Chapter 17: Hot Tub

At midnight I pinned the last sheet of Davenport Crown to the wall and stepped back.

It was done.

The ring of glass at the top rose over the harbor in forty clean lines.

My name stood in the corner of every sheet, first, in my own hand.

The Skyline Awards were two days away.

I stood there with a pencil behind my ear, and I thought I might cry.

Leighton came and stood behind me and said nothing, and his arms went around my waist.

"It's beautiful," he said into my hair.

"It's yours."

"It's yours. It always was."

I turned in his arms.

"I'm too wired to sleep," I said.

"I know where we're going."

He took my hand and led me out of the long room, past the kitchen, up a short spiral stair I had never climbed.

A glass door opened onto the roof.

The terrace lay open to the black sky, with the whole city around it in lights.

A square tub of steaming water sat in the middle on slate paving, with a low wall around it and no neighbors for forty-eight floors.

"Two years," Leighton said. "I haven't used it since I bought the building."

"Why not?"

"Nobody to look at."

I laughed and shed the robe he had put around my shoulders.

The air bit my bare skin.

I climbed over the rim, and the water closed around my hips, hot and silky, and I sank to my shoulders with a groan.

He slid in beside me.

Steam rose around us.

For a minute we only floated, shoulders touching, looking up at a sky the city had washed out.

Then he turned toward me, and his hand moved up my ribs under the water.

"Sit up on the edge for me," he said.

"Why?"

"I've been thinking about your breasts all day."

Heat ran through me that had nothing to do with the tub.

I lifted myself onto the broad stone rim, and the cold night air hit my wet skin, and my nipples drew up tight.

I sat there with my legs in the water and my back against the low wall, and the city stretched out behind him.

He knelt up in the water in front of me, between my knees.

He looked at me for a long moment, at the full weight of my breasts, the water running off them in beads.

"God," he said. "Look at you."

"They're big."

"They're perfect. They're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, and I've been trying to say it for a week."

He cupped one in each hand, lifting them, heavy and wet, and he groaned.