Although it's very hot in the sun, Christine lies quite still with her arms up above her head and her eyes closed. She has factor seventy sunblock sprayed in an equal sheen over her entire body, even her eyelids; especially her eyelids. She's a doctor. She knows exactly how sensitive that skin is. The air is thin enough that she feels like doing nothing. She's happy to lie as soft as a cat, almost in sleep, feeling the sun bleach the sweat from her skin. She knows enough to take a sip of water every now and then, but even so, she will probably be dehydrated by the end of the day and find herself in need of replacing water and vital electrolytes.

To Spock, she knows, it is not a hot day. It's just below 40°C. It's mid-winter. There is actually snow on the mountain peaks, very far away. Not a hint of snow here, though. Just sun, sun, and sun.

'Christine, are you taking care not to get sunstroke?' he asks her anxiously.

She moves a hand limply to touch the open parasol she has propped and shading her head a little.

'Yes, Spock,' she murmurs.

She can feel his dissatisfaction with that answer, but she can also feel that he's quite content to sit out here and look at her as she reclines in her taut blue one-piece bathing suit on the wooden deck. If she were on stone or sand she would be burning, but the wood somehow keeps just enough coolness to be bearable.

'Come inside, Christine,' he says.

She murmurs a non-committal response, and keeps her eyes closed. With her eyes closed she can almost pretend the sky is blue up there, not red. It's not that she doesn't like Vulcan, but sometimes she misses home, and it's fun to pretend. With this heat, though, she has to pretend she's in Dubai or Australia, not New England, and she'd like to pretend she was in New England. Most of all she'd like to pretend that the Atlantic was a few hundred metres away, waiting for her to cool her skin in the waves.

Suddenly there are arms sliding underneath her, and she's shocked into opening her eyes by the sensation against skin that, despite everything, is a little burnt.

'You are coming inside,' Spock murmurs against her ear, holding her against his chest, in the deep, commanding voice she loves so much. She's too sleepy to argue; and besides, when her eyes open she sees the sky is red after all, and knows there's no cooling Atlantic to slip into in her bathing suit.

'All of you,' Spock adds, laying her on the couch inside, one hand slipping a little until his fingers trace over pubic bone and further down, slipping over her soft inner lips, separated from her skin only by the thinnest layer of her swimsuit fabric. The touch sends electric shocks through her loins. She shivers, suddenly torn between heat and chill as he touches his fingers to her shoulders, slips them under the swimsuit straps, and peels the clinging fabric down her body to her navel.

'You were getting too hot,' he whispers as he kneels beside her, his mouth right by her ear again, his tongue flicking out at her skin and making her shiver again.

He's changed so much from the man she used to know. A lot has changed. She's been away from the ship and come back again. So has he. She's become a doctor. He has tried to erase all emotion and didn't succeed. He has ended up feeling more than she had ever imagined he could because of one machine-being called V'Ger; not just feeling, but accepting that feeling. It isn't as if he emotes all over the place now, but he can accept that emotion is not a dirty thing. He can accept his human half.

His head lowers over her body, his mouth sinks over the pucker of her navel, kisses up the centre of her torso, takes in one rapidly stiffening nipple as his hand caresses over her other breast. Suddenly the shivers are everywhere. Suddenly she's wet in the bone-dry swimsuit that still clads her lower parts, and his moving hand is a creature of heat warming all of those places that are abruptly chill. His fingertips slip under the tight cling of her folded down swimsuit, through the rough, dark hair, through to the wet valleys between her legs, and she can't keep in her sighs.

There's a noise like a rumble deep in his chest, and he's pulling the rest of the suit down so she lies utterly naked in the cool room, gasping in air which has a little extra oxygen pumped into it, thank god, because she thinks she's going to need it. She turns her eyes towards him as he stands up, seeing that he's stripping off his loose Vulcan robe and dropping it to his feet, and he stands there naked as the day he was born, but oh so much more glorious in his forty-something adult state. There's not a hint of being nearly fifty about him. Such is the joy of the Vulcan ageing process.

