His fingers splayed wide under her spread thighs, holding her close so she rubbed against his erection with every step. She was wet.
He could feel it through the denim of his jeans and the thin fabric of those sexy pants she had on.
Ryan moved by rote until the front of his thighs hit the closest available surface. The table’s edge. Divorce headquarters. Good enough.
He leaned Claire back, following her down as he swept an arm across the tabletop, clearing what had been a barely ordered mess to begin with.
They could sort it later.
Priority number one was the hellion with her legs locked around his hips, her hands jerking the buttons of his shirt free.
He had to get inside her. Had to take her.
Deep. Hot. Fast. Hard.
The primitive mantra hammered through his head as they fought the clothing between them, rocking in restless anticipation of a union that couldn’t come quickly enough.
Incoherent words of pleasure spilled from Claire’s lips in needy pants, punctuated by the upward tilt of her hips, a hungry openmouthed kiss at his neck and the desperate clutch of hands, unsettled and seeking, beneath his open shirt.
“I want… Oh, God…you don’t even know…so good…I need you…never thought…so long…”
A man’s ego could survive an eternity on words like that alone—if his head didn’t blow off first.
Fisting the gauzy fabric of a shirt that had been driving him to distraction all day, he wrenched it over Claire’s head. Her hair fell in a soft tumble around her slim shoulders, neck and breasts. Dark silk and creamy skin. A barely-there lace bra in shades of nude.
His palms shaped the firm swells, taking the jutting points of her erect nipples against them as raven strands slipped and teased over the backs of his knuckles in a lure he couldn’t ignore.
She was so fine. Pushing into his hands as her lips parted on a thready gasp.
Sensitive. Inviting. So damn responsive.
Echoes of her soft cries from a hundred different nights tightened his spine, demanded he test the memories against now.
Because it was different. This time it wasn’t about love or forever or anything but what they simply couldn’t deny a minute longer. He licked his lips and willed his brain to function. “We’re just taking a time-out here.”
Her legs tightened around his waist, pulling him into closer contact with all that wet heat. “A break,” she panted, nodding quickly, and Ryan felt himself going harder at her eager willingness to go along. They were on the same page.
“Just two adults indulging in an adult activity.” Curving two fingers into the scant cup of her bra, he caught her nipple. Savored the sweet hitch in her breath at his gentle tug.
“And that’s all?” No expectation, no demand, just the need to understand.
He held her gaze, lost himself in the depths of blue and let the truth wash over him.
“No.” Even if he could lie to himself, he couldn’t lie to her. “It’s more than that.”
“Closure.” Her lips held a trace of smile as if she was only just realizing it herself.
“Closure.” The idea resonated within him. The goodbye they’d never had. He rolled the tight bud, watching as her eyes smoked, her lids heavied and her head fell back, exposing the slender column of her neck. Beautiful. Wanton. Woman.
Claire.
Reaching behind him he unlocked her ankles and brought her legs around to the front, so he could strip her pants. His gaze raked hot and fast down the length of her. Lush curves and tempting hollows. And then she bowed up, squirming to unclasp her bra, pushing all that rounded, soft perfection toward him so there was no option but to lean over and take her into his mouth, close his teeth around her, and let his tongue circle the stiff tip until she cried out her broken plea, begging for more.
He yanked the last scrap of her lacy panties down the length of her legs. His hands circled her ankles and skated up her calves, catching behind her knees. Opening her to him.
Jerking at his fly with one hand, he stepped between her legs, ready—and froze.
Muttering a quiet curse, he sucked air into his lungs. Fought the tantilizing scent of her. And forced himself to meet her eyes. Eyes that were confused and hazed with heat and hurt.
“What? Please, don’t stop. This will be okay, Ryan. Just now, just tonight. Just don’t stop.”
“No, sweetheart. Condoms, do we need them?” He didn’t know how he’d gotten this far without thinking of them. Except with Claire he’d never used them. She’d been on the pill even before the first time for some regularity issues. And then she’d been—
“I won’t get pregnant.” If nothing else had told him how strong she’d become, the way she spoke those simple words would have. Not a flinch or flicker of the old heartbreak he knew was there. He wouldn’t give her time to think about it. Not now.
“Safe sex,” he answered flatly, refusing to acknowledge the pinch of discomfort he felt at voicing the necessary words. She might still be his wife, and he was relieved she had birth control taken care of, but they hadn’t really been married in more than eight years. And though he’d been diligent to the extreme about protection—
“Oh, right,” Claire answered, the flush across her chest and neck building darker than before, pushing into her cheeks. “Of course.” She nodded quickly, then shook her head before letting out a short laugh that wasn’t quite funny.
A quiet alarm began to sound from that part of him that was all instinct and gut. It wasn’t guilt in her eyes. It couldn’t be. They’d both had other lovers and they both knew it. So then what?
“Claire?” He brushed his thumb across the bare skin of her hip. Soothing rather than seducing. “You don’t need to feel uncomfortable about this. It’s not like I’ve been a monk.”
“I know. It’s just—”
“Dahlia.” It had to be. “Look, the stuff in the papers isn’t even close to the truth. Whatever you’ve read, it’s not true.”
