The Dare Collection May 2020

Because Dylan worked on that marvelous body of his. There was a gym in the house, where he put in at least an hour a day, but he also liked to run. He’d introduced her to the coastal walk that stretched from Bondi Beach to the north down to Brontë in the south, and Jenny had taken to walking it on fine mornings, breathing in deep. Letting the Tasman Sea breeze and the lovely Australian sunshine dance over her face like happiness. Stopping here and there to gaze at the water or take pictures from the rocky cliffs.

Dylan ran it.

She could tell that he’d been out on the run already this morning, because he wore nothing but a pair of athletic shorts, and he was…gleaming.

Sweating, she corrected herself crossly.

She should have been revolted. But he didn’t smell bad. He smelled clean. Male. And the sweat of his exertion only made him look better, somehow. It made his green eyes gleam brightly, and Jenny felt reduced to a stuttering, bumbling mess.

It happened more and more the longer she stayed here. One more reason she should leave.

“I’m not scowling,” she told him, ignoring all that gleaming. “I was thinking about business-related things. I’m so far away I keep pretending England doesn’t exist. But it does.”

“Last I heard, yes.” He sounded amused as he went to the refrigerator, and pulled out the makings of the shake he put together every morning. Several different powders she assumed were proteins and superfoods and whatever else it was health nuts liked to put in themselves to keep up with all the gleaming. Green things and antioxidants and worthy supplements packed with vitamins. The very opposite of the full English breakfast she remembered him tucking into with gusto on hungover Oxford mornings.

There was no reason for her to be here, but she leaned against the counter, her mug of strong tea in her hands and watched. Dylan fixed himself his drink then chugged it down, tipping back his head so she could hardly help but stare at the strong column of his throat. And all the lines, planes and ridges of that body he worked so hard on almost entirely exposed to her view.

She studied the tattoo on his back, the line of Gaelic down his spine and the Celtic knot he wore over his heart. Why did she want to put her hands on him so badly? To trace those tattoos she recognized like old friends, to remind herself how well they suited him and how easily he wore them.

Because you need to go home, she told herself sternly.

“I’m headed into the office,” Dylan said. And when he looked at her, his green gaze swept over her the way it always did, after that first conversation. Friendly. Happy. Not complicated in the least.

There was no reason it should make her teeth ache, so hard that she clenched them.

“The housekeeping service will be in,” he continued mildly, though something about the way he looked at her made her unclench her teeth. “I told them to expect a guest on the premises, so don’t be put off if you wake from a nap to find someone hoovering up the place.”

“I won’t be here,” she said grandly. And without thinking it through. “I’m going to do a bit of the tourist thing.”

“And here I thought you planned to waft up and down the coastal path again.” He studied her. “You should roam about Circular Quay and the Rocks. Take the ferries all over Sydney Harbour. Get a sense of the place.”

Jenny had spent most of her life charging around doing this or that, but not since she’d arrived in Australia. All she wanted to do was stay tucked up in Dylan’s house, or lost in her own head as she wandered up and down what had to be the most beautiful walk in the world. It hugged the coastline, meandering through the beach towns and around a haunting cemetery set into the side of a cliff, over the ocean pools, up the rocks and down again. When the sun was out it could be warm enough to feel like summer while other days it was moody. She loved it either way.

But she’d announced she was off to play tourist, so that was what she was going to do.

“I’ll drive you in then,” Dylan said, with a grin.

And that was how, scarcely forty-five minutes later, she found herself sitting in an outrageously flash sports car, prowling through the morning traffic toward the Sydney Central Business District.

“I have to make a confession,” she said as they waited at a light. She glanced over at him, dressed in his usual uniform of jeans and a T-shirt—which should have looked ratty and casual and student-y, but didn’t. Not the way he wore them. “I had no idea you worked this hard. You underplayed it.”

Dylan laughed. “Maybe I wanted you to think it was effortless.”

