Voss had an excellent excuse for being on that roof right up until the moment he put the blanket down. Now the woman he'd been hoping to get a second look at had asked him to stay, and he stood at the greenhouse door with both hands empty and absolutely no idea what to do with them.
"Should I be bringing the peaches up next?" he asked. "I'd hate to run out of respectable reasons to come up these stairs."
"You ran out about ten minutes ago," Felicity told him. She sat between Victor's knees with one ear turned toward the door and her face tipped to the glass. He could see her smile in it. "You can stay by the window if you like the view."
He did like the view. He also liked his teeth where they were, so he took a second to look at Victor. The eagle had one hand tucked under the hem of her shirt, and he'd gone still when Voss stopped at the door. What interested Voss was the direction of the man's gaze. Victor had spent the whole walk here watching other men's hands. Right now he had his eyes on his wife.
"What made you change your mind about getting me to yourself?" Victor asked her. Voss knew a sore spot when he heard one. He could leave them to take care of it in private, although he'd have to walk back past that window to get to the stairs, and he was human enough to regret his timing.
"I do have you to myself. I thought it might be nice if somebody saw how lucky I got." She turned to kiss her husband. "There's another reason, but if I get any redder saying it, the radio tower's going to start blinking back."
He ought to have warned her just how well he could hear. Then she looked out at him, straight at the crooked ear he tended to forget about until it gave him away. He realized she could hear his boots scrape the roof every time he shifted his weight. Odds were she knew better than he did exactly how much of this conversation he was getting.
"He looks at me like he already knows what I'll do," she told Victor. "I really want to see his face when I do something he didn't expect."
That one got him. He'd spent the walk to the brewery checking their flanks and coming up with excuses to look back at her. Meanwhile she'd figured out exactly which of his bad habits she could use to get his attention. He'd even dressed up a personal question as advice about where to stand in a patrol. She was behind glass in her husband's lap, and she had a better read on him than anybody in the building.
"Then you ought to look at him, little fox," Victor told her, "because you're about to miss it."
Felicity looked. Voss hadn't thought he had much pride left to lose after admitting how badly he'd wanted her to look at him in the storeroom. Turned out there was a little left, and he lost it when she smiled at him and worked the jeans down over her hips. He'd seen naked women before. He'd never stood outside a perfectly ordinary piece of window glass and wished quite so hard to be on the other side.
Victor gathered one side of her shirt in his fist and slid his fingers inside her. She fit her hand over his and guided his thumb where she wanted it. Voss could see her pleasure in the way she moved, the tip of her tail catching against Victor's knee. She had the softest voice of anybody he'd brought back with him that day. He could still hear her over the wind as she asked for a little more.
He put his hand at his belt and waited. If he'd mistaken an invitation to look for anything else, this was where she'd let him know. His pride could stand another dent. His balls, on the other hand, were going to file a formal complaint about these pants.
"It's all right, Voss. I'd like to see you too." She said his name like she had when he first turned for the stairs, when he could have gone and she'd given him a reason to stay.
He unbuckled his pants and closed his hand around himself. He kept one fist on the ledge while he stroked, letting her see exactly what she did to him. All afternoon she had been slipping behind Victor when men sniffed the air too close to her. It pleased him more than he could have explained that she'd found one she wanted standing in plain sight.
When she came, Victor held her through it. Her mouth went to his shoulder. A few strands of honey-blond hair stuck to her lips afterward, and Victor brushed them aside with the back of his hand. That small, familiar kindness did Voss in worse than the sight of her bare thighs. He wanted to be someone she'd come to for that, too. Getting there was going to take a damn sight more than looking good with his pants open.
The wind tipped the blanket off the sill. Voss caught it and fastened his belt. Felicity followed his hands, and when he looked up, she was waiting for him to meet her eyes. It would have been easy to leave with a clever remark and let her wonder what he'd meant. She'd taken a chance on telling the truth in front of two men. He figured he could manage it in front of one woman.
"If I stay much longer, Felicity, I'm going to want to come through that door." He stood where she'd asked him to, with a cold hand on the window frame, and waited to hear how much of that wanting she shared.