again.
Oliver went upstairs and undressed with angry jerks. He needed a shower. He needed to wash her out of his brain. But all he could think about under the almost-scalding water was how soft her skin was and how she’d sounded as she came. And how pale her naked body looked against his, contrasted with the rich darkness of her hair where it tumbled against her neck out of its makeshift knot, while she’d writhed in his lap.
Jesus, this was bad. He’d lost his mind. He had to end their association. Let Wes and Nora deal with her on this case. He was done. If she came pounding on his door in the middle of the night with battle wounds, he wouldn’t answer. There was an emergency room in Cottonwood. If she was such a badass, she could get herself there.
But when insistent knocking woke him hours later, Oliver jumped out of bed and hurried downstairs to open the door anyway.
Lucy stood on his doorstep. Not bleeding. Not injured. Just Lucy, in her jeans and Oxford rugby shirt and a black leather jacket, bloodred lips in a pallid face and pale blue eyes boring into him, like the Queen of the Night.
“I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
He tried to breathe normally. “Are you coming in?”
“No. Maybe.”
Oliver took her hand and pulled her inside and kissed her with her back against the door until their mouths ached. When they came up for air, Lucy wriggled out of her coat with a swift, sexy shrug and went for his belt buckle, but Oliver stopped her.
“Upstairs.”
Lucy nodded and let him lead the way, both of them taking the steps two at a time, and they were half-undressed by the time they reached the bed. She’d braided her hair again, and he unbraided it while he sucked on her neck and nipped at her throat, and the dark hair spilled across his white pillow like clouds of dark paint in water while he rocked and thrust and drove himself inside her for almost an hour. She came twice before he finally did—once underneath him and once on top—and he was almost sorry to come because he had to stop fucking her. Almost.
Oliver collapsed onto his back, exhausted and dripping with sweat. He hadn’t had an aerobic workout like this in ages. Lucy curled up against his side and promptly fell asleep. He didn’t realize she’d done so until he’d been talking for ten minutes—about politics and the messed-up state of the world and about being a widower and how he hadn’t been with a woman since and how he was constantly questioning himself and his values and feeling adrift in his own mortal frame. After he’d asked her twice why she’d decided to come back and she hadn’t answered him, he finally realized he’d been talking to himself. Thank God.
He played with her hair where it snaked across his chest. It felt like silk. Oliver curled it around his fist and smelled it—crisp and cool, like cucumber or avocado—and wondered what she used to keep it so luxurious.
It was too cold to lie here unclothed, as much as he would have been content to look at her being naked and still, her body for once without its uneasy coil of tension and mistrust. He pulled the comforter up from the foot of the bed and covered them both.
When he woke—more rested than he could remember having been for a very long time—he found himself alone.
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