She could feel the heat of him, as if she’d slapped her hand down on a stovetop.
And it occurred to her as she stood there, her palm spread against his hard, dense muscles, that she didn’t touch him much. They hugged each other hello and goodbye, but that was usually it. There was very little jostling of shoulders. No offhanded, friendly little touches, here and there. Sometimes, if he was being courteous, he might brush his fingers against the small of her back as he guided her somewhere.
But for all the years they’d known each other, all the intimacies they’d shared, there were never any intimacies involving touch.
And as she stared up at him, she was aware for the first time how she had to tip her head back to look at him. How big he was, so tall and with such wide shoulders. And that he was remarkably beautiful for a man who seemed so rugged at the same time.
Jenny didn’t bother to ask herself why.
She knew.
Because touching him like this was electric.
It surged through her to become a part of that drumming thing in her veins, a restless, insistent rhythm that flooded through her. It went right to her pussy.
She felt slippery. Red hot.
And all they were doing was standing close together, talking. With her hand on his chest, but not even flesh to flesh.
Dylan stood very still. Too still, maybe. And something in her fluttered at the thought, because suddenly she could have sworn that he was looking at her as if she was a meal. And one he intended to savor.
“Let me make sure we’re both very clear about what’s happening here,” he said, and there was something almost gravelly in his voice then. It only made that electric touch seemed to glow. Hot and hard. “We’ve been friends for a long time, Jenny. I wouldn’t want there to be any misunderstandings.”
“I want you,” she said. Again.
“To fuck you.”
And she was sure she didn’t imagine the light in his green eyes then, or the way it made her...quiver.
“To fuck me properly,” she corrected him. “I want to leave giddy and staggering about, like all the rest. Can you promise me that?”
“I’m insulted you would ask.” But he didn’t look or sound insulted. He looked...more, maybe. More intense. More focused. More fierce. And much more dangerous. “Let’s discuss the housekeeping, shall we?”
“Housekeeping?” She frowned at him. “Does that mean you have... Grooming requirements?”
“If I did, I’d expect you to comply with them,” he said, and there was some kind of amusement in his gaze then, but it still wasn’t the Dylan she knew. It wasn’t that laughter. It was something else, something male and demanding, and she had never felt so feminine, before.
It was as if she suddenly understood the point of fancy dresses that cinched in at the waist and made a girl breathless, or high heels that made her unsteady, because she was neither tonight and felt both of those things. And it was glorious. She felt shivery and silly. Her breasts ached and her pussy was slick, and she wanted nothing more than to rub all that against him and see what he might do with it. With her.
“Is that part of the Dylan Kilburn promise?” she found herself asking. “Compliance?”
Again, there was that gleam in his green eyes, that hard amusement that made her sway a bit on her feet. His mouth was a stern line, but that only made it better. He reached over and took the thick tendril of her hair in his hand, then tugged it. Not entirely gently.
And everything inside her...bloomed.
Dylan’s mouth didn’t move from that hard line, but she still thought she could see his smile there.
“We’ll get to compliance,” he told her. Promised her. “But first, there’s this. Us. You’ve never had someone turn you out, so you have no idea how you’ll feel in the aftermath.”
“I thought the point is giddiness. Isn’t it?”
“That’s part of it. Sometimes. But the girls you’re thinking about didn’t call me their best friend. The only thing I promised them was orgasms. They didn’t know me.”
“Do I know you?” She was kidding. Or she thought she was kidding when she started speaking. And then, somehow, wasn’t. “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this side of you before.”
“Because you haven’t.” He studied her face as she took that in, blinking because he sounded so uncompromising. “You need to be absolutely certain you want to open this door, Jenny. Because once it’s open, I don’t think you can close it again.”
“Why does that sound like a threat?”
He tugged on her hair again, and it was such a strange sensation. Sharp at the start, but then like a flush as it moved through her. She didn’t understand how the slightest stinging sensation on her scalp could make her nipples pinch and then travel down to make her entirely too aware of her clit.
“You’ve gone to great lengths to set your life up precisely as you like it,” Dylan said, quiet and intense. “As long as I’ve known you, you’ve never wavered from this path of yours. You say you promised your father, but I think we both know you could have fought him if you had a mind to. You don’t. This is what you want. A cold fish husband who won’t ask anything of you but your bloodline. Decorous, polite society sex, genteel and very seldom, until the heirs are properly sorted out. And then you get what you really want. No more demands, nothing but an empty freedom to do what you already do. Charity work. Tending to your father. Closing yourself up tight.”
Her breath suddenly seemed harsh and loud there, down below the great opera house, and echoed in her like it was quiet. When it wasn’t. When there were so many people about she should have found it hard to hear him.
But she heard him all too well. “I prefer to think I’m in a position to do good,” she managed to say, over the mess his words left inside her. “And I plan to. I already told you, Conrad isn’t a bad man.”
