by Edie Harris
He went momentarily light-headed from the onslaught of lust. She wanted him. He’d guessed at it, peripherally, but stupidly assumed she was proving a point, or trying to this time around. Getting some sort of revenge, maybe.
He wasn’t conceited enough to believe she had pined for him all this time, for Ryan Andrew Young of Arlington Heights, Illinois. Impossible to imagine her body missing his as his longed for her. Males the world over saw her up on the screen in their local movie theaters, lusted and loved, and then went home to perform a safety-off Internet search of Sadie Bower naked. Or Sadie Bower sex tape.
Or, in his case, Sadie Bower boyfriend.
He’d always wondered why there weren’t any concrete search results. She would appear on the red carpet with someone—usually an actor—followed by two weeks of media frenzy over whether they were a couple, but they would never be photographed together again, and the buzz would die down. No furtive paparazzi pics of her holding hands with an unidentified man at a coffee shop. Nothing. Nada.
The satisfaction he experienced at never finding those pictures shamed him.
Her open mouth was on his throat, her hands eager at the knot of his tie, tugging and loosening it until she could toss it to the floor. The flat of her tongue swept over his Adam’s apple, a tease and a torment.
His hold on her waist tightened, and he settled her swiftly onto a filing cabinet before trailing his hands down her clothed body. Palms curved around the outsides of her thighs, he mumbled against her lips, “Touch you. Have to touch you, Sadie.”
She kissed him back, hard, the sharp points of her fingernails pressing pleasurably at his nape. Using his body as leverage, she lifted her butt off the cabinet. Instantly, he shoved at the skirt of her gown until it pooled around her hips. Her sharp inhalation filled the space between them as heated bare skin met cool metal. “Do it.” Her knees spread to make a space for him between her legs. “Touch me. See if I’m what you remember.”
How could she be? What he remembered carried a piercing clarity that a decade apart couldn’t erase, but a haze clouded its edges from the emotional and physical high that had held him in thrall that long-ago Christmas. Yet when he trailed shaking fingertips along her inner thigh, the memories dispersed like so much mist.
“I feel empty, Ryan.” She whimpered, gaze liquid and locked on his, as aware as he that they needed to keep quiet with the theater employees only a few feet away. “It’s been so long without you. So long.”
Sweat broke out on his forehead, his shaking increased. The heat from her body buffeted against him the closer his hand came to paradise, and then he found the lacy gusset of her panties.
He found it soaked. “Sadie. God.”
Writhing as she sensed his light caress, she fisted his shirt in both hands and closed her teeth over his lower lip. “If you don’t touch me right this second, Ryan Young, I vow I’ll scream and bring both of those silly little girls down on us with their phones and their tweets.”
The part of his brain still capable of rational thought couldn’t understand why she felt that was a threat to him. Wouldn’t she be the one who cared if she were caught on camera in a heavy make-out session with a strange man? But he shuffled that sober, confused voice into a closet of its own and locked the mental door. “No more emptiness, babe. I promise.” Capturing her mouth with his, he pulled the lace aside and slid two fingers into the wet heat of her.
Oh, Lord. This was heaven. He’d died, and somehow ended up in the only heaven he’d ever had any interest in ascending to: the heaven where some part of him was inside any part of her.
Her fingers fumbled with the top button of his suit pants, making hasty work of his zipper and delving into the open fly to stroke him through the thin cotton of his boxer-briefs. He bit back a tortured groan as she yanked down the waistband of the briefs, revealing his erection in all its pulsing, painful glory.
She made a humming noise, low in her throat, and holy Jesus, that was sexy. But not as sexy as her sighing, “Mmm, just as pretty as I remembered.”
A choking laugh caught in his throat, tinged with a fair amount of embarrassment. “Pretty?”
“Oh, yes.” Wrapping warm, slender fingers around his length, she pumped him. “All long and hard and big in my hand.”
