Life isn’t safe.
She could spend the next few months running from the feelings that were growing more confusing and more intense by the day, or she could turn and face them. On her own terms. Maybe she could control it if she was driving it.
Or die trying.
‘One room,’ she heard herself saying past a dry mouth.
The crewman’s lined face wrinkled further. Hayden’s eyes swung her way.
‘One room?’ the two men said together.
She locked eyes with Hayden. Shock filled them. And that was pretty rare in the Master of the Impassive. She lifted a brow. Took a breath. ‘Any objections?’
Five little syllables that changed so very much.
He stared at her, a question live in his blue eyes. The crewman glanced between them, still uncertain.
‘One room.’ Hayden nodded.
In a flourish of reproachful Greek, the crewman collected her bag and Hayden’s and swung the door to his old room open and placed the suitcases inside. Then he turned and stomped off. Shirley followed Hayden in, her heart wringing every single drop of blood out of its tight chambers. He spun around to face her as soon as she clicked the door shut behind them. And locked it.
‘You have to live life or you might as well not bother,’ she quoted, bolder than she felt.
Suspicion lined his handsome face. ‘You didn’t want this.’
‘I still don’t.’ He frowned. She swallowed slowly, dampened her lips. ‘So why do I? So very badly?’
Then she was moving. And so was he. They came together in the middle of the tiny room, all hands and lips and tongues and clumsy haste. Hayden pressed her up against the locked door and plundered with his tongue, forking his fingers into her hair and yanking it roughly out of its elastic band. She did the same with his T-shirt from the band of his shorts. It was still damp from their river dunking and bus travel. But freeing it meant she could slide her hands around his searing flesh and mould the refined, lean contours of the back she’d glimpsed when he was Leonidas as he pressed into her hard from the front.
‘It’s like the surf at night,’ he murmured, nuzzling his face into the dark waves of her hair and breathing fire into her ear. She smiled at the poet still in him, knowing well what it must really look like after their adventures today, and tipped her head back as far as the door behind her would allow so that he could suck and bite his way across her throat.
Then he returned to her mouth, pressing short and long kisses into her receptive flesh as he ground his hips into hers. ‘I’ve wanted to do this since you first sat in my living room all prim and proper and with boots fastened up to your knees.’ His hands left her hair and traced a path down to her waist. ‘I wanted, then, to unlace you one eyelet at a time. This will have to do.’
Her dark maroon shorts were a surf brand, tied at the top for effect. He impatiently yanked each lace free of its eyelet and then pulled her backwards towards the two tiny beds. He released her only long enough to get behind one while she got behind the other and they pushed them together, the momentum flinging them back into each other’s arms as they met in the middle.
She kneeled on her side of the bed, stretching up to find his mouth again, breathing heavily. Gasping as she had in the boat. Overwhelmed by her own audacity. And need.
He fisted his fingers in her hair and tipped her head back, away from his lips, until her heavy glance lifted and focused on his.
‘Are you sure, Shirley?’
She was sure that she’d never felt this swirling, uncontrollable need in her life. She was sure this moment would never come again if she stopped it now. She was sure that people had survived entire lifetimes on a single glance, a touch, and that just wasn’t going to be enough for her.
Was she sure …?
‘No,’ she breathed. ‘But I’m doing it anyway.’
He circled her with his arms and twisted her below him, lying at right angles across the rift between the twin beds, pressing down hard and hot on top of her and gently finding her lips with his. If he’d come on heavy just then—seducer Hayden—she might have baulked, the intensity of feeling soft mattress below her and solid man above just a little bit too real. But he didn’t; he timed his switch to explorer Hayden just perfectly—long, leisurely, lazy—and it sucked her into a place where the room spun gently and her breath shallowed out, and the only thing that wasn’t spinning or stealing oxygen was right in front of her.
Hayden.
Heavy and protective lying across her. Stroking her hair back from her damp face, taking his time, getting to know her, his blue eyes creating an anchor for her out-of-control emotions. He levered himself up onto one hand and stripped his shirt off with the other, watching her closely the whole time. Waiting for her to freak out and change her mind. Waiting for her to follow suit.
She lay there, breathing heavily as his eyes raked her body. Flat out refusing to back out now. Just when she was getting everything she didn’t know she wanted.
‘You want some help getting those off?’ he whispered, his eyes darkening dangerously and his fingers tracing down her shirt to her unlaced shorts.
‘What?’ She gasped at his fingers low against her belly and forced herself to focus.
‘Your shorts. Your shirt.’
She sucked her lip between her teeth and breathed, ‘You want them …?’
His body answered for him. His eyes darkened. ‘I want what’s inside them.’
She locked eyes on his and smiled—determined, desire-heavy, defiant—and then purred two magical words into the air between them.
‘Molon labe.’
COME and take them.
Boy, had he. He’d practically torn them in his haste to get them off her, to strip off all the final trappings of Shiloh and get back to the raw essence of Shirley.
Raw.
The right word. That was how they’d been long into the evening. They’d missed the captain’s supper—bad passengers—and he’d had to sneak up to the galley late that night to guilt the cook into bundling together a few things for them to eat. To refuel.
A few hours later they’d fallen asleep, slick and spent and wrapped in each other’s scent in the pushed-together bed.
And now it was morning. And Shirley was stirring.
Hayden used the last precious moments of her oblivion to scan her face once more. Free of make-up, free of stress, free of any kind of judgement. Greedy, guilty, stolen moments. He lifted a single lock of dark hair from her face with his little finger.
Her
