Page 65 of Salt Kiss
After I’ve sat, gingerly, on the edge to face him, he looks down at where the blanket is pooled around his naked waist. “You saved my life,” he says.
“I thought—” My throat suddenly hurts so much that I can barely speak. “I thought you were dead. I really thought you were dead.” I’m shaking now, and I realize how close I’ve been to actually fucking losing it ever since I saw that knife plunge into his body.
A hot tear tracks down my cheek and I wipe it away quickly.
Mark’s face softens. “I’m hard to kill.”
It shouldn’t have come down to that. If only I’d sensed the deception earlier...never left his side. “I failed you.”
His brows shoot up. “You saved my life, protected my club and its treasury. You were astounding. For the last two hours, I’ve been congratulating myself on hiring you. I’d be dead if I hadn’t.”
I open my mouth, and he holds up his hand, bringing the IV cord with it.
“I can’t argue with you tonight,” he says, and he looks so tired, so etiolated and worn, that my heart aches.
“You need to rest.”
“I can’t.” And then lower, more exhausted: “I can’t.”
“You have to. And I’ll wake you up the minute you’re needed, I promise.”
He’s reluctant to agree, but I have an ally in the morphine because his eyelids keep sliding closed. They’re bruise-colored and delicate-looking, and he’s abruptly so fucking dear to me that I just want to gather him to my chest and bury my lips in his hair and keep him there and safe forever.
“Okay,” he finally mumbles. His eyes are still closed, the long lashes resting on his cheeks. “But wake me up as soon as the FBI gets here.”
“Of course, sir,” I assure him. Without asking, I slide my hand behind him to help him lie farther back. His skin is cooler than it should be but still firm and warm, and I can feel the muscles shifting under my palms as I move him.
He blinks up at me with blue, blue eyes, and there’s a fond expression on his face. “A knight in shining armor,” he murmurs as I finish settling him on the pillows. I pull the blanket up to his chest, my knuckles grazing the fresh gauze there.
“I thought heroes didn’t exist,” I say, letting out a long breath as my hands linger at their work, tucking the blanket gently around him.
“I might have to change my mind.”
I’m about to force myself to get off the bed when his hand reaches out, snares my wrist.
“Stay,” he says sleepily. “Stay close.”
He pushes his fingers through mine, and he might as well be pushing his fingers right into my heart, right into its valves and ventricles. He might as well be clutching the tender, bloody thing in his fist.
He’s asleep within seconds, his hand cool and relaxed in mine, and I bend over it, pressing my lips to his skin and confessing the words that have been clawing at me since I first felt his blood slick my hands under the dazzling dance floor lights.
“I love you, sir,” I whisper against his knuckles and his fingertips and his wrist. “I love you.”
I love you so much that I can’t bear it.
Twenty-Two
“We shouldn’t, sir,” I whisper three mornings later as Mark pushes me to my knees in his shower. The large open space is lined with stone on two sides and glass on the other two, and the damp mineral scent and running water smells almost like Morois House. Almost like him.
I blink up at him, my eyelashes wet, my hand still clutching the washcloth I was using to clean him. “Dr. Sutcliff said no sex.”
“I don’t need my shoulder for this,” Mark says in a low voice, his hand already on my head, twisting in my wet hair. He pulls me to his waiting erection, and I groan in the back of my throat, unable to resist, even when it’s for his own good.
It looks too wonderful, standing straight up, his balls heavy underneath, and his hand in my hair is like the hand of God for all I can fight it. I let him guide my open mouth to the crown, plump and soft, and then down the shaft and back up.
He’s standing with the spray behind him, and water is running down his chest and stomach, dripping into his navel and along the line of hair leading down to his sex. It makes a soft tapping noise against the waterproof bandage sealed over his wound and hisses against the stone floor, and when he finally nudges me to take him all the way inside my mouth, I hear the rush of his breathing over it all.
A symphony of water, breath, and stone. And as he finishes down my throat, he murmurs my name like a coda, like it was the reason for the music to begin with.
