Ten Years Later...

by Marie Ferrarella

  She would have been willing to bet anything that he was anything but emotionally invested right now.

  “Okay,” she allowed, stretching out the word as she tried to understand exactly what he thought he was telling her. “In any case, I forgive you.”

  But as she tried to get up for a second time, she found that Sebastian was still holding on to her wrist. Resigned, she sank back down onto the sofa. “Anything else?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” he answered.

  “All right, what?” she asked when he didn’t immediately follow up his words with anything further and the moments began to tick away.

  “This.” He said it so quietly, there was a part of her that thought that maybe they were communicating by telepathy rather than with words. Supposedly, some people in love could do that.

  Except that they weren’t people in love.

  Brianna caught her breath as his hand lightly skimmed along her throat. The caress branded her skin.

  He tilted her head just a fraction and then, in the next moment, his lips brushed against hers so incredibly softly she was sure she was just imagining it. That she had all but willed it with her mind.

  But she hadn’t.

  And the next moment, the first kiss was followed by another.

  And another.

  Each flowering kiss was a little more forceful, a little lengthier than the last.

  By the fourth kiss, rockets went off in her head and a hunger was suddenly unleashed within her, a hunger that she had never experienced before, even when she’d been on the brink of making love with him that very first time.

  The hunger was coupled with fear—fear that he would pull back.

  And then he did and she felt a desperation taking hold, interweaving itself with a sense of bereavement.

  “You’d better go upstairs,” he told her hoarsely. When she merely looked at him as if she didn’t understand what he was saying, he repeated the sentence, saying the words more forcefully. “Go. I don’t know how much longer I can hold back.”

  “Maybe I don’t want you to hold back,” she told him, remaining exactly where she was, her lips hardly moving. The only part moving was her heart, which had gone back to pounding wildly, the way it had initially.

  “You don’t know what you’re saying, Bree.”

  Her eyes held his as she remembered their past and remembered, too, what she had once thought would be their future.

  “I know exactly what I’m saying,” she told him, her voice just a hint above a whisper. “Don’t worry,” she added, never taking her eyes off his. “No strings, no requests for promises. All I want is tonight. Just now,” she told him, her breath warm on his lips as she spoke.

  Seducing him.

  Taking the last of his willpower and breaking it into tiny bits.

  “Oh, damn, Bree,” he lamented, “you’re making it hard to walk away.”

  “Then don’t,” she suggested softly. “Don’t.”

  He could feel the last of his resolve being blown to pieces as he pulled her back into his arms. As he kissed her with all the pent-up emotion he had. But now it was out, exploding right before him and ensnaring him just as much as it ensnared her.

  It was as if, after years of separation, he’d been allowed to glimpse his soul again.

  The intense desire to reunite, to become one, to become whole again, was just too overwhelming to resist.

  So he didn’t.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Wait.”

  The hoarsely voiced entreaty came from Brianna.

  She’d summoned the last of her all but shredded resolve in an attempt to momentarily pause the wild rush that had seized not only her, but she suspected him as well. She needed him to listen to her, provided she could still string a few words together.

  Sebastian felt more than heard her asking him to hold off. His pulse hammering against his rib cage, he forced himself to pull back.

  It was far from easy, but he wasn’t some sort of rutting pig. “You changed your mind.”

  It wasn’t a question but, to him, an agonized statement of fact. At the last minute, her senses had obviously returned to her. The realization created an ache deep in the pit of his stomach.

  Paradise lost before it was gained, he thought with a heavy heart, resigned to his fate.

  Brianna took his words to be a question and answered him with breathless feeling. “Oh, hell no. I haven’t changed my mind, and don’t you dare change yours.”

  He looked at her, confused. “Then why—?”

  Brianna didn’t expect him to think along the same lines that she did. After all, he hadn’t had to constantly place the needs of a little girl above his own for the past three years. She’d been doing it ever since she’d become first Carrie’s legal guardian and then her adoptive parent. It was second nature to her.

  Even so, it was a struggle to think clearly. All she wanted was to make love with Sebastian. To feel his hands along her body, to finally, finally become one with him again.

  Her mouth dry, she managed to push out the words and actually sound as if she was making some sort of sense.

  “We need to go to your room to do this,” she told him. “If either Carrie or your mother comes out of their bedrooms for any reason—”

  She didn’t need to finish. He understood.

  “Right, right,” he agreed wholeheartedly, already on his feet. Holding her hand, he drew her up with him as well. Ready to all but sprint up the stairs, Sebastian still paused for a moment. He threaded his fingers through her hair so that he could turn her face up to his. And then he kissed her. Soundly.

  Dazed, her head spinning, she looked at Sebastian the moment he drew his lips away from hers.

  “What was that for?” she asked breathlessly.

