If the food had been the cause, I wanted every damn person at the restaurant to feel as miserable as they’d made her feel. I knew this wasn’t a normal reaction. I hadn’t had this strong of a reaction to anyone in my entire life. Dani did it to me. She pulled my trajectory until I couldn’t find up or down or out. Someone easily could have taken me out several times today when my head had been full of her. My head and my heart. The damn charcoaled muscle, which barely could beat for the people I considered family, had been beating for weeks at her siren call.
I watched over her for several hours while she slept as the late morning shifted into late afternoon. Sitting still wasn’t an issue for me. I’d spent hours in the same position, waiting for a target to come into view on multiple occasions. I’d been places where I hadn’t been able to move more than a toe or finger without giving my cover away. Watching Dani breathe was like a gift compared to those times. A moment I would never have again. So I took it with both hands, memorizing the parts of her visible over the sheet as well as the curves underneath it.
The room had started to shift into the autumn afternoon shadows by the time she shifted back to life. The only light we’d turned on was the one in the bathroom, and it barely shed its beam into the room as Dani’s eyes slowly opened, meeting mine.
“Have you been sitting there the whole time?” Her voice was dry, throaty.
I took the ginger ale out of the ice bucket, poured some in a glass, and put it on the table next to the T-shirt I’d left for her on the nightstand. At first, she didn’t reach for it; she just lay there. Eventually, she moved slowly, as if she was trying out her muscles. When she finally sat, the sheet fell away, leaving her beautifully toned skin on display. Her breasts with their rosy pink tips. The waist that curved in over hips before widening out to her gorgeous ass. She was perfect. Everything which called to me about a woman, I found in her. Gentle curves, smart brain, sharp mouth.
She reached for the T-shirt I’d left and slid it over her head, covering the body I still had burned on my brain. She reached up and undid the band which had been holding her hair back the entire day, and the dark curls rushed down and around her chin, spilling over her breasts hidden beneath my T-shirt.
She ran her fingers through her hair, rubbing over the scalp, and I had to control my body’s reaction to jump over and do it for her. To massage her head and then tilt her long, smooth neck so I could trail kisses along it. I wanted to touch her and kiss her more than I’d wanted much of anything in the last few years. Even before the mission which had cost me everything.
She finally took a sip of the ginger ale and grimaced. “Do we have any water?”
I nodded and pulled a bottle from the hotel minibar. I cracked it open for her, and our fingers collided when I handed it off. She watched me as she took a small sip before putting it on the table.
“I’m not sure I can even put the water in my stomach.”
I nodded.
She curled her legs up and rested her head on her knees like when I’d found her in the shower. Naked, pale, unmoving. It had been terrifying, and there wasn’t much that could terrify me anymore. There’d been another time I’d seen a pale, dark-haired woman who wasn’t moving. It had happened so long ago, and the pain was so piercing it was hard to remember anymore exactly what had happened when I’d found her that way, on the shore with the wind blowing the waves from the small pond onto her feet, the pale-blue nightgown clinging to her frame.
I hadn’t thought of that memory in a long time until seeing Dani in the shower.
Dani rested her head on her knees with her face turned toward me. She closed and then opened her eyes, a small smile quirking at the corner of her lips, and I felt relief wash over me. Relief that she could smile. “You’ve seen me at an awful low, Otter.”
I gave a curt nod. If this was the lowest she ever got, it was a good thing. The other dark-haired woman had been much lower.
“If you tell anyone, I might just have to kill you,” she said quietly but with a portion of her normal fierceness.
I returned her small smile with my own. “That’s the second time you’ve threatened my life today. Should I be worried?”
“Only if you spill the beans on what happened in that restroom.”
“You don’t have anything to be embarrassed about,” I told her.
“Still not a moment I want shared with the world.”
I couldn’t disagree with that.
“I feel like you need to share something completely humiliating about you so we’re even,” she said.
“You already know one of my secrets,” I told her and then regretted it because she went right to our night together. The secret I’d made her keep by forcing her from my bed. Before Dani worked herself up at the thought, I continued, “You’ve seen my hairless chest.”
Her eyes flicked to the black T-shirt I was wearing as part of the uniform for Garner’s company. Her flawlessly shaped brows joined together as she frowned. “What’s so embarrassing about it?”
“Well. It wasn’t always hairless.”
“Oookaaay,” she drew out her response.
I sighed. Was I really going to tell her this story?
“It once actually had quite a lot of hair.”
Her lips curled. “Did you shave your chest, Pretty Boy?”
Relief hit me. If she was feeling good enough to tease, she was coming through it okay.
