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But in her bed together, that hadn’t mattered.
In her bed, nothing had mattered except the way they moved together, the way they made each other feel, the sense of discovery and magic, the blissful contrast of his big, strong body and her softer, smaller one.
The only thing they’d ever really had during those short, intense weeks—sex, and bed, sleeping wrapped in each other’s arms.
It had scared her with its overwhelming power.
“Are we doing okay to move?” he asked. “Steady?”
“Yes. Thanks.”
But before they could start the walk toward the stairs, he added quietly, “We should say it, don’t you think? We’ve both been holding off.” He took a careful breath, and she could feel it through their contact. “You remember me.”
“Of course I do.” She opened her eyes, but they still wouldn’t focus properly. He was just a darker blur in a fuzzy radiance. “Even though I can’t see you.”
Sight was overrated, her body said. Neither of them moved. Time slowed. The heat of his hands burned into her and she felt the air seem to thicken around them. She could have let him go and stepped away, but she didn’t. Neither did he.
“You’re not blonde anymore.”
“That was my divorce hair.” She could feel the way his chest expanded and contracted as he breathed, could feel the detail of ribs and abs and back muscles beneath the cool weave of a short-sleeved T-shirt.
“You never wanted to talk about your divorce.” She knew the sleeves were short because the soft inner skin of his arm was in direct contact with her forearms as he closed his body more protectively around her. “I think you mentioned it twice.”
“We weren’t all that much about talking, you and me, were we? I still don’t want to talk about it.”
“It was that bad?”
“No, it was more … The marriage was that bad.”
“That’s not why we fell at the first hurdle, the two of us—because you’d had a bad marriage.”
“No. One of the reasons.”
“The other reasons … I never really understood what they were,” he said slowly. He loosened his hold a little, creating a slow friction where their bodies touched.
“You were angry …” she reminded him.
“So were you. And you pulled right back. I could feel you pulling back, and so I pushed harder and it all got worse until you just cut off.”
“The timing was wrong. Everything was wrong.”
“Without giving me a chance to bridge the gap. The last thing we ever did was go to bed.”
“Are you still angry?”
“Are you?” he countered quickly.
She bit back a retort that this was what he’d done before, he’d always turned things onto her, made her talk first and talk longest, so that she was the one who had to put herself out there, put her needs and feelings on the line, at a time when she was still such a mess from her marriage.
It was true. He had done that.
But there were so many mistakes and faults on both sides, she couldn’t untangle the rights and wrongs of it. It had been a mess. If she forgave herself, then she had to forgive him.
She said some of this, haltingly, and felt—because she couldn’t see—the way he listened. Cautiously. Willing to hear. Resistant about some of it. Tightening his hands at one point, and then softening them against her back. “I agree it was both of us,” he said. “I agree that we can’t just … be angry. Anger is such a prison. It holds you back. Even when you can see it, you can’t help it sometimes. But let’s not.”
He spoke as if he knew from bitter experience, driving home to her once again how little they’d really known about each other. She didn’t know what had happened in his past to make him believe anger was like that, did things like that.
“Is anger what you’ve felt, if you’ve thought about me, over the past six years?” She tried to open her eyes again, saw a shimmery blur. He was too close. She couldn’t bring him fully into focus and it threatened to make her queasy. Best not to look.
“No, mostly not,” he said. “You?”
“No. More like a sense of inevitability. I’ve thought about it. I could never find a way for it to have been different. We just weren’t in the right place, either of us. Me more than you, maybe?”
“Don’t know about that. But yeah, neither of us in the right place. Lot of regret. Not much clarity.”
“Pretty much.”
He shifted his weight again, and she felt the pressure of his chest against hers. They didn’t speak. She remembered what she’d decided after Daniel—that she really wasn’t cut out for the whole love thing. It was too daunting. Too huge. Too much of a contradiction to everything she’d been taught about her own strengths.
She’d had one failed marriage, and one failed fling where even the great sex couldn’t hold them together for more than a few weeks. The great sex seemed like the problem more than the solution. It was deceptive. It got in the way.