He groaned as quietly as possible, but it was difficult not to be loud, like he wanted to be. He remembered being loud with her before, how he’d gotten off on their mingled breaths, harsh and panting. The little moans that had turned to whimpers, then cries when her fingernails had raked over his naked shoulders. The dirty words he’d never been able to say to another lover, before or since, and the shout he hadn’t been able to contain as he came, the only barrier between them a translucent layer of latex.
Latex. His forehead fell forward to rest against hers, breathing ragged. “I don’t have a condom.”
“You don’t— Why the bloody hell not, Ryan?”
One hand cupping the side of her flushed face, he used his thumb to lift her chin, bringing her lips a mere centimeter from his. “Because,” he murmured, mouth brushing hers, teasing them both with every word, “I didn’t bank on the privilege of being inside you tonight.” Or ever again.
For the first time in far too long, some of her old sunshine started to peek through. She melted into him, soft and warm as she adjusted her grip on his cock. A firm, twisting stroke nearly had him in tears. “Be careful. Semen stains don’t wash out of satin.”
“And you would know this how?”
She sniffed, suddenly every inch the haughty aristocrat. “I wouldn’t, of course. I merely…assume.” But there was a playful gleam in her eye that tugged at his heart. And further south.
“Of course,” he echoed, a slow smile spreading across his features. The hand at her jaw moved, sliding over her shoulder, his fingers hooking around the smooth, expensive fabric. “So if I can’t come on this”—he stroked the satin, then her skin, and there was no comparison between the two, her skin winning every single time—“and I can’t come in you, where can I come?”
She gripped the back of his neck with her free hand, holding him close as her tongue darted out to sweep over his lower lip. “I’m not sure I want you to come.” She licked at his top lip before nipping him. Dang, but he loved her tendency to bite him, as if she was more comfortable using her teeth than her words, that sunshine manifesting itself in sensuality instead of anger when she was irritated with him. “I’m not sure you’ve earned it.”
She was probably right, but he was already so hard, so painfully hard in her hand, and the idea of all this buildup with no reward made him want to die, just a little. “Fine,” he growled, surprised to learn he was the sort of man who growled. But then, he supposed, if anyone were to introduce him to a new facet of himself, it would be the inimitable Sadie Bower. “I’ll earn it, then.”
Without warning, he adjusted the two fingers that he’d never bothered to pull from her body, his petting of her inner walls rewarded with the clamping of tight muscle around him. Maybe he couldn’t be loud, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t let loose the other part of himself he’d unlocked during their first encounter—the part that loved looming over her, that adored the physical differences between them—as he whispered all the private thoughts he’d kept cooped up inside for so long. “I watched you on set, did you know? I imagined stepping out from behind my monitors and tossing you over my shoulder, in front of everyone, and dragging you into a dark corner.”
A shiver wracked her. He felt her grow wetter against his hand, but she didn’t say a word.
“I’d sit there and watch you work and fantasize about stripping you out of your costume. I pictured making you face the wall, how your back would arch while I stood behind you, stroking you. Petting you. Those hard little nipples of yours. First with my fingers, but I’d want to suck on them, too. God, I can almost feel them on my tongue now.”
She moaned, trembled. Her knees pressed against his hips, the heels of her stile
ttos scraping the backs of his thighs through his trousers.
“Yeah, hold me here, right here.” He increased the speed of the fingers stroking in and out of her, his other hand falling to the hot skin of her bare thigh to anchor her for each thrust. “But you know I wouldn’t be able to keep it at just touching, right? Or even using my mouth. If I’d ever taken you how I wanted to the past few months”—he squeezed his eyes shut, because no, no, he couldn’t think of all the mistakes he’d made with her, not right now—“Sadie, babe, I would’ve wanted to be deep inside you, like I’m in you now, but with my cock. I would’ve pressed your palms flat on that wall in that dark corner, pulled out my cock, and slid into you from behind. And you would have been as wet and tight are you are right now, and, Sadie, it would have killed me. You would’ve killed me the second you let me inside you.”
