Chapter Five #3
‘But that’s what love is, Jesse. It’s complicated, and it’s messy.’
‘I’m not talking about love. I’m talking about kissing, and about screwing, and about honesty.
This thing in here –’ he tapped two fingers against his heart ‘– it doesn’t need to get involved.
’ Reaching over, he drew a cross over her heart with one fingertip.
‘No entry,’ he whispered. ‘It’s better that way, trust me.
You don’t need to involve your internal organs when it comes to sex.
All the good stuff happens on the outside. ’
She didn’t look convinced by his philosophy. ‘So to be clear, you’re saying I need to exercise my external pleasure organs more and my internal emotional organs less. Is that your actual advice?’
He swallowed. She was wide-eyed and actually looked as if she was seriously considering his life advice.
‘Did you know that your skin is the biggest organ of your body?’ he asked, letting his arm fall across the back of the bench until his fingertips brushed her upper arm. Her blue eyes widened a fraction as she registered his touch. ‘See?’
‘No, I don’t see,’ she said, pulling away a little until he was no longer touching her.
‘Then let me show you. Call it an experiment.’
She shuffled further away from him along the bench, her eyes nailed on the view. ‘Stop being so ridiculous.’
She was so very, very tense. It emanated from her every pore, and it frustrated the hell out of him that she clearly lived her life as buttoned up as if she were wearing an invisible straitjacket.
He’d been there, and he’d learned that flinging off the shackles and sticking two fingers up to romantic notions and expectations was the most liberating thing you could ever do.
‘Turn your brain off. Stop thinking about anything and concentrate on that ridiculously fabulous view,’ he said quietly, and then trailed the back of his fingers slowly down her arm from her shoulder all the way to her spread fingertips on the bench between them.
‘Now do you see?’
She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth and her nostrils flared slightly.
‘What I see is you trying to make a point,’ she said, turning to look at him with those big, trouble-filled eyes.
‘Damn right I am,’ he said, stroking his fingertips along her jawline from beneath her ear to her chin.
‘If showing you that it’s OK to let someone make you feel good physically without risking your sanity is making a point.
’ As he spoke, he let his thumb skim lightly across the fullness of her bottom lip. Jesus, it was soft.
‘And what was that supposed to show me?’ she breathed, as still as if they were playing statues.
‘That the mouth has more touch receptors than any other part of your body.’ He paused to stroke his thumb the other way across her mouth, and looked away for a second when her lips parted in a tiny, involuntary sigh.
‘Even more than …’ He lowered his gaze to her lap for a second and lifted a knowing eyebrow.
‘Are you blushing?’ he said, leaning slightly back to study her face better. ‘Man. You’re something else.’
‘I’m hot,’ she shot back, defensive.
‘You are,’ he agreed, and then slid his hand around to cup the back of her neck.
Anxiety clouded her pretty eyes.
‘I get it, Winnie,’ he said softly, massaging the tense muscles beneath her hairline.
‘You’ve never let anyone except Needledick try to make you feel good.
’ Unshed tears pooled in her eyes, making him feel like a prize cock for pushing her like this.
In truth, he didn’t know why it suddenly felt important, but he couldn’t hold it in.
‘I can’t separate love from sex,’ she said. ‘They go together like a package deal.’
He shook his head, his fingers sliding her hairband out until he could muss her hair down around her shoulders and her jaw.
‘You have real pretty hair,’ he said, and then wished he hadn’t because it was a physicality of hers he didn’t care to acknowledge.
‘I’m gonna kiss you now,’ he said, and her eyes widened in alarm.
‘I’m going to show you how a kiss can just be about your mouth and mine, and about pleasure, and hedonism, and nothing whatsoever to do with love, or your heart, or even your brain.
’ He slid closer until her body was almost but not quite pressing his.
He’d never seen a woman look more like she was staring down the barrel of a gun.
‘Are you OK with this?’ he asked, stroking his hand over her hair once, and then again when she gave him the tiniest of nods.
‘Good girl,’ he said. ‘You can say stop whenever you want.’
What in God’s name was he doing? This wasn’t his plan.
He was way off track and somewhere in the back of his mind an alarm sounded, but the bell was drowned out by the loud drum of his heartbeat and the soft sound of Winnie’s shallow breathing.
Was she trembling? Jesus, she was. Had he pushed her too far?
‘Do it,’ she murmured, like a determined sixth-former telling her first love to take her virginity on the back seat of his car.
It was enough to make him tip his head to hers until their lips touched and her eyelids drifted down.
He didn’t close his eyes. He couldn’t, because the pure crack of electricity that flowed from his mouth to his groin wouldn’t let him.
He watched her instead, saw the single tear slide down her cheek at the same time as her lips began to move tentatively against his, the smallest of movements, parting to let her sigh slide into his mouth.
Christ. It really was like kissing Sleeping Beauty, as if she’d spent a lifetime waiting and this was the moment he woke her up.
And then she snaked the tip of her tongue along his top lip, and she stopped being a fairytale princess and turned into a siren instead, and he lost all sense of sentient thought and slid his hands into her hair and kissed her mouth hard and open.
He heard her gasp, and then her arms moved around him and pulled him into her, both of her hands sliding into up his hair at the back of his neck.
‘Holy God,’ he muttered, ragged against her mouth, and then he stopped thinking and took his own advice to shut the hell up and just enjoy it.
God, she was too responsive, he couldn’t control himself or her.
He licked his tongue inside her mouth and felt himself spiral, the sensual kick of her intimate reaction pulsing all the way through his body.
Could you kiss someone for ever? Because he wanted to.
He wanted to spend the rest of his life right there on that bench without even coming up for air, because this was the most sensational, mind-bending, unexpectedly better-than-any-sex-he’d-ever-had kiss he’d known in his entire life.
