Page 77 of Special Ops Seduction

But instead she came and took his hand, tugging him with her across the cabin and into her small kitchen.

“I don’t know about you,” she said, not even looking at him as she busied herself in her small refrigerator. “But I’m starving.” She paused as she assembled simple ingredients on her counter. “Does the mighty Jonas Crow admit hunger?”

“Occasionally,” he said, and found he was actually smiling back at her. “I’m starving, myself.”

The strangest part about it was that he actually was. He did whatever was required of him when he was playing a character, but here, back in Fool’s Cove, he usually adhered to a strict eating schedule that he used to maintain the ratios he preferred in his body’s lean mass.

None of which he could bring himself to care about while Bethan set about making sandwiches.

He recognized the bread as Caradine’s. It was the same bread she baked daily and used in her café.

“Oh yeah,” Bethan said, glancing up to see that he was looking at the loaf she was cutting hearty slices from. “Caradine sells bread. But you better believe she charges three times the going rate for it. Still.” And she sighed a little, a bit like the way she had when he’d been inside her. “Totally worth it.”

She finished making two sandwiches, not skimping on any of the ingredients. They were piled high with what looked like anything she happened to have in her refrigerator. A refrigerator she must have restocked at some point today, with what looked like items pilfered from the lodge.

She levered herself up and onto her counter, then sat there, cross-legged, to eat, which she did with the same greedy abandon she’d used on him. Jonas thought he shouldhave felt out of place. Awkward and strange, standing there naked an inch or so away from her, but he didn’t.

It was hot in an entirely different way. There was no awkward conversation. There were only the two of them, clearly enjoying the hell out of the sandwiches she’d made them.

It was only when they were both done, and Bethan was licking her fingers with sheer relish, that he understood that this, too, was another intimacy.

Only with her. Always with her.

She led him over to the side door, and he had no idea why he was permitting her to tug him around like this, only that he didn’t have it in him to stop her. He didn’twantto stop her. Not tonight.

Outside, the air was cool but the wooden cistern she had out there, just large enough to hold the both of them, was steaming.

“How did I not know that you had this here?” he asked when they were both in the water and he’d gone with an urge he couldn’t identify and pulled her onto his lap with her back against his chest.

“Because I like to keep my private life private,” she replied simply.

But she’d let him in.

Jonas didn’t have to ask her to clarify what that meant. He knew.

And for a long while, they simply soaked there together. The hot water was another caress, soothing the body he’d worked so hard to beat into submission earlier. And all around them, the Alaskan spring night was dark, cool, and wet. Like a secret.

Jonas could hear the water in the distance, waves against the rocky shore. He heard a cabin door slam, somewhere on the hill. There was the sound of Horatio barking, which meant Isaac and Caradine were spending the night here, rather than in their house in Grizzly Harbor. There was thehum of generators. The rush of the wind up above as it tangled with the evergreens.

The crackle of the fire in the stove heating the water. And each and every breath Bethan took.

There were so many things he should have said. But he couldn’t begin to imagine how he could go about it. Any of it. He wasn’t built that way.

So instead, he showed her.

He shifted her in his arms, tipping her back so he could kiss her the way he wanted to. Hungry and reverent, sweet and wicked.

And when they started to get hotter than the water, he picked her up again. He carried her out of the tub, grinning when she yelped at the blast of cool air against her warm skin.

Jonas brought her inside and toweled her off. Then he carried her up the open, wooden stairs to her sleeping loft. He laid her out on her soft bed, flushed and ripe in the middle of what looked to him like approximately ten thousand pillows.

“What are you doing?” she asked, but she was smiling, stretched out before him like a lazy sort of cat.

“I’ll show you,” he told her, crawling onto the bed.

And then he taught them both how to want all over again, as if it were new.

Nineteen

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