“Conrad is the least offensive man your father could find,” Dylan replied, and she might have been outraged if there had been any heat in it. But it was a statement of fact. “At least he’s not geriatric. But you never had the slightest intention of choosing your own husband. You want the arrangement. You want to stay untested. Unchallenged. Because that’s the thing about intimacy, Jen. It’s messy.”
“I came to Australia because you’re the expert on sex,” she managed to say. “Not intimacy. I’ve never known you to keep the same woman around for more than a weekend. And that’s a very rare weekend indeed.”
“Sex is intimacy,” Dylan shot back at her, his hard tone brooking no argument. “Anyone who tells you otherwise isn’t any good at it. But you need to decide if you can handle that. Because the Jenny I know has made it clear, in word and deed since the day I met her, that she wants no part of it.”
“I want a taste,” she heard herself say.
And she wanted to step back and put some head-clearing distance between them. Knock his hand away from her hair. But she rather thought he expected her to do all of those things, and more—that it would prove his point. So she did the opposite. She moved closer, and brought her other hand to his chest. Then angled herself against him, as if they were already in an embrace.
“A taste of me might be more than you bargained for,” he said, as if he could tell that she’d just gone ahead and lit herself on fire. “It will be. And then what?”
“What do you mean? Are your morning afters normally fraught with peril? Because they look very civilized. No broken crockery or rending of garments as long as I’ve known you.”
“For starters, my morning afters don’t normally occur with women who are staying with me. So there’s that to consider. But even if I gave you the weekend option, or even a week, just to make sure you were well and truly fucked properly in every possible way, do you really want that?” Dylan’s gaze was as hard as his chest felt beneath her hands, and twice as hot. “Because it seems to
me that it would be one thing to go into your chilly little marriage with no knowledge of what you’re missing. But torture if you do know.”
She wasn’t sure moving closer to him had been her best idea, because he felt so good. Too good. And this close, she could smell him, and that was like a wave of sensation all its own. Something deep and spicy that made her think of forests back home. And something else that reminded her of the abundant sunshine here, even in winter. And holding it all together, him. Dylan.
All the versions of him.
“It will be my torture, not yours,” she said.
“Do you think I won’t care about that?” He took her elbows in his big hands, and held her away from him, almost splayed against his chest. Almost. “Because as we talk about opening doors that can’t be closed, sex does have a way of changing friendship. You must know that. I remember several right tossers trying their hands at befriending you, all for a chance to get in there.”
“They weren’t really friends.” She shrugged. “There was nothing to change. Or to lose.”
“We’ve been friends for years, Jenny. Think about that. If I give you what you want, and it’s everything you imagine it to be, what do you think will happen then?”
She searched his face, trying to figure out what the right answer would be here. What he wanted. Her experience with men had been limited to either the dates her father had sent her on, with men who had hardly noticed she was there. Or the men she’d actually dated, who had been so eager to please that she’d hardly had to express half a wish before it was excessively granted. And every now and again, the odd one who thought insulting her was the right tack to take—and it was certainly different. In all cases, it had always been easy enough to simply sway close, say something sultry, and sort them out with sex.
She didn’t understand why Dylan wasn’t so easily led.
That drumming thing inside her got louder. Longer.
And maybe that was the secret she’d been dancing around all this time. Men who could be led didn’t produce that giddy, begging for more effect. How could they? Standing at a rail looking out over Sydney Harbour as the evening ferries slid past, that answer seemed so obvious. How had she missed it all this time?
“Nothing will change,” she told him. “This will be our secret. An experiment between two good friends and when I leave Australia, everything will just...go back the way it was.”
“Will it now.”
She laughed. “Of course it will.”
Because she couldn’t imagine any other option.
Dylan shifted, one of those big hands moving up to slide along the length of her jaw, as if it belonged there.
But it was like a storm. A hurricane, unleashed from every point of contact. Skin to skin, like something torrential. The heat of his palm, its faint roughness. Everything inside her...rioted.
But she didn’t move. She couldn’t.
“You keep acting as if we’re talking about regular sex. Tepid, faintly embarrassing fumbles in the dark with men who come too soon and act like you should be grateful all the same. But what if that’s not all there is?” He shook his head slightly, his gaze so hard on hers it would have hurt, if she could feel anything but his hand. “I know you think that there can’t be that much of a difference. Not really. You’ve come to conduct your wee science experiment, but in the final analysis, you don’t really think I can rock your world. Change your life. Show you the difference between black-and-white and full-on color. Do you?”
And his hand was on her face like a brand. And he was crowding out the night, and the city, and the whole wide world. And her heart was beating so fast she was vaguely concerned it might turn into a medical issue.
“I think if anyone could,” she managed to say, “it would be you.”
She thought he should look pleased at that. But he didn’t. He looked as if she’d hurt him. “And what if I do everything I claim I can do, and more, and you do the very thing I suspect you think is impossible?”
Her eyes searched his, and she frowned, faintly. “I have actually had an orgasm before, Dylan. You don’t have to be quite so up yourself.”