  “For not saying no,” he told her. The next second, he laced his fingers through hers and was drawing her over to the stairs.

  Brianna smiled to herself. How could she say no to him when everything inside her was screaming yes?

  The door to Sebastian’s bedroom closed.

  Finally.

  More than ever, she was anxious for his touch, for the feel of his firm, capable hands moving along her skin. Caressing her.

  Making love with her.

  Clothes flew off their bodies in a flurry of material, falling to the rug, comingling with little to no notice paid to what had fallen where. Clothes didn’t matter.

  Only this mattered.

  How had he let this happen? This separation that had kept them apart for so long, that had scissored through their happiness, leaving only rubble and ruin?

  The question hammered away at his brain. How could he have allowed hurt feelings to drive a wedge between the two of them?

  He needed to know because he’d turned his back on this. He had to have been crazy, he concluded. Crazy to leave her, crazy to maintain distance between them. Crazy not to attempt to get back in contact with her for all those years.

  Years he wasn’t going to get back.

  Years, despite this frenzy-driven interlude, that he might not be able to trade for something positive on the other side of this night.

  Sebastian was no longer a dreamer. He’d long since become grounded in reality and that reality wouldn’t allow him to be foolish enough to believe in a different life. He and Brianna had let too much time pass, had too much happen to each of them individually to just murmur, “Never mind,” and pick up where they had left off ten years ago.

  He knew all this to be true, that it all mattered—but not at this moment.

  Now he just needed to immerse himself in her, to absorb her, to drink her in as if she were a tall, frosty glass of water and he had just spent ten years crawling through the desert. He only wante
d to feel, think and exist in the moment with her.

  And nothing else mattered.

  It was a madness in the blood and he knew it, but he didn’t care.

  As he once again sought her mouth—the very reason for his existence on this earth at this moment—they were suddenly tumbling onto his king-size bed, their limbs tangling, their body parts instantly heating at even the barest hint of contact.

  There wasn’t a single microinch of his body that didn’t throb from wanting her.

  Sebastian tried to be as gentle as he could, restraining his all but overwhelming sense of urgency, as he ran his hands all over her body.

  Unable to satisfy himself.

  Unable to get enough of her.

  The quest for more seemed as if it were never ending. And that was the way he wanted it.

  Because he didn’t want this to end.

  His mouth followed the path forged by his hands and he gloried in the fact that Brianna twisted and turned beneath him, arching to absorb every sensation, every delicate nuance.

  Brianna felt as if she were running in some endless marathon, unable to catch her breath.

  At the same time she was struggling very hard not to emit a cry that would pierce the stillness of the night and quite possibly garner them an unwanted audience of two.

  At the very least, it could wake up either his mother or her daughter—if not both—and cause questions to be born full-grown and viable in the wake of the noise.

  Brianna was well aware of the danger of crying out, knew that it could very possibly terminate this wild, adrenaline-fueled ride she found herself on. But it was so hard to contain the sound of pure, raw, guttural pleasure broken down to its basic components that was throbbing in her throat, begging for release.

  She wasn’t sure just how much longer she could control herself.

  And then it came to her, the only way she knew of to keep from all but shrieking out her enjoyment.

  Throwing Sebastian off balance, she deftly switched positions so that suddenly, she was the one on top, she was the one with the upper hand.

  Straddling him now that he was under her, she began to weave a tapestry of soft, openmouthed kisses along his upper torso.

  She artfully applied her tongue as well and slowly worked her way down, past his chest, past his waist. Past his navel.

  She paused in her impromptu, erotic trail blazing long enough to lightly blow a small cloud of warm air along the lower region of his body.

  Just as she’d hoped, she was instantly rewarded with visual evidence that Sebastian was indeed responding to this exquisite torture.

  When she heard a strangled groan escape his lips, she knew he was all but at the breaking point.

  As was she.

  With a triumphant laugh, she hovered a moment longer, seductively teasing him with her tongue just along his hipline. Her heart racing, she slid her way up along the length of his body until their faces were on the same level again.

  As she reached down to caress him, he caught her wrist in his hand, holding her still.

  “Where did you learn to torture a man this way?” he asked in a barely audible whisper.

  “I didn’t ‘learn’ it anywhere,” she answered innocently. “It’s just creative instinct.”

  The next moment, raising his head, Sebastian seized her mouth, covering it with his own, and then, as he tasted her surrender, his arms surrounding her, he flipped their positions, reversing them so that once again she found herself under him.

  Under him and utterly compliant.

  He drew his head back for a second, looked into her eyes and knew—knew she was ready. Knew she was his for the taking.

  Which was good, because he didn’t think he could hold himself in check even a split second longer.

  He took Brianna’s mouth again, his pulse racing with each kiss. Echoes of the past tightly surrounded him as he parted her legs with his knee and then drove himself into her as if his very life depended on this union.

