won’t deny that I was a selfish man, Lily,” he bit out, his gaze like fire, and she didn’t know when he’d ventured so close to her. “I can’t. I regret it every day. But we had no commitment. I may not have treated you as well as I should have, but I didn’t betray you.”
She pulled in a breath, amazed at the burst of white-hot pain that caused when there was nothing fresh or new in this. Nothing but an old wound, a dull blade.
And the same familiar hand to wield it.
“Of course you didn’t.” She wished she could hate him. She truly did. Surely that would be better. Simpler. “Oh, and along those lines, I never concealed Arlo from you. Technically. Had I seen you, I would have told you.”
That shimmered in the air between them, like anguish.
If she could die from this, Lily thought, she would have already. Years ago. God knew, she’d come close.
Rafael said something harsh in Italian, vicious and low. He hauled her to him with a wholly inelegant hand around her neck, sending her sprawling into his hard chest. Then he stopped talking and took her mouth with his.
And this time, there was no party nearby. No parents who might be horrified at what their stepprogeny were about. No one to walk in on them. No one to hear.
This time, Rafael took his time.
He kissed her like this really was love. Like she’d been wrong all along. His mouth was condemnation and caress at once, taking her over and drawing her near, and Lily lost herself the way she always did.
Heedless. Hungry. Needy and desperate and entirely his.
Just as it had always been.
Rafael shrugged his way out of his coat, letting it drop to the thick carpet beneath them, and still he kissed her. He sank his hands deep into her hair, scattering the combs that held it in place until the heavy mass of it tumbled down around them and the sparkling accessories rained out across the floor, and still he stroked her tongue with his, deeper and more intense, as if nothing in the world could ever matter as much as the delirious friction of his mouth against hers.
Lily traced the planes of his chest, unable to control herself and not certain she wanted to try. She dug her fingers into the gaps between his buttons and pulled, gratified when the buttons burst free and exposed the smooth, hard planes of his sculpted chest. And then she succumbed to that same old need and ran her palms against his hot, smooth skin like red-hot steel with its dusting of dark hair. She was aware of his scent, soap and Rafael, his devil’s mouth teasing hers to endless wickedness, and the truth of her own mounting desire for this man she shouldn’t want like a near-painful ache low in her belly.
She wrenched her mouth from his and they both panted as they stared at each other, all the twisted wrongness of their connection, all the lies they’d told and the things they’d done, like a thick mist between them, blurring the edges of things.
He said something despairing in Italian that hurt to hear, and she didn’t even understand the words. Lily didn’t know what to do. It was easier to hurl old, embittered words at him. It was easier to try to hate him.
It was so very easy to hate herself, lecture herself on the importance of abstinence, call herself an addict. But heroin didn’t feel pain in return. Heroin didn’t hurt.
It was infinitely harder to tilt her head closer and to press her lips into the hollow between his pectoral muscles, like the apology she didn’t dare utter. That she was afraid to admit she wanted to speak out loud at all.
Rafael sighed, or perhaps it was a groan, and tore the rest of his shirt off without her having to ask. And then he stood there, bared to the waist, even more perfect than he’d been all these years inside her head.
She couldn’t read the look on his face then, nor define what rose in her in response. What tore at her and threatened to rip her apart, and it was all there in the dark gold of his eyes. In the constriction in her chest, making her wonder if she’d ever really breathe again.
“Turn around,” he ordered her. She froze, but he only stared back at her implacably, his eyes too dark and too bright. “Do not make me repeat myself.”
She obeyed without quite meaning to, turning so her back was to him and she faced the scrolled height of the nearby settee.
“Rafael—” she began, but cut herself off on a sharp intake of breath when he came up hard behind her, that mighty chest of his pressed into her back, making her feel dizzy with need.
That endless, delirious, life-altering need.
“These are your choices, Lily.” His mouth was close enough to that sensitive place just behind her ear that she could feel the tickle of it, a sharp, impossible electricity that seemed to bolt straight through her to linger in her core. She was surrounded by him, sex and scent and strength, and she didn’t know what she felt. Who she was anymore, when she was with him. What the hell she was doing. But she also couldn’t seem to stop. “You can walk away right now, go to sleep, dream of all the ways we’ve wronged each other so we can tear bigger chunks from each other in the morning. I won’t blame you if you do.”
She felt as if she couldn’t breathe, but that was her, she understood, making that rough sound. That harsh breathing a little too close to outright panting.
“Or...?” she asked, in a voice that hardly sounded like hers.
But it was. She knew it was.
So did Rafael.
And he was hard and hot and perfect behind her. “Or you can bend over that settee and hold on tight.”
* * *
Rafael expected her to bolt. To take a breath and then hurl herself away from him. Run screaming from him. Maybe some part of him wanted her to do exactly that.
Maybe he didn’t know which one of them he was trying to scare.
He heard the deep, shuddering breath she took. He braced himself for her to walk away. Told himself that he would let her. That he had no other choice.
“And...” She shifted from one foot to the other. “And what happens if I do that?”
He didn’t pretend he didn’t know which that she meant. Triumph lashed at him, more potent than the whiskey he’d tossed back, and he smiled. Hard.
His hand smoothed down the length of her side, all that silken heat and the tattoo he knew waited for him beneath her dress. She bucked slightly against him, then went too still, as if she couldn’t control herself any better than he could.
And he found that made all the difference. It clarified things.
It didn’t matter how messy this was. What they’d lost. How they’d lied.
It didn’t make her any less his.
Nothing could.
“Bend over, Lily,” he ordered her, as gruff as he was certain, and he was animal enough to enjoy the trembling reaction he could see her fight to repress when he said it. “Now.”
