Can't Stand the Heat - Louisa Edwards [94]
She clung and shuddered through the aftermath, pleased to discover, as she came back to herself, that Adam was clinging just as much. They were pretzeled around each other inextricably, and Miranda’s heart felt fluttery and warm. She never wanted to move.
If she moved, she’d have to think about things. And really, she’d prefer never to think about things again. Thinking was bad. Very bad.
Miranda frowned and burrowed tighter into Adam’s embrace.
“Stop that,” Adam said, his warm voice husky and laced with amusement.
“What?” Her reply was muffled against the damp, delicious skin of his shoulder.
“The wheels in your brain are starting to turn again, aren’t they? Like a hamster in one of those plastic balls.”
Miranda snorted, but allowed her lips to curve into a sleepy smile. “Nice pillow talk.”
“Ooh, speaking of pillows . . .”
TWENTY-THREE
The disentangling process was slow and satisfying for Adam. He liked the way Miranda moved as if she were swimming through melted chocolate, sort of boneless and effortful. Her eyelids drooped nearly shut, getting lower with every breath.
Adam settled her on her back, loving her unselfconscious snuggle into the pillows, and drew the thin cotton sheet over her while he went to the bathroom to clean up.
He narrowed his eyes against the harsh glare of the bulbs over his bathroom mirror. One glimpse was enough to tell him he looked thoroughly “shagged out,” as Frankie would say. Adam grinned at his messy hair and remembered Miranda’s fingers tunneling through it, snarling it up into its current condition.
Glancing back through the open doorway, he was arrested by the sight of her sprawled across his bed the way he’d imagined her, spotlit by the shaft of light from the bathroom. It was a gorgeous picture she presented, and Adam took a moment to enjoy it. The deep evenness of her breaths told him he’d most likely be basking in the afterglow alone, but he didn’t mind.
There was plenty of good stuff to think about. He switched off the bathroom light and stumbled his way back to the bed. Sliding in beside Miranda, he spooned up against her, relishing the silkiness of her skin and the murmuring noises she made. He propped his head on one hand and studied her beautiful face.
Was it stupid and soppy to be happy just watching her sleep?
Whatever. Adam would’ve shrugged, but he didn’t have the energy. Either way, he was definitely justified in the surge of gladness he felt when Miranda turned toward him in her sleep, nuzzling closer and throwing a possessive leg over his.
Thus happily pinned in place, Adam prepared to relive the last hour in his head, from the instant she requested a tour of his townhouse, to now. He wanted to cement it all in his memory, every touch and every look. The tight satin grasp of her body, the breathy, almost shocked sound of her cries, the raw red of the flush that suffused her cheeks and all the way down to her breasts in the moment of climax.
Adam’s heart thrummed with deep satisfaction and contentment. The most basic part of him, what he thought of as his hind brain, was cavemannishly pleased to have his woman locked into his embrace, sleeping peacefully under his protection with the livid evidence of his possession fading into light bruises on her hips.
Miranda was his now.
And he was hers.
Morning hit Miranda like a sledgehammer. One minute, she was lost in a dream where Jess was a toddler again, strapped into his car seat in the front of the van their mother used to drive, while Miranda was stranded in the last row of seats, unable to reach him as the van started to move down the road on its own. The next minute, she was gasping awake in an unfamiliar room, a moss-green sheet knotted around