I guided Xavier down to my cabin where we barely made it through the door before our clothing was discarded. Only the mooring lights from the boat and dock filtered through my tiny window as I cradled his body between my open thighs and he slid into me, filling the seemingly endless ache I had for him. His face and eyes were barely visible in the shadows.

Our lovemaking started off slow and deliberate.

He lifted my leg, finding his way deeper, and I cried out at the new angle. “There’s no one to hear you,” he whispered, moving in and out of me languidly, making me feel every slow inch as he dragged out and pushed back in. “Tell me what you want. Let me hear you.”

“This,” I’d gasped. “You. You feel so good inside me.”

He grunted and mumbled something back to me in French. Then switched to English. “Faster?” he asked as he thrust in hard and fast.

I cried out again.

“Oui, like this,” he answered for me. “You make me crazy. Hungry. I will finish and need more. How is it possible?”

Then his whispers quieted and it was just the sound of our labored breaths and my cries as he brought me closer and closer to the edge. The sudden silence from him was disconcerting, but, oh God, he was just in the right spot.

“Xavier. Yes.” I wrapped my other leg around his firm butt, urging him faster, deeper. Lightning shot up and down my skin.

His body grew tense and strained and we both struggled against and toward the rush to the edge. I got there first, my eyes squeezing closed and my head going back as I gave myself up to the fall.

Then I held his head in my hands, watching his shadowed features as he came apart, wishing I could see what was going on behind his tightly closed eyelids.

He collapsed on me, his heart pounding against mine, and then slid off to the side. Cool air whispered over my sweat-slicked skin as I caught my breath.

I disentangled myself without resistance and crept out of bed to clean up. When I re-emerged, I found Xavier already sleeping, hand thrown up over his head, the other on his belly. The light from the bathroom showed his features were smooth and relaxed at rest, his thick eyelashes resting on his cheeks. I made myself stop staring and clicked the bathroom light off, crawling in to join him.

I lay in the dark next to his warm body, feeling strange and discomfited. There was a struggle going on within Xavier. He was open and teasing one moment and quiet and broody the next. Despite our romantic evening and the foreplay, verbal and otherwise, that had preceded our lovemaking, he’d seemed distant at the end, as though he suddenly found himself being vulnerable and had scrambled to close himself back up.