The water is a shock. Hot, almost too hot, needling down over my shoulders, my back, his chest pressed against me from behind. He hasn’t moved to do anything but hold me here, under the spray, one arm banded around my waist, his other hand splayed flat and still against my stomach.
We’re just breathing.
The steam rises around us, the glass door fogging over, sealing us in a warm, white world where the only sound is water and our own uneven breaths. I feel every ridge of his abdomen against my spine, the steady, too-fast beat of his heart against my shoulder blade.
This is worse, somehow, than the ocean. More intimate. There are no waves to blame for the way I’m trembling.
“I can feel you thinking,” he says, his mouth close to my ear, the words a low vibration through my body. His voice is rough, stripped of its usual polish.
“I’m thinking the water bill for this villa is going to be astronomical.”
A soft, breathy sound escapes him. Not quite a laugh.
His hand slides up from my stomach, over my slick ribs, until his palm cups the underside of my breast. He doesn’t squeeze. Just holds the weight of it. His thumb strokes, once, over the peak. My head falls back against his shoulder.
“Stop thinking,” he murmurs.
His hands move with a devastating, focused patience. He turns me, water sluicing between us, and his mouth finds mine. It’s not hungry like before. It’s slow. Searching.
He kisses me until my knees genuinely threaten to buckle, until I’m clinging to his shoulders for purchase, until the only thought left is the taste of him, the slick slide of his tongue against mine. He washes me. Actually washes me. His big, clever hands moving soap over every curve, every dip, rinsing the salt and sand from my hair with a tenderness that makes my throat ache.
He treats my body like something precious, something to be handled with care, and it unravels me more completely than any frantic touch ever could.
Later—how much later, I don’t know—I’m lying on my side on his crisp, white sheets, my head pillowed on his chest. The room is dark, lit only by the faint glow from the bathroom door he left ajar. My leg is thrown over his, my fingers tracing idle, meaningless patterns through the fine, dark hair on his torso. I can feel the steady, solid thump of his heart under my palm. The silence between us is immense, a living thing. It’s in that quiet that he speaks, his voice a rumble beneath my ear.
“What now, Imogen?”
"You want to go again?" I ask, my voice too bright in the dark.
My hand shifting lower over the hard plane of his stomach, finding him already half-hard against my thigh. My fingers curl, a teasing suggestion, but his hand snaps down and covers mine, stopping it completely.
I look up at him. The faint light from the bathroom cuts across the sharp line of his jaw, the serious set of his mouth. He’s not looking at my hand. He’s looking at my face.
Oh.
This isn’t about that. My stomach does a slow, unpleasant roll. I know this is the talk. The one I’ve been expertly avoiding with every dramatic flourish and ill-advised kiss since I got here.
"Imogen," he says, and my name in that quiet, measured tone is worse than a shout. His thumb strokes the back of my knuckles, a gesture that feels more like regret than affection.
"Let's just enjoy this. See how it goes." The words tumble out, too fast, a verbal wall I slam up between us. I sound like a tourist suggesting we wing the itinerary.
He presses a kiss to my forehead. The gesture is so unbearably tender, so final, that panic cinches tight around my ribs. He starts to pull away, but I grab his face, my palms against the rough stubble of his jaw, forcing him to look at me. In the faint light, his blue eyes are dark, unreadable pools. “Tell me,” I say, my voice barely a whisper. “What do you want from this?”
He doesn’t flinch. His gaze holds mine, and I see the careful, frustratingly British calculus happening behind it. “I’m not good at winging it, Imogen.”
“Is it that easy?” I ask, the sarcasm a thin shield. “You just… decide?”
“No.” His hands come up to cover mine where they hold his face, his thumbs stroking my wrists. “It’s not easy. It’s a bloody nightmare, actually. But I need to know what I’m walking into. I need parameters.”
