He rose up over her, braced above her. “I’m not keeping score. I’ll play you all night if you want that.”
“It’s always about the score.”
Everything else in his life was. He notched between her legs. “Not you. Never with you.” He toyed with entering her, slid against her wetness, the pressure of that glide making them both moan. “You need that, baby.”
“I—oh—” Twin spikes from her boot heels on his ass said it all.
“I should—” Arms around his neck, heels stabbing, she wasn’t going to let him up to find a rubber without a struggle.
“I have an IUD and I’m good to go, but if you give me a disease I will—”
No more threats. No diseases, no accidents. The best cons and liars were also the most careful. He adjusted his hips and pushed home, past an unexpected tight ring of muscle and nails biting into his neck, and into the lush even heat of her, until he was seated all the way in and Aria stopped holding her breath and softened under him.
He dropped his forehead to her shoulder, overcome by the collision of desire and relief and the immensity of having Aria in his arms after all the years of having her only in his thoughts.
“Don’t fall apart on me,” she said. Hard words that didn’t match the tenderness of her hands on his back or the way she crossed her legs, boot leather squeaking as she rocked her pelvis.
“Too late.” He lifted his face to look for her eyes. “Been there, done that. Bought the T-shirt and wore it till it disintegrated. Never recovered.”
She said, “Liar,” but her lips tremble
d and her eyes were wet and it was no lie when she kissed him with inflamed longing that matched his own.
When he moved in her, it was to find the part of himself that believed in happy endings, and knew paradise wasn’t the place he’d created in the Balinese mountains, but the woman who met his every thrust with her own, who said his name over and over, in a voice broken with passion as they spiraled together and both fell apart.
For the first time in a long time, post-sex didn’t make him antsy. He didn’t want to leave the bed, clean up and move on. He wanted to stay there forever. Aria, free of her boots at last, tumbled over his chest, almost asleep, no more tension in either of them, only a kind of peace he couldn’t remember ever feeling.
Maybe it was the bed.
There hadn’t been too many beds in their relationship. A lot of cars, walls, staircases, the club chairs in the professor’s study, but mattresses had been rare and a whole night sleeping together was something they’d never done.
“I want to stay, sleep with you,” he said.
“Hmm.”
“I’m taking that as a yes.”
“Old man.” His laughter disturbed her; she lifted her head and blinked at him. “You used to be good for more than one round.”
“Not that we’re keeping score, but you’ve had three rounds.”
She climbed across him, and that’s all it took to be young again.
Chapter Seven
Aria had to stop feeling like this. Like an idiot schoolgirl who thought love was real and she was the only one in the world to find it. She’d been that girl, but that was long ago, and she’d wised up since then. She had to stop letting Cleve get to her. Oh, he could make her orgasm as many times as he liked, but he couldn’t touch her with such reverence, couldn’t look at her like he was ready to die for her, because that was every dirty trick in the book.
He was a filthy rotten liar, apprenticed to the best of them, no matter what his lips on her skin said. All the sweet touches and cravings he built were carefully calculated to get her to relax, to give in to him. He didn’t have Celestia, but that’s the way he intended to get her, with his honeyed tongue and hot sex.
Pickled Christ, he was good at the hot sex part.
She couldn’t fake her response to that. She realized he always had been good at the sex part, but she’d had no scale of comparison. He’d been her first and she had a thousand reasons to remember him as a terrible lay. Maybe it was the long drought and the blowback from the Celestia job, maybe it was worrying about walking into yakuza territory to clinch the sale, but she’d never felt so free with another man, so deliciously ready to rock and roll, as she did with Cleve, and that was confusing. He was the enemy and a diabolically clever one, and she couldn’t afford to forget that in the heat of the moment.
She’d promised herself she’d keep it impersonal, wouldn’t say his name, but when he was inside her it was the only word she remembered. And she was keeping score. He only stopped being dangerous to her and Celestia when he was asleep.
Or dead.
Dead would be preferable, but she was a master thief, not an assassin, and dead could be messy, so dead, for all its crazy-good threat value, was off the table. Fuck it.