She just looked. He just looked. Both of them held in tight stasis that knew exactly where to centre itself. Her chin was up and her dark eyes were defensive, her soft, lush, beautiful mouth quivering and as vulnerable as hell.
Now she had come this far Cristina did not know what to do or say next to make something happen. If he rejected her she would die where she stood. Water hissed from behind the plastic curtain drawn across the bath, steam swirled and eddied, to say that the ancient boiler had not let her down as it often did.
He recognised his bowtie holding her hair back and his eyelashes flickered across the darkening green of his eyes.
‘I thought we could share the shower,’ she heard herself say in a breathless little voice. ‘Do you mind?’
Did he mind? Anton mocked. For the first time in six years she had come to him, and it did not need words on his part to tell her how he felt about that. She only had to dip her eyes to the cluster of black curls surrounding his sex to know whether he minded her coming to him like this.
The pink tip of her tongue appeared as she looked at him. The physical response his body gave brought her eyes flickering back to his face. Without uttering a single word he reached out with one hand and swept back the plastic curtain, watched the tight little pull of air she took before she could peel herself away from the door.
Suddenly stupidly shy, Cristina slewed her eyes away from him and turned to put out a hand to test the heat of the water spraying out of the shower head. It was too hot; she adjusted it. His hands arrived on her hips as she did so, the jut of his sex making its bold statement against her while he waited for her to be very practical and get the water temperature just right. For some reason the situation caught her with a compulsive giggle, and from behind her she heard his low, deep, husky laugh.
The tension broke, just like that, and he was lifting her up against him to latch his teeth to her shoulder while he stepped into the bath. Water poured down her front, the curtain was swept shut, steam fogged her vision and Luis fogged up everything else.
He touched, he stroked, he moulded her to him, following the streams of water. She responded by lifting up her arms to curve them around his neck and turned her face so she could claim his mouth. When that was no longer enough she twisted to face him, and that was when the really serious kissing and stroking began.
He filled her hands and she stroked him gently. His hand slipped between her thighs. They made love to each other with their mouths and their fingers until both were barely on the planet, but he was not going to let this be over as quickly as that, because once it was over neither knew what was waiting beyond, and they didn’t want to know.
So he soothed things down by locating the soap, and began washing her all over while she stood gazing up at him with heavy, dark, love-drugged eyes. ‘Luis, Luis,’ she kept on saying. He wondered if she was aware at all that she said his name like a whispered call to a lost lover. I’m here, he wanted to say, but was too afraid of breaking into the spell that was holding them both.
Instead he handed her the soap and then stood and just enjoyed while she washed him, caressed him, until he could stand it no longer and he switched off the shower and stepped out of the bath. He wrapped a towel each around them, then lifted her into his arms to carry her into the bedroom.
His eyes blazed when he saw that the covers had been stripped back from the bed. She’d planned this, had known they were going to end up here. This beautiful, stubborn contrary woman, who was her own worst enemy, pushed him away with one hand and hooked him right back to her with the other.
They fell on the bed in a spray of clean water droplets, rough towelling and deep, hungry kisses. They made love while the afternoon sun dropped lower in the sky. And when it was over it wasn’t over, because they still touched, kissed, drew out the after-loving like a trailing silken thread, until hunger and thirst sent her leaping off the bed to pick up the tray.
She’d forgotten nothing. Anton smiled as she placed the tray on the flat of the bed between them, then gave him the wine bottle to open while she knelt beside him, golden, slender, totally carefree in her nakedness, as she broke off chunks of bread and smeared them with conserve, offering him a piece, then smiling at him as he handed her the wine to pour while he bit into the bread. His bowtie had managed to stay in her hair, though he didn’t know how it had, considering what they had been doing. She looked loved and lovely, lips soft and swollen from his kisses, the swing of her nipples dark and tight.
She offered him a glass of wine. He took it and drank, then his face instantly contorted at the harsh, brackish taste.
‘My God, you’re trying to poison me,’ he gasped.
To his shock, huge glistening tears filled her eyes.
‘What did I say?’ he demanded in bewilderment, then saw the way she was staring at his glass of wine. ‘Christina…’ He sighed. ‘Don’t be such a baby. I was joking! Here—try the wine,’ he invited. ‘I can guarantee it will knock your eyes out.’
She shook her head, mouth small now, and trembling, those tear-filled eyes too big in her face. Anger roared up like a monster inside him. Who the hell had knocked the spirit out of her to the extent that she could almost fall apart over a glass of poor wine?
That bastard Ordoniz?
He tossed the rest of the wine to the back of his throat and swallowed, then slammed the glass back down on the tray.
‘All right,’ he said then. ‘Let’s talk about this. Since when did you get this upset over a lousy glass of wine, instead of just tossing your own glassful into my face for being so insensitive?’
‘I wanted it to be perfect.’
‘Wanted what to be perfect?’
‘This…’ She stared at the bed, the tray—him. ‘You, me, here—our last time together,’ she whispered.
Our last time…
The rumbling beginnings of their next major battle began to roll around the room. Anton tried to hold it back by clamping his lips together and clenching just about every muscle he could. But it was not going to happen. Anger six long years in the fermenting, it was filling with a bitterness that by far outstripped the taste of the wine.
‘So this—’ he flicked a hand at the tray ‘—the surprise visit to the bathroom and the rest—was just for the sex, was it?’
‘No—’
‘A last good old frolic with your Englishman before you kicked him out of your life again?’
‘Y-you—’
‘I’ve had it,’ he announced, and launched himself right off the bed.