“Mm-hmm.”
“That means you’re okay with this?”
“Mmm.” She shifted, straddled his lap, and melded her body to his.
Maybe it was stupid. Probably it was something worse than stupid, but Kal couldn’t think what that worse thing might be, and stupid was a sin he could forgive himself for, easy, if it meant he could keep kissing Rosemary.
She tasted like chocolate. She’d eaten most of the cake and had the ice cream, besides. He palmed her breast through her shirt, ran a thumb over her nipple to feel it harden in response, breathed a sigh into her mouth. He remembered this and didn’t—that night in Lukla felt like it had happened to him in another life, but he knew how she liked him to hold her head, knew to sink his fingers into the hair at her nape and tug to get her to moan.
A soft knock at the door ripped their bodies apart.
The crew member’s “excuse me?” collided with Rosemary’s “who is it?” and then it was just a flurry of flustered movement as she fumbled with the remote to pause the movie, flew to the door, gathered dirty plates and glasses, her cheeks on fire, Kal watching from the couch, amused.
When the attendant had gone, Rosemary flopped down beside him. “Heavens,” she said, and the exasperation combined with her mild language made him laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“You.”
“Why am I funny?”
“You got caught being bad.”
“And?”
He reached out with both hands and tweaked her nipples, hard, just to watch her wiggle away and pretend to be horrified. “I bet that didn’t happen to you much, back when you were wallpaper.”
The grim line of her mouth was spoiled by the sparkle in her eyes and the dimple that kept winking into life in one cheek. “Let’s finish the movie.” She turned it back on and settled the cashmere throw over their laps.
Kal let her watch it. He watched her instead, the glow from the screen flickering over her skin, her excellent posture even sitting cross-legged on a leather sofa in first class.
“Such a princess,” he whispered. Just to see what would happen.
What happened was she gave him a look he couldn’t interpret and said, “Shh. I’m watching the movie.” Two minutes later, her hand crept over his thigh underneath the blanket, settled between his legs, and started to stroke.
She kept up a running commentary on the movie, telling him that Deadpool was charming but unsympathetic, because his problem was Hollywood simple. All he had to do was trust the girl he loved to love him back. She didn’t understand why comic book heroes had such problems with trust. The whole time, her hand worked him through his pants, hard and steady, like she’d read about how to give the perfect hand job in one of her comportment manuals.
Kal felt it was a point of manhood that he be able to contribute something to the conversation, though his balls were on fire and he’d broken out in a sweat. “Doctor Doom hides his face behind a metal mask because he has a scar.”
She shoved the waistband of his airplane pajamas aside, wrapped firm fingers around him, and said, “That’s absurd.”
“Yeah. That’s the whole reason he…” She twisted at the top of a stroke, and Kal lost his train of thought.
“He what?” She kept her eyes on the screen. Her smile was wicked.
“Turned evil,” he choked out.
She glanced at him. “Evil is as evil does, I suppose.”
Kal didn’t last long after that. He came, gasping, thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic, wondering if he’d ever meet a woman he liked better than Rosemary Chamberlain.
Chapter 8
Rosemary slid her passport across the counter to the immigration official. “What is the purpose of your visit?”
“I’m going to see my daughter.”
He scanned her passport and began thumbing through the pages. “How long do you plan to stay?”