  Because right now, it did.

  They’d been here, just like this, once before. And yet...

  And yet it felt all brand-new.

  This joining enticed him like a temptress who had been waiting all eternity for this moment.

  A wild frenzy rose up in his veins, a frenzy born in the wake of Brianna’s frantic movements beneath him.

  Born in the barely contained, barely muffled cries of absolute pleasure he tasted as her mouth continued to be sealed to his.

  The frenzy continued to grow, feeding on the way her hips were pressed to his, even as they were arching, bucking, moving only slightly less quickly than the wings of a hummingbird hovering in a single position.

  He felt her fingers digging into his shoulders, felt her nails scraping against his flesh.

  The sharp pain was muted, its edge all but completely blotted out in the wake of the explosions going on inside him.

  They reached the very tip of the known universe and then, after hovering there for what seemed like an endless moment, they went into a free fall, their hands, bodies and souls joined.

  Sebastian felt that at any second, his heart would crack through his rib cage and make a break for freedom, still pounding insanely.

  Instinctively, his arms tightened around Brianna’s damp body. At first protectively, and then in fear. Fear that as the moment grew further and further away, so would she.

  More exhausted than he’d ever thought humanly possible, Sebastian still managed to turn his head and press a kiss to what he hoped was the top of her forehead.

  But he couldn’t swear to the accuracy of his delivery, only to the fact that Brianna had stolen not only his breath—and possibly his stamina—but his heart as well.

  How can she steal what she already had? his brain taunted him.

  In a moment of complete clarity, Sebastian suddenly realized why he’d never been in another relationship after they’d parted company. Because, together or apart, Brianna still retained possession of his heart.

  And what good did that do him? he silently demanded. He hadn’t had any contact with her after he’d left for college. No contact whatsoever. Instead, he’d allowed his ego, his baseless pride, to dictate his course of action—or lack thereof—and doom him to an existence filled with professional accomplishment yet devoid of any sort of emotional connections.

  For all the people that were always around him in Tokyo, he was soul-wrenchingly alone.

  “So,” he heard her say, invading his thought process, “same time, same place, ten years from now?”

  He turned his head to look at her, certain he hadn’t heard her correctly. “What?”

  “Same time, same place, ten years from now?” she repeated. When the confused expression on his face didn’t recede, she patiently pointed out, “We made love here, in your bed like this, the night of the prom.”

  She didn’t have to add what she was leaving unsaid: that they’d made love for the very first time just before the hospital had called on her cell phone to tell her that her father had been involved in a near-fatal accident and that they weren’t entirely sure if he would make it through the night.

  “Did we?” He asked in such an innocent voice, it was her turn to stare at him.

  “You don’t remember?” she asked him, trying not to sound as stunned as she felt.

  And then he smiled at her, that soft, bone-melting smile that always got to her. “I don’t remember anything that happened before we came up to this room and then went on to systematically destroy the world as we once knew it.”

  “Oh, you’re kidding,” she realized, feeling a wave of absolutely stunning relief.

  For a second, she’d believed his performance and had actually thought that Sebastian didn’t remember their first time the way s
he did. For her, that first interlude between them was forever embossed on her brain as well as her heart. That it was, in some measure, embossed on his as well meant a great deal to her.

  “No,” he told her in utter seriousness, “I’m not kidding.” He cupped her cheek just before he kissed her softly on the lips. “It does feel as if we just forged our own brand-new world.”

  She smiled up at him, then rested her head on his shoulder as she curled her body up against his.

  “That was very poetic,” she said with a contented sigh.

  She allowed herself just a few more minutes to savor this dreamlike state. All too soon, the peace she was experiencing would break up like the bubbles hovering above a bubble bath. She knew that this contentment’s life expectancy was incredibly short. Almost over before it began. That didn’t seem very fair.

  “Where do we go from here?”

  The question suddenly escaped his lips, even though he’d already thought that through logically and knew there was no final satisfactory destination for them.

  She raised her head and looked at him. “Do we have to decide that right now?” she asked, lightly grazing his lips with her own.

  There it was again, that instant response that only she could arouse from him.

  He closed his arms around her, holding her close, taking comfort from the feel of her heart beating against his.

  “No, we don’t have to decide anything at the moment,” he told her.

  “Since we’re not going to talk, what would you like to do in the interim?” she asked teasingly. They both knew the answer to that question.

  He laughed softly, thinking how right all this felt, just as he’d thought the very same thing ten years ago. He’d been right then, as he was right now.

  But maybe this time there would be a different outcome.

  At least he could hope.

  “Guess,” he suggested.

  “What do I get if I guess right?” she asked, her eyes dancing with barely suppressed mischief.

  “Me,” he told her.

  Her grin was wide as she slid her body up against his again. “Works for me,” she whispered.