He withdrew his thrusting fingers and grabbed her hips with both hands. The weight of her bunched skirts rested on the backs of his hands as his naked shaft found her slickness and rocked against her. “That’s what I wanted. God, you feel good, so good.” Another slide along her slit, the hard bud of her clitoris a scalding point of pleasure where it brushed him. “Sadie.” Her name on his tongue while she rubbed her wet self against him threatened to snap the single thread of control he had over his impulses.
Little whimpers began to escape her, even as she pressed aggressive kisses along his jaw, his neck. Cool satin shifted as they moved together, caressing the too-sensitive head of his cock and making his balls tighten with urgent need. “Let me come, babe,” he pleaded, groaning into her ear before his lips found the racing pulse beneath her jaw, and his tongue her heated skin. “I’ll pay for the dry cleaning. I’ll pay for the whole dress. Just—”
“Yes.” She muffled her cries against his shoulder as she came, and that, coupled with the faint scrape of teeth trying to bite him through his dress shirt, sent him spinning wildly into orgasm.
I’ve missed you. His last thought before ecstasy swallowed him whole. I’ve missed you so much.
FOUR
London, Ten Years Earlier
Early morning sun filtered through the gauzy curtains draped across the window over her bed, urging Sadie awake as her sleepy mind tried to catalogue what, precisely, was different about this morning than any other.
For one, it was Christmas morning. Also, there was a guy in her bed. No, a man. It was a man’s long, strong arms holding her, one bent under her head as a pillow, the other wrapped securely around her waist, and a man’s naked body aligned to every inch of hers in proper spooning fashion.
Merry Christmas to her.
She sighed happily, and he shifted behind her, hips pushing against her backside. Suddenly, she was very, very awake, and so was he. “Morning,” Ryan murmured. His cute American accent did something crazy to her insides, that deep voice of his all husky with sleep and satiation.
“Morning.” Then she clapped a hand over her mouth. Morning breath. Oh, no, no, no. She was not doing the morning-after of the most amazing night of her life with morning breath. “Be right back,” she promised as she darted into the bathroom, utterly unconcerned with her nakedness and far, far more worried about the negative effects bad breath could wreak on this magical Christmas morning.
Three minutes later, minty clean and having run a brush through her snarled hair—tangles put there by Ryan’s hands the night before, she mused with a blush—she slipped back under the coverlet and slid her arms around his lean, sturdy torso. “Good morning, again.” Pressing a line of kisses along one collarbone, she smiled to feel his mouth at her forehead, delivering a gentle kiss of his own. “It’s Christmas.”
“It is.” One long arm curved around her shoulders to hold her to his chest, and she peered up into irises the deep, dark green of fir trees. His light-brown hair, overgrown and curly, was a wild, sleep-tousled mess.
Though perhaps the tousling had nothing to do with sleep and everything with how many times she’d speared her fingers into the soft thickness of it during the night. Holding him to her. Pushing him away. Urging him to slide up her body, lips and tongue and hands so big they reminded her of a puppy’s oversized paws.
Except when he touched her. When Ryan touched her, she caught fire, and he’d followed her willingly into the flames.
The aftereffects of the night swimming through her body with delicious languor, she nuzzled into the hollow of his throat, chancing a brief taste of his skin that made him shiver beneath her. “I’m glad you stayed.
“Hey, you saved me having to find a hostel in the snow after dark in a strange city.” Smiling as he teased her, he pushed upright in the bed and propped a pillow behind his back. His smile softened, and he grabbed her hand, held it between both of his. “I would’ve stayed even if I had someplace to go.”
Tugging the sheet to her chest, she sat up next to him, mimicking his posture against the headboard. “What did you and your brother fight about last night?”
For a minute, she thought he wouldn’t answer, but then he sighed, heartfelt and sad. “The house.” All traces of last night’s feverish descent into desire disappeared from him in the blink of an eye. “We still own the house, our parents’ house, but no one’s living there or taking care of it. Before winter set in, I would drive up and mow the grass once a week, but it’s basically empty. I want to sell it. Jon doesn’t. Doesn’t even want to deal with it.” He shrugged, but there was nothing careless in the gesture. “When I told him I’d do it without him, he freaked. So…I left.”
