"Yes," he said, flipping open the top as he bent to take my breast in his mouth. I squealed again when he tugged ever so gently with his teeth on my nipple, then moaned when the cool liquid hit the tip, oozing downward. He leaned over me and took my other breast in his mouth while his fingers teased the slick oil over my breast. The combination of the heat of his mouth and the coolness of the lotion made my mind go numb with pleasure. He teased circles around my cherry-flavored breast, gently rubbing my nipples between his slippery fingers just as he started suckling hard on my other breast.

I almost came off the bed, my back arched up so high.

"Like that, do you?" he chuckled, his voice intimate and sexy and rough with pleasure. He dribbled a little lotion on my bare breast, then switched sides and sucked all the cherry goodness off the first breast, laving my breast and nipple with long, sweeping strokes of his tongue.

"RaphaEL," I screamed, clutching his shoulders as he burned my breasts up with the fire his hands and mouth were causing. "Oh, please, Raphael, you have to stop! My nipples are going to explode, and then what'll I do? I don't think they can do nipple transplants, can they? Oh, sweet baby Jesus, that's so goooood…"

He drizzled cherry down my belly, his fingers painting me with the wetness, tracing intricate paths that his mouth soon followed. While he was busy nibbling around my belly button, his hand slipped down to my underwear, rubbing the heel of his hand over me, his fingers teasing the satin into my heated core. My eyes crossed at the cool silk of his curls brushing against my skin with each stroke of his tongue on my belly. The dance of his fingers against my soft folds was driving me wild, winding the coil inside me up tighter and tighter. "Raphael!" I shrieked.

He smiled against my stomach.

"Take my underwear off!"

He cocked an eyebrow at me. "Demands? Do I hear demands?"

"Please," I begged.

"That's better," he smiled, and nuzzled the flare of one hip. "Do I take it you don't like it when I do this?"

He pulled my underwear tight against my flesh, his finger stroking out a quick tempo that had me mindless in seconds.

I whimpered. It was all I could do, I couldn't form words—words were too much to expect when my body was being pleasured beyond any pleasure it had known.

"Baby, all you have to do is tell me what you want," he crooned, his eyes hot and wicked and full of the terrible, terrible things he wanted to do to me.

I prayed he had time to get to every last one.

"Please," I sobbed, my body bucking in time to his fingers. "Just you. I want to feel just you."

He ended one torment by pulling my underwear off, but started another when he spread my legs and went wild with the bottle of cherry.

"Dear God in heaven," I cried at the first stroke of his tongue against my heated flesh. "Raphael! Bob! Please!"

"Anything for you, baby," he said, settling my thighs on his shoulders and preparing to send me flying. His mouth sent me into a maelstrom of sensations: fire, silk, pleasure, love, desire, need… they were all tangled up together as he drove me higher and higher until at last I went up in a bonfire of ecstasy. He caught my shout of exultation in his mouth as he plunged into me, so deep it was impossible to tell where he ended and I started. He pulled my hips against him as he entered me again and again with quick, hard thrusts, touching my womb, touching my soul, searing himself into my heart with every hot word of love he moaned into my neck, setting me alight with the pure joy of our combined rapture.

"Each time," I told him later as I stroked my fingers down the long, damp sweep of his back to the curve of his lovely behind; "each time I think it can't get any better, and then it does."

His head raised from the crook of my neck just enough to press a kiss to my collarbone.

"You set me quite a standard to follow," I complained. "I don't know how I'm going to match you, let alone exceed you. Everything you do to me is wonderful. Do you have any idea what sort of stress that puts on me to strive for perfection? What if I fail? What if I can't ever match you?"

"You're forgetting an important fact." He pushed himself up so he could grin before swooping down to capture my lips in his. "Practice makes perfect. We'll just have to let you practice until you're perfect."

I thought about that for the scant second before I gave myself up to the hot lure of his mouth. "Works for me."

"Where's your gun?" I asked, stepping out of the claustrophobic shower so tiny I wondered how Raphael fit into it.

He was dressed, sitting on the bed pulling his boots on, having washed off all our cherry fun. He looked up as I toweled myself dry and reached for my clothes.

"My gun?"

"Yeah. You know, the one you pulled on us when we did our breaking and entering the other day. The big one."

"Why do you want to know?"

I unzipped my dress, stepped into it, and turned so he could zip me up. "Idle curiosity. I thought maybe since you were in charge of security you'd be wearing it, but you haven't, and it's not under your pillow, so I was just wondering what you did with it."

His hands were warm on my back as he pulled the zipper up; then he turned me around and looked at me for a minute with those amber eyes that could melt my knees. With a sigh, he bent down and reached under his bed, pulling out a small black metal box.

"Oh, it's in there?"

"Yes."

"Ah."

He pushed the box back under the bed, then grabbed my hips and pulled me onto his lap. "Joy, about what you said earlier—"

"Oh, my apology? Yeah, I know I still owe it to you."

"No, about—"

I put my hand across his mouth. "Let me do this with style, will you? I really am sorry for what I said, Raphael. You're entitled to your privacy, and if you don't feel like you can trust me with something in your past, that's fine. It hurts me, but I'll live. I just want you to know that, despite the pain I feel because I know I'm not as important to you as you are to me, I will still be here for you. I love you, and that means I'm stuck with you no matter how badly you treat me."

I pulled my hand from his mouth and smiled at him, pleased I had gotten my groveling out of the way.

There was a decidedly disgruntled look on his handsome face. "That was an apology?"

"Sure was."

"Ah. Perhaps it is the latest rage in apologies—one that backhands the person you're apologizing to."

I nudged him on the shoulder. "Stop being so argumentative. You're supposed to accept it and tell me you love me and worship me and you'll never, ever keep anything from me again."

"I'm supposed to do that, am I?"

"Yes, you are."

He tipped me over onto my back and loomed over me. I smiled and looped my hands around his neck.

"And you came all this way just to apologize to me?"

He started nibbling on my neck, his hot breath starting familiar fires that had just been put out.

"Well, not just for that. Roxy and I had to talk to Dominic."

"Why?" he asked, his hands sliding up my dress to massage my breasts.

I squirmed and lifted my jaw to give him better access to all the sensitive neck spots, my hands tracing out the muscles in his back. "Roxy set it up. Dominic had something to tell us."

"Something about what?" His tongue curled around the outer edges of my ear, his uneven breath doing more to me than the hot touch of his mouth.

"Something to help us. Oh, God, Raphael, you can't do this again, we just got cleaned up!"

"Something to help you what?" he asked, sucking my earlobe into his mouth as he gently squeezed my breasts.

I nuzzled his cheek and tried to remember what I wasn't supposed to tell him. "We're trying to find out who killed Tanya."