Immersed in her work, she might have tried love again if it had come her way. She’d planned to be very careful about it, to take it slow, to keep sex safely out of it for as long as she could. But she’d never had to follow through on those plans because no man had seriously tried for more than a date or two. How likely was it, really, when she kept to such a tight, demanding routine?
Daniel was the first to speak again. “What about the reasons why it was good between us, Scarlett?” His voice dropped low and slow. “What do you think, now, about those?”
The air went still and heavy around them, while the past crowded in and their bodies remembered. She wanted to tilt her head and see if her cheek would find his shoulder. Or lean in and lift her chin. Her mouth would be sure to find something, if she did that. Something delicious and wonderful. She knew it, because he was so close. She would find the hard, satiny heat of his neck. Or the fragrant tickle of his hair. Or the tease of his gorgeous mouth.
A man’s mouth didn’t change in six years.
Her own body began to soften and swell and melt. Her skin was so sensitive, she was acutely aware of every inch of Daniel’s touch, every ounce of pressure, every tiny sound he made, the strength that seemed to come off him in waves, like radiant heat.
“The reasons why it was good …” she said.
Incredibly, with her vision still below par, her capacity for arousal seemed to be working just fine. She shifted her weight, the way he had done a minute ago, and the movement brought their thighs together. He stood at a slight angle, so that one knee pressed between her legs, dragging her skirt into a deep fold.
“Yes. You know what I’m talking about. Have they changed?” The whole world narrowed to just this—her and Daniel, holding each other, remembering with their bodies what they were skirting around so cautiously with their words. “Has it changed? That one amazing reason?”
“How can I know?”
“You have an inkling.” His hand slipped a little, closing over her hip. She could feel the warmth, and didn’t want it to go away.
“Okay, but that’s a toe in the water.”
“Is it? You can tell a lot from a toe. If the water’s warm or cold. If it’s clean against your skin.” They both stood very still, and Scarlett barely managed to breathe. “You want to find out if this feels the same all the way?” His hand slid across and down and traced the curve from the small of her back, across her butt, to the top of her thigh. “More than a toe in the water?”
She answered him only with a ragged breath.
“This was always so good, Scarlett, so good. This was how it started. We got to this pretty soon. This was the center of it, the meaning of it. This was where it was always the best.”
“Yes …”
“Yes!”
“But we stuffed it up.”
“We stuffed everything else up,” he corrected her. “We never stuffed this. Never once. We slept together on our first date and we never, ever got it wrong.”
Chapter Four
Daniel heard himself sweet-talking—practically begging—Scarlett into bed and wondered what the hell he was thinking.
Start into this again? Risk losing himself this way? He didn’t know if he should wish he’d never stopped beside her skewed car on the verge of the road this afternoon, or if he might count it as the luckiest action of the year.
His body had a pretty powerful opinion on the subject, but should he listen to it? His body told him he could have Scarlett in the palm of his hand with the right touch behind her ear, the right peachy softening of his mouth over hers, exactly the way he’d had her before, but how crazy would that be?
He couldn’t believe how much he wanted her, even with all the baggage they had, all the memories of how it hadn’t worked before. His body said none of that mattered. The past was gone. Now was what counted. But he knew that now didn’t last, while its legacy often did.
It was like in a cartoon, with a tiny angel version of himself sitting on one shoulder and a tiny devil on the other. Talking him up. Talking him down.
“You can regret it in the morning, big fella,” the tiny cartoon devil urged. “Now is now.”
“She’s worth more than a one-night stand,” the cartoon angel insisted.
“Doesn’t have to be one night. The regret might be weeks away. The regret might never happen.”
While the cartoon symbols of his conscience bickered away, Scarlett made the decision for them. He could feel her body shaking beneath his touch, the power of her response that much stronger because she otherwise seemed so thin and frail with the pain and dizziness that were only just losing their hold. “Upstairs,” she said. “In a bed.” She took his hands and made them move down her body, the message that she wanted his touch so naked and clear. “Because I don’t have a strong enough head for anything creative tonight.”
“You mean—?” he began, slow about it in spite of her bluntness and her signals, not able to believe that she would make it this easy, even though she’d always made it easy six years ago.
