It was what she’d always wanted.
You can’t have what you want. You can just have a tiny piece of it. Will that be enough?
Megan lifted her chin and silenced the whisper of doubt in her head. You had to take a risk. Life was short and when it threw the possibility of something precious your way it would be churlish, not to mention stupid, not to grab it with both hands!
The alternative was always wondering what if? Megan didn’t want what ifs. She wanted Emilio. She wanted Emilio heavy on top of her; she wanted him inside her.
For the first time she allowed herself to look at him without trying to disguise what she was feeling. The sensation was simultaneously liberating and scary, but since when was anything that involved Emilio uncomplicated?
‘I want you so badly, Emilio, I can’t stand up.’
Megan heard the sharp intake of his breath and sighed as his long fingers slid into her silky hair. Her head fell back, the expression in her golden eyes hazed by a sheen of lust as he slid a supporting second hand into her hair and angled her face up to him.
‘You are so beautiful—that face, that body.’ Megan saw the raw hunger in his eyes and tasted for the first time some of the female power he had spoken of—it felt pretty good. She wanted to tell him it was the first time she’d felt this way, that he was the first man who—
Her eyes widened. God, she had to warn him that she hadn’t done this before it went any further, even at the risk of her confession ruining the mood. The possibility of that happening made her hold back, but only for a moment. If he had a problem with her inexperience it was better to know now, not later down the line.
Rejection later on really would be crushing. ‘Do you remember that night in the car?’ Emilio swore softly under his breath at the reintroduction of the subject.
Obviously he remembers, stupid, she told herself. He thinks it’s the event that triggered your moral downfall. ‘Well, I know that it looked—’ ‘I remember that that night I came this close …’ he interrupted, bringing his face within a whisper of hers.
Megan’s eyelids drooped. She could feel the waft of his warm breath on her skin, on her mouth. The thought of confession slipped from her head as lust and longing shuddered through her body. She stared transfixed at the fine lines around his eyes, the gold tips at the end of his otherwise ebony eyelashes. Her heart ached. He was the most breathtaking, perfect thing on the planet and he wanted her.
‘This close?’ she parroted, fighting her way through the sensual fog in her head.
‘To throttling the bastard,’ he explained matter-of-factly.
Not following this instinct had taken a large chunk of will power, but the effort had faded into insignificance beside the will power he had needed to tap into to stop himself taking Megan in his arms to comfort her.
The sight of her standing there, white-faced and shaking, looking so vulnerable and fragile, had awoken every protective instinct he had and some new ones. While she had struggled not to cry he had struggled to keep his distance.
Emilio hadn’t allowed himself to even touch her.
He couldn’t. If he had he knew it wouldn’t have stopped at comforting.
He had been tempted. Dios, but he had been so tempted standing there, fighting against his baser instincts, especially given the status of his relationship with his then wife playing in a loop through his head.
Little snippets of the beginning of the end of his marriage slid into his head now.
‘I understand,’ Rosanna said when she discovered he had removed his things from the room they shared.
‘And are relieved?’ he asked, genuinely curious, and taking no satisfaction from her obvious distress.
Emilio felt a lot of responsibility for what had happened. His mindset when he had entered into the marriage had not differed from how he would enter into any other contract.
With the benefit of hindsight he could see that this had been a mistake—this wasn’t any contract.
Mistake number two had been not factoring in the emotional factor, not allowing for the possibility that, despite what she had said, Rosanna needed more than he had been prepared or able to offer.
What had happened had been inevitable.
The suggestion made his errant wife look uncomfortable. ‘I wasn’t dissatisfied with what we had. That isn’t why I slept with—’
Emilio took pity on her. ‘It’s all right, I don’t want a score out of ten, Rosanna, and I don’t want to know his name.’
‘I know you don’t. If you’d loved me you would have.’
‘I never—’
‘I know you didn’t,’ she cut in quickly. ‘He didn’t love me either, but he said that he did, and I needed to hear that even if it was a lie,’ she admitted sadly. ‘Don’t look like that, Emilio. Don’t be sorry for me. I’m not asking you to sleep with me. I don’t expect it, and I do realise that you will need—when you do I won’t make a fuss.’
‘So you are giving me permission to have sex with other women?’
‘It’s a sensible solution.’
Cold-blooded and clinical were the words that slid unexpectedly into Emilio’s mind; they were two things that he had been accused of in the past. And mostly those accusations had been justified, so why now did settling for a dispassionate solution make him feel discontent?
Why did he think it was settling? Settling implied there was a better option. He knew there wasn’t—marriage was by definition flawed, at best a compromise.
‘More sensible than a divorce? ‘
She looked at him, white with anxiety under the perfect make-up he had never seen her without. ‘But you agreed we could make this work.’
‘I agreed that a divorce would be messy. I agreed that we make better friends than lovers. I agreed that domesticity is not something I am suited to.’
‘You haven’t met anyone?’ she began tentatively. ‘Someone special?’
The idea amused him. ‘I have met no one I wish to have sex with and, even if I had, I have no desire to leap into another marriage,’ he promised, believing it.
They left it like that.
When six months passed and he had not taken up the offer of guilt-free cheating, he did pause to consider the situation. Six months was a long time and he was a man with a healthy sex drive. He recognised channelling his energies, no matter how successfully, into work was not a long-term solution to the problem.
Did his reluctance to even acknowledge a problem existed stem from the fact he still thought of sex outside marriage as cheating?
It was not a distaste of cheating that held him in check when he looked at Megan that night and burnt with a primal need to make her his.
It was the knowledge that following through with his instincts, taking advantage of her at a moment like this would make him no better than the man he had just sent packing.
The idea filled him with repugnance; for the first time in his life he wanted more than sex. He did not want some sordid hole-in-the-corner affair; he did not want their relationship to be tarnished with his past mistakes. He knew he had to be patient.
Despite his reputation for infallibility, Emilio had made bad decisions in the past. While he did not advertise that, neither did he agonise over it; he shrugged and moved on.
But the decision he made that night to be patient had not been one he had been able