“I’m talking about love, not orgasms,” he said with a certain brutal directness. And once again, there was that ferocity stamped all over him, so she couldn’t tell if he was about to laugh or shout or take over the world. All of the above, maybe. “It tells me everything I need to know about the sad sex you’ve had that you don’t understand how they could be connected.”
“You think I’m going to fall in love with you if we have sex?” she asked, astonished.
He didn’t laugh. Not exactly. It was all much too intense for that. “I think that if I fuck you properly, there is almost no possibility you won’t fall in love with me.”
“Why aren’t you worried that you’ll fall in love with me?” she demanded. And told herself that was outrage, not panic, that leaped around inside her, then. “Isn’t that just as possible?”
“No chance of that,” he said, and she could have sworn there was something almost sardonic in the way he said it.
She refused to dwell on the little stab of hurt that bloomed inside her then. That panic—that outrage—spurred her on.
“It doesn’t matter if I go head over heels, however unlikely,” she told him hotly. “I’m still engaged.”
“So the worst case scenario is that I teach you what it means to properly fuck.” And there was definitely a sardonic little twist in the corner of his mouth then, though she was too wound up to focus on it. “There will be sobbing, in all likelihood. Begging, almost certainly.”
“I won’t hold it against you,” Jenny said magnanimously.
His green eyes glittered. “I appreciate that. Things may get emotional. Your plan, no matter how emotional things get, is to hop a plane back to England, continue to wave that great bloody ring around the place and marry the man your father personally selected for you. Is that it?”
“You’re the one who just pointed out to me that that’s always been it.” She lifted her chin. “And you’re right. I don’t believe in love, Dylan. I never have. You and Erika seem to think that I’m some great, hidden romantic—”
“Not hidden. You’ve made no secret of it. You read romantic books. You like romantic films.”
“That doesn’t make me a romantic. I like horror films and I’m not a ghoul.”
“You don’t believe that you can have a romance, Jenny,” he said, and he sounded almost tired, then. As if this conversation was costing him something, which made no sense. “Or you’ve decided you won’t. That isn’t quite the same thing as not having a romantic bone in your body.”
“This is ridiculous.” She pushed his hand away from her face then. And the light in his green eyes changed again, but he dropped his hand all the same. “If you don’t want to have sex with me, Dylan, I wish you would just say so. All this poncing about, grimly talking about doors that can’t be closed and emotional states that will be forever disrupted. I’m talking about having sex. You either want that or you don’t. And I won’t hate you if you don’t.” She made herself smile. “Too much.”
And the strangest expression moved over his face then. She couldn’t read it. Still, she found herself holding her breath, and felt something almost like loss when he ended up somewhere...wry.
“Risk assessments are a part of what I do for a living,” he told her, sounding...careful. “The part you don’t like to talk about, as it’s so hard for you to imagine me ordering people about. Isn’t that what you said?”
“I find it a lot less hard to imagine after tonight.”
“You don’t think you’ll fall in love with me,” he said, and surely there was no reason for her heart to turn over at that. “That’s fair enough. I won’t patronize you and tell you, again, that I don’t think you quite know what you’re talking about.”
&nbs
p; “Even if I don’t, does it matter? It’s obvious in the way you’re talking about this that you’ve had it happen before. But it’s obviously not real love, or the lady in question would still be here. That means it’s a sexual hangover, or some such. Don’t worry, Dylan. You’re safe.” She smiled at him, and this time, she didn’t have to force it. “I’m not going to relocate to Sydney, start stalking you and scale your wall to boil bunnies on your stove. I’m getting married next spring. And Conrad might not be in love with me, nor I with him. But I don’t think either one of us is interested in the kind of scandal that would ensue if I was arrested in Australia for harassing an old friend. This is about as low risk as possible to get.”
He only stared at her. She sighed.
“I promise,” she said.
“Right.”
And again, she watched him change. There was a flash of the Dylan she knew, almost rueful. Then that intent Dylan again, edgy and dangerous. And breathtaking.
He shifted, turning her around so her back was to the rail. And his hands moved to either side of her so he was caging her there, then angling himself toward her.
“What kind of protection do you prefer?” he asked, blandly, as her whole body ignited.
“Uh... You mean...?”
“Yes, I mean. Do you have a latex allergy? Are you on the pill? Do you prefer the ease and convenience of a coil?”
She was a grown woman. An adult in all ways. And yet the clinical frankness of those questions made her blush.
“I do not have a latex allergy,” she managed to say, perhaps more primly than necessary. “And as a matter of fact, I am on the pill. Thank you for asking.”
His green eyes gleamed, and this time, she was absolutely certain that it was, in fact, amusement. But she couldn’t tell if that was better or worse.
“When were you last tested?” And his head was lowered close to hers, but all he did was smirk. “Or do you not bother with such things, because you’re Lady Jenny, impervious to love, married off for a fortune and unlikely to ever choose the sort of disreputable man who might dare approach you anything less than squeaky clean?”
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