She’d never used sex as a bargaining chip or a power play or a strategy. Not even right at the end. As he’d reminded her just now, the very last thing they did before she told him it was over was to make love with dizzying, almost desperate satisfaction, as if there’d been no problems between them at all.
“You’re right,” she said simply, with her palm cupped softly against his jaw and her whispered words just a fraction of an inch from his mouth. “We never once got this wrong.”
He carried her.
Not because she needed it, the way she had on the verge of the road, but because the sheer, crazy charge of hearing her say that she wanted him had no place else to go. He just scooped her up and settled her against his chest and went for the stairs, while she tightened her arms around his neck and tried to control her breathing. “Oh, Lord, Daniel, how do you make me want this so much?” He felt so strong and full of triumph about what was happening that he practically laughed out loud.
It was so sudden.
So very much wanted.
Both of them.
Total equality about it.
He’d had to fight all evening not to keep looking at her and mostly it was a fight he’d lost. He’d watched her color slowly come back and her movements become stronger and less dominated by pain. He’d watched her sipping the soup and chewing neatly on the toast with her eyes closed. She’d kept her hands wrapped tight around the mug and he could see in her face that it made her feel better, even before she’d said so.
He’d watched her occasional attempts to open her eyes, the dark lashes lifting to show darker pupils before she’d made a frustrated sound and closed them again. He’d watched the careful way she talked. Their past relationship was written so clearly on her face, in good ways and bad, if only she knew.
He wasn’t done with this, and she wasn’t, either.
It was unfinished, six years ago.
Or it was finished wrong, which came to the same thing.
“I’m scared,” she said.
“I won’t drop you.” Her butt was safe against his stomach, while her thighs and spine pressed on his arms, with such warm, satisfying weight.
“I’m scared of pretty much everything except you dropping me.”
“You changing your mind?” They’d reached the top of the stairs. He lowered her down, the initial charge of his energy spent. They held each other almost desperately, as if their contact wouldn’t be able to reconnect if it broke.
“No! But scared is part of it.” She stroked his arm, sliding her hand beneath the sleeve of his T-shirt and then bringing it right down to his wrist. Her touch triggered a million nerve endings into a response. “Honesty matters in bed.” She spoke as if she knew from experience. Different experience. Bad experience. Not what they’d had together. Her marriage, he guessed.
“It does,” he agreed. He stepped closer, even though that was barely possible. “Honestly, then? I’m scared, too.”
“Yeah?”
“Same reasons, maybe. That it won’t be as good.”
She laughed, hunched her shoulders and gave a shiver. “I’m scared of the opposite.” She held on to the belt loops at his waistband as if she needed the support, and pressed her forehead into his shoulder. His jaw settled against her hair as if it lived there.
“What’s the opposite?” He couldn’t think straight. Her hand had come whispering across the front of his jeans. He wasn’t sure if she even knew she was doing it. Her eyes were closed, the way they had been all day. She was so naked in what she gave away, when she couldn’t see.
“That it’ll be too good,” she promised. “Mind-blowingly, terrifyingly good. And you’ll reach into my guts and squeeze and I won’t know where to go next.”
“Did that happen before?”
“Yes. It did. And I don’t know how much of that was because of … well, my marriage.”
“Not a factor this time around.”
“No.”
“You squeezed my guts pretty hard, too,” he admitted on a growl. “You nearly broke them. And you’re squeezing ‘em right now.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. Hard. It almost hurts. It aches.”
“Good,” she said, almost fiercely. “Because I’m aching just as much.”
He kissed her because he couldn’t help it. Because her mouth was right there, so soft, with a tiny patch of dryness on her lower lip that he wanted to moisten with his tongue. She responded in an instant and they deepened the kiss with mutual need, couldn’t get enough of each other.
He took her lower lip lightly between his teeth, softened it, stroked it, covered her whole mouth with his and felt the deliberate caress she gave back to him, and the little nips and tastes. Her mouth moved with velvety softness and he chased every movement, wanted it deeper and deeper and seriously couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t get enough.
Sometimes a kiss was just a kiss.
