding on to that warmth, that security, that contentment.
His lips brushed her brow as he started to untangle himself from her.
She said, “Uh-uh.”
“Sleep,” he murmured, and would have lifted her arm away but she tightened her hold.
“Too early. Still dark. Stay.”
“I’ve a holo conference in—”
She just didn’t care, and angling her head found his mouth in the dark.
She wanted not just the arousal, but the intimacy of the quiet, the silky splendor of unity before the world woke and pulled them both back into the bright and the hard.
Just him—she wanted just him—in the big bed under the sky window before dawn crept in cold.
So she drew him with her into the soft and the sweet.
He heard her sigh with the kiss that built a shimmering bridge between night and day, one that poured love into him like liquid gold. And she shifted over him, laying heart to heart, mouth to mouth, body to body.
The long lines of her enchanted him: smooth skin, firm muscle. His hands roamed, slid under the thin shirt she slept in, glided up the lean length. He thought he could be content, his world complete, if a moment just like this spun into forever.
Then she rose up, tugged her shirt up and away, and took him in.
Pleasure leaped, one hot, hard bound, then settled into soft beats, like a pulse, a proof of life. They were shadows in the dark, cocooned in its secrets, bathed in its silence, enspelled by each other. She rocked him, rocked herself, toward bliss with slow, undulating movements that gripped his heart, ruled his body.
He rose up to her, his hands lost in her hair, his mouth locked on hers, and his heart—all its chambers—flooded with love. They took each other now into the slow burn of sensations kindled by that steady flame of love, beat by beat until the pulse was all.
Joined, they rose and they fell together.
Again she sighed, still wound around him, her cheek pressed to his. “Okay,” she said, sighing again. “Okay.”
When he lay back with her, she was limp as melted wax and just as warm. He brushed his hand over her hair, over her cheek, made her smile.
“I think we’ll make it.”
“Didn’t we just?”
Still smiling, she jabbed a finger in his belly. “Not that—though that was really nice. I guess my brain keeps circling around the Miras. You weren’t there with them at the crime scene. It was . . . it’s the way they look at each other, and touch. A couple times I had to look away because it felt like I was intruding. They’ve been married for decades, but when you see them like that . . . like last night? You know why.”
She closed her eyes. “I want that. I never thought I did or could or would, but I want that. I want to be with you for decades and have you still look at me the way he looks at her.”
“You’re the love of my life. And always will be.”
“Maybe you could tell me that in like thirty years.”
“That’s a promise. And now, love of my life, go back to sleep.”
She frowned when he rolled out of bed. “It’s the middle of the night.”