The S Before Ex by Mira Lyn Kelly
Except it didn’t feel like a mistake. Not when she’d been burning like wildfire beneath his touch, and, damn it, not when she told him he was the only one. The only thing that felt wrong had been the one thing he should have been used to by now. Watching her go.
Claire paced the winding pebble path of Ryan’s interior garden, waiting for her cab to arrive. A tremble ran through her and, wrapping her arms around her middle, she sank onto the driftwood chaise. The garden, like everything else in the house, was a masterpiece of balance between contrasts and complements. Colors, textures and scents. Time, motion and light. Young bamboo shoots, hip height, slender and vivid green, rustled in the night breeze opposite a twelve foot sculptural installation of petrified bridge supports preserved from a river in China. Brightly colored birds of paradise craned above chubby-leaved ground cover. And cocoa husks buried beneath the varied foliage and brush infused the otherwise briny sea air with the rich scent of decadent comfort.
A comfort Claire couldn’t embrace.
What a disaster. The last thing she’d wanted to do was add to the guilt and responsibility Ryan already carried on his shoulders because of her. But that’s what had happened tonight. And now, so much damage had been done she couldn’t fathom a counter to it.
Tomorrow she’d have to return. She’d have to face Ryan knowing how close they’d come to making love. And how everything had gone to hell because of it.
A horn honked twice. Her cab.
Pushing up from the bench, she walked to the gate. “I’m coming.”
Only, after a dumbfounding moment, she realized she had no idea how to open it. Every time she’d come or gone, it had been through the side driveway with an electric gate she didn’t know how to access. This exit was a six-foot-wide square that had once been a Buddhist temple ceiling. Elaborately carved in an intricate floral relief, the smoke-blackened panel was stunning and stupefying all at once.
She pulled at the handle. It didn’t budge. Searched in vain for a latch and felt her face heating at the notion of having to seek out Ryan just so she could leave his house. No. There had to be a way.
“One more minute, please,” she called to the waiting cab, going up on tiptoe to feel for a release or catch. Nothing.
“Like this.” The deep murmur came from startlingly close behind, and Claire jumped as Ryan reached around her to push a recessed button while simultaneously pulling the handle. The gate swung soundlessly open, forcing her to step back into the heat of his body. But already he was moving around her, his eyes holding briefly with hers.
“We’re not done.”
Ryan jogged to the waiting cab and handed off a few bills through the open window with an apology for the inconvenience.
And then he was back. A dark silhouette amid the shadows, Ryan was unreadable in his features, but radiated a tension that was unmistakable nonetheless. Intimidating.
He closed the gate behind him. Preventing her exit with his presence more than his physical form.
“I drove you over here. I can take you back. Later.”
Pressing her lips together, she nodded. After what happened, or nearly happened, she supposed they should talk. Clear the air, if only to agree to leave the incident behind them. Now more than ever they needed to be able to work through the division of the assets as a team. Finish the job quickly. Finish everything.
“I’m sorry,” she began, then let her gaze drift as she tried to pinpoint from where exactly the remorse welling inside her originated. It was there, a tide of regret, but for what? What might have been? Hurting Ryan? She didn’t even know.
The silence stretched taut until the rough edge of Ryan’s voice cut through it. “Are you still broken, Claire?”
“What?” She jolted at the unexpected direction of his inquiry, wondered if he’d somehow figured out what had happened. If he knew—
“Your soul. Your heart. I look at you and I almost see the woman I married. But you’re not. I don’t know you the way I knew her. You look strong. Alive. Whole. But I don’t know… So I have to ask. Are you still broken?”
Her heart rattled, unsteady in her chest.
“No…” Her life was nearly what she’d hoped for it. And yet, at times… “Not the way I was.”
“That guy in Rome,” he asked. “Did he make you feel…anything?”
She closed her eyes, thinking back. Everything had happened so quickly, she hadn’t really had time to ponder her response before Ryan’s name alone had killed the chance for anything more. At first it had been enough to know the man’s touch hadn’t repelled her. She’d been aware of it on a superficial level, aware that it might have been nice, but not connected closely enough to the experience, to the man…
“No.” She swallowed. “But I wanted it to.”
She couldn’t be sure beneath the thick shadows, but she thought she saw a muscle jump in his jaw. “Because you found him attractive.”
“Because I wanted to be normal. I wanted to have my life back. I wanted a chance—” Her throat constricted tight around the emotion tinged with hopes and dreams she told herself not to imagine.
“And with me?” he asked, stepping closer and drawing her out of her quiet turmoil. Breaching the moonlight, the hard set of his jaw and taut lines of his face stood out in sharp relief. “You feel when you’re with me?”
This wasn’t cocky arrogance or ego speaking. It was the man she trusted above all others asking her for a truth he deserved to have. “I don’t want to.”
Because she didn’t want Ryan to be the answer to another one of her problems. Didn’t want to put another obligation out in front of the man who met them as though it was a compulsion.
His lips slanted into a wry twist. “But that’s not what I asked.”
Forcing her chin up, she met his eyes. “Yes.”
