“One minute I saw you with them at the beach, the next minute, you’d disappeared.”
“And you think...”
Melanie’s shoulders drooped. This wasn’t what she had planned to talk about the next time she saw him. What was she doing?
“Forget what I just said,” Melanie told him. “Obviously I gave up any rights to you a long time ago.”
Something flashed in his eyes. Hurt? “What you saw was me and Shemar being friendly with two women. No big deal.” He paused. Held her gaze. “The truth is, I wish I could get involved with someone else. Shemar keeps telling me that I need to start dating again. But damn it, all I keep thinking about is you.”
Butterflies began to flutter in Melanie’s stomach, but she said nothing.
“Do you know I came here to try to forget you once and for all?” He laughed without mirth. “Instead, I get here and you’re at this resort. Of all places. Talk about a kink in my plan.”
“If I had known...”
“If you had known, what? You would have avoided coming here? That’s how uneasy you are at the idea of seeing me?”
Melanie said nothing. Because every time she opened her mouth, she was saying the wrong thing.
“I always believed that you loved me, Mel. But I guess I was wrong.”
“Of course I did!” she said immediately.
“Then prove it.”
Melanie looked up at him in confusion. “What?”
In a flash, Lawrence took her by the shoulders and brought his lips down on hers. He kissed her in a heated, almost angry fashion. As his tongue tangled with hers, he slipped his hands around her waist and pulled her close.
She sighed against him. His kiss... It was like coming home. Coming home when there was a celebration going on. Because the sensations she felt were hot and thrilling, like fireworks going off in rapid succession.
Lawrence eased his lips from hers. “God, this is what I wanted to do since the moment I saw you again. It’s what I wanted to do every day for the past nine months.”
A lust-filled sigh escaped Melanie’s lips, and then his mouth was on hers again. Her hands were moving up his back now. She dug her fingers into his shirt, needing to feel more of him. Re-familiarize herself with his magnificent body.
She hadn’t felt this alive in a very long time.
And as his tongue twirled with hers, creating the most delicious sensations, and as her body overheated, she acknowledged that this was the truth. Since the day she had dumped him by not showing up for the wedding, a part of her had been dead.
But that part had just come roaring back to life.
Chapter 8
All too soon, Lawrence broke the kiss and stepped back, leaving Melanie feeling dazed and confused. She stared up at him with narrowed eyes, not understanding why he had stopped just as things had gotten decidedly hot.
“What— Why are you stopping?” Melanie stammered.
Lawrence took another step backward. “I’ve wanted to do that since I first saw you again,” Lawrence repeated, too dispassionately for Melanie’s liking. “Maybe that’s my own way of getting closure.”
“Closure?” Melanie nearly choked on the word as she said it. “You—you kissed me for closure?”
“Good night, Melanie.”
“Good night?” Melanie repeated, totally baffled.
But he was already turning, already starting to walk back toward the hotel.
Melanie scrambled after him. “I don’t understand. You follow me out here, you kiss me like that—and then—and then—”
“And then nothing.” Lawrence paused. “You don’t trust me, remember? I’m a man, so I’m bound to cheat. Right?”
Melanie didn’t want to think about what she had said to him, the words she had used to push him away. Because right now, she wanted to be lost in his kiss again. The sensations she had just experienced were overpowering and so delicious that nothing else mattered.
“You’re right, I was wrong to mention those women,” Melanie said.
Lawrence raised an eyebrow as he looked at her. “You don’t get it, do you?”
“What I’m saying is that, right now, it doesn’t matter.”
“It might not matter for you, but it matters for me.”
Lawrence began to walk again. Melanie was hot and bothered and utterly frustrated. She continued after him. “Okay, I don’t believe you slept with that girl from the bar. I’m just saying that, even if you did, I don’t have a right to be upset. I pushed you away.”
Lawrence stopped, looked at her. “Great. See you around.”
Melanie was at her wit’s end. He couldn’t leave her like this!
Holding up her dress, she ran in front of him and stopped him by putting her palms on his chest. Her heart was beating hard. She smoothed her hands over his firm, hard muscles and drew in a shaky breath. Oh, how she had missed this.
“Lawrence, I don’t understand. You come out here on the beach with me, and you kiss me like—”
“You needed to let me go, and I needed closure.”
“Then why stop at just a kiss?” she asked. “Why don’t we... Why not make it a night of real closure? One last time.”
She knew she sounded desperate, and she was. That kiss... She wanted more of him.
Lawrence placed his hands over hers, and Melanie’s heart began to beat more rapidly. But then he lifted her hands from his body, removing rather than caressing them, and the night air around her seemed to suddenly chill.
“No,” Lawrence said.
“No?” Melanie said, her voice sounding like a little cry.
“You don’t understand, Mel. I can’t do what you want. I can’t make love to you without emotion and just go on.”
“Why not?” Melanie asked, one last desperate attempt. Again, she was aware that her words had come out wrong. But she didn’t want to argue, to bring up the past. Because she was certain that once they fell into bed together, everything else would fall into place.
“Because I’m not the kind of guy that you made me out to be,” Lawrence said, holding her gaze. “I never was.”
Melanie swallowed.
“It’s okay, Mel. Now that we don’t have the pressure of a relationship between us, we can be friends.”
Friends?
“Like I said...I’ll see you around.”
And with that, he walked away from her with long, fast strides.
Melanie watched him, feeling as though her heart was breaking.
All over again.
* * *
Walking away from Melanie had been one of the toughest things that Lawrence had ever done. To see the look of lust in her eyes, to know that she wanted him in her bed... It would have been so easy to simply say yes. Say yes and end the nine-month dry spell with the woman he still loved.
But he couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t do it. He wanted all with Melanie, or nothing.
And he had a plan. Sort of. The kiss had been calculated. To give her a taste of what she had walked away from. And if a part of her still loved him, then she would