Better Hate than Never (The Wilmot Sisters, #2)(91)

My shoulders start to shake as I fight a laugh, not knowing how my lungs can handle it when I’ve had the wind knocked out of me. Despite my worries, a hoarse, deep laugh leaves me as my head flops back onto the wet floor.

“Christopher!” She’s still laughing as she buries her face in my chest. “I’m so sorry. I’m the worst.”

“Hush.” I drag her back down into my arms, pulling her across my body and clasping her jaw in my hand, stealing a deep, hot kiss. Gently, I tug her lip between my teeth and earn a delicious, tiny head-to-toe shudder. “You are the best.”

Her laughter dies away. She looks at me, unblinking, and brings a hand to my face, sweeping back the hair that’s fallen onto my forehead. “I think you are, too.”

Leaning in, she brushes her lips over mine, sweet and fleeting. “Let me clean this up,” she says. “Then I’ll call you in, okay?”

“I can help—”

“Christopher.” She kisses my jaw, my throat, her hand sliding down my chest. My hips lift, waiting for her to finally touch me where I ache so badly for her, but she stops just short of where I want. “Please let me clean up my mess.”

Grumbling a little about it, I sit up with her carefully, then let her push me out of the bathroom, before she shuts the door in my face.

Suddenly the door opens a crack, one beautiful blue-gray-green eye blinking at me. “Oh, and by the way. Just to be clear, when I call you in. Please be”—pink dances up the sliver of her cheek that I can see—“clothed. I think I can only take one of us naked at a time, to start things off.”

I lean into the crack of the door and steal a kiss. “Clothed it is.”



* * *



—

    Now it’s my turn to sit on the edge of the bed, staring into the fire.

“Ready!” she calls.

I straighten like I’ve been shocked. Clearing my throat, I stand from the bed. “Coming,” I call back.

“Heh,” she says. “So soon?”

“Watch it, Wilmot,” I tell her, even though I’m smiling, reaching for the door and once again realizing my hand isn’t steady.

“Ooh, I’ve been Wilmot-ed. And I thought calling me Katerina was as stern as you could sound.”

Opening the door, I tell her, “Katerina, you haven’t even seen stern . . .” My voice dies off.

A mountain of bubbles surrounds her, obscuring most of her body, but not all of it. The tips of her bare toes. Two knobby knees. The freckled tops of her shoulders. All that hair, piled high on her head, delicate wet tendrils plastered to her neck.

Her face, flushed and lovely, tight with nerves.

“Take a look,” she blurts, lifting one long arm out of the water, pointing toward the polished, now-dry tiles, the neat stack of folded damp towels in the far corner where the broken towel rack rests. “I can sure make a mess, but at least I can clean it up, too. What do you think?”

Staring at her, I drag the door shut behind me. “Unimaginably lovely.”

She frowns. “That’s a strange way to describe a tidied-up bathroom.”

I ease onto the edge of the tub and set her wine beside her. “I’m not talking about the bathroom.”

Her cheeks stain deep, rose pink. “This tub,” she says, staring down at the bubbles, “is incredible. Get your digs in now. I will forgive anything so long as I’m soaking in this thing, even outlandishly sweet compliments like that.”

I smile, guiding a hair off her cheek that’s stuck there. “Are you telling me that all I should have done when I tried to fix things with you was throw you over my shoulder and toss you in my tub?”

She laughs. “Yep! Little did I know, all I had to do was get drunk and spill my guts for you to be nice to me.”

My heart clenches. “Just ‘nice’?”

“Well . . .” She makes a thoughtful face. “Maybe a little more than nice. Maybe caring. And unexpectedly gentle. And thoughtful. And excellent at providing upright orgasms, which I have yet to master for myself.”

She’s rambling. Which means she’s nervous. I rest a hand over hers, tracing with my fingertips the droplets of water beading her skin. That’s when I feel her trembling like I have been, too.

“Kate, honey—”

“I’m okay,” she says, flipping her palm, squeezing my hand hard. “I promise.”

She slides forward in the water, wrapping her arms around her knees, baring a long expanse of smooth, pale back that I’ve seen only once before, the night at her apartment that she gave me right back what I’d given her. It does not feel remotely the same. “Would you wash my back?” she asks. “My shoulder’s still a little too stiff to reach it.”

I set my hand between her shoulder blades, tracing my fingertips down her vertebrae. “Yes,” I tell her, savoring the trail of goose bumps that blooms on her skin in the wake of my touch.

I reach for a washcloth and dip it in the water, then glide it over her back. She sets her chin on her knees and sighs. “That feels nice.”

“Good.” I scrub over her shoulders, tracing carefully over the one she broke. “Kate, should it still be stiff like that? Do you need physical therapy?”