to find her lids were closed tightly, her lips compressed. He wondered just how long it had been for her.
Quite a while. Years maybe.
If she’d left him for Slade, she hadn’t been seeing the guy recently. Hadn’t been seeing anyone recently.
And he was a son of a bitch for being thrilled by that knowledge.
“Kat,” he whispered. “I don’t want to—”
She gripped his ass with her hands when he would have eased back and kissed him again. “No. Don’t stop. Please. Don’t stop. I need…I need…” She shifted her hips so he slid in another inch, groaned at the friction. “You,” she finished on a deep breath.
He dropped his forehead to hers and drew air into his suddenly shaky lungs. When he felt steady, he licked his finger, got it good and wet and slid it between them to find her sweet spot again.
The flick of his finger, the push and pull of his hips soon had her moaning and writhing beneath him. And with one final thrust he was all the way in.
Okay, he’d been wrong. This was coming home.
“Kit-Kat,” he whispered against her mouth. He wanted to remember the feel of her clenched around his length. Wanted to memorize each sigh and sound and movement she made so when he was ninety he could look back and remember how he’d felt at this moment.
Whole. Not broken. Not empty. Nothing but complete.
Then she was moving beneath him, and all thought rushed right out of his brain. He matched her thrusts until the little tugs were long strokes and they were both sweaty and breathless from exertion.
He had to grit his teeth to hold off his climax, but the instant he felt her muscles clench around him and her back bow in pleasure, he let go. Erupted deep inside her on a long groan. And in the process let go of six years of emptiness and anger and bitter betrayal.
He just didn’t know if it would be enough to get past what had happened between them.
Six years earlier
Cairo
By the end of the first week, Pete knew he was in trouble.
Shannon had made herself scarce as soon as Pete had arrived in Cairo, staying with Kat’s friend Sawil Ramirez two floors up, but it hadn’t cut the tension. When Pete wasn’t making love to Kat, they were walking on eggshells around each other.
He hated the strain. Hated the way she was censoring what she said and did around him. He knew she was afraid to talk about anything serious for fear of another eruption like the last time they’d been together.
It nearly killed him, because there were things they needed to get out in the open, but he decided not to push her. Instead, he smiled when she told her silly jokes, held her hand as they played tourist and scoured the Abdeen Palace and the Sharia al-Muski street market, even managed to laugh when they took a belly dancing class that made him feel like a complete idiot. But always in the back of his head was the weight of what he needed to tell her and the fear she may not be as thrilled with his plans for the future as he was.
Her dig would be over in three months—at least for her. They’d talked briefly about what she planned to do when her time was up. She’d given up her apartment in Maryland when she’d come to Cairo, so she didn’t have one to go back to. After a year away, she wanted to go home to Washington and see her mother for a while, and then she needed to get busy on her dissertation. She could do that anywhere, he knew. She didn’t need to be back in Maryland to write. In his head, he’d already worked out the details.
Convincing her to come to Miami, though, was small potatoes compared to what he had to convince her about himself. And after a week, he felt like he was running out of time.
She rolled over in bed and snuggled into him on a sigh, and as he wrapped his arms around her and drew her closer, he told himself he’d do it today. She’d taken a week off to be with him, and she had to go out to the site this morning to work, but tonight, when she came home, he planned to lay it all out for her. Strip himself bare and hope what she felt for him was strong enough to overlook everything he’d done.
“You smell