“You work all the time,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know when you sleep. No matter what time I wake up, jetlagged and victimized by the time change, you’re always awake. You take phone calls night and day. And yet you still have time to go on runs and toss weights around in your gym. I thought I was busy, but you’re a right superhero.”

“I do run a company, Jenny,” he said, in a tone of mock reproach. But she was caught up in the way he propped his arm up on the steering wheel, and it was difficult to tell which was more powerful, the car or the man. “It can’t run on its own.”

“It’s just so…”

“Surprising?” Dylan supplied.

And he laughed when he said it, but she didn’t think he was kidding.

“Impressive,” she corrected him. “I was going to say it was impressive.”

The look he threw her way was unreadable, but then traffic surged forward, and he put his attention back onto the road. And then, before she could ask him something, or say those things she kept biting back, his mobile rang the way it always did. And he answered it the way he always did, because he was far busier than she’d ever imagined, and he launched himself back into another business conversation.

Jenny told herself she’d imagined her reaction to him when he pulled up to a curb on a city street some time later, told her to walk straight ahead and indicated that she should get out. But when she reached over to open the door, his hand grabbed her arm, stopping her.

It made her feel jagged inside. Scraped up. His hand was big and hard over her forearm and his eyes were so green. And something about Dylan looking at her so intently made her think she might shake. She wanted to, anyway.

“I’ll meet you later,” he told her, gruffly. “At the Opera Bar at the Opera House. Eight o’clock.”

“It’s a date,” she said, brightly.

And immediately regretted her choice of words.

But she didn’t have time to stammer about it, or take it back. Or even qualify what she’d said.

Because Dylan smiled, and it was an edgy thing, wired directly into that jaggedness within her. “I’ll see you then.”

And Jenny found herself out on the street, then walking, oblivious to her surroundings. Because all she could see was that look on his face.

Which is why it took her a moment, after she’d walked down the block and under a rail overpass the way he’d told her to, to realize where she was.

He’d dropped her a block away from a walkway that led around to the iconic opera house itself. And the Sydney Harbour Bridge. And the gleaming, beautiful water of the harbor itself, cut through by the green-and-yellow ferries. And sailboats catching the wind.

It was like standing in a postcard.

And later, Jenny couldn’t have said which one of those things made the tears begin to stream down her face. Only that she cried, and she couldn’t believe that a place she’d seen on television a thousand times was far more beautiful than she ever could have imagined.

And that somehow, even though she was standing there on a bright winter morning, crying her eyes out in the middle of the streams of Sydneysiders and tourists, so very far away from England and the world she knew, she had never felt quite so at home in her life.

CHAPTER FOUR

DYLAN HAD RESIGNED himself years ago to the fact that he clearly loved a hair shirt. He liked to suffer, obviously. What other explanation was there for a hopeless, unrequited love that stretched on past hope, past reason, and insinuated itself into every interaction he had with other women?

Aren’t you just a fecking martyr, his older brother Dermot had sneered at him, there in their grotty flat in the tower block of the estate—now happily demolished—when Dylan had announced that he was going up to Oxford. He might as well have said he was going to the moon. Oxford made about as much sense to his sprawling, vicious family hunkered down poor and addicted in the land of saints and scholars. The more you suffer, the better you feel about yourself.

Dermot had talked a metric ton of shite, but that particular dig stayed with him.

And if he’d ever had any doubt, that was gone now. Because there was carrying a torch, which Dylan had done for years now whether he liked to admit it or not. And then there was Jenny in his house. Living under the same roof. Jenny looking soft and sleepy, shuffling around his kitchen. Jenny lost in thought, gazing out over the rail on his deck.

When they’d been at university together, he’d known things about her. Intimate things that could only come from daily interaction. That she worried a lock of her hair around and around one finger while she studied. Or when she was nervous, she worked a knuckle between her teeth. The way she hummed beneath her breath, always off tune, when she was happy. The awkward, yet endearing, way she danced to the endlessly cheesy music she liked.

Since graduation, those things had faded. When he saw her now, there was always so much less time. A dinner here. Drinks there. He texted her more than anyone else he knew, combined, but it wasn’t the same as those stolen intimacies. It couldn’t be. And he would have said he’d accepted all that, long since.