Parameters. Of course he’d use a word like that. I almost laugh, but it gets stuck somewhere behind my breastbone. My mind races, presenting me with a montage of disastrous options. The secret affair. The messy polyamory. The dramatic, tear-streaked goodbye at the airport. Every possible storyline feels like a costume that won’t fit. “What if I don’t have the blueprint?” I finally say, my defiance crumbling into a confession.
“What if I’m just… here? With you?”
His eyes search my face for a long moment. Then, slowly, he leans in and kisses me. It’s not like the kiss in the shower. It’s soft, a question. When he pulls back, his forehead rests against mine.
“Then be here,” he murmurs. “Just be here.”
His mouth finds mine again, and this time, it’s deeper, a slow, claiming sweep of his tongue that melts the last of my resistance. When his hand slides down the curve of my waist, over my hip, it doesn’t feel like a prelude. It feels like an answer.
He moves over me then, a slow eclipse of warm skin and shadow, bracing his weight on his forearms so he’s caging me in without crushing me. The sheets whisper beneath us. He doesn’t kiss my mouth first. He starts at my temple, his lips a soft press against the damp hair there, then my cheekbone, the corner of my jaw. Each kiss is deliberate, a word in a sentence he’s writing on my skin.
“Seb,” I breathe, but he just shushes me gently, his mouth trailing down the column of my throat.
He takes my hands, lacing his fingers through mine, and lifts them slowly above my head, pressing them into the cool linen of the pillow. The position arches my back, bares my throat to him more completely, and a shiver runs through me that’s equal parts vulnerability and pure, aching want. He kisses the inside of my left wrist, right over the frantic flutter of my pulse.
“You’re here,” he murmurs against the sensitive skin, his breath hot. He says it like a fact, like a ritual. He moves to the right wrist, repeating the kiss, his tongue flicking out once to taste the salt there. “You’re here.”
“I’m here,” I echo, my voice thin.
He releases my hands, but I leave them where he put them, anchored.
He kisses a path down my arm, the hollow of my elbow, the swell of my breast, his mouth closing over my nipple with a suck that’s so slow, so thorough, it draws a whimper from my throat. I fist my hands in the pillowcase.
He’s mapping me, worshipping every inch, and the analytical part of my brain—the part that’s always narrating—goes silent. There is no performance. Only sensation: the scrape of his stubble, the wet heat of his mouth, the solid weight of him between my thighs.
His face is inches from mine, his blue eyes dark and fierce in the dim light. He’s poised at my entrance, and I can feel him, hard and unyielding, the head of his cock slick with my arousal. He doesn’t push. He waits, his gaze holding mine captive.
“Just this,” he says, the words a strained promise. “Just us. Here. No parameters.”
Then he sinks into me, one relentless, perfect inch at a time, and my world narrows to the stretch, the fullness, the unbearable rightness of it.
“Christ, Imogen,” he groans, his forehead dropping to mine as he sheathes himself completely.
He sets a rhythm that’s pure agony in its slowness. Every retreat is an emptiness. Every return is where I belong. He kisses me as he moves, deep, drugging kisses that steal my breath. Then breaks away to mouth at my neck, my shoulder, my collarbone. His hands slide under me, gripping my hips to angle me deeper, and I cry out, my legs locking around his waist.
“That’s it,” he whispers, his breath hot in my ear. “Let me hear you.”
The careful professor is gone. In his place is this raw, hungry man, his control fraying with every roll of his hips, every broken sound I make.
It builds not like a storm, but like a tide—inevitable, all-encompassing. The pleasure coils tight, and I’m trembling with the effort of holding it back, of staying in this moment with him. He seems to sense it. He slows, his movements becoming even more deliberate, his eyes searching my face.
“Come for me,” he says, and it’s not a command. It’s a plea.
The last thread of my restraint snaps. The climax unravels me slowly, then all at once, a wave of pure sensation that pulls a sob from my chest. He follows me over, his own release shuddering through him, his groan buried in the curve of my neck as he pulses deep inside me. For a long time, the only sound is our ragged breathing, mingling in the dark.