Claire blinked up at him with those big blue eyes touching some part of him he didn’t want to deal with. “I mean, yes, we’ve been together on and off. But what they say about the other women…”
“The soccer player.” A woman from the U.S. Olympic team he’d been paired with…
“Before I met Dahlia. There have been a few women. Four. Two longer-term and two that were…very brief.”
Damn it, this was uncomfortable. He didn’t want to think about other women. He didn’t want to think about anyone but Claire. And what it was going to be like when he got inside her. But to do that, he needed to do this.
“What you said before about me being ‘off again’ with Dahlia, it’s just off. For over a month now. And for the record, I use condoms every time.”
If he’d been expecting the tension to be wiped from Claire’s face at hearing he wasn’t half the player the rags made him out to be, it didn’t happen. If anything, she looked more uncomfortable.
And then quietly she asked, “Are you waiting for me to tell you…my sexu—”
“No,” he choked out as jealousy snagged unexpectedly in his throat. He shut his eyes, trying to blot out the images that too quickly filled his mind. That was the last damn thing he wanted to hear.
“I know there’ve been other men.” All he needed to know now was whether he was going to have to beat the world speed record in a sprint to the market down on Avenida de la Playa or whether he took her hilt deep now.
Only, then he caught her expression—and the world around them ground to a halt.
Hell, he knew that face. The one that tried to hide the truth stamped so blatantly across it. She turned away with an awkward shift, averting her gaze. The woman who’d been bare and open to him without a second’s hesitation didn’t want him to see her eyes.
Catching her chin in his hand, he brought her face back to his. “There have been other men.”
The wince was almost imperceptible. Anyone who wasn’t looking for it—prayi
ng it wouldn’t come—would have missed it. But it was there.
No. He couldn’t be right about this.
Let his blasted gut and instinct have turned worthless overnight.
“Please,” she begged, trying to pull back from his grasp.
She couldn’t do this to him. Panic crawled up this neck as unwilling certainty settled over him.
“Tell me I’m wrong! Tell me there’s been someone else.”
Just the one! he silently roared. Give him something. Anything. But as her gaze held with his, he knew.
“Ryan—”
“No.” He jerked the clothes hanging half off his body back into place as memories of the past years accosted him with sickening force. He’d moved on…because she had. There hadn’t been any guilt. But now.
All this time. How could she—
He nearly choked. “Have you been waiting for me to come after you?”
“God, no!” It was worse than Claire could have imagined.
She reached for him, only to have her hand pressed away.
“Then what?” he demanded, anguish and accusation warring in his eyes. “How?”
The sincerity of the question, one she couldn’t believe he wouldn’t understand, sliced through her concern and compassion, exposing the old hurt she’d tried so hard to overcome. “How? How can you even ask? You were there. You saw me. What I was like. After we lost Andrew—” Images of his too-tiny body assaulted her, constricting her chest. Shaking her head, she forced air in and out of her lungs, refusing to give in to the dark emotions that threatened to swamp her when she delved too deeply into the old pain. “I was broken. To my soul.”
“I know you were…different.” He crossed to her, grabbing her arms and then setting her back from him as though to touch her was both necessity and beyond tolerable. “I took you to counseling. Yes, I knew. But all this time? I thought—I believed you’d—”
He jerked away from her, shoving his fingers through his hair as agony shone in his eyes. “Damn it, Claire, I saw another man leaving your apartment! Five in the morning. What the hell was that?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
HE’D seen her. And, while nearly killing him, it had been the key to his sanity. The free pass he’d taken and run with. Claire had moved on. Taken that irrevocable step and given up on the marriage they’d stopped fighting for years before.
He’d been sickened and relieved all at once. Reluctant and determined that night when he’d gone out and found a woman—one who wasn’t looking for anything more than he was.
It hadn’t been beautiful or meaningful or intense. It had been an act. An escape. One he’d hated himself for taking. But after that he’d been free.
And he’d refused to look back.
Only now, the confusion painted across Claire’s face had him twisting with denial, scouring the gritty details of a memory he’d tried to forget.
“What are you talking about?” she demanded, taking the clothes he’d so recently stripped her of and pulling them on in jerky movements.
He wanted to help. To reach out and straighten the sleeve that had somehow turned around and inside itself. But, God help him, he couldn’t touch her right then. Couldn’t stand the feel of his own damn skin as the framework of who he was, the choices he made, and how he lived began to crumble around him.
“Back in New York. I went to your apartment. You were finished with school. You’d told me you weren’t coming back.” His teeth ground down as he dragged a breath through his nose. “I’d flown in on the red-eye. And when I got to your place, I saw him. Saw you walk him out to the front stoop. Put your arms around his neck.” Had he known she hadn’t slept with him—
What would it have mattered?
Even if she hadn’t been interested in another man, she hadn’t been interested in him either. He would have been waiting around like a fool for something that would never have happened.
An old knife twisted through his gut, making him push back and cross to the far corner of the room before she could see the reaction he didn’t want to acknowledge to himself, let alone her.
