“Are you with me?” he demanded hoarsely. “Please tell me you’re with me.”
“Always,” she whispered.
Something tilted in his face. A look of such raw, uncensored emotion that she felt it in a place she’d never felt it before. He might not love her anymore, but he wasn’t devoid of emotion.
She committed it to memory, held onto it as he surged up inside her and demanded she ride him harder, faster. Something told her she was going to need it as he made her drown in the sensations he was creating. As he branded her with his touch and found that sweet spot he knew would take her over the edge. Her fingernails dug into his shoulders as he stroked her deliberately, repeatedly, until she felt the white-hot beginning of her release. Once, twice, three times he drove into her, and she screamed, her body contracting around his in an orgasm stronger and more shattering than the first.
He cursed under his breath and fell back onto his elbows, his body surging up inside her. She felt him throb even bigger, watched his face as he lost control. His hands clamped down on her hips and his body shook in a release that rocked them both.
Winded, shaken to her core, she collapsed forward onto his chest, listening to his heart thunder beneath her ear. This was the time when he’d used to whisper that he loved her in Italian. When he’d tuck her into his side and cradle her until she slept. When she had been sure beyond a shadow of a doubt of his feelings for her.
The hot, humid Caribbean air throbbed around them—heavy and full. A loaded silence stretched between them. They stayed like that for several long minutes. Then Riccardo lifted her off his chest and tucked her beneath the sheets.
“You need to sleep.”
She wanted to beg him to hold her. To prolong what they’d shared for just a few more minutes. She heard him snap off the lights and come back to the bed, felt the mattress dipping beneath his weight. Then he reached for her and pulled her into his arms, curving her back against the warm length of him. She exhaled in a long, slow breath. This was enough. Being back in the place where everything felt right. Even for one night.
She fell asleep almost immediately.
Her pounding head woke her at two a.m. She stumbled into the bathroom and grabbed her painkillers out of her bag. She had unscrewed the bottle and downed two tablets with a glass of water when the unthinkable occurred to her.
In the hustle of traveling this morning she’d forgotten to take her birth control pill.
It had been almost twenty-four hours since she had.
“Do me a favor.” Alex’s words rang in her ear. “Whatever you do, don’t get pregnant.”
She pulled the birth control pills out of her bag and desperately shoved one in her mouth. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours... It would be fine.
But even as she reassured herself she knew it had been stupid, stupid. How could she have complicated a relationship in which the only thing that was clear was that it didn’t need complicating?
LILLY WOKE UP with such a supreme feeling of well-being she thought she might have been accidentally transported to a land of paradise, where everything was silk sheets, hard male and a bone-meltingly familiar sense of satisfaction she never wanted to end.
Turning her head from its face-down planting in the pillow, she slid her palm across the sheet in search of more warm, hard male. Nothing but silk. Her eyes flickered open. She was alone in the huge king-sized bed.
She flipped over, settled back against the mountain of pillows and stared out at the brilliant blue sky. She might almost think it had been a dream, the ridiculously hot sex she’d had with her husband. But the ache between her legs begged to differ. And in the blinding light of morning everything seemed magnified by ten.
She’d let the man she was still madly in love with, who didn’t love her anymore, strip her of the defenses she’d spent a decade building. Then she’d slept with him in a moment of madness without using protection, which demonstrated exactly what a moment of madness it had been.
Damn.
She squeezed her eyes shut. It had been a monumentally stupid thing to do. The one thing she’d never been able to deny was the connection they’d had in bed. And once that took over all bets were off.
It was the reason she’d refused to see him for so long. Because she didn’t trust herself around Riccardo.
Her stomach churned. Both she and Riccardo had extremely fertile families. But hadn’t it taken her girlfriend, Darya, forever to conceive? Surely it wouldn’t happen in one night?
Finding the whole thing entirely too disconcerting, she threw back the covers and swung her legs out of bed. Riccardo would have been up hours ago. He’d probably swum fifty lengths of that Olympic-sized pool and gone through every set of weights in the exercise room by now.
She padded restlessly over to the patio doors and threw open the curtains. The humid heat hit her immediately, and the perfume-soaked, salty, heavy air was filled with the scent of dozens of exotic flowers. It begged complete lethargy—a sunchair, a book and a drink, followed by a cool swim.
She blinked and shaded her eyes against the brilliant sunlight. And found her guess had been right. But rather than laps her husband was slicing through the ocean with a powerful front crawl that ate up the distance between the raft that bobbed about a mile out and the beach.
She watched as he hit the shore and walked up the beach, water sluicing down over his washboard abs. The drool that formed in her mouth was swift and uncontrollable. As if having him so completely last night had done nothing to stem the urge she had for him.
He lifted a hand to swipe the water from his face. And saw her standing there.
A heart-meltingly sexy smile curved his mouth. He walked up the beach and came to stand below the balcony, a fully relaxed, content-looking Riccardo who turned her insides to mush.
“You coming down?”
A smile twisted her lips. “If you’ll come swimming with me. I’m sweating already.”
“We have fifteen minutes before breakfast is ready. Get your suit on and get down here.”
She slipped off her négligée and pulled on the fuchsia bikini she’d bought with Alex. She might have made the huge mistake of sleeping with Riccardo last night, but that didn’t mean she had to continue her foolish behavior today. She needed to focus on keeping her head. She bit her lip as she pulled on a short cotton dress over her bathing suit. So what was she doing, running down to swim with him? And what had he meant when he’d said, “This is not over. We are only getting started”?
It didn’t matter what he’d said! She swiped some sunscreen across her cheeks and nose. Riccardo was a lethal banned substance for her. Best to accept that last night had been inevitable between them, like a storm reaching its conclusion, and find a way to make it through the next six months without killing each other.
Hot sex wasn’t going to accomplish that.
A rational brain would.
Tell that to her hormones, she thought as she joined Riccardo on the tiny private beach in front of the villa, the sand as smooth as silk between her toes. Because the intensity of her husband’s dark gaze on her was making her overheating problem a virtual crisis.
“You’d better lose the dress,” he advised. “Nowhere down here to leave it.”
She darted a self-conscious glance around her. The bikini wasn’t French Riviera material but it was revealing enough. She would rather have just gotten in the water, but since there