Ivy slid her fingers up the back of his arm, the pull to touch him, comfort him, too strong to resist. Cade was such a sexual man, she couldn’t imagine his frustration at the time. But sickness took so many things from you, even when you weren’t the sick one. It took so many things, things you never even appreciate when you’re all right.
“Cade, people cope differently. Survival mechanisms kick in and things don’t run so smoothly. Sometimes we close up and our bodies don’t do what we’d like them to. I saw you there every day. Every day.” She lifted her head and held his gaze in the mirror, which had risen up in search of hers. “Everybody talked about how … sweet you were. How devoted. I wished if I ever had a husband, I would have one like you.”
His face twisted. “I couldn’t even make love to my own wife, Ivy.”
She melted for him, stroking her hands soothingly up his taut, muscled back. “But she knew you loved her, Cade. She had to have known that.” She slid a hand upward and turned his head sideways until he looked at her. “And I know from experience that you do make love.”
He turned away, his gaze downcast. “I fuck, Ivy. We—just—fuck.”
Her heart stuttered for a tiny second, but she wouldn’t let it hurt. She wouldn’t.
This was exactly what she’d signed up for. The only thing she’d allow herself to get.
“If you’re trying to hurt me, it won’t work, Cade. I happen to like the way you fuck me very much. We’re just playing with each other, right?”
He groaned as he whipped around and snatched her against him, cupping the back of her head and pressing her jaw to his chest. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“No! You’re too grumpy with my friends.”
“I’ll behave.”
She laughed. “Cade, I’ll be back to say good-bye before I leave Monday. She lives near my apartment, so I’ll pack my bags and leave straight from here early Monday morning.”
“No, damn it, I’ll go with you. I can see some of my friends when you see yours, and I can sleep at your place.”
The excitement she felt was so powerful, alarm bells began clinging all around her. “Cade. You know, we’ve been together too many days and I don’t want to get attached to you.”
He slicked his hair back and covered the scruff of his beard with shaving cream. “I’m not attached to you. I’m playing with you, remember?”
The act of watching him shave felt so intimate, so erotic, she stood there for a second, watching him. It took her a moment to realize it was her turn to answer. “I’m playing with you, too.”
He smiled as he splashed water onto his face.
And yeah, that smile was still a great look on him.
* * *
Cade was on his laptop that evening, answering a thousand e-mails that had popped up from his office. He’d never taken a vacation, never even taken a day off since Laura had died. So he sure as hell wasn’t sorry he was taking one now.
Wiping his tired eyes with the heels of his palms, he glanced around the eclectic décor of Ivy’s cozy little one-bedroom place, finding it so unique and colorful. So like Ivy.
She still had the Christmas thing going on. Bits from Halloween splattered here and there. All this in the middle of July. He’d asked why, and she’d said she didn’t have good storage, and she didn’t want that to keep her from celebrating. He’d never heard of anyone doing this, but it was damned cute.
She was a little box of surprises, Ivy.
Passionate, but shy. Courageous and stubborn, but also somehow frightened. What frightened her? When she slept, she went into this tight little ball against Cade’s chest, like she wanted to make herself very small next to him.
It made his chest hurt, when she did that, even though he always found himself drawing her up even tighter to him. The way she needed him in the middle of the night, when she woke up sweating and touched him like she wanted to make sure he wasn’t a dream, called to every protective, primal instinct inside him. Instincts he hadn’t even known he possessed.
He’d wake up to find her softly kissing him, delineating his muscles like she wanted them memorized in her head, and he’d realize he was already hard from her attentions. He fucked her unfailingly in the middle of the night, sometimes several times, and he took care of her in the morning, too.
The reminders stirred his blood, for he hadn’t had her all day, and his balls had started to ache a while ago when he kept remembering the way she’d looked in that little blue dress before she left to see her friend.
He heard the door click shut and he closed his laptop, his heart kicking into gear.
Ivy strode straight across the living room and down the hall, failing to see Cade sitting over by the unlit Christmas tree as she padded directly to her bedroom.
She may think he was still with his friends, he supposed, so he followed her to her bedroom and heard the shower running in the bath. He tried the knob, and it opened.
For a moment he stood at the threshold, getting aroused while at the same time getting emotionally assaulted. She … God, she did things to him. There were no words, no freaking words, to describe her slim, little naked figure, and what it did to him. She was facing the water, scrubbing her face, giving him an ample view of her lovely curved butt.
Heart pounding as animal instincts roared to life, he jerked off his T-shirt. Maybe she would get pissed, for she’d made it clear a dozen times that she didn’t want him to see her fully naked. Cade didn’t care. He shoved off his pajama bottoms and shut the door quietly behind him, the sound muffled by the running water.
They’d been apart all day and it had felt like another decade.
He opened the glass door and felt the water mist over his skin as he entered. Soapy bubbles slid down Ivy’s face, tilted up to the showerhead. Easing up behind her, Cade curled his arms around her waist and splayed his hands possessively across her abdomen, pressing his erection up her backside.
She stiffened in his arms as he bit her earlobe into his mouth. “You okay, baby?” he asked.
“Cade.” She melted on that whisper, melted back against him, and melted his insides as well.
His hands slid upward and covered her small breasts for the first time, flesh to flesh, and his cock jumped like he was a teenager with his first feel up. They were small and the nipples puckered in the water and he wanted to see them and lick them and suckle them dry.