“Let me take you
back to your room.” Her healer stood up smoothly, in spite of her weight. “After I’m cleaned off, we’ll start with a sponge bath for you.”
Her nose crinkled in distaste. “How clinical.”
There was more of that secret smile of his. “Not the way I’m going to do it. Trust me.” He paused. “Hey, any chance you can hit the lights for me so I don’t bump us into something? You’re glowing, but I’m not sure it’s enough to go by.”
Payne had a moment of confusion—until she lifted her arm. Her healer was right. She was softly aglow, her skin casting a faint phosphorescence. . . . Perhaps this was her sexual response?
Logical, she thought. For the way he made her feel on the inside was as uncontainable as happiness and as luminous as hope.
When she willed the lights back on and unlocked the doors, he shook his head and started walking. “Damn. You’ve got some fancy tricks there, woman.”
Perhaps, but not the ones she wanted. She would love to give him back what he had shared with her . . . but she had no secrets to teach him and no blood to gift him with, as not only did humans not require such a thing, but it was capable of killing them.
“I wish I could repay you,” she murmured.
“For what?”
“Coming herein and showing me . . .”
“My buddy? Yeah, he’s an inspiration.”
For truth, ’twas more about the man in the flesh than the one on the screen. “Indeed,” Payne demurred.
Back in the recovery room, he took her to the bed and laid her out with such care, arranging the sheeting and blankets so that no part of her was bare . . . taking the time to resettle the equipment that dealt with her bodily functions . . . plumping the pillows behind her head.
Whilst he worked, he always covered his hips with something. A part of the bedding. The two halves of his coat. And then he stood on the far side of the rolling table.
“Comfortable?” When she nodded, he said, “I’ll be right back. Holler if you need me, okay?”
Her healer disappeared into the bathroom and the door shut most of the way—but not completely. A shaft of light pierced through into the stall of the falling water and she saw clearly his white-coated arm reach in, turn a handle, and call forth the warm rain.
Clothes were removed. All of them.
And then there was a brief glimpse of glorious flesh as he stepped under the spray and closed the glass partition. As the auditory rhythm of the water changed, she knew his naked form was breaking up the free fall.
What did he look like, sluiced with water, slick and warm and so very male?
Pushing herself up off the pillows, she leaned to the side . . . and leaned a little more . . . and leaned more still until she was all but hanging off....
Ah, yeeees. His body was in profile, but she saw plenty: Carved with musculature, his chest and arms were heavy over tight hips and long, powerful legs. A dusting of dark hair sat upon his pectorals and formed a line that went o’er his abdomen and down, down . . . so far down....
Damn it, she could not see enough, and her curiosity was too desperate and driving to ignore.
What did his sex look like? Feel like . . .
With a curse, she awkwardly shuffled herself around so that she was on the end of the bed. Angling her head, she made the very best of the limited exposure of that crack in the doorway. But as she had moved, so had he, and he was now facing away from her, his back and his . . . lower body . . .
She swallowed hard and stretched upward to see even more. As he unwrapped the cleansing bar, water streamed across his shoulder blades and rivered o’er his spine, flowing onto his buttocks and the backs of his thighs. And then his hand appeared on the nape of his neck, the frothy suds he had called up in his palms going the way of the water as he washed his body.
“Turn about . . .” she whispered. “Let me see all of you. . . .”
The desire for her eyes to get greater access only increased as his soapy ministrations went below his waist. Lifting one leg, and then the other, his hands were tragically efficient as they went o’er his thighs and calves.
She knew when he tended to his sex. Because his head fell back and his hips curled up tight.
He was thinking of her. She was sure of it.