Carly didn’t want to think about what had split them, what had brought them here. What this might lead to. She just wanted Dylan.
He left her mouth to plant a trail of hot kisses along her jaw line, homing right into the sensitive part of her throat that had always turned her on. This was the man who had introduced her to sensual pleasure, taught her about the ecstasy her body—and his—could give her. He knew exactly which buttons to press—and she wanted his hands and mouth right there.
He slid down the straps of her dress, tugged the bodice down to her waist. Then freed her breasts from her bra and tossed it aside. His eyes narrowed in that intent, almost unbearably sensuous way she remembered so well as he gazed at her breasts as if in worship. “They…you are perfect,” he said, his voice husky with want. Her nipples peaked and hardened without him even touching them. He bent his head and took one nipple in his mouth, sucking and stroking with his tongue while he caressed the other with warm, skilful fingers, kneading the nipple until it ached. Just the way she liked it. She gasped with fierce pleasure as sensations shot straight to between her legs.
Urgently, she pushed her fingers through his short, spiky hair and pulled his head closer. He swapped attention to her other breast. “Dylan, oh!”
After giving each breast equal attention, he kissed her mouth again, as he pushed her dress right down over her hips so it pooled at her feet. Impatiently she kicked it away, then her sandals so they landed with a thud on the wooden floor. Left in only her tiny, lacy panties, she pushed her hips forward, urging him to strip her of those too. With anyone other than Dylan she might have felt a tad embarrassed at how damp her panties were with her arousal. But he knew her body so well and he smiled as he stroked her with clever, knowing fingers using just the right amount of pressure. He made tugging her panties down her thighs a caress in itself.
“Not fair,” she murmured unsteadily. “I’m naked and you’re not.”
With unsteady fingers she unbuttoned his shirt, slid it off his shoulders and splayed her hands against his chest. She marveled at his power and strength. “I like these new muscles,” she murmured.
He moaned his arousal as she teased his nipples between her fingers until he pushed her away. Pleasure must have become pain and she dropped her hands immediately. They’d explored everything together as she’d learned about lovemaking—but always stopped if the other had felt uncomfortable. Not much had ever made them stop.
She undid his shorts, pushed them and his boxers away. He was magnificent but he wouldn’t let her take him in her hand. “You’ll tip me over the edge,” he said, his voice husky. “I want to come with you.”
“I’m on the edge myself and I don’t want to wait a second longer to have you inside me,” she urged him. “I need you now.”
“Carly,” he groaned. “You don’t know what you’re doing to me.”
“Oh, I have an idea,” she murmured, as she brushed her fingers teasingly across his flat, hard belly, tracing his perfectly defined six-pack.
He shuddered, his voice hoarse. “You haven’t changed, have you? Always the tease. Making me want you so much I can think of nothing else.”
Effortlessly, he lifted her up on to the console and placed her on the edge. A carved wooden Christmas reindeer went crashing to the floor. “Ignore it,” he said tersely. He pushed her thighs apart, parted her with gentle fingers, positioned himself at her entrance— Then they both froze.
“Protection,” she said.
“Condoms,” he said at the same time.
“I don’t have any, do you?”
He took a step back, his breath coming in deep gasps. “They’re in a drawer in the bedroom.”
She drew in great gulps of air. “I can’t wait for you to go upstairs, Dylan. Can’t you see I’m desperate for you? Don’t you have any down here?”
“The kitchen,” he said hoarsely. “There’s more in the first aid box.”
“I won’t ask why you keep spare condoms in a first-aid box, just get them,” she demanded. “I’ll be on the sofa.”
Melting with anticipation, Carly lay back on the sofa to wait for him. He was back within seconds. And she was ready for him. As she drew him close with a murmur of welcome, he entered her with one hard thrust that made her cry out. She pushed her pelvis forward to meet him as he thrust deeply and rhythmically, filling her not only with intense pleasure but also a soaring joy. “Dylan, I never thought we—oh!” She tightened around him, immediately felt the first tremors of her release. It was too soon. She wanted to wait for him. But he thrust harder. And then she was coming, the waves of her orgasm rolling through her as he shouted his own climax.
She lay panting on the sofa, tremors of satisfaction still surging through her. Yet disappointed it had been fast and furious and over too soon.
With strong, muscular arms Dylan pulled her back to him. “No relaxing yet,” he growled. “That was just for starters. We’ll take it slower this time.”
He was still perfectly, wonderfully hard and they made love again. And again. As if all the pent-up longing she had for him—and, it seemed, he had for her—needed to be completely vanquished. Finally she fell back, replete, boneless, drowsy and rested against Dylan’s chest, feeling the reassuring thud, thud, thud of his heart.
But through her satisfaction ran a vein of sadness. Was this just sex with the ex? Or would their lovemaking take them somewhere else—somewhere neither of them had anticipated or prepared for?
Dylan awoke to the urgent buzzing of his smart phone. He was on the sofa, the warm and wondrous weight of Carly pressed against him, her head resting on his chest, her hair tickling his skin when she shifted in her sleep. They were both naked. He remembered tucking a light throw rug around them against the cool of the air-conditioning.
