‘Why not?’ she sighed against the warm skin of his throat. Too tired to move and not particularly inclined to. ‘Whose great idea was that? That we have no say in our destiny?’
‘I didn’t say that. Just that sometimes things just. happen. You can’t hold yourself responsible for everything that occurs.’
She crawled in more comfortably. He took her full weight. ‘That sounds an awful lot like you’re accepting my apology, ‘ she whispered.
His broad chest rose and fell beneath her torn-up hands. She held her breath.
‘We were both kids, ‘ he mumbled against her wet hair. ‘We both did things we regret.’
She lifted her head to stare quizzically at him. ‘What do you regret?’
His eyes darkened. Then blanked carefully over. ‘I regret a lot of things.’
Stop talking, Beth. Now! That voice in her head seemed to know exactly where she was going next. She ignored its excellent advice. Her saturated chest heaved. ‘Do you regret kissing me?’
Marc sucked in a breath, and she was too close to him to miss it. She wished she could see his eyes to gauge his reaction. ‘I regret the manner in which I did it,’ he said simply.
Pushing her hard up against the library wall and forcing her lips apart with his? She could see why he might regret that. If not for the fact that she’d been waiting years for him to take the initiative. She just didn’t know it.
The sixteen-year-old tomboy deep inside asked the same honest questions she always had. ‘How do you wish you’d done it?’
His thick voice was strained and it drew her eyes up to his. ‘That’s not a question you can ask me, Beth.’
She lifted her head. But the move cost her. She winced as her over-taxed muscles reacted sharply to the move. ‘Why not?’
‘Because of what you said afterwards. What you made me promise as you pushed me away.’
Don’t ever touch me again. Don’t speak to me again.
She closed her eyes. ‘I was angry. And confused. It never occurred to me that you would actually honour that. ‘ But he had. All damned year.
‘Confused how?’ His tired eyes took on a sharper edge.
‘Because I … ‘ Lord, how to get out of this one. ‘Because it was us. Kissing. It threw me.’
He straightened. ‘Because you hated it? Or because you liked it?’
For all her faults, she’d never been a liar. Not to Marc. But she was proficient at hedging. ‘Are you seriously asking me to rate your kissing prowess?’
‘Do I look like I have any doubts about that?’
Her mouth twisted. ‘No. You always were infuriatingly confident.’
His expression changed in a blink and then was gone. Maybe the moonlight was playing tricks on her, making her see vulnerability that couldn’t possibly be there. Not in that body. Not in this man.
‘It matters to me, Beth. Whether you hated it. Whether I actually damaged our friendship, too.’
Too. Misery came surging back in at the reminder that she’d said the words that destroyed their friendship. Even if she hadn’t set out to. She was only going to ask him to back off for a while. But he’d kissed her and she’d panicked. Those soft lips pressing against hers, forcing hers wider. The hands that had plunged into her hair to hold her captive sent electric sparks through her body and threw her into confusion. The press of his eager body into hers had made her want things she shouldn’t want. The desperate, intense pain in his eyes echoing hers. The thick smoke-like energy he’d been pumping out all around them.
Did she like it?
Enough to rip his heart out with her reflexive over-reaction. She took a breath. Held his eyes. Held her breath. ‘I didn’t hate it.’
This was where he’d kiss her in a movie. The water. The cold. The intimacy. The moonlight. And her admission practically cried out for his mouth on hers.
Instead, he nudged her head back down to his shoulder and rested his cheek against her wet hair. She felt his low words against her ear, vibrating in his throat. ‘Thank you, Beth. Deep down, I worried I’d struck the death blow.’
No. That honour remains with me. Snapping on the heels of that thought came another. He’d wondered about his part in that kiss? That wasn’t the admission of a man who’d never given it another thought.
Beth lifted her face to study his. A particularly full wave washed over them and buffeted Beth against him with its chilly brush. Waiting for a kiss was stupidly naive and impossibly romantic. Her heart squeezed hard. Had she been so starved for affection in her loveless marriage that she was finding it now in impossible places? Marc was just moved by their circumstance and harking back to better times. That was all.
Since there was to be no kissing, she needed, really badly, to get off him. But her body had practically seized up in the foetal position and straightening her limbs was a new kind of agony. Just when she thought she’d already met all the cousins in the Pain family.
‘Easy, Beth. You need to walk off the ache. Your muscles will be eating themselves.’
Pretty apt, really. Starting with the giant thumping one in her chest cavity. Crawling into Marc’s lap had not been part of her plan as she drove up the coastal highway this morning, but now that she had it was hard to imagine ever getting the sensation out of her mind. Her heart.
But she had to.
Her back screamed as she pushed against Marc’s chest and twisted up onto her knees, between his. She gave herself a moment to adjust.
‘Just one more thing … ‘ he said before she could rise much further.
Those powerful abdominal muscles she’d spied back at the car did their job and pulled his torso up out of the splash and hard into hers. His lips slid warmly, firmly against her mouth and he took advantage of her shocked gasp to work them open, hot and blazing against her numb flesh. Her lips drank heat from him and came tingling back to life, startled and wary. His hands forked up into her wet hair and held her face while he teased and taunted her blissfully with his tongue, letting her breathe his air as though he were giving her the kiss of life.
Which, in a way, he was.
Relief and a decade of desire surged through her. Forgiveness tasted an awful lot like this.
He lifted his face and stared into her glassy eyes. ‘This is how I would do it if I had my time over,’ he said softly and then lowered his mouth again.
Whether he was making a point or making good on a ghost from his past, Beth didn’t care. His mouth on hers felt as if it belonged there. Her nipples, already beaded from the icy ocean, suddenly remembered they had nerve endings and they sang out in two-part harmony from the pleasure of being crushed against solid granite. Heat soaked out from the contact even through his wetsuit.
Marc seemed to notice too, because he groaned against her mouth and let one hand slide down to where small waves lapped against her underwear, worked under her blouse and then surged back up, scorching against her frozen spine.
It was the only other place that her skin met his. Other than his amazing, soft, talented mouth. Maybe she just hadn’t kissed enough men, but she couldn’t imagine how a kiss could possibly be better. Or more right. It was every bit as confronting as their last one.
Only this time she was equal to it.
It was a weird kind of rush, kissing a total stranger and your oldest friend. The man who knew everything about you. And nothing at all. Exactly as that unwelcome thought shoved its way to the front of her mind, she felt