New York. Claire remembered. She knew whom he was talking about. Only one man had spent the night with her since she’d left Ryan. But he’d slept on the couch, not in her bed, and sex had been the last thing between them.
God, to think he’d flown through the night to see her and instead saw that. If only she’d known he’d been there, she could have explained. Saved him the hurt or betrayal or whatever it was he’d felt.
No. There weren’t any if onlys. She’d stopped playing that game a long time ago.
“That was Joe Nevin. He was a good friend, and he did spend the night. Only, we didn’t….” Her words trailed off. She couldn’t say it. “He’d lost his wife. It was the anniversary of her death and he needed a friend. He drank too much and I let him stay on the couch. But even if the circumstances had been different, I wouldn’t have been able to spend the night with him the way you’re talking about.”
Ryan caught her reflection in the glass. “Because of me?”
“Not you. Me.” Partly because her body hadn’t physically recovered from the trauma that put her back in the emergency room the week before—one she hadn’t told Ryan about then and wouldn’t burden him with now. Especially not now.
But that was only half the reason.
Claire wrapped her arms around herself, refusing to think about how warm she’d been in Ryan’s arms just a few minutes before.
All that was gone now.
“What happened between us. The way things changed after I lost our baby. The way I stopped responding to you… It was everything, Ryan. I didn’t feel. I didn’t care. I barely existed. It was as if my entire world went gray.” She straightened her shoulders. “I’ve been working for a long time to get back to living rather than just existing. And mostly I’ve done it. But in some ways…” She drew a slow breath, held her hands out helplessly before her.
“Only, then you showed up and, I don’t know how or why, but suddenly it’s like a switch flipped. You make me feel. And I wanted that. I thought you’d take me to bed and I’d finally have all the pieces of myself I’d lost, back again.” It wasn’t the whole truth. She knew she couldn’t be put back together the same way she once was, that there were parts of who she’d been that were lost forever. But of those that were salvageable, this was the last one.
“You weren’t going to tell me.”
“No.” If she’d been able to keep that secret, Ryan never would have known. It exposed a part of her she didn’t want shared. Worse yet, she recognized the toll this truth had taken on him. It was written in the lines of his face. Ryan didn’t take his responsibilities or commitments lightly. He’d married her because she was pregnant and he would have stayed with her through those dark times no matter what it cost him…if she’d let him. He wouldn’t have left because that was the kind of man he was.
That day in New York she’d unknowingly given Ryan the permission he’d needed to move on. And now he’d just found out everything he believed was wrong.
She reached out to him, only to drop her hands at the last second. Better she just leave. Quietly she gathered her bag, surveying the devastation they’d left in their wake.
Folders and reports were strewn across the floor and only a single leaf of paper remained atop the table that had once been nearly covered. “I thought we could give each other a last night together, something good. But I see that all I’ve done is take something away. I’m sorry, Ryan. I didn’t mean to.”
Moments after watching Claire collect herself and leave, Ryan shoved through to the master suite, only vaguely registering the door bouncing shut behind him. Blindly he stalked the length of his floor and back, straining for control as adrenaline and testosterone, mixing at toxic levels, beat a violent path through his veins. Hammered past his ears in a deafening roar.
Six years, he’d been completely, perfectly, contentedly ignorant. Wielding that damn image of a m
an leaving her place like a weapon every time guilt tried to gnaw at the comfort of the life he’d built.
He hadn’t been the one to give up. That’s what he told himself. He hadn’t quit first. Because that wasn’t the kind of man he was, it wasn’t how he’d been raised. He may not have had a man at home to teach him about being a father or husband, how to be there for a wife who needed him, but he understood commitment and responsibility.
Only, he’d been wrong.
He hated that. Hated himself and hated Claire for disrupting the reality he’d so easily accepted. For making him wonder. Doubt. For giving him one more failure to heap on the pile building since nearly the day he’d first met her.
Why hadn’t he just gotten out of that damn car? Walked up to her door and confronted her. She would have told him the truth, and they could have gone forward from there.
Not together. Even then it had already been too late. Their marriage had died years before. There was no resuscitating it.
That part of the story wouldn’t change no matter what he’d known or when.
But if he’d manned up and talked to her—instead of letting the months slip past, turn into years—they would have had to face facts. It was over. They could have ended it then.
And now Claire would be nothing more than a distant memory.
Right. Because she was so easy to forget.
Hell, he could still taste her skin on his tongue. Smell her hair in his clothes. Feel her burning beneath his hands, against his chest…around his hips. His fists clenched at his sides. She’d been ready. Hot and wet and so damn eager.
Desperate. For him.
Because in nine years she hadn’t had another man.
Why did it have to affect him so much? Knowing he’d been the only one. That on some primitive level he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge, she was still his.
His hand sliced through the air in aimless aggression.
He didn’t need this. It wasn’t what he’d planned or expected. But then nothing was going the way he expected with Claire. That truth had been bombarding him since the first minute he laid eyes on her in Rome. He’d wanted her then, even if he hadn’t wanted to admit it—because he’d known it would be a mistake.
The S Before Ex Page 6