But she’d been here almost a week and they were building up again, those encyclopedia entries that together made up Jenny. She still twirled her hair when she was miles away, lost in thought. She still bit down on that knuckle.

She no longer hummed beneath her breath, which Dylan felt like a shocking loss. But one morning, when he’d been heading out on the long, hard runs he took to keep his goddamned hands to himself, he’d found himself standing outside the door to the guest room. She’d been in the shower and he’d heard the water running, but that wasn’t what kept him there, frozen still. It was Jenny, singing an egregiously bad pop song from their Oxford days, as tuneless as ever.

His cock had been rock hard and his grin had been wide, and a bigger fool could not possibly have existed on God’s green earth. And the desperate notion he’d formed over these last years when he only saw her sporadically, that familiarity would breathe a little much-needed contempt…

If anything, the opposite was true. It was worse now.

Much, much worse.

Because this time around, Dylan wasn’t the overwhelmed, out-of-his-depth Irish kid on cobbled-together financial assistance, lost in the Bodleian. He was no longer afraid that he might betray himself completely and start tugging on his forelock to the English overlords, or something equally horrifying. He wasn’t crushed under the pressure of his own ambition and need to climb up out of that hole his family had been in for generations, not anymore. Over the years, he’d told himself that if he ever got the chance to spend quality time with Jenny again, he would see that it had only ever been a crush. He’d been a poor kid from the worst estate in Dublin, surrounded by toffs and unsurprisingly drawn to the kindest and prettiest among them.

But the truth was that he had never been much of a kid. Children in his old neighborhood grew up fast, or not at all. By the time he’d gone up to Oxford, he’d been like an old, weary man next to the soft public schoolboys and pampered Oxford dons.

Maybe that was why he still, all these years later, was as destroyed by Jenny as if he’d only just met her.

Something he was sure he would feel more bitter about later. When she left him, the way he knew she would, and fucked off back to England. And that terrible arranged marriage of hers. And bloody Conrad Vanderburg, who was as approachable as a spot of freezer burn and would crush all the joy and Jenny out of her.

He would enjoy this time. Jenny here, now. He wouldn’t expect anything. And he wouldn’t be disappointed. He would enjoy it, if only because he had the distinct impression that this was the last part of her life she would enjoy, too.

Dylan had been whatever she needed him to be for as long as he’d known her. He could do it this one, last time.

Because he knew that it only felt like it might kill him, the weight of this thing he had for her. It never actually did.

That was what he told himself that night, as he dodged tourists on his way to the bar tucked up under Sydney’s famous opera house. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans, glad he’d shrugged on a jacket after his last meeting. He took rather too much pleasure in dressing down, particularly when the client he was meeting with expected rather more of a song and dance.

Jenny was the only member of the landed gentry he had ever bothered to dress up for.

There was a notion to make a man’s blood run cold.

But it told Dylan everything he needed to know about himself—and in truth, he already knew it—that he didn’t tear off the coat he wore and toss it in the harbor. And that when he saw the slim, dark-haired woman standing at a rail near the bar, her eyes on the harbor bridge lit up against the night, he walked faster.

These were the moments he liked the most. The moments right before she turned to look at him. The moments when he could almost believe that this time, when she did, she would finally see him. The real him, which would be some feat, since he’d spent the entirety of their friendship burying the real him as deep as it could go.

He slowed, his eyes locked on her, and it was as if they were all alone instead of in one of the busiest spots in Sydney. She was dressed exactly as she had been when he’d dropped her off this morning, but she didn’t look tired or frazzled. She’d clearly bought a pair of heels to replace the more comfortable shoes she’d been wearing earlier. She’d secured her hair on the back of her head, though tendrils danced in the winter breeze. Because she was Jenny, she’d somehow transformed jeans and a slouchy sweater into something elegant.

She turned her head before he reached her, her gaze finding his in the soft dark.

