should have danced with, the woman he would have kissed, made love to.
A well of pain, deep, unreasonable and no less intense for it, opened up in her, threatened to consume her. What a joke. A cheap trick. And the worst part was that she’d played it on herself. Letting herself pretend that he’d wanted her at the river, playing like he wanted her in his arms tonight.
Letting hope exist in her, along with the futile, ridiculous love she felt for him. Ridiculous, because for half a second, her breath had caught when she’d seen the ring, and she’d forgotten it was fake.
“No,” she said.
“Clara …”
“I don’t …” She was horrified to feel wetness on her cheeks, tears falling she hadn’t even realized were building. She backed away from him, hitting her shoulder against one of the bar area’s supporting pillars. But she didn’t stop. “I’m sorry.”
She wasn’t sorry. She was angry. She was hurt. Ravaged to her soul. Maybe it had been ignorant of her not to think all the way to the ring. To think that the farce wouldn’t include that. Of course it would. Zack didn’t cut corners and he didn’t forget details. So of course he wouldn’t forget something as essential to an engagement as a ring.
But it hurt. To see him, impossibly gorgeous and, in so many ways, everything she’d always dreamed of, offering her a ring, a ring he’d already given to another woman, as part of a lie, it killed something inside her.
Maybe it was just the fact that it pulled her deepest, most secret fantasy out of her and laid it bare. And made it into a joke. Designed to show her that there was no way he would ever consider her. Not with any real seriousness. That she was nothing more than a replacement for the woman he’d intended to have here with him.
That she was interchangeable.
She was hopeless. She needed a friend to tell her what a head case she was. To tell her to get over him. To take her out to pie and tell her she could do better, have better.
But Zack should have been that person. He was her best friend. He was the one she talked to. The one she confided in. And she couldn’t confide this, couldn’t tell him that he’d just shredded her heart. Couldn’t tell him she was hopelessly in love with a man she couldn’t have, because he was the man.
The crushing loneliness that thought brought on, the pain, was overwhelming.
Her stomach twisted. “I have to. I’m sorry.”
She turned away from him, walking quickly across the lawn, back to into the lobby area to find a car, an elephant, whatever would get her back to the villa the fastest.
She was running and she knew it. From him. From her hurt. And from the moment she knew would come, the one where she’d have to explain to him just why looking at the ring had made her cry.
It was an explanation she never wanted to give. Because the only man she could ever confide her pain in, was also the one man she could never tell. Because he was the man who’d caused it.
ZACK’S heart pounded as he scanned the villa’s courtyard. It was too dark to see anything, but he was sure this was where she was. Unless she’d called the car service and asked them to come and get her, which, if Clara was really upset, he wouldn’t put past her. She could be on the next plane back to the States.
His plane.
Which, he had a suspicion he might deserve.
There was a narrow path that led from the main area of the courtyard into an alcove surrounded by flowering plants and trees. And he was willing to bet that, if she was still in the villa, she’d gone there.
He was right. She was sitting on the stone bench, her knees pulled up to her chest. She was simply staring, her cheeks glistening in the moonlight. The sight made him ache.
He was all about control, all about living life with as few entanglements and attachments as possible. But Clara was his exception. She had been from the moment he’d met her.
She was the one person who could alter his emotions without his say so. Make him happy if he really wanted to be angry. Make his gut feel wrenched with her tears.
“Are you okay?”
She dropped her knees and put her feet on the ground, straightening. “I’m sorry. That was stupid. I overreacted.”
He moved to the bench and crouched down in front of it, in front of her. “What did I do?”
“I was just … I told you, it was an overreaction. It was nothing, really.” She sucked in a breath that ended on a hiccup and his heart twisted. “I can’t really … explain it.”
The confusion he felt was nearly as frustrating as the pain he felt over hurting her. He didn’t really understand exactly what he’d done, but not understanding it didn’t make it go away.
Without thinking, he lifted his hand and curved it around her neck, stroking her tender skin with his thumb. It was a gesture meant to comfort her, because he’d upset her somehow, for the second time in forty-eight hours, and he hated to upset her. She meant too much to him.
But something in the touch changed. He wasn’t sure exactly when it tipped over from being comfort to being a caress, he wasn’t sure how her skin beneath his fingers transformed from something everyday to something silky, tempting.
She looked at him, her eyes glistening, the expression in them angry. Angry and hot. And that heat licked through him, reached down into his gut and squeezed him tight.
It was close to what he’d felt down at the river, but magnified, her anger feeding the flame that burned between them. And he couldn’t walk away from it. Not this time.
Without thought, without reason or planning, without stopping to think of possible consequences, he leaned in and closed the space between them, his lips meeting hers. First kisses were for tasting, testing. They were a question.
At least historically for him they had been. This kiss wasn’t.
Something roared through him, filling him, a kind of desperation he’d never felt before. He didn’t ask, he took. He didn’t taste, he devoured. The hunger in him was too ravenous to do anything else, so sudden he had no chance to sublimate it. He wrapped his arms around her, and she clung to his shoulders, her lips parting beneath his.
He growled and thrust his tongue against hers, his body shuddering as his world reduced to the slick friction, to the warmth of her lips on his.
Clara was powerless to do anything but cling to Zack. Powerless to give anything less than every bit of passion and desire that was pouring through her. To do anything but devour him, giving in to the hunger that had lived in her, gnawed at her for the past seven years.
This was heaven. And it was hell. Everything she’d longed for, still off-limits to her for the same reasons it always had been. Except for right now, for some reason, it was as though a ban had been lifted. For this one moment, a moment out of time. A moment that
