"I want you in here with me," Dylan said. She held his stare as she ran her palms up her flat belly and over the buoyant swells of her br**sts. "Come in here with me...I want to feel your hands on me. All over me."
Holy...fuck.
Rio's jaw was clamped so tightly his molars should have shattered. It was damn hard to wallow in self-doubt or shame when the only woman he wanted - a woman he wanted more than anything ever before in his entire existence - was looking at him like she intended to devour him whole.
He got rid of his boots and socks, then stripped out of his shirt and pants and boxers. He stood there, naked, fully erect, his dermaglyphs pulsing with all the colors of his desire. Hands fisted at his sides, he let Dylan take a good long look at him. It was excruciating - those first few seconds as her darkening eyes lowered and her gaze swept slowly over him.
He knew what she was seeing. Hell, he could see it well enough for himself: his battered torso, the skin of which was glossy and tight in some places, rough in others, where he still carried tiny pieces of shrapnel embedded several layers down into his flesh. And farther down was the thick red scar that ran down the length of his left thigh, the gash that had almost cost him the limb entirely.
Dylan was seeing all of that ugliness now.
He waited for her eyes to lift.
He waited to see pity in her face, dreaded that he might see revulsion.
"Rio," she murmured thickly.
Her head came up slowly and her eyes met his. Her peridot gaze was the color of a night-dark forest now, her pupils large beneath the heavy fall of her lashes. There was no pity there, nothing but dusky, feminine desire.
Rio wanted to throw his head back and shout his relief, but the sight of Dylan's parted lips, her hungry eyes drinking him in so wantonly, robbed him of his voice.
She opened the glass door of the shower. "Get in here," she demanded, her mouth curling into the most incredibly sexy smile. "Get in here...right now."
He grinned and stepped inside, joining her under the warm spray.
"That's better," Dylan purred as she wrapped her arms around him and pulled him down into a deep, wet kiss.
She felt so good against him, all that slick, hot skin, all those exquisite curves. Rio held her close, burrowing his fingers into her wet hair, feeling the warm beat of her pulse against his wrist where it rested at the side of her neck.
"I want to taste you," she said, already breaking away from his mouth to kiss a slow trail down his throat, to the hollow at its base, then along the line of his shoulder. She sank lower still, playing her tongue over the muscled slabs of his chest, teasing his male ni**les into tight little buds. "You taste good, Rio. I could eat you up."
He groaned as she let her mouth travel down his sternum, nipping at him as she went along. Her kiss got less playful as she moved toward his scarred left side.
Rio sucked in his breath. "Don't," he rasped, awkward panic seizing him when he thought of her getting anywhere near those hideous marks. She glanced up at him in question and he wanted to die from shame. "It's all right. You don't have to..."
"Will it hurt you if I touch you there?" she asked gently, her fingers skating so carefully over the ruined skin. "Does that hurt at all, Rio?"
He managed a weak shake of his head.
It didn't hurt. What little he could feel through the damaged nerve endings and scars felt good.
Cristo en cielo, it felt so very good to be touched by her.
"Does this hurt?" she asked, pressing the lightest, most caring kiss to the ugliest part of him. "How does that feel, Rio?"
"Good," he rasped, his throat going thick, and not just from the sheer pleasure of Dylan's mouth on his body. Her tender gift just now - that sweet, accepting kiss - touched a place in him so deep and forgotten he thought it had been long dead. "Dylan...you are...Jesus, but you are the most incredible woman I have ever known. I truly mean that."
She smiled up at him, beaming now. "Well, brace yourself, because I'm only getting started."
Going down on her knees on the tiles before him, Dylan kissed his pelvis and thighs, lapping at the thin rivulets of water that sluiced down from over his shoulders. Each brush of her mouth near his c**k made his erection ratchet tighter, harder. When she reached up and took him in her small wet hands, he thought he was going to lose it.
"How does this feel?" she asked as she stroked him from balls to head and back again, the wicked look in her eyes telling him she knew precisely how it must feel.
Good thing, because he was incapable of talk so long as she was lavishing such slow, rhythmic attention on him.
And as if that weren't glorious enough, Dylan's tongue joined the party too. She slid along the length of his shaft, then wrapped her lips around the head of his c**k and sucked him deep into her mouth.
Rio let out a hoarse moan, and it was all he could do to hold his balance as she swallowed even more of him. He shuddered as she tongued the underside of his penis, her mouth moving up and down on him, tightening the pressure that was already building at the base of his spine. A fierce orgasm was roaring up on him like a freight train.
Ah, f**k, if he didn't stop her soon he was going to -
With an animal snarl, he lifted Dylan off his throbbing sex. "My turn now," he said, his voice deep and otherworldly.
She gasped as he pushed her back against the tiles and kissed her with the same slow torment she'd dealt to him. He played his mouth along her throat and down between her br**sts, where the fluttering drum of her heartbeat danced against his tongue. He kissed her perfect rosy ni**les, using only the slightest tips of his fangs to graze her as he moved lower, to the dip of her navel and then the pleasing curve of her hip.