'Oh, Spock,' she sighs, at his angled cheekbones, at his long, lean limbs, at the dark tracery of hair up his limbs, on his chest, and thickening as it trails down to between his legs, where he is already beginning to harden.

And he scoops her up again and carries her into the wet room, where there lies a shallow bath, more a pool really, an indoor area for the luxury of water in a desert. When they first stepped foot in this house Christine had gasped and Spock had seemed contented as a cat at her reaction, when she saw the scoop in the granite floor wider than a table in one of the Enterprise briefing rooms, sliding from a depth of a centimetre to almost half a metre of water at the other side of the room.

Into this perfect stone pool Spock carries her and lays her down. The water is perfectly pitched so it is neither hot enough to aggravate her subtle sunburn, nor cool enough to shock her sun-warmed body. He lays her in the pool, her head in the shallow waters, her legs floating free in the deeper end, and then he dedicates himself to her, coming over her, slippery with water himself. She kisses him back as his lips touch hers, she lifts her arms, all sleepiness roused from her, and traces her fingers over the delicate points of his ears. She comes to meet him, each of them kneeling, face to face, and feels the hardness of his erection pushing against her hip. As she reaches down to grasp it she hears him sigh and throw his head back, and she kisses the peak of his adam's apple and then his chest, and then the rearing staff of his erection, which is hot, so hot, against her lips.

She is back in the water again, lowered down by his arms, and he is over her, kissing, suckling her breast into his mouth, his hand roaming down between her legs and touching that one part of her that makes her cry out aloud, makes her thoughts run away from her mind, makes her dizzy.

'Oh, please, Spock, please,' she sighs.

He is torturing her. His fingers keep moving on her, and then he scoops his head down below the water and with his breath held he licks her there, his tongue hot and firm against her flesh. She is alight, she is crying out, her head is back in the water and her hair loose around her, and she almost screams because he tortures her so.

'Dear god, Spock,' she cries out, and he rises from the water, dripping, his hair a slick crown of black, and a sparkle in his eyes. He is almost smiling. 'Dear god, Spock, you bastard, if you don't fuck me right now, I'll – ' she begins, and watches a wet eyebrow shoot up at her profanity.

And then there he is. He touches her once more with his fingers, slipping inside, as if opening her up, and then there he is over her, touching the heat of his erection to her needful lips, slipping to her aching opening and pushing in. Oh, he is hot. She is sure she can feel his pulse inside her now, as he slips himself all the way home, as his lips come down to kiss hers again, as his slim hips pull back and then push forward again. Each time he moves inside her she wants to scream. Each time he pulls out, almost all the way out, she wants to grab at his hips and pull him home again. She lays her hands on his buttocks and feels the tense, slim muscles and all their work. He penetrates her again and stays for a moment, and dammit, she wants him moving again. She wants him out but she wants him home. She wants that slipping motion as he fills her, as his heartbeat is inside her, as his mind reaches out into hers and she shares his joy, and he shares hers. She is lost. She is nothing but dizzy pleasure as his hips keep butting home.

His hands are on her face, his fingertips at her temples, on her cheekbones. His mind is so far in hers now that there is no she, there is only they, there is a state the veers between he and she and melds together into a shared joy. She feels the shivers through his abdomen, the tightening in his balls, the blessed joy of slipping into her cool, clenching body. Her joy sparks into his, his into hers, and magnifies. He is losing control. He is unable to pace himself. He is coming home hard.

And then the supernova. Then all thought goes away, and he has released his seed into her, hot and quick, and she can feel the jerking inside her, can feel the ripples through her own body as she is brought to orgasm and she cries out into the stone room, beating her hands into the water and arching into his dominating body.

And slowly it subsides. She can feel his chest hard against her breasts, can feel his cheek against hers and the roughness of his furred skin, his arm limp against her shoulder, his mouth panting. She can feel his erection slowly subside until it is a limpness lying just inside her, a soft, hot thing that she loves.

'Dear god, Spock,' she murmurs.

'I am no deity,' he replies, his voice deep and very close to her.

'Oh, you are,' she responds with all her heart and soul. 'Oh, how you are, Spock. How you are.'