The lamp on the side table illuminated him in a way it hadn’t when he’d been on the floor. His beard was wet. From her.

It looked just like she’d imagined it would, back when they’d been climbing down from the roof of the Mermaid and the image had randomly popped into her head.

“No,” she whispered. “Nowhere to be.”

He licked his lips again.

Then he lowered his head and licked her lips. A few passes, and she was ramped right back up, fighting competing urges to writhe away from him and to buck her hips against his face to nudge him a little higher.

But wait. She didn’t have to nudge, right? She had her newly discovered power. “Higher,” she panted, and he moved higher. Amazing.

But he must have thought she was instructing him to move on to the main event, because he started tonguing her clit.

That wasn’t going to work. “I can’t take that much direct pressure. You have to kind of dance around it. Like, on the sides.”

And damn if he didn’t just adjust. Once he was licking around the nub with a steady amount of pressure, everything inside her started spiraling up and up and up. She was about to say something like Right there, just like that, but it was too late. All that came out was a shriek. She clamped her thighs around his head as she’d done before, and he kept working her as she pulsed around him.

When she finally slumped back and loosened her hold on him, he sat up and drawled, “Well, that didn’t take long at all.” He was wearing the world’s most self-satisfied grin.

She grabbed the throw pillow that was scrunched up behind her back and threw it at him. He caught it and winked at her. “Just give me…two minutes.” She waved a hand back and forth between them. “To get my limbs working again.” Except…something was wrong with this picture. “Wait. You’re still wearing all your clothes.” And they were wet, too.

Well, of course they were. And of course he was still wearing them: between her grabbing handfuls of the wet fabric of his shirt and him going to town on her, they hadn’t stopped to disrobe him.

“Your limbs aren’t working, but thank goodness you haven’t lost your powers of observation,” he teased.

“You should take your clothes off now.”

“Okay.”

And he did. Another example of the power of using her voice.

“You should, too,” he said as he struggled with his wet pants.

She was still wearing his T-shirt. Wow. How was it she’d had pretty much the hottest sexual encounter of her life and he’d been fully dressed and she’d been half-dressed?

“Okay,” she said.

And then they were both naked. They eyed each other.