Free Make Me Desperate by Beth Kery

soap-covered hand. He was cleaning her with a handheld showerhead. It felt divine. Decadent. She wanted to look at him, but her head felt so heavy. He put one hand on her knee, opening her thighs. Warm water rushed over her sex. She whimpered. It soothed the slight sting in her tissues. For whatever reason, his gentle, patient bathing of her, his implicit understanding of what she was experiencing following his demanding possession, struck her as one of the most intimate, beautiful moments of her life.
    He was eclipsing her grief and her existential crisis . . . but he was confusing her, too. She couldn’t comprehend why she was so trusting of him when she knew with a man like him, hurt was an inevitability.
    When he’d finished, Harper found the wherewithal to lift her head and watch in silent wonder as he quickly cleaned his own body. No sane woman would want to miss that, she told herself wryly. He seemed completely unaware of her admiration as he quickly ran his soapy hand over broad expanses of ridged, taut muscle, glistening bronzed skin . . . cock and balls. He was growing erect again. Harper realized with a dazed sense of longing. He fisted and pumped the length of his wet cock, then massaged his balls briskly. Her grew harder and longer in front of her eyes.
    Maybe he wasn’t as unaware of her watching him as he seemed.
    A moment later, he reattached the showerhead. She stared fixedly at the image of him turned in profile, his glistening cock protruding between powerful thighs. It took her a moment to realize he was looking at her with a question in his eyes.
    “I’m okay,” she said, reading his concern for her wrung-out state. “I didn’t know there was such an extreme difference between good sex and mind-blowing sex,” she managed through numb lips. “It really saps you.”
    He smiled that smile. He walked over to her and reached for her hand. Fortunately, her legs held her when he pulled her up. His hand went to the back of her head, where he tugged gently at her damp hair. Her head fell back.
    “You come hard, Harper McFadden,” he said next to her lips.
    “With you I do.”
    His kiss melted her even more, if that was possible. After he sealed it, he looked down at her searchingly.
    “I know what you need,” he said with the air of someone who had just made a decision.
    “A bed?”
    “No. Food,” he said, taking her hand and opening the shower door.
    * * *
    She had nothing to wear since she’d left her clothing down at the pool house, so Jacob supplied her with a dark blue microfiber robe that was decadently soft and enormous on her. Jacob himself dressed in a pair of gray workout shorts and a plain black T-shirt. They stole through the now-darkened house, hand in hand, to Jacob’s enormous kitchens.
    He opened the fridge, and she examined the well-stocked shelves hungrily. She lifted a damp cloth on a large container.
    “
Oysters
,” she groaned longingly. Her stomach growled loudly. Jacob gave her an amused glance.
    “Oysters it is, apparently.” He pulled the container of oysters out along with a fresh loaf of French bread and a bottle of champagne.
    He’d been right about what she needed, as usual. Harper reanimated during the kitchen raid. They sat on two stools next to the cook’s wood-block prep table and proceeded to devour their simple meal. The oysters had a clean, briny flavor. The champagne was dry, crisp, and divine. Jacob entertained her by telling a story about the first time he tried a raw oyster at age sixteen while at a fancy cocktail party, where he’d been a fish out of water. He’d nearly thrown up on the immaculate party hostess and had to make a hasty retreat for the bathroom. The party hostess, who was the wife of the man he was working for, saved him further disgrace by halting him when he initially mistook the cloak closet for the powder room.
    “I came this close”—he signified a fraction of an inch with his thumb and forefinger—“to losing my