He moved into the space she occupied. The flex of his fingers at his side set her every sense on wild alert. This was worse than she could have imagined. The one thing she wanted—the one way she couldn’t live with having it.
“I know you want to feel complete again, and you see this as the last step to getting there. But I need you to understand something, Claire.”
She shivered beneath the heat of his breath washing over the column of her neck. Aching with a need she couldn’t sate.
“I’m not here to help you heal so you can learn to be with some other man. I’m not selfless—” his lips grazed her collarbone “—and I’m not heroic. I’m here because I want you so bad, the idea of not having you kills me. But there’s only one way this is happening, and that’s if you want me.”
Her breath burst free in unburdened relief. Ryan was wrong. He was all those things. Just not, thank God, tonight. There was no doubt, no hesitation or second-guessing. Nothing but a trembling desperation. “I want you.”
CHAPTER NINE
CLAIRE had barely the span of a second for her breath to catch before the kiss blotted out all but the rough press of his lips covering hers. There was no question, no testing measure of restraint, and her acceptance was scored in the willing give of her mouth as she opened beneath the demand of his lips. Moaned around the claim of his tongue and reveled in the tightening band of the arms holding her to him.
Ryan knew the truth and still he’d come back.
His mouth slid over hers, hot and hungry.
He’d come back because he wanted her as badly as she wanted him. Not because of some misplaced sense of guilt or obligation. But because of mutual attraction.
Liquid heat sizzled through her veins, slid through her center and sensitized her flesh. Her mind blanked to all but the seductive experience, making her fingers tingle and twinge with the need for contact.
Shared breath passed between their lips in intimate exchange. A swirling caress of warm and wet, drawing deep until it filled and stretched the empty hollows within. Lingered. Then escaped, only to be taken by the other. After so many years without intimacy, Claire shuddered at the base sensuality of it.
The need for Ryan.
She wanted him. Wanted his strength and desire penetrating her completely, infusing every cell of her being.
Her hands moved desperately between them, climbing the fabric of his shirt, clutching at his shoulders, his neck, then delving into the thick silk of his hair.
He broke away from her lips only to work his way down her jaw to the tender skin beneath. A scrape of teeth shot lightning through her core and she moaned at the sensation. Was stunned by her body’s near betrayal in its utter surrender after all the years of refusal to stir.
“Do you have any idea,” Ryan growled against her throat, the vibration of his voice sending chills skittering across her skin, “what a mistake it would have been not to tell me how long it’s been for you?”
Eyes pinched shut, she didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want him to, either. “Ryan, I’m sorry.”
“You would have been.” His tongue ran the length of the tendon in her neck in a deliberate, slow, back-and-forth caress that had her hips seeking his.
The hot burst of his breath rushed across the cool damp trail he’d laid and she groaned beneath the sensual wash.
“You don’t understand.” His hold tightened as a muttered curse ground out against her pulse point. “The way you respond to me…I wouldn’t have held back. I wouldn’t have known to. And the way I want you…”
Another low growl behind her ear. “I had you on the table. Open to me.”
Her heart stalled and her skin pebbled from tip to toe.
“It wouldn’t have been gentle, Claire.” His voice deepened, the words coming like a rough-tongued caress against the most sensitive parts of her body. “It wouldn’t have been slow.”
A pleading moan escaped on her next breath as seductive images bombarded her mind, Ryan over her, thrusting hard, penetrating the last defense of her heartbreak, and she quivered with the need of it. “Oh, God, yes.”
Unyielding stone met her shoulders and she realized with a start they were still outside. Under the cover of Ryan’s secret garden, a mere foot from the mammoth front gate and little more than that from the point where stone ended and the wall became a tangle of densely grown cypress.
Breathless and crowded against the column behind her, she met the dark blaze of Ryan’s eyes. “You make me forget where I am in the world.”
Ryan hardened to the point of pain and beyond the point of further delay. Planting one hand at the rock pillar above her head, he leaned into her, fitting his body to hers in as many places as contact could be made. Mouth to mouth, chest to breasts, her hips tipped to take his thigh in a snug fit. His groin seeking relief in the plane of her flat belly. “You’re with me.”
She trembled beneath his touch, the beaded points of her nipples rubbing across his chest with each ragged breath.
Damn, that was good.
Aching as he hadn’t ached in too many years to remember, he molded the palm of his hand to the firm curve of her hip. Circled back to shape her bottom, and then followed the tuck and curve of her body up to her breast. Leaning away, he took the weight of her softness into his hand and brushed the hard tip with a slow sweep of his thumb.
A featherlight pant tickled across his lips, tortured his entire body. Another brush of her nipple and her hips rocked out to meet the press of his thigh. She was so needy, so desperate.
So incredibly sexy.
He wanted her flesh in his mouth. Between his teeth, responding to the flick of his tongue.
Skimming down, he caught the hem of her shirt and pulled it up to expose the ripe swell of her breast, the berry tip.
His mouth went dry.
How had he missed that she hadn’t replaced her bra?
Catching her between his lips, he drank in the muted cries that rained upon him at the swirl of his tongue.
“Do you feel this, Claire?” he asked, letting his lips brush the engorged flesh with each word.