Dylan forgot to grin the way he usually did. And so did she.

And for the space of a long, slow heartbeat, he was lost in that gaze of hers.

Usually he broke the tension, because that was safer. Because that made sure they stayed right here. On the same ground where they’d always been.

But tonight, he didn’t do it. He went to the rail and bent down so he could rest his forearms on the top of it the way she was doing.

And for a long while, they stood there, not quite touching, staring off toward the bridge together.

“Did you play tourist all day?” he asked, many long breaths and jarring heartbeats later.

“I did.” He didn’t look, but he could hear her smile all the same. “I marched all over the place. I explored the Rocks. I got chocolate from Haigh’s. And I was nearly mowed down by health fanatics jogging around Macquarie Point whilst scoffing it down.”

“Best to stay out of the line of traffic with your sugar and shame, then.”

“I took the ferry out to Manly to have a bit of lunch.”

“A fine beach, that.”

“I rode the ferries all over. Even in the rain. I think I’d quite like to live in a place where I could take a ferry to work. It feels more civilized, somehow. And wild at the same time.”

“Sydney Harbour’s not the Thames,” Dylan said. “But it has its charm.”

“This all feels like a dream.” She was no longer talking about the city, or the water, he knew. “One of those dreams where you’ve fallen, and try to surface again, but can’t. And the longer I stay here, the more it seems as if my life back in England is the dream. I don’t know. Maybe everybody feels that way on holiday.”

He reminded himself that it wasn’t his dream they were discussing here. It was hers. And much as he might like to tell himself different, he knew full well that Jenny was running away from her life. Not taking a holiday. And if he was truly her friend, not just the sad sack bloke who’d mooned about after her all these years, he would take himself out of the equation, wouldn’t he?

“I haven’t forgotten what you said when you arrived,” he said, and he had to look at the bridge because if he looked at her, he wasn’t sure what he would do. Or maybe he was sure. And that was the problem. “It sounds to me that you think you’re missing something. That’s the long and the short of it. But if this marriage is really what you want, the way you say it is, then you’re going to have to accept it. All of it. Not just the bits you can rationalize away.”

“I don’t need to rationalize my marriage,” she said, and he ordered himself not to pay too close attention to how cross she sounded. “You and Erika can’t get your heads around it, but you don’t have to. I know what I’m agreeing to.”

“But you haven’t accepted it, have you? Or you wouldn’t be here. Across the world from where you ought to be right now, calling it a holiday when we both know you’re hiding.”

“I just want to know,” she blurted out. She turned toward him then, and then he was turned toward her as well, and so much for his intentions. “I think this is an act of acceptance. Radical acceptance. I fully comprehend what marrying Conrad will mean. I want one little thing to bring with me. To hold on to, through whatever comes.”

“A different radical suggestion would be not to marry him.”

Jenny’s eyes searched his face, and she sighed a little, then she shocked the hell out of him by reaching over, and taking one of his hands in hers.

“When my mother died, my father and I were devastated,” she said quietly. “My father has never been a warm man, and never will be. But he loved my mother as much as he was capable. And in the years that followed, when it was only the two of us, he made me promise that I would arrange my life with my head, not my heart.”

His system was going haywire because she was holding his hand like that, between hers and up against her chest, and he couldn’t think. He had to force himself to use his big head.

“That sounds like grief talking,” he said, gruffly.

“Maybe so, but it’s not a grief I want to repeat. That’s the promise I’m keeping, Dylan. To my father, first and foremost. He wants me to be safe, not in a position to shatter.”

And Dylan was only a man, after all. He shifted so he was the one holding her hand in his, and it was a kind of agony, really. Her fingers were long and elegant, and he would never sleep again, thinking of the things she could do with them.

But all he did was hold her hand there. Safely. Sweetly, even.

“That you promised your father is all very well,” he said. “But you and I both know that you’ve always been a romantic.”

She pulled her hand away, and he let her, because he had to let her. Her eyes flashed. “I don’t think I’m romantic at all.”

“Please. When that wanker started writing you love poetry, you cried.”

