Fired Up (Dreamlight Trilogy #1)(49)
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz

He could see her through the clouded glass walls of the shower. She was standing beneath the rushing waters, her back to him, washing her hair. He realized he was hard, fully aroused.

“In or out, take your choice but close the door,” she called above the thundering waterfall. “You’re letting all the heat out of the room.”

He closed the bathroom door and opened the shower.

“Chloe, about last night,” he began.

She straightened, opened her eyes and turned slightly toward him. “I thought we agreed that no good conversation ever started with about last night.”

He did not know what to say. She looked so delicious standing there with water splashing and pouring everywhere, so delicate and feminine and soft. He must have crushed her on that table last night.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what I can do or say. Hell, you’re bruised.”

She glanced down at the mark on her thigh. “Not your fault. I bumped into a chair. You did not hurt me, so you can stop apologizing.” She became very busy soaping up a washcloth. “It’s not as if you attacked me. We were both in the grip of a major burn, and I think the energy of the lamp was affecting us. Things got a little energetic, that’s all. Nothing to be concerned about.”

She was writing off the most powerful sexual encounter he’d ever experienced as merely the result of a heavy psi burn and the effects of the damn lamp. Maybe for her that’s all it had been. He realized that he didn’t like that possibility.

“So, you’ve done it that way before?” he asked. He peeled off his shirt, dropped it on the floor and unzipped his pants. “After a burn or after working a paranormal artifact?”

“Well, no.” She soaped her face. “But it’s a known fact that when a person is running hot, there is a lot of adrenaline and testosterone and bio-psi chemicals flooding the bloodstream. We were both maxed out last night, and there was the added complication of the lamp, that’s all. No big deal.”

He kicked his pants out of the way, stepped into the shower and closed the glass door very quietly. He moved up behind her and kissed the curve of her shoulder. She froze, the washcloth covering her face.

“No big deal?” he asked. He put his hand on her hip and gently, very gently, bit her ear. “You’re sure about that?”

He felt her shiver beneath his hand, but she did not pull away. He realized that he’d been braced for rejection. The relief nearly overwhelmed him.

“You know what I mean,” she mumbled into the washcloth.

“No, I don’t think I do.” He eased her back against his heavily aroused body and moved one hand between her legs. “What happened last night was a very big deal to me. So was what happened the night before.”

She lowered the washcloth and tilted her face so that the spray rinsed off the soapy lather she had just applied. Slowly she turned in his arms. She regarded him with very serious eyes.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Good.” He considered the matter more closely and smiled slowly. “Very, very good.”

She glanced at the shower door behind him. He felt energy pulse and knew that she was checking out his prints on the glass.

“Some of your dream psi was a little disturbed. That’s why you were getting the hallucinations and nightmares. But I fixed the wavelengths.”

“I know. The weird shit is gone.” He removed the washcloth from her hands, tossed it aside and touched her ni**les. “I can sense the difference.”

“The weird stuff might be gone, but there are still traces of those sleeping meds. I didn’t have a chance to do anything about them.” She frowned intently. “They’re fading, however. Shouldn’t be much longer now before the last of the drug is out of your system.”

He captured her face between his hands, forcing her to look at him, not the door.

“About last night,” he said again.

She blinked, as though he had distracted her from whatever she had been going to say next. Her air of intense concentration slowly evaporated. She smiled. Heat and feminine mystery darkened her eyes.

“Okay,” she said. “It was a big deal. So was the night before.” That was what he wanted to hear, he thought. So why wasn’t he satisfied with her response? He decided he would have to think about the problem some other time. At that moment the only thing he could concentrate on was touching Chloe all over, kissing her all over. This morning he was going to do everything the way he should have last night.

Invisible energy sparked and flared in the atmosphere. Just like last night, he thought. But this time she wouldn’t be able to blame it on the lamp.

A LONG TIME LATER she got out of the shower and wrapped herself in a thick white towel. He followed, reaching for one of the towels. He was feeling very good, even better than he had when he had awakened.

He smiled at her as he dried himself. “Well?”

She wrinkled her nose and turned pink, and then she laughed.

“Okay, that was a big deal, too,” she said.

He grinned. “No lamp involved.”

AFTERWARD HE PUT ON the new clothes the Harper family had provided. He made the call to Fallon while Chloe was getting dressed in the bedroom.

Fallon picked up halfway through the first ring. “You’re not in L.A.”

“Still in Vegas. Sorry about that. I wanted some privacy.”

“Yeah, I started getting suspicious this morning when I saw the credit card charges. Harper running those for you?”

“Part of the full-service package. It’s designed to make it look like I’m somewhere other than where I happen to be at the moment.”

“You sound different. I take it the lamp worked?”

“As advertised. Chloe says my dream-psi patterns are stable again. She’s right. I can sense it, too.”

“So you’re not going to turn into a Cerberus on me. Great. That takes one problem off my to-do list.”

“You never did sound all that worried.”

“Probably because I wasn’t. Griffin Winters survived, so the lamp must have worked for him. Figured it would work for you, too.” Fallon paused. “I’m assuming, of course, that you haven’t been overcome by a compulsion to murder anyone with the last name of Jones?”

“Well, now that you mention it—”

“That was a joke, Winters.”

“I knew that.”

Fallon was silent for a few seconds.

“Think there’s anything to the story about the Midnight Crystal that Old Nick claimed he inserted into the lamp there at the end?” he asked eventually.