Trying not to wake her, he reached out to the side table for his phone. But his movement—careful as it had been—must have woken her. She sat up, dazed. Looked around her. Then focused on him. Her eyes widened and she smiled the slow smile of a thoroughly satisfied woman.
“Dylan,” she murmured. The wealth of feeling she put into his name struck straight to his heart. And it terrified him. He could so easily fall for her again—and she would be gone again, leaving him bereft. Her life was in London; his was in Sydney. Nothing had changed.
She stretched her arms gracefully above her head, lifting her beautiful breasts into view as the rug slipped away. “Was that a dream? A wonderful, exciting, erotic dream?”
“It felt pretty damn real to me,” he said.
She took his hand, stroked the palm with her fingers. Even that simple action aroused him. He could never have enough of her.
“It was good, wasn’t it? Like…like old times.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Good” was the understatement of the century. Physically, he and Carly were perfectly in tune with each other—always had been. Trouble was, making love with her had brought back bad memories along with the good. Memories of the heartbreak and devastation she had left behind her. He’d thought being with her again might bring closure. Having her in his arms again had only cracked open the dam behind which he’d barricaded his emotions. The old feelings had come flooding back.
Yet he didn’t regret a moment of his time with her—and not just because of the awesome sex. He just had to see it for what it was. A fling with an old flame. No strings. No obligations. On either side.
The phone had stopped buzzing but it started again. He picked it up. The restaurant. They were holding his reservation but couldn’t hold it for much longer as there were people waiting.
He mouthed to Carly: “Still want to go to dinner?”
She shook her head. He apologized to the restaurant and let their table go.
“You’ve got so much food in the fridge, I’m sure I could whip together a meal,” she said. “Are you hungry?”
Only for her. “Not really,” he said.
“Me neither. Not for food anyway. I’ve got other
appetites on my mind.” Her face was flushed, her nipples stiff, hard peaks. “Yes. Again. Already.” She laughed as she pushed him back onto the sofa.
Dylan pulled her down so she lay on top of him, her breasts against his chest, one leg hooked over her thighs, his erection letting her know exactly where his hunger lay. Carly planted urgent kisses down the firm column of his throat as he threw his head back and groaned his pleasure. She remembered everything that pleased him.
Hands splayed against his chest, she claimed his mouth again and kissed him long and hard before she pushed herself up to straddle him. He held his hands to her hips as she rode him just the way he liked it, ecstasy building with her movement. Her face was intent with both giving him pleasure and achieving her own, her mouth swollen from his kisses, her pupils dilated with desire. They came together with perfect timing. Carly.
Dylan realized with a blinding flash of clarity why his forays into dating had been less than successful. He was a one-woman man. And this was his woman.
Carly collapsed on his chest, panting. For a long moment she lay there as they both recovered their breaths. He felt her heart slow from its rapid pace to something slow and regular.
She lifted her face and gazed deep into his eyes, her forehead pleated into a frown. “How did I ever leave you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me?”
CHAPTER SIX
Carly stalled for time by padding barefoot over to where her white dress lay discarded on the floor. She pulled it over her head, not bothering with underwear. As she did so, Dylan pulled on his shorts. Clothed, she felt less vulnerable, less open to the hint of hostility in Dylan’s eyes. Or was it thinly disguised hurt?
She walked to the sliding glass doors that opened out to the deck and stood facing the magnificent view. During the day, sailboats dotted the blue waters off Balmoral Beach. Now, the final light of the day completely swallowed by darkness, the magical view was of a myriad lights and their reflections in the water. Sydney was an amazing place. People were always asking her why she lived in gloomy London when her home was in Australia.
Why had she left Sydney? How had she found the strength to leave Dylan four years ago?
She’d tossed those questions around in her mind many times during the time she’d been away. Being back home—being with Dylan—was beginning to clarify something that approached an answer.
He stood behind her, she was conscious of his height, his strength, his scent—the subtle, sexy scent of them. Carly and Dylan. That’s how it had been for them. Treated as a couple from the get go—her aged nineteen, him twenty—with no doubts from anyone that they would be together forever.
She turned to face him. Her heart flipped over at the intensity of his gaze. How dangerously easy it would be to fall right back in love with him again—and make herself vulnerable again to all that pain. He’d known her so well—and that knowledge had given him the perfectly targeted weapons to wound her. Yet she’d hurt him too. More, perhaps, than she’d realized.
“It wasn’t about André, you know. Me leaving, I mean.”
“I think I know that now.”
“It was about me. There was the travel, of course. Australia began to seem restricting. I wanted to visit the countries of the cuisines I’d learned to cook—work in kitchens there. I wanted to see Italy, discover my heritage. Not just the village near Naples my grandparents came from but Rome and Florence and Venice.”
“We could have gone to all those places. Taken vacations.”
“I realized that afterward—and how much we would have enjoyed them together.”
