“Ow,” he said, not opening his eyes.
“Baby,” she told him. “You fainted.”
“Passed. Out.” An important distinction there.
A featherlight tight brushed across his brow; he belatedly recognized lips and wished for them back when they’d gone. “Go to sleep,” she said. “It won’t happen again.”
He did, for the moment, believe her.
Gwen’s voice came tired in his ear—something reassuring, which was all that mattered for the moment. Her hands moved gently over his skin—damp cloth, healing touch. His arms throbbed; his body ached.
“Just patching you up again,” she said. “Please excuse me if I don’t even try to resist enjoying it. The touching part, anyway. Not the bandaging part.”
“Ow,” he said.
“Baby,” she told him. “You had already fainted.”
“Sleeping.” Definitely a distinction to make.
Her fingers trailed down his side, unexpectedly proprietary. “Go back to sleep,” she said, as if she was actually the boss of him. “You’re safe for now.”
He did, for the moment, believe her.
Something snored in Mac’s ear.
A quiet, girly snore, there and gone again.
Mac opened his eyes. Saw, to his relief, not the filthy carpet in the nighttime darkness, but instead the more distant ceiling.
In the dark. The almost complete darkness, obscuring every fine detail—just as it should but as he barely remembered it ever doing. Before the blade.
The pieces fell into place. He was on the floor of their hotel room, on his back—one hand still cuffed to the bed, his head on a pillow, his shirt gone, a blanket soft against his skin.
His free arm, pretty much asleep, curved around Gwen as she used his shoulder for a pillow and tickled the side of his face with her magnificent hair. She draped over him, her leg resting over his, her arm heavy on his chest, her hand resting directly over the faintly raised tattoo over his heart.
Her breath tickled his skin.
His arms still throbbed; his body still ached. The blade hadn’t worked on it, not any of it. A glance at his cuffed arm showed him the pendant, duct-taped to his lower arm above the bandaging there. Hot pink even in the darkness. Yay?
Slow as he was, he could put it together. She’d gone out, gotten supplies, cleaned him up again—proprietary hands—and trusted him just enough to uncuff one arm. Leaving him to heal the old-fashioned way—slowly. Without interference. Without any price to pay.
I’ll pay it sooner or later.
Of that much he was sure. As soon as he lost contact with the pendant—or it failed on its own—the blade would come roaring back, exacting its price for these moments of freedom.
Freedom.
His mind, his own. His thoughts, his own. His feelings...
His own.
His body...
That, he thought, currently belonged to Gwen.
“Mmm,” she said, barely waking, rubbing her cheek against his bare skin.
Oh, hell yeah. All Gwen’s.
He found himself grinning.
She lifted her head; he thought he discerned a frown. A reach, a stretch, a soft grunt, all during which she managed to push herself quite firmly against him, and a light clicked on. Mac made a sound of protest, squinting away, but figured it out quickly enough—the inadequate little dresser lamp, relocated here to the floor.
She said, “Was that a grin?”
He said, “Come here,” and trapped her leg beneath his own.
“Me?” she asked, waking fast, brow lifted—some sarcasm there. Challenging him.
He thought back over it—the moment in front of the hotel, the night of battle and illness, the day crammed with such intensities of vulnerability and trust that might not come in a decade of partnership. “Let me,” he said, pulling her close with that one numbed arm, abruptly enough so she lost all her breath in a short laugh, “be perfectly clear.”
She let herself fall on top of him—hesitating there for a moment, pressing against him from top to bottom and tangled along the way. When her smile came again, it was slow. “Yeah,” she said, moving subtly against him—not so subtle that it didn’t inspire an instant catch of his breath, a tremble of return thrust. “This was pretty much there from the start, wasn’t it?”
Probably he was supposed to say words. He didn’t have them. She took his face in her hands—thumbs stroking the stubble of the past day, mouth coming down on his, hair tumbling free to surround them. Her leg twined between his thighs, her shirt crept up to give him soft skin, her breasts pressed against his chest with nipples sprung hard. One hand left his face to creep down his chest, lying flat against his stomach and reaching lower.
And all of it, all of it, was his to feel. His...and hers. The swell of sensation, the rush of heat. The groan in his throat born of wanting, the wicked hard thump of his heart pounding in his chest and ears. Gwen’s hand reached his belt buckle. He sucked his stomach away, making it easy.
She froze, however briefly, and then tipped her head back and laughed.
“Ha ha?” he said, breathless and bemused.
“Ha,” she said. “Do you see us? Rolling around on the floor a day after we first saw each other, one of us handcuffed to the bed and the other of us about to go down his pants?”
“It works for me,” he said and then cursed softly as her hand slipped in under the belt. “It...totally...uh...”
“Yeah,” she said. “It works for me, too.”
And a moment later, he managed to say, more or less, “Cuffs?”
She left his zipper alone to push back her hair and regard him with regrettably serious eyes. “Ditch the knife-sword thing?”
Two syllables. He could do it. “Pocket.”
“Oh!” she said. “Pocket diving!” And went for it.
He cursed, and crushed her close, and forgot he was supposed to be kissing her—straining against the cuff, straining against her hand, straining against sanity in the very best kind of way.
“Yeah,” she said. “That is an impressive...sword.”
“Cuffs, dammit!”
“Must be the other pocket.”
It was, in fact. By the time she found the blade, working it free and withdrawing it with two very cautious fingers, he’d used his one free arm to roll her on top of him and start in on her neck—tender, silky skin, warm beneath her hair, smelling of her shampoo, tasting faintly of salt and ahh, there, that little earlobe with its three little gold hoops—
She stiffened, making a soft noise in her throat.
“Uh-huh,” he murmured, right into her ear, and nibbled. His hand worked its way down her back, found her waistband, slipped under to cup soft, warm flesh.
“Oh,” she breathed and shifted to offer better access, trembling against him just as he’d been straining moments earlier.
He jerked her a little closer. “Cuffs.”
“Cuffs,” she repeated blankly. “Oh! Cuffs!” And sat up, straddling him, tossing the blade across the room with vigor and moving against him so perfectly that his eyes rolled back and his hips lifted. She froze right where she was, hands at his chest, her gasp the only sound in the room. “Oh,” she said again on the next breath. “You— I—”
Not that he could truly hear her. Not with the blood pounding through every part of him and his body straining and the heat gathering, perfectly normal just-between-two-people heat.
“You!” She pulled off her shirt in one swift motion. No wonder those breasts had felt so perfect in every way, because there they were in that dim light and they so obviously were completely unfettered by a bra. She stood long enough to jerk off her shorts and that dim light shone golden on pale and lightly freckled skin. By then all he could do was whisper, quite hoarsely indeed, “Cuffs...”