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But really, could she imagine standing before him with her hands on his skin under that warm spray . . . ?

Yes. Yes, she could.

The Primale went lower with the soap, down his chest and stomach. Then he cupped what was between his thighs, swiping his hands over and under his sex. As with the rest of his ministrations, he moved with disappointing economy.

It was a strange torture, a pleasurable pain to watch him in his private moment. She wanted this to last forever, but knew she would have to make do with her memories.

When he turned off the water and stepped out, she handed him a towel as quickly as she could to shield that heavy, dangling male flesh from her eyes.

As he dried off, his muscles flexed under his golden skin, tightening up hard, then stretching out lean. After he wrapped the towel around his hips, he reached for another and dried his hair off by rubbing the dense, wet waves back and forth. The flapping of the terry cloth seemed loud in the marble room.

Or maybe that was the pounding of her heart.

His hair was tangled when he was finished, but he didn’t seem to notice as he looked over at her. “I should go to bed now. I have four hours to fill, and maybe I can start going through them now.”

She didn’t know what that meant, but nodded. “All right, but your hair . . .”

He touched it as if only just realizing now that it was attached to his head.

“Would you like me to brush it?” she asked.

An odd expression hit his face. “If you’d like to. Someone . . . someone once told me I’m too rough with it.”

Bella, she thought. Bella had told him that.

She wasn’t sure how she knew it, but she was dead certain—

Oh, who was she fooling? He had an ache in his voice. That was how she knew. The tone was the verbal equivalent to what was in his eyes when he sat across the dining room table from the female.

And although it seemed petty, Cormia wanted to brush his locks in order to replace Bella with herself. She wanted to imprint a memory of herself over the one he had of the other female.

The possessiveness was a problem, but she couldn’t change the way she felt.

The Primale handed her a brush, and though she expected him to sit on the edge of the deep bath, he went out to the chaise by the bed and sat down. As he put his palms atop his knees, he bent his head and waited for her.

As she approached him, she thought of the hundreds of times she had brushed the hair of her sisters in the bath. In this moment, though, the thing in her hand with all the bristles, was a tool she wasn’t sure how to use.

“Tell me if I hurt you,” she said.

“You won’t.” He reached over and picked up a remote unit. When he hit a button, that music he always played, the opera, swelled in the room.

“How lovely,” she said, letting the sounds of the male tenor seep into her. “What is the language?”

“Italian. It’s Puccini. A love song. This is about a man, a poet, who meets a woman whose eyes steal the only wealth he has. . . . One look into her eyes and his dreams and visions and castles in the air are stolen by her and replaced by hope. He’s telling her who he is now . . . and will ask who she is at the end of the solo.”

“What is the song called?”

“ ‘Che Gelida Manina.’ ”

“You play it often, do you not?”

“It is my favorite among all solos. Zsadist . . .”

“Zsadist what?”

“Nothing.” He shook his head. “Nothing . . .”

As the tenor’s voice soared, she fanned his locks out across his shoulders and started at the ends, taking the brush to the waves in careful, gentle sweeps. The rasping noise from the bristles joined the opera, and the Primale must have been comforted by both, because his rib cage expanded as he drew in a long, slow breath.

Even when all the tangles were gone, she kept on going, continuing to smooth the wake of the brush with her free hand. As his hair dried, the colors came out and its thickness returned, the waves re-forming after each pass, the mane she knew as his emerging.

She couldn’t keep this up forever.