He started to say something but she put up her hand to halt him. “Hear me out. Remember, at that time, you were reluctant to take anything more than a week or so off work. Too worried, I guess, about losing your rung on the ladder to success.”
“True,” he said. “I was driven. Couldn’t bear to miss an opportunity for advancement.”
She waved her hand around her. “It paid off. You made it. In such a short time, you made it. Look at this fabulous house.”
He paused. “It’s a lonely house. You being here makes me realize that.”
“I’m sad to hear it,” she said. “Maybe…”
“Maybe what?”
She caught herself just in time. “I…I lost my train of thought.” She could not let her imagination stray in the direction of her living here with him one day—let alone put voice to it.
“In spite of that, the house is still a damn good investment.”
She laughed. “That’s the Dylan I know and—”
She bit the word off just in time. Love came only too easily when she thought about Dylan. But she wasn’t ready to acknowledge that yet. “The Dylan I know and admire,” she concluded.
But he knew. Knew she hadn’t felt able to say the word. She could see the knowledge in his eyes. Did he feel the same about her?
She was too frightened to admit—even to herself—how little her feelings had changed. No wonder she’d never had much luck with men since she’d left him. Not when she was always—consciously or not—unfavorably comparing them to Dylan.
“Admired, but still was able to leave,” he reminded her, an edge of bitterness to his voice. This would not be easily fixed.
“Believe me, I went over and over it trying to figure out where I went wrong—where we went wrong. Finally I realized it was because I had a desperate urge to be me. Not someone’s daughter or someone’s girlfriend.”
“Me being a someone?”
She nodded, hating the hurt she was causing him but knowing it had to be said. What he saw as her betrayal had become like a festering sore that needed to be lanced. She had to explain why she had left him if she were to have any hope of getting him back. And she wanted him back.
“My parents are wonderful and I love them dearly,” she said. “But sometimes I felt I was being smothered by their expectations, their love, the responsibility I felt toward them as an only child. For heaven’s sake, I was still living at home at twenty-four years of age. Their princess.”
His lips tightened. “I know all about parental expectations.”
“Of course you do. You were so young when you had such responsibility thrust on you. It was…it was like you’d had your youth snatched away from you. That…that was part of it too.”
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I could see your obligation to your mother and brother coming between us.”
Now he scowled. “How could you say that?”
“Toward the end, you never seemed to have much time for me. Your obsession with work and study meant you had decreasing amounts of spare time. Your mother always seemed to need you to help her with something she, quite honestly, should have been able to do herself.”
The tensing of his jaw told her how uncomfortable he felt discussing his mother. “Her husband does all that now. It did take a lot of my time.”
“And you helped her out of love and duty,” she said. “Another thing I admire about you. But back then, I was used to you dancing attention on me. I guess your mother was right when she called me ‘a high maintenance little madam’.”
“She what? When?”
“Several times over the years she hinted at how demanding she thought I was of her son. But it all spilled over when I called your family home from France on the landline, after I couldn’t get through to you by cell phone or email.”
“You spoke to her? She never said.”
“Your mother told me in no uncertain terms that you didn’t want anything to do with me and I needed to get that into my head. I was not to call again.”
Dylan shook his head in disbelief. “I’ll have this out with her.”
“What’s the point? I don’t want to come between you and your mother. Would it have made any difference?”
“Probably not,” he muttered. “I was too single-minded and stubborn to see how stupid I was being in cutting you off.”
&nb
sp; “What I’m trying to explain is what I wanted, what I needed was to learn to be me, Carly de Luca. To forge my own identity, to figure out what I wanted from life, not what others wanted for me. Even…even you.”
His face contorted with anguish. “But I adored you.”
“I adored you. Have no doubt about that. But…but I began to feel stifled in Sydney and you didn’t want to come with me to Europe.”
“I wanted to look after you, like a woman needs to be looked after.”
“I wanted to learn to look after myself.”
He cursed. “If only you’d told me all this at the time.”
“I did tell you about my urge to travel and see the world. But you were so blindly jealous of André, I wonder if you even heard me. I think I only fully realized about the independence thing after I left. After I started to miss you so badly.”
“He encouraged you, filled your head with stories.”
“Stories I was eager to hear.”
She turned away from him to face the view and then back again to face him, bracing herself. “Here’s the thing, Dylan. André or no André, I would have gone some time. Best I went then, before we…well before we committed to anything permanent. I might have broken out later and that would have been much worse. As it was, it didn’t take me long to learn to stand on my own two feet. Then I really started to miss you. To realise that while it was good to be independent there was also such a thing as…as loving and being loved and sharing a life together. And that you were the one. I don’t know how many times I’d be at some beautiful place—a Bavarian castle or an Italian vineyard—and think Dylan would love this or I wish Dylan was with me to share it.”
“And when I blew you off?”
“I began to think the Dylan I thought I knew and…and loved, might not be the real Dylan. I quit the super yacht after a year and headed to London where someone I’d met on the boat had a job lined up for me. I decided to stay away until I got over you.”
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