Chapter Thirteen #3
‘See?’ he said, when he opened his eyes. ‘It’s OK to feel good, Winnie.’
He held her breasts in his hands as he spoke, his tanned skin stark against hers as he watched her face.
He took his time, and suddenly it wasn’t enough any more and Winnie swung herself around and dropped to her knees on the floor in front of him.
Wordlessly he pulled her up against his bare chest and pressed his mouth into her hair, then filled his fists with it, twisting his fingers in the strands to tip her head back and kiss her, all at once fierce and hot.
‘Jesse,’ she breathed, loving the hardness and heat of his shoulders and back as she explored him at last with her hands.
The press of his naked body against hers had changed everything.
From tender to hot, from measured to frenzied, from thinking to feeling, from sensual to sexual.
His chest heaved against hers, his hands stroking down the rise and fall of her spine to cup her ass and move her forwards to straddle his thighs.
‘I want you,’ he whispered, holding her to him with his arm around her waist. ‘More than you know. More than I should.’
She knew how much he wanted her; the hard heat of him nestled between her thighs told her so.
And then he kissed her again, changing down through the gears to barely moving and open-mouthed, his sighs on hers, more exquisite and honest and raw than Winnie knew kisses could be.
She wrapped her arms around his head, closing them into a warm, intimate space where only their mouths mattered.
It wasn’t just kissing. It was giving, and feeling, an intense, overwhelming closeness, all-encompassing and spiritual, the slow slide of his tongue over hers.
He spoke her name, stroked her breasts sometimes.
She cried a little, but it didn’t matter, and when his fingers moved between her legs she rocked with him, biting his lip when he found her rhythm.
There wasn’t any conscious thought in Winnie’s head.
Just sensation, just bone-deep pleasure, just heat and need and want and then almost painful need again, because she was so close.
He knew, of course, holding her steady, licking into hermouth when her body clenched around his fingers.
Cradling his hand around the nape of her neck, he massaged her as her hips began to jerk.
‘Look at me,’ he whispered, and when she opened her eyes he met her gaze with deep, abiding understanding of what this was to her.
The end, and the beginning. The hint of an incredulous smile tipped his lips, and then hers too, until she almost laughed with the giddy, exhilarated, hell-yes thrill of it all.
‘I told you,’ he said against her hair, wrapping his arm tightly around her body until there was no space. ‘Didn’t I tell you that it’s better?’
Winnie buried her face in his neck, her mouth moving over the warm crook that smelled of pine needles and picnics at dusk and of him. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’
She said yes because he’d made her feel like a goddess, and because she’d never felt so in touch with her own body before, and because for probably the first time in her life she’d completely let herself go.
The realisation came at a cost; the life she’d thought was perfect with Rory had been only half-lived.
And the realisation gave her release, because from here on in she wasn’t going to do anything by halves.
Life was here, and now, and heady, and goddamn brilliant.
It was blue skies and sand beneath her toes, it was an adventure with the best friends she’d been lucky enough to have beside her all her life, and it was embracing life gasp by delicious, exhilarating gasp.
‘Thank you,’ she murmured, wrapping her arms around the firm, solid breadth of Jesse’s deeply tanned shoulders, somewhere between holding him and clinging to him. ‘I feel like you should hang a best orgasm medal around my neck.’
Laughter rumbled in his chest as it pressed against hers. ‘Solid gold, Legs. Solid gold.’
Bright shafts of moonlight lit the dusty path when Jesse walked Winnie back to Villa Valentina at a little after eleven.
‘The skies here seem so much bigger than they are back in England,’ she said, looking up at the vast, star-studded velvet overhead.
‘Same skies,’ he said. ‘You just can’t see it for all the other crap. Another of the many reasons I stay here.’
She nodded. The list was getting longer every day.
‘Can I ask you something?’ he asked, shoving his hands deep in the pockets of his jeans.
Winnie nodded. ‘Shoot.’
‘Do you ever miss your old life?’
She thought about it. ‘I don’t think it’s been long enough for me to answer, really. I don’t miss living back with my parents and sleeping in my single bed, but I’m not sure that’s what you’re asking me, is it?’
He shrugged, kicking a brick along in front of him. ‘It’s a big thing, being married, that’s all. And it’s a big thing when you’re suddenly not any more.’
Winnie slowed as the familiar outline of the villa came into view, the sound of the sea washing onto the sand a soothing backdrop to their quiet conversation. ‘Are you asking me for my thoughts, or telling me yours?’
Jesse looked away, slowing up at the edge of the terrace.
‘Just idle conversation, I guess.’ He dug his hand in the pocket of his jeans and pulled out the small silver key.
‘Will you take it now? If you decide you don’t want to use it then that’s fine, but keep it anyway, just in case.
You never know when you’re gonna need a bolthole.
’ He tucked her hair behind her ear. ‘If you ever have to run, run to me.’
Winnie shook her head, looking at the floor. ‘Damn it, Jesse. For a man so insistent on keeping things simple, you sure know how to make them feel complicated. Do you even know how romantic that was?’
He dropped his arm around her waist and pulled her close, sliding his hand into her hair. ‘I prefer to think of it as practical.’
‘It was romantic.’
‘Are you still wearing those rose-tinted glasses, Legs?’ He held her face in his hands. ‘Take them off and crush them beneath your foot. You don’t need romance and sentiment spun around things to make them real.’
He kissed her then, soul-deep, making a lie of everything he’d just said.
‘Do you want to come in?’ she whispered, sliding her hands inside the back of his T-shirt.
He kissed her again. ‘Yes. But I’m not going to.’
‘Is that the first rule of living an uncomplicated life? No spooning?’
He shook his head at her, his hand around her nape as he kissed her forehead.
‘Go inside.’
She stroked his jaw. ‘Can I still come and visit my donkey?’
‘I think we both know you were always visiting me.’
‘So vain,’ she said, backing away. ‘So sure of yourself.’
‘Goodnight, Legs.’ He winked, then turned away and walked down the lane without glancing back.
Winnie watched him until he was out of sight, then wound her way around the side of the villa and saw Frankie flat out on one of the sunbeds facing the beach, with Seth Manson alongside her on another.
They were talking, gazing up at the stars and laughing softly.
Winnie tiptoed inside, made her way up to the top floor and tapped on Stella’s door.
She heard footsteps and then it swung open.
‘I’m glad you’re awa–’ Her words dropped off, because it wasn’t Stella.
It was Angelo who opened the door, dressed only in Stella’s badly fitting silk robe.
‘I’ll just … goodnight,’ she said, half laughing, almost running for the safety of her own room.
She climbed into bed, leaving the French doors open so she could hear the sea, and as she closed her eyes she wondered how they’d all wound up spending their evening with someone so extraordinarily perfect for their individual needs right then.
Stella might think she wanted a Scandinavian puppy, but a big, bad Greek wolf had her in his sights tonight.
Frankie thought romance was a thing of the past for her, yet right at that very moment she was stargazing with one of the most lusted-after men on the planet.
And as for Winnie … she was discovering her inner Venus, and how twenty seconds of insane courage really could lead to a whole evening of bone-melting bliss.
Thank you, Matt Damon, she muttered. You might have bought a zoo, but we bought our own slice of paradise, and I don’t have to wrangle lions as a result.
And that’s how it happened that they all took their eye off the ball, and no one noticed Mikey Miller drink himself into a stupor on island gin and then pass out in the garden with a lit cigarette in his hand.