“It was love poetry, Dylan. You’re supposed to cry.”

“It was dreadful. Embarrassing.”

“It was years ago. It was one poem and you were cruel about it then, too.”

“Because you wanted it to be a romance, and it wasn’t. It was an Oxford swot looking to get a leg over. And using pretty words to get the job done.”

“It’s not you who he was trying to get a leg over, so I don’t know why on earth you would care.”

“I don’t care,” he said, and it was a lie. A very old lie, so he said it with tremendous dignity. “I’m simply pointing out that where anyone else would see a right tosser, you saw a poet. You’re romantic, plain and simple.”

“Even if I am, it doesn’t matter, because I’m not planning to act on it. And that’s not why I’m here.”

“Are you ready to tell me, then?”

And he waited, a strange, new kind of energy rising in him as she turned and met his gaze. Looking uneasy, for the first time.

He couldn’t say he minded.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You can hide here as long as you like, Jenny,” Dylan said quietly. “You’re always welcome.”

“I’m not hiding.”

“It’s nothing to me if you wear a groove into the coastal walk while you fret over thinking yourself frigid. Though I will point out that most people, when they want to know about sex, take to the internet. I’m not necessarily advocating that you watch porn, mind. I’m not saying you shouldn’t, either. Maybe you’ll learn something.”

Jenny rolled her eyes. “The last thing I want to do is watch porn.”

“Because you’re too good, is that it?” And he laughed, though he didn’t find it funny. The notion of Jenny and anything pornographic was enough to turn him inside out. “Saint Jenny, Our Lady of Restraint?”

“Of course not.” She frowned at him. “Porn is just fucking. I want to know what it’s like to be fucked properly.”

And he wanted to say something to break the tension inside him. Between them. He wanted to make them both laugh the way he usually did. That was what he should do, and he knew it. It was the only thing that would keep them steady. On even ground, where they needed to stay.

But he didn’t do it.

Jenny stared up at him, and something in her face changed. Maybe it was because he wasn’t grinning. He wasn’t hiding himself. Maybe the truth was, he was tired of all the hiding he’d done all these years.

For a moment, here in the dark with the light of the bridge in the distance and the opera house rising like a wave behind them, he was, for once…himself.

Unfettered.

Unapologetic.

Unleashed, at last.

Jenny made a soft, small noise. Shock, perhaps. Need, something dark within him insisted.

“I didn’t come all the way here to talk about sex,” she said her voice resolute.

“Fucking,” he corrected her, and he really did sound like himself then. Not the happy-go-lucky version of himself he played for her. “The proper fucking you’ve gone without all this time, in fact.”

He watched her swallow, and the way her throat moved. And even that felt like her elegant hands around his cock, holding him. Massaging him.

Driving him fucking crazy.

“I didn’t jump on a plane and fly here to talk about it,” she said, a strange insistence in her words. “I don’t want to talk about it. I want to do it.”

He didn’t help her. He only waited, his gaze on hers, so intent he was sure he must have seemed harsh to her. But she didn’t back down.

“And I don’t want to do it randomly,” she said, her expression every bit as intense as he felt. As he was and always had been. “I want you, Dylan. I want you to show me what it’s like.”

CHAPTER FIVE

JENNY COULDN’T SEEM to regulate herself. Her temperature, the way she shook, her wildly pounding heart.

Because Dylan was still Dylan. But once again, she couldn’t quite recognize the man she knew on the face of the man who stood there beside her.

This Dylan was dangerous.

And the voice that whispered that word inside of her wasn’t Erika’s. Not this time. It was some base of feminine knowledge she wouldn’t have believed existed if she didn’t hear it so clearly. It understood when she didn’t, when she couldn’t, that whatever this was—whoever he was when he changed this way—he wasn’t the easy, lazy, comfortably relaxed friend she knew so well.

“Are you sure?” he asked, and there was that intensity in the way he asked it. And the way he looked at her. And the way he held himself while he did it. “You want me to show you how to fuck?”