‘Jesse,’ she gasped when he broke the kiss to tilt her head back and slide his open mouth down the centre ofher neck, licking her skin, inhaling the scent of her into his lungs. Her clothes were in his way. His clothes were in hisway.
‘Jesse,’ she said again, a little louder, her fingers tightening in his hair so she could hold his head and lower her gaze level with his. ‘Stop.’
He nodded, both of them breathing harder than if they’d sprinted a hundred metres, staring into each other’s wide eyes, speaking without words.
What the hell was that?
Did you feel it?
Did you know that would happen?
Winnie pressed her still trembling fingertips against her lips, and Jesse wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
‘Well?’ he asked, and she half laughed shakily.
‘Well what?’
Jesse concentrated on counting his own heartbeats to slow them down. ‘Do you see now how a kiss can be a physical pleasure in its own right?’
She shook her head slowly. ‘No. No, I don’t think I do.
’ Picking his hand up, she laid it flat over her heart.
‘Here, feel how fast my heart is beating.’ He could feel it racing, but he could also the feel the swell of her breast and it made his own heartbeat quicken again too.
‘And in here,’ she tapped her finger to her temple, ‘my brain felt as if someone was letting off party poppers. So no, I can’t kiss for physical pleasure alone, and for the record, I don’t think you can either. ’
Oh, she was wrong there. He shoved his hands through his hair and concentrated on tracking the lanes criss-crossing the island while he marshalled his thoughts.
‘I’ll level with you, Legs, you caught me off guard. I expected that kiss to be a little more … well, chaste, shall we say. You blindsided me when you put your tongue in my mouth.’
She sucked in air, affronted. ‘I did not.’
‘You so did. It was meant to be five seconds max, not a full-on pash.’
‘Pash?’
He flicked his eyes to the side like a teenager caught smoking. ‘Call it what you like. Point is, it wasn’t supposed to give you a heart attack or me blue balls.’
Winnie’s eyes dropped momentarily to his crotch, and he scowled and fired her a tiny sarcastic smile.
‘I think we can safely conclude that you just proved yourself wrong with your own experiment,’ she said, prim and just a teeny bit superior.
‘Not exactly.’ He jerked his chin towards his lap. ‘My junk is on the outside, strictly speaking.’
‘Junk?’
‘Do you have to keep repeating my words?’
They both stared dead ahead. For his part, Jesse was confused how to play it.
On the one hand, Jesus bloody Christ, that had been one hell of a kiss and a big part of him wanted to take her home, fling her on his bed and rip her clothes off, because if that was how they kissed, what would sex be like?
On the other hand, Winnie didn’t conform to any of his rules.
She wasn’t passing through. She was his new neighbour, and she’d come here to recover from a crapshoot of a relationship, and if he really, truly examined his feelings, there was an element of nostalgia in play here.
She reminded him of Erin. That hair … those eyes …
she was different but cast from the same mould, and it was a mould he’d deliberately denied himself any right or access to. He should never have kissed her.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and he found that he meant it. She’d cried, for fuck’s sake. Was he such a selfish man as to let his own desire override common decency? Had he kissed her against her will? ‘I shouldn’t have kissed you.’
She sighed and crossed her arms, leaning back against the bench.
‘Don’t apologise, Jesse. I enjoyed it.’
OK, so that surprised him. Not surprised because it had been fairly bloody obvious that she was into it, but that she had the balls to say she’d enjoyed it rather than let him feel shoddy was unexpected.
‘I need a beer.’
‘I need to get back to the villa.’
It seemed that they both needed to get off that bench. He stood up and she did the same, following him carefully down the uneven path through the pine trees to his car.
‘Thanks for showing me the view,’ she said, after he’d been driving for a couple of minutes. He glanced sideways towards her, but she didn’t look at him.
‘I can show you around the rest of the island, if you like. I know it like the back of my hand.’ Shit.
Why did he say that? He was so obviously suggesting that they have wild animal sex because he knew women’s bodies like the back of his hand.
He might as well have said, ‘I’m a gigolo and you’re a desperate fair maiden, let me deflower you in my olive grove while the donkeys watch. ’
Winnie tipped her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes.
‘I think I should probably take my time to discover it on my own,’ she said eventually.
‘For the best.’
They didn’t speak again until he pulled the Golf back through the gap in the stone wall onto his property.
‘Go on home,’ he said, slamming his door. ‘I’ll bring your shopping over in the cart. The car won’t fit down the far end of the lane.’
‘I can take the cart myself, if you want?’
He huffed. ‘Winnie, what kind of man would that make me to let you haul all of that stuff yourself?’
She frowned. ‘A normal one, in my world.’
Jeez, what sort of men had she surrounded herself with? He reached into the car and tossed her a fresh bottle of water.
‘Go home.’
She nodded just once, and then turned and half walked, half ran across the olive grove and disappeared over the wall. He stood still for a few deep breaths, and then banged his fist down on the roof before heading into the house.
Down the lane, Winnie kept going until she was well out of sight of Jesse’s place and then dropped down onto a boulder beneath the shade of an olive tree, holding her head in her hands.
Tears came easy, soaking through her fingers, her shoulders shaking.
She was such a long way from home, a lifetime away from all that was familiar, and she’d just been kissed stupid by someone who wasn’t Rory.
She felt right and all wrong, unfaithful and mad with herself for feeling that way because she hadn’t done anything out of line, but whichever way you shook it down she’d complicated things in a way she wasn’t ready for.
They’d all come here looking for escape, and she’d somehow walked out of one romantic mess and straight into the arms of the nearest stranger. What a stupid, stupid thing to do.