Chapter 25
Fifty-Three Days Until the End of the Summer Excavation Season
Ripley’s never seen this look on James’s face before, though it must’ve been there under the surface—the hunger sharpened to the point of pain, like it’s both worse and better now that he’s had a taste.
He grips her neck, his fingers plunged into the base of her bun, his thumb at the corner of her jaw.
Softly, he tilts her head back—not touching, just looking.
He follows her lines and curves, his eyes glinting blue and green and gold as the angle of his gaze changes.
Absently, he pulls his hand from hers to push up his glasses.
Ripley lets out a shaky exhalation. He wants to see her.
“I want you to undo your hair,” he says in a harsh whisper. “Will you?”
She reaches for the elastic that secures her bun, lets her hair tumble free. Before she’s got the hair tie around her wrist, his fingers are in the strands, spreading them with a slow reverence.
In her imagination, those fingers are everywhere. Opening her. Showing him what’s soft and needy and hidden.
“It’s beautiful stuff, Ripley. I’m sorry, I know you don’t like that word, but fuck.” His thickened voice scrapes over the profanity like a tongue over rock candy. “I want to…” He rubs a lock of hair between his fingers, winds it around his fist like a rope.
She’s going to pass out and he’s kissed her exactly once.
“I got it from my mom,” she says, a little dazed by the darkness in his eyes.
“No. It was always yours. And now it’s mine,” he says, bringing a fistful to his nose. He learns with his hands, this man—the shape of things, their texture, the lay of the shadows he’ll draw later. Under his eye, she feels beautiful and rare, worth preserving in strokes of bright color.
She realizes she’s put her hand to his ribs when his chest startles at her touch, filling in an eager movement that’s almost a gasp, then tightening on a wry breath of a laugh.
“Not there,” he says against her mouth, picking up her hand and interlacing their fingers.
“Oh, sorry. Bruise?” Little injuries happen all the time on the dig. She wants to see this one, to peel his shirt away and kiss it better.
“No,” he says, his face against her cheek. His fingers tremble between her own. “I meant not anywhere. Not yet. I want this to last.”
She’s not sure she can endure as long as him.
James, it’s clear, can deny himself pleasure for years.
He’s got one hand on her breast and the other inside the waistband of her skirt, tracing the dimples at the base of her spine.
When he bites her ear and she makes a half-surprised, half-gasping little Oh!
, he slows down and does it again, stays there until he’s learned everything about pressure and tongue and teeth.
These stolen hours will end sooner than they think. Still, she wants to try to wait for him. She wants to last as long as she can.
She knows she’ll be begging him to let her come long before he cracks.
She stretches her finger to stroke the bridge of his glasses. “I want to take these off when it’s time.”
A double curve blooms on his lips, and she wishes she could draw with anything near his level of skill. It’s not for a photograph, this expression. It can’t be seen by a lens, only through a living eye that leads to a heart that leads to a hand.
“You can take them,” he says, sliding his fingers out of her hair.
“They’re mostly for distance vision anyway.
” The brief, sure press of his thumb against her throat before he starts on the buttons of her blouse isn’t an accident, because nothing he does is an accident.
Darkness blooms in her head, desire leaving her dizzy.
She presses down the urge to have all of him now.
Instead, she reaches for his glasses, cherishing his small, tight breath as she touches his ears, loving the sweep of his eyelashes against his cheek and the almost shy dip of his chin as he lets her take them.
She folds them deliberately, the way he would, and slides them into his breast pocket.
He pushes her blouse off her shoulders, sweeping away her surface layer as worshipfully as a preservationist.
“Oh, Ripley,” he says reverently in his scratchiest morning-after voice. “Look at you.” He splays a hand around her side to tuck his thumb under the lace of her bralette, strokes like they have nothing but world and time.
His admiration feels like a lot all at once. “You make a B cup sound like a Powerball jackpot,” she says shakily.
“Don’t do that, my darling.” His eyes flick up to hers, his smile full of so much compassion and tenderness, her breathing stutters. “You see beauty in everything but yourself. Let me see the beauty in you.” He easily pulls her astride his lap and settles her arms around his neck.
He brings her hair over her shoulders, arranges it across her chest. His hands make her forget she has an unspeakable farmer’s tan as they draw her bra straps down.
His thumbs ease her out of the slippery, stretchy cups so he can feather across her nipples, shade them in as she gasps, add crosshatching that makes her ache.
“Can I?” he whispers before learning her with his mouth. He moves so slowly, she’s not sure if time has stopped altogether.
“I want to see you,” she breathes when she can’t take it any longer. “I want your clothes off, I want my clothes off, I want you in my hand and in my mouth and inside me now, James. Now.”
She can feel his lips making a double curve against her clavicle.
“Patience, Ripley,” he says, so low and slow that her body clenches on a spasm of unbearable anticipation.
He sounds amused, but would an unaffected man flip her to her back and move his big body over her quite that quickly?
Would he bring her fingers to his buttons, watch as she undid them, then toss his shirt to the floor with his glasses still in the pocket?
Ripley doesn’t think so.
Still, when he comes down, he holds himself back, hovering, his eyes a serious shade of blue.
His chest is wider than she imagined, with a triangle of dark hair in the center.
His arms she’s seen before, but not like this—not straining above her, shoulders defined by broad strokes of muscle that rise with his effort.
