hot springs, where his travel sack was. He’s getting the soap, she realized, watching as he took the vial out. They’d come there to bathe, after all, not to fool around.
Temptress? she questioned silently, still liking it entirely too much when he called her his.
“What do you mean?”
“Sometimes you are…steady. Calm. You look at me and I feel not so out of control.” Her lips parted, surprised by his confession. “Other times, you show me how uncontrolled you can be too.”
Erin swallowed, remembering crouching over him in his sleep, pressing the knife to his throat. He didn’t say it in a way that made her feel embarrassed. Rather, his tone told her it was acceptable to be that way. But perhaps he recognized that same impulse in himself. Perhaps he understood.
“And then there are times when you test my control entirely. When you tempt me beyond reason,” he murmured, his lips at the shell of her ear, softly pressing the words there, though they made her shiver. “The image of you in the waterfall, watching me as you bathed, will forever be imprinted on my mind.”
His voice sounded like a groan and Erin gasped, feeling his words burn in her belly.
“I had never thought it possible to envy water until that moment,” he confessed.
Erin was dizzy with his confessions. She was so used to him putting a wall up between them, so used to him not speaking about things like this. Hell, she was so used to putting a wall up too. But now, when he was tearing both of those walls down, it was both thrilling and terrifying.
“Tonight, you are that female—my temptress, teasing me beneath a waterfall and forcing me to beg for her—but I wonder which I will have tomorrow.”
“Maybe you’ll have all three,” she said.
He didn’t smile. He simply smoothed back her hair away from her face and her heart went wild with that gentle, intimate touch.
“I welcome all three,” he told her.
Those words gave her a lump in her throat. Erin looked down at the vial in his hands, watched as he unstoppered it and shook the black granules loose.
“Back on Earth…” she started, not quite knowing how to say what she wanted to tell him.
“Tev?” he murmured, lathering the soap in his hands while she held onto his shoulders.
“My siblings, my friends, anyone that knows me would tell you I was only one of those things. Definitely not two and certainly not all three.”
His eyes lifted to hers, pausing. “And which one would they say you are?”
“You know already,” she said, because she was certain he did. “I have never been called a temptress in my life. And the craziest thing I’ve ever done was try surfing once, though you know I’m terrified of sharks.”
He probably wouldn’t understand what surfing was, but he caught her meaning.
“What I’m trying to say is that I had a…a role,” she finally said, struggling to find the right word. But sometimes that was what it had felt like. A role. A part in a play. “I grew up trying to be responsible. Then when I grew up, I had to be responsible because otherwise…”
She trailed off but she didn’t look away from him. Because otherwise, her family truly would’ve been broken. She would have failed Jake and Ellora. But now, Erin recognized that she was proud of them. Proud of the life she’d been able to give them, though it hadn’t been perfect. Far from it.
Looking at Jaxor, she knew there was so much they didn’t know about each other. So much they’d both kept secret. Erin was tempted to ask him everything.
At the same time, she wasn’t such a complete fool as to believe that what had just happened between them changed anything. It might change a little. It might have chipped away at the barriers between them. But there was so much that he still wasn’t telling her. And thinking about her short joyride in the hovercraft just that afternoon, Erin still held onto her secrets too.
Would that change? Could it? More importantly, did she want it to?
Yes, that little voice whispered in her mind.
Jaxor surprised her by leaning forward in that moment. Surprised her when he kissed her, softly, gently. Her fingers gripped his shoulders as she returned his kiss, her chest aching.
She wanted to test their new boundaries, she realized. Pulling back, Erin’s gaze darted between his eyes and she requested, “Tell me something you don’t want me to know.”