Hidden Depths(32)

But she had given him one useful skill he hadn’t known he would need until Miss Andrea Prentiss was passed out in his bed. Braiding hair. And he had found it surprisingly intimate, pleasurable.

Once he had Andrea in the shirt, he had taken his brush and tugged slowly and carefully through the long, drying hair for quite some time before he pulled it back into a braid, the dog watching him, head cocked at an angle.

“Yeah, I know,” Evan had said to him softly as he tied the end with a strip of cloth. “Next thing I know I’ll be having to brush you. Or tap-dancing,” he added with a mutter.

But now that he and Andrea were in bed together for the first time, he wished he had unbraided her hair as well. Something about having her here was so right. With her dark brown hair falling down her back and gleaming in the firelight, his shirt in place of a proper white cotton nightgown, she could be the lighthouse keeper’s wife in some long-forgotten time. Except he was the lighthouse keeper now. And he was never getting married. His mother’s broken heart and his father’s relentless quest to replace his long-dead first wife had convinced Evan of that.

Still, he would love to feel her long hair all around him, above him as she rode his cock.

He involuntarily jerked at the thought, his whole body, not just his cock and felt her startle.

“I’m sorry. Go to sleep. I’m going back to the guest room. I don’t want to hurt your stitches.” Or prove to be the mercenary she’d accused him of being. “I’ll bring the—er, Bingo, with me.”

But she grabbed his arms and brought them tighter against her waist, below the bandage. “No. you’re not hurting me. Stay with me.”

Hearing that from this woman, who had so coldly pushed him away the last time he had seen her, was incredibly satisfying.

And who was he to refuse? For the first time in a long time, since well before she had gotten here, he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Hours later, his cock woke him up, jamming determinedly through his sweats against her silky bottom, bared by the shirt that in her sleep had hiked up. He froze, but she seemed to be asleep. Tempted to groan in frustration, he settled for extricating himself from the same spooning position they apparently were in all night and getting up. It was dawn anyway—his usual time to rise on the island, although he’d never had a gorgeous woman here to stay in bed with. Standing by the window, hands on hips, he tried to calm the damn erection down—comical as it almost was sticking straight out like that—by looking out at the view. The morning air was grayish mist and the rest of the tableau just the darker blue of the ocean waves beyond. Like every morning, it was beautiful and humbling and mesmerizing.

He glanced down. His cock was not appeased. He better just hit to the shower and jerk off to the view in his mind’s eye if not in the corner of it if he turned just a bit. Andrea all bottomless and sleepy, ready for him to slip between her legs.

“Oh.”

He turned automatically and Andrea was sitting up slowly, staring right at his erection. He wished he had a folder or a tea tray or something in a thousand other comedies the protagonist would use to shield his enthusiasm. But with nothing, there was no use trying to pretend it wasn’t there. Better to try to minimize it, if not physically, at least conceptually.

He pointed to his cock, as if he was in one of those comedies. “No big deal. Happens every morning.” Especially if there was a bare female ass snuggled up to it. “Don’t worry about it.”

Her hand went to her hair, pulling back the strands that had come loose in the night, and she looked away. “I’m not worried.”

She did get out of bed, though, the sight of her long bare legs not helping much. “Where did Bingo go?”

He concentrated on the mist outside the window in an effort to forget the no-panties thing as she came to stand next to him. He shrugged. “The dog has the run of the place. He’s probably up in the lighthouse room.”

“You’re all alone on the island?”

He glanced at her, surprised that she hadn’t known that since she had apparently chosen it as her sanctuary from whatever she was running from. “Yes. It was uninhabited before I bought it.”

“You don’t get spooked all alone here so far from another living being?”

“No, I’ve never been spooked.” Except when she showed up at his sliding-glass door, of course. He had never been lonely either, not until lately, that is. “Why? Are you afraid of ghosts?”

“Not afraid of them so much as cognizant of them, I guess.”

He snorted, but declined further comment. “How do you feel?”