You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(100)

She got the jeans and briefs off, forcing them down those long legs. He had been running a lot, hadn’t he? The hard muscles of his thighs felt so good under her fingers, and it had been so long since she had touched them and—she couldn’t think about that.

She pushed him back into the shower, watching him flinch as the warm sprays hit him all over, and then he shivered into the water voluptuously, his face turning up, his body slowly unfurling from a tense knot of cold as the warmth sank into his muscles.

Muscles.

Water running over skin, tracing the strength and definition of shoulders, arms, chest, abs. Water relaxing every single one of those muscles, caressing him as no one else had caressed him for so long. It trailed down over his ribs, following a V of hair down, down. As soon as the first wash of water ran over his penis, it sprang up hard again, as if only the cold had kept it contained.

She wanted to run her hands everywhere the water ran, show that damn shower how to really warm Kurt up. That water had no idea what it was doing, and she—oh, she knew exactly what Kurt liked. How hard, how fast, how long. What kind of kisses drove him a little crazy, what she could do to him if she took her hand and rubbed firm but slow, slow, slow, down from his chest, over his abs, to—

She looked back up at his face to find him watching her.

Their eyes locked through the streaming water. Her heart beat very hard.

“Kai,” he said and leaned both forearms against the glass, looming over her while that clear pane kept them separate. Her heart seemed to thud in slow motion, that separation stretching out for all eternity, as if the glass would stay there forever, leaving two souls caught in longing. She wanted to go up on her tiptoes and kiss that glass, right where his mouth would meet hers.

She placed her hands against his forearms, through the pane, her own weight swaying onto them.

“Kai,” he said again, a question or a demand. Or just a statement of her existence right there, on the other side of the glass.

Eyes caught by his hazel—how she loved their secret color, those sweet, gorgeous eyes that had always been hers—she swayed onto her toes, her lips almost brushing the glass.

He reached around the glass, grabbed her wrist, and yanked her into the shower.

Water hit her, pounding into her face, soaking her clothes, her shoes. Kurt never did that—he was never careless, and only rough in the deepest throes of lovemaking, and even that, only after he had learned that sometimes she loved it when he was rough.

Yet now, he didn’t seem to give a damn that he had just ruined her shoes, that her clothes clung awkward and heavy to her. Catching her face between his hands, he lifted it up to him and kissed her, driving, hungry, starved, while the water sprayed all over them, streaming down their faces, spilling over their lips.

He kissed her until he was shaking with it, until she had forgotten they had ever stopped kissing in their lives, and yet the embrace felt as new and as compelling as that very first kiss, that day in the summer glade when the other hikers had been all that stopped them.

“God, I wish I knew what to do,” he said into her throat, as her face fell back into the stream of water. He had done this before, tried to make love to her as their relationship tore apart, tried to get through to her with sex. Oh, God, they couldn’t go back there again. They had been at peace. They had been healing.

And yet she didn’t feel as she had then—angry and grieving and hating him—but alive, flooding with warmth, wanting to expand into him the way he had expanded into the hot water. Her hands scrubbed down his body. Those water-slickened muscles felt so good.

I love you.

God, where had that come from? She couldn’t say that. It would do untold damage. She bit the words back as hard as she could, bit her tongue on them, and twisted her head around suddenly and bit him, right in the curve of his shoulder.

He drew a hoarse breath and lifted her up, pressing her back against the shower wall, so that the sprays massaged from too close, almost painful against her body. He rode her on his thigh while he pulled her soaked sweater over her head. It felt so good to have its clinging wetness off, to have the water beating painfully against her from all sides, to have his hands slide down her ribs and up again over her breasts, as warm now as the water but so much more intimate and caressing. She loved it when his hands got a little too hard on her body, when he lost his care. She had always loved that.

That old thrill of driving him crazy surged back in her as she pulled herself into him, as she found his mouth through the water and kissed it again, claiming it this time for herself, in hot, hungry, invasive kisses, taking it for hers.

He drew one of her legs up, knee bent, past his hip, stretching all her muscles, running his hand down her jeans-clad calf until he could find her furry suede slipper-boot, and he pulled it off and threw it out of the shower. Scooping that arm around her bottom to hold her into him, he pulled the other leg up and did the same thing.

Her feet, bared twice now in only an hour, and for the same reason, curled and flexed into the water, thrilled beyond measure. This warmth from him was so gorgeous. She wanted to soak it up everywhere.

He unfastened her jeans and worked them and her panties off her, with some difficulty, the wet denim clinging to every inch of skin on the way down. She liked it, she liked it so much, the feel of his hands loosening that denim over and over, sliding between it and skin, the water streaming down her bared legs, chasing his hands.