“Mmm,” came her aching reply. But he wanted the words.
“Tell me.”
Her fingers tightened over his shoulders, her pants coming faster, making her nipple rub his lips in time with each straining breath. “I feel you…I need you.”
He rewarded her with an openmouthed kiss that drew hard, making her moan again.
It wasn’t enough to quench his thirst for her pleasure. Not near.
Rising again, he shifted left of center to give himself more access to where he wanted to be. Finding that sweet spot at the base of her neck, he circled the delicate hollow with his tongue and let his hand run down the center of her body. Over her belly to where those gauzy pants hung low at her hips. Slipping his fingers inside, he brushed the neat strip of hair at her sex, took the skip of her pulse against his lips, and then curved his fingers into her slick feminine flesh.
Soft and wet. No panties. His pain moved beyond the sweet torture of restraint, allowing room for the guilt of how they’d left off earlier. She’d rushed to get dressed because of his response to learning she was still his. As though, intended or not, it weren’t a gift. A claim it shamed him to want.
“Ryan,” she gasped, jolting at the intimate touch she’d gone so long without. Her knees pressed closed against the invasion of his touch, but he palmed her smooth thigh.
“Open for me. Like this.”
Blue eyes deeper than the ocean peered up at him as she gave herself over to his command. Her weight shifted and she allowed him to guide her leg to notch at his hip.
And then his fingers were slipping through her, back and forth, holding contact with that bit of flesh that made her writhe for him. Pant. Plead.
He brought his mouth back to hers, parting her lips with the press of his tongue, and pushed a single finger inside her. She was wet and hot and tight. And God, yes, those silky walls were clasping around him in rhythmic strains as he slid in and out of her, stroking deep until she was so close he could feel her body bow taut against him. Her breath stopped as she hovered at the brink. Ready to come apart for him.
In and out. She hugged him tighter.
“Oh, God. Ryan. Please…”
The slam of a car door and muted chatter of a couple beyond the gate ripped him back from the haze of seduction, had his head jerking up as he silently cursed his poor choice of location.
He hadn’t been able to wait to touch her.
“Don’t stop…I can’t…” She shook her head, her whispered pleas washing his neck with her need, making it his own.
Claire’s body pulsed with desire nearly fulfilled. Her heart raced and her breath held. She was so close. Already there. Caught in the force of a wave where the crash was imminent.
“Breathe, kitten,” he growled against her lips.
Ryan’s erection nudged hard and thick at her hip, his lips brushing hers as he thrust inside her, first with one thick finger, and then stretching her to take two.
She gasped at the straining pressure. Spasmed around the next thrust as sparks of wild hot sensation shot across her skin, drew back, deepened, built, centered. Pulsed hard and pushed her over the edge in an explosion of white-hot pleasure.
“Shh. I’ve got you.” His mouth covered hers, catching the low keening cry she couldn’t contain as the world around her went up in flames, turning her body to cinders.
Catching in the wind, she spiraled skyward. Light. Soft. She was finally free.
CHAPTER TEN
THEY’D made it halfway up the first flight before giving in to greedy hands and mouths left them in a tangle of writhing limbs atop the steps. Claire’s legs cinched at his hips, her arms rounded his neck as Ryan devoured her mouth with a hunger that left her breathless.
He’d given her release. Set her free only minutes before, but it wasn’t enough. She wanted more. Wanted all of him. Wanted everything again, and again after that—just to make sure it was real.
With the strength of one arm, Ryan rocked her against the steely shaft of his erection
“Shirt,” she urged, aching for his bare flesh beneath her fingers.
Rearing back, he grabbed a handful of the fabric between his shoulders and wrenched it overhead. Lightning lanced her core as bunched muscles ripped free above her and the hard cut expanse of his bared torso was once again within reach.
God only knew how long she’d have this. An hour. A night at the most. Unwilling to waste even a second, she bowed into him, letting her tongue run between the hard ridges of his six-pack, her teeth graze the tops.
Ryan’s breath sucked in on a hiss. “Claire, I need to get inside you.”
Her shirt was yanked off, followed immediately by her pants, both stripped by hands too impatient to wait for her to do it herself. And then she was naked except for her delicately beaded sandals with their slim high heels and open toes.
“Upstairs. Bed.” Hauling her into his bare chest, he rose, took the steps two at a time until they hit the third floor. Rounding the corner, he shouldered them through the door and reached out for the wall switch, dropping them into darkness.
Unlocking her ankles from where they tucked against the low hang of worn denim riding his hips, Claire slid to stand before him.
“I don’t want slow, Ryan.” Her hands rushed over the hard planes of his chest, setting the muscles beneath to jump at her touch. Then drifted lower until she’d skimmed beneath his fly. Palming his hardness, she wrapped her fingers over the length of him.
“Claire.” Her name sounded in a low growl, rolling in like a warning. A warning she couldn’t bear to heed.
“And I don’t want gentle.”
He already knew. She could see it in his eyes, feel it in the firming hold of his hands at her hips. Sense it on the currents charging the air.
Brushing her hands aside, Ryan shucked his pants and drew her hard against him. Backed her across the room.