Browned neck, lighter chest, dark nipples. Painfully beautiful.
“We can still stop,” he says, sounding very much like he does not want to stop. “If we don’t go any further, we can still check the No box on the conflict-of-interest declaration. If we ever need to.”
She smiles and traces the ladder of his abs to see them jump. “No real world,” she says. “Not allowed.”
“I want to keep you safe, Ripley,” he whispers.
“I know,” she says, cupping his face in her hand, trying to stroke his soul through his skin. “But this is the time we have. Now, James.”
He groans, letting his weight down, finally letting her feel the good length of him between her legs, the almost involuntary buck of his hips, his hot breath against her neck.
He smells like grass and lemons, like discovery, like a hot wind and a cold drink in summer.
The pressure inside her is wound so tight, and he feels so good.
So good. If she moved against him like this, if he would put firmer pressure right there—
“Pants stay on,” he gasps out, easing himself away exactly where she wants more. It’s all she can do not to keen her disappointment.
“They do?” She looks down at his trousers and her skirt. They’re both wretchedly sturdy.
He gives a breathless laugh, laying hot, seeking kisses from her ear down her neck and toward her breasts. “Knickers, Ripley. Knickers stay on. Trousers come off.”
“Now?” she asks hopefully. “And then knickers soon?”
“Stop tormenting me,” he commands. “I need them on. I might get carried away without them.”
“Do you often get carried away?” She hopes the answer is yes.
“No,” he says darkly, and that’s so much better than yes that she can’t help making a little sound. “Patience, Ripley,” he repeats, but he pinches her nipple while he says it, and she cries out again.
He takes his time, making her wait long enough that when he kneels and eases her skirt down over her hips, the slide of fabric on skin makes her arch and burn, the trace of his shaking finger under the lace of her underwear damn near pushing her over the edge.
He would be like this if he were inside her—patiently, methodically taking her apart.
Seeing her with an artist’s uncompromising eye, like she’s a series of portraits: Unkissed. Undressed. Undone.
She wants to undo his trousers, but her fingers are no good, fumbling the incomprehensible fastenings until he guides her hands away. “Hooks,” he explains, letting them fall open. “My tailor loves them.”
“Wow,” she says. His very short boxers are navy with white trim, one hundred percent uptight. His erection is ruining any lines his tailor tried to achieve. His thighs are bunched with restraint, the dragon at the apex of his right leg shifting its spread wings above his long, deeply carved scar.
“Can I?” she asks, reaching out.
He nods once, his expression harsh with hunger and pleasure as she thumbs the little dragon.
She doesn’t have to ask why he got it—the meaning isn’t subtle. Everything he loved, everything he lost. Instead, she asks, “How old were you?”
“Eighteen. And very, very drunk. Afterward, the artist asked if the design was original, then offered me a job. I vomited on his shoes.”
“You’re never easy on yourself, are you?”
“You’re one to talk.”
“I could be easy on you.” She lets her hand move up from the dragon, and he groans. Underneath the navy cotton, his cock strains. She wants to see the moment his control breaks.
She’s moving to cup him when he abruptly pulls back. He yanks two of the divans out of their square arrangement, shoves them into one long line, and lifts her dangling legs onto the makeshift bed. Before she can parse what’s happening, he’s turning them so he’s underneath, his eyes a little wild.
“This way,” he says, rocking her hips against him. It’s so much pleasure all at once that her lips part, her head falling back. “Yes? This way,” he repeats, his voice like smoke over Scottish whisky, his fingers digging into her ass.
“Do that again,” she says, the words reedy and thin. “Can you do that—ah.”
“Patience, my darling.” The strain of keeping his unbearably slow pace shows in his clenched jaw. His eyes consume her. Every line, every curve. All the places the light catches when he thrusts.
“Please, James. Please, please, please, I need—”
He lets out a broken breath, a garbled “Fuck,” and she’s on her back.
“You need more,” he says, letting himself be heavy between her legs, pushing into her soaked knickers.
“God, James!” It comes out high with joy and wonder.
He heightens the pressure again. “You need me to give this to you.”
“Yes. I need you now.” Now and forever, she thinks, and they feel like the same thing.
“You’ve been so patient, my darling,” he whispers, his lips caressing the shell of her ear, and that’s all it takes. She’s flying, pushing up underneath him, crying out with pleasure and release.
He stretches it out for a long time, staying close, rocking her until she’s limp and sated.
“Your turn,” she says lazily, drunk on what he’s done to her.
“Not tonight.” He kisses her jaw, reaches for his shirt, hands it to her.
She sits up. Not tonight means possibly never. “Seriously?”
He smudges his thumb across her cheek. “Leave me one thing I can honestly say I didn’t do. Just in case.”
“If you’re going to invoke the future, James, can it not be the terrible future where everything has gone to shit and we need plausible deniability?” she says, joking but not joking. “I mean, surely we can come up with something better than that.”
“Then let’s say we’re saving something in case we meet again. In another life.” He eases himself into his pants with a wince and a smile. “Come on, then. Take my shirt, leave the skirt. How about we break into the gift shop and see whether they have any blankets.”
“You mean how about I break into the gift shop.”
“If you insist.” He grins, and she realizes she’s fallen into his trap again.
Fallen into a lot more than that.