She was so tired of being so alone. Maybe that made her weak. She decided she didn’t care what it made her. Not when he could make it all go away.
He could. She knew he could. He’d made whole cities disappear with a laugh, the whole world with a kiss. He was far more magical than he deserved to be. She just wanted to taste a little of that oblivion again.
Hell, she’d earned it, hadn’t she?
Anais reached up and wound her arms around Dario’s neck, angling herself against him. His hands moved up and down the length of her spine in a lazy rhythm, tracing her. Relearning her. Sending a wild heat spiraling all through her until it pooled between her legs, a swollen, delirious ache.
And she was the one who lifted herself up and pressed her mouth to his.
She kissed him with all those dreams she’d kept pent up inside her across so many long years. She poured all the rants she’d aimed at her reflection instead of to him into it, all the tears and the fear and the loss. She kissed him with her broken heart and her new mother’s terror. She kissed him and she kissed him, lonely and resolute, as strong as she was afraid, two sides of the same coin.
Finally, all these years later, she kissed Dario goodbye.
And he let her.
He slipped a hand around to the nape of her neck and he met her, as if he knew exactly what she was doing, what this was.
Anais was shaking. That might have been a tear that scraped its way down her cheek. She didn’t care. This was a bloodletting. A ritual of loss and leaving, six years overdue.
And when she was finished, she pulled back, not exactly meaning to rest her forehead against his as she gasped for breath. But she didn’t pull away when she realized she was doing it.
“Better?” he asked in a rough voice that hardly sounded like his.
It didn’t occur to her to tell him anything but the truth, as if the Hawaiian night that brushed against her skin was its own kind of confessional. “No. Not really.”
“Good.” A small laugh, entirely male, snaked its way down her spine and made her shiver. “My turn.”
And then he hauled her mouth back to his, and took control.
* * *
Dario should have felt triumph wash over him. He should have been wild with his victory, with a sense of accomplishment. He’d set out to seduce his errant wife and he’d done it.
But all he could concentrate on was the taste of her mouth beneath his, and better, the way she pressed her sweet body against his. Her breasts underneath that soft cream silk were like torture against his chest. Her arms were around his neck as she arched into him and it still wasn’t close enough.
He couldn’t get close enough no matter how he kissed her, and he couldn’t pretend what he was feeling then had anything to do with revenge.
Dario shoved that unnerving truth aside and threw himself straight into the lightning storm instead.
He took her mouth with a ruthlessness that might have concerned him if he’d let himself consider it too closely, but he was lost in the storm. The electric burst of sensation between them. There was nothing but this slick perfection, the tangle of her tongue with his, the sensation of Anais in his arms again at last. It didn’t matter why or how or what needed to happen next.
It only mattered that he possess her, totally. Now.
Forever, some traitorous part of him whispered.
Before he lost her all over again.
He didn’t know how he managed to pull his mouth from hers when it was the last thing he wanted. He hardly heard the band as they rolled easily into another song. He barely knew where they were and he didn’t much care. He only knew he needed her naked and that no matter how accommodating the resort had been so far, they’d likely take a dim view of it if he stripped her here and lost himself in her against the nearest palm tree.
Which meant they needed to go somewhere else.
Immediately.
Dario swept her up and into his arms without a second thought. He begrudged every step he took as he held her high against his chest and strode down the path toward his villa. Every second that he wasn’t deep inside her, braced above her, wrapped around her the way he ought to be, was torture. The weight of her against him wasn’t enough. The way she looped her arm around his neck was little more than a tease. The way she tipped back her head to watch him with that solemn expression that did nothing to hide the stark, unmistakable need in her gaze made the hunger inside of him threaten to take him to his knees.
It wasn’t until he’d shouldered his way back into his villa, striding across the living room and into the sprawling master suite, that he faced the fact that he wasn’t acting according to his hastily hammered out plan at all. This was no deliberate seduction, designed to tear her into a thousand pieces and leave her inert and destroyed and unable to lift a finger to stop what happened afterward. This was mutually assured destruction, and he had no idea what the hell he was doing.
He knew he should back off. Stop this right now. He set her down on her sleek red shoes at the foot of his platform bed and forced himself to let go of her. This was the perfect moment to rethink. Regroup. He wasn’t in control here and that was unacceptable.
But he couldn’t seem to care about that.
Because all these long years after he’d given up imagining any way it could ever happen again, Anais was standing there before him. Her smooth perfection was once again marred by his own hands, and he was so hard it bordered on pain. He reached over and dug his fingers into her thick, black hair, pulling on the bun so the pins scattered everywhere as it all tumbled down to swirl around her shoulders. Her lips were full and lush and faintly swollen from his. Her soft blouse looked crumpled against her breasts.
He still loved it as much as he always had. He was the only one who’d ever seen her like this...
No. A cold voice in his head stopped that line of thought. Not the only one.
And the fury that rose in him at that was nothing new, but the way it wound itself around all that need and hunger was. It rolled and twisted all over each other, becoming something new. Something darker and wilder.
He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to reason it through.
He just wanted her.
God help him, but he’d never stopped wanting her.
As if she could read the turmoil inside of him like a book, a faint shadow moved over her lovely face and a line appeared between her brows.
“Dario?”
He didn’t want to talk. He didn’t know the difference anymore between his hunger and his fury, his sense of betrayal and his mounting need; he only knew that there was a single cure. He didn’t want to think about the implications. He told himself that it didn’t matter what he felt while this was happening, as long as in the end it achieved the desired result.
Dario had never believed that the ends justified the means—hadn’t he learned that when he’d uncovered all the shifty practices his former silent partner in ICE had signed off on before he’d started there?—but here, now, there was no other way. He refused to allow himself even a moment of regret.
He realized he was staring holes through her when Anais shivered slightly, but the truth of things was the way her nipples poked hard against the soft silk of her top, telling him everything he needed to know about her own need. Her own hunger that had always matched his own. Dario concentrated on that now. He moved closer to her, indulging himself. He traced the stiff little peaks with his fingers, rubbing the silk against her own flesh and smiling slightly when she let out a moan.
Anais let her head fall back, and another beast roared in him then. Pure lust. Sheer desire. He stopped trying to pretend