climax.
Darius was breathing heavily as he lay against Miranda’s thighs, too physically satiated to want to move. Instead he simply enjoyed the pleasure of having her fingers moving caressingly through his hair as she lay just as relaxed beneath him.
It had never been like this for him before. So intense. So immediate. To the degree that Darius hadn’t been able to control or stem his own pleasure, and he’d experienced the deepest and most intense climax of his life.
Damn it, the two of them had made out on Miranda’s sofa like a couple of teenagers!
Darius might have laughed at himself for that adolescent eagerness if he weren’t so bemused by it.
Not just bemused, utterly confused.
He’d been sexually active since he was in his teens and had always enjoyed sex as a recreation, a release of tension, but this—this time with Miranda had been unlike anything he had ever known before.
He’d felt a connection, the emotions so intense, he had been unable to stop himself from climaxing in her hand like that overeager teenager. And he hadn’t even been inside her yet!
A fact his body was only too well aware of, if the stirring of renewed arousal was any indication.
What did it mean?
What did he want it to mean?
He liked Miranda. Admired her even. But was it more than that? Could it be more than that?
How was he supposed to think, about anything, when Miranda still lay naked beneath him, and with the smell of her feminine musk invading, capturing, all of his senses?
Distance.
He needed distance.
Between himself and Miranda.
Except he couldn’t think of any way, any graceful way that was, to extricate himself from between her naked thighs, let alone from her apartment!
For goodness’ sake, he was Darius Sterne, billionaire businessman, well known for keeping his emotional distance from all but his twin Xander—to the point that several of the women he had been physically involved with in the past had accused him of being cold and ruthless.
But he freely admitted that he had no idea right now how to escape this situation without hurting Miranda. And he didn’t want to hurt her; he just needed to get away from her for long enough to be able to think straight. To be able to bring some perspective to the situation. To see if there was any perspective to be found!
The question was how?
This was also something which had certainly never bothered him in the past.
He didn’t believe himself to be a deliberately cruel man when it came to the women he had been involved with, he had just never been interested in them outside the bedroom.
He already knew that Miranda wasn’t anything like the women he usually slept with. She was nothing like the models and actresses he usually took to bed. They were women who were only too willing to sleep with him, even if for nothing more than the boost the publicity of just being seen out with one of the Sterne brothers could and would give to her career.
Had he always chosen women who were deliberately no threat to his closed-off heart?
Maybe.
But Miranda was different.
He’d had to blackmail Miranda into going out with him at all!
He sensed that she was extremely vulnerable, emotionally as well as physically, and his own emotional scars from the past, and the estrangement between his mother and himself, made him the very last man she should ever become involved with.
Which was why Darius needed to leave.
Now!
He pulled away from her, deliberately not looking at her nakedness as he rose to his feet, knowing that if he did his resolve would weaken, and he would simply end up making love with her again.
‘Bathroom?’ he prompted gruffly as he refastened his jeans before pulling his T-shirt back on.
* * *
Darius’s thought were an enigma to Andy, but the fact that he couldn’t even look at her as he dressed didn’t bode well for what he might have been planning in his head for these past few moments.
Which was fine, because Andy couldn’t look at him either, now that the euphoria and pleasure had faded and the stark reality of the fact that she had just made love with Darius on her own sofa became all too embarrassingly apparent.
She had never had a man caress her so intimately before. It made her blush just to think of what she and Darius had just enjoyed together!
At the same time as she couldn’t forget the ecstasy he’d brought her. It was a pleasure such as Andy had never dreamed possible, let alone ever imagined sharing with Darius Sterne.
He might be physically and emotionally distant now, but he hadn’t been at all the cold lover she had feared he would be. No, he had been so considerate of her, so caring of her physical shyness. He had even kissed the scars she had hidden away these past four years!
Which, Andy admitted, had been her complete undoing.
How could she have resisted a man who saw those scars as battle wounds rather than the unsightly imperfection Andy had always considered them to be?
She couldn’t. She hadn’t wanted to.
And Darius had made her first physical encounter so beautiful.
Enough so that she could feel herself falling in love with him?
Whatever her own feelings on the matter, Darius’s distant behaviour told her that the closeness was over.
‘Up the stairs and on the right,’ she answered him huskily, frowning as Darius turned abruptly on his heel and strode off in the direction of the bathroom without so much as glancing back.
It gave Andy time to quickly gather up her scattered clothes, so that she could dress before Darius came back. Except, she realised as soon as she sat up, that there was no way she could put her clothes back on when her thighs and abdomen still bore the evidence of Darius’s climax.
How embarrassing was that!
Maybe if she made a quick run for the kitchen, grabbed a towel, and—
Before she could so much as move Darius had come back out of the bathroom and run lightly down the half a dozen steps onto the main floor space. He was carrying one of her fluffy gold bath towels in his hand, his eyes unreadable as he strode purposefully towards her.
Suddenly acutely aware of her nakedness she instinctively crossed one knee over the other before she leant forward with her elbow on her knee, effectively shielding at least part of her nakedness from him.
‘Here.’
The expression
