on me." With one arm he reached out and pulled her into the shower with him, fully clothed.
Z backed her against the shower wall opposite from where the water sprayed down, his searing kisses stealing the protests from her mouth. Fiona gripped his shoulders - the only solid thing to hold onto in there. The rest was slippery, wet tile.
He wrapped one arm around her, pulling her flush against him, and propped the other against the wall over her head.
"Fiona... you're playing with fire with me."
"Hey, you pulled me in here!" Her clothes were sticking to her. Jeans and wet T-shirt. She wasn't prepared to be so close to him in such good lighting with no clothes on, but soaked clothes clinging to her every curve wasn't comfortable, either.
Z pulled the shirt over her head, wrung it out and tossed it out on the floor. Then his fingers hooked into the front of her pants. Fiona's stomach clenched in excitement and fear at his fingers being so close to such an intimate place. No man's hand had been that close before. She sucked in a breath and looked away.
The energy around him shifted, and then his hand was stroking her face and the side of her neck. She couldn't help arching toward him.
"Hey," he said, his voice going gentle, "we both need a shower. That's all we have to do here."
She chanced a glance at his eyes. "Okay." Sure, they'd pretend this was about hygiene and being conservationists. Two people. One shower. It was good for the environment. Now to collect her ecology merit badge.
He went back to the jeans, fumbling with the two buttons at the top, then with help from her and a lot of frustrated cursing, he peeled them off. She crossed her arms over her chest.
"You've got nothing to hide from me," he said, taking her hands in his.
She tried not to think of his long list of conquests. As if he could read her mind - and how big of a mystery could her thoughts be under the circumstances - he said, "Believe me. They don't hold a candle to you."
It was a line, but she couldn't help falling for it, because right now she needed to hear it and believe in it. If she was going to keep doing this normal thing that grown women who aren't afraid to leave their houses do, if she was going to have this one moment where she pretended she was one of those normal women, one who didn't have powers she was afraid of and phobias about being outside, then she needed to hear the line and be the stupid girl who believed it. Because that was normal, too.
The cave was small and closed in and protected. Z could protect her. She could exist in this tiny, safe world with him. The trouble was, would he want her here tomorrow after he'd scratched his itch? Z's cave had become the new safe base, but there were no guarantees she'd be allowed to stay. How was she going to function if she had to leave?
His hands moved to her back to unclasp her bra, then it joined the rest of her clothes.
"Give me some sign you're in this with me," he said.
Fiona felt her face heat, and it wasn't from the steam of the shower. She pushed her panties down over her hips and stepped out of them, then she tossed them out onto the floor with the rest of her clothing.
He nodded his approval. To his credit he didn't stand there and gawk too long, nor did he do anything else to make her uncomfortable. Instead, he grabbed the bar soap. It was a masculine-scented deodorant soap that smelled like him.
He worked up a lather, and then his soapy hands were on her. Fiona couldn't help the moan that escaped her lips. He wasn't touching her anywhere intimate yet. It was her shoulders, and her arms, but there could be no separation of safe zones and unsafe zones when naked in a shower with him. All those lines and boundaries dissolved away, leaving two aroused adults with nothing stopping them but scruples. What were those again?
She couldn't pretend this was just an exercise in hygiene. She wasn't that innocent. It was an exercise in foreplay. He led her down his path of seduction, and she followed without even a weak whimper of protest.
He turned her around and placed her hands on the tile, one on either side