They were quiet for a several long moments, side by side where they leaned against her headboard, bare arms warm and touching. Eventually, he reached over and picked up the framed photo on her bedside table. “Where was this taken?” he asked, pointedly changing the subject, and she was happy to let him.
“Provence, this summer. We were at a friend’s wedding.” Her best friend Marie’s sister had married the oldest son of one of the area’s largest lavender producers. The ceremony had been beautiful, the wine plentiful, and she and Marie and Kai in high spirits long past midnight. Marie had snapped the photo of Sadie and Kai in the middle of a field, the sunset at their backs, cheeks flushed from being two bottles into the celebrating.
“That’s your…brother?”
It wasn’t nice to want that hesitation to mean Ryan was jealous of how close she was standing to Kai in the picture, but that didn’t stop her from secretly hoping he wasn’t keen on photographic evidence of her wrapped around a handsome man. Immediately chagrined, she nodded. “Kai takes after our dad, and I’m more like Mum.” Plucking it from his hands, she returned the photo to the nightstand, shivering when her breasts brushed his chest as she leaned across him. “He hears far more ‘what are you’ questions than I do. Most people assume I’m one hundred percent Japanese.”
“Ah.”
She peered at him, curious, then grinned. “I’ve made you uncomfortable, haven’t I?” When his jaw clamped shut and a blush colored his cheekbones, her smile widened. She crawled into his lap, dropping the sheet as she straddled him, and ran a fingertip over one flushed cheek. “Well, then. I have arrived at a decision.”
“Oh?” His big, warm palms settled on her body, one at her hip, the other over the small of her back.
Sparks zinged over her skin, along every inch he touched. It seemed both wrong and right that she’d never had this reaction to anyone before. The intensity of it shook a few key places inside her, places she’d believed were unshakeable until now. “Yes. You’re coming to Christmas brunch.”
His thumbs traced her bottom-most ribs, easily spanning her torso and making her feel more acutely feminine than she could ever before remember being. “Please say Christmas brunch is happening here in your bed.”
A kiss would make him less likely to panic, yes? So she leaned in, lips open and gentle, teasing and coaxing. “More like at my parents’ house. In less than an hour.”
“You want me to meet your parents?” Strangely, he di
dn’t sound panicked, at all. He sounded…touched.
Damn it. She could have kicked herself for forgetting. This was his first Christmas without his parents. It wasn’t too much a stretch of the imagination to think he might be missing his family, or to wonder if he wasn’t craving something homey and intimate, like her parents’ Christmas Day brunches always were. “I want you to meet my parents,” she confirmed softly, leaning in to kiss him, embracing the joy that inevitably enveloped her every time she did so. “But that will mean leaving the bed.”
A grin spread across his lovely face. “So long as we can come back to it when brunch is over.”
She shivered in delight, kissing him again. “Deal.”
They took turns in her shower, the stall much too small to share, but it was only a matter of minutes until both were fresh and clean, with him smelling faintly of her orange blossom body wash. He dug into his duffle and she in her closet, and then they were dressed, pulling on their winter gear and heading out the door. By cab, it didn’t take long to get from her tidy flat off Euston Road to her childhood home, a seven-bedroom house in South Kensington. She paid the driver, wished him a happy holiday, and exited the car, Ryan close on her heels. “I…feel like I should warn you.”
“Warn me about what?”
She paused on the sidewalk, gloveless hands shoved in the pockets of her purple coat, and stared down at her boots. “It’s a big house.”
“I’ve seen big houses before.”
Sadie drew a line through the slush with the toe of one boot, her mouth twisting wryly. “My parents have a staff.” She glanced up in time to see his tawny eyebrows rise and tried not to feel defensive. Americans so rarely grasped all the nuance of British society. “A small staff, though. My father is a baronet and the country’s former ambassador to Japan. Mum is the CEO of Senabo Financial, and…”
“And?”
