Chapter Six
CHAPTER SIX
L EANING BACK IN the chair, Trip gazed up at the sky and breathed in deeply. It was another perfect day.
The sun was shining hard but there was a light breeze, just enough to make the heat bearable. He tilted the glass in his hand to his mouth. This wine was perfect, too. Cool, bright and energetic with apricot and peach flavours.
Finally, everything was going according to plan.
He glanced across the table to where Lily should have been sitting.
Lily was cooperating. But only in the same way that a soldier accepted being a prisoner of war. Outwardly passive while privately counting down until the day of their release.
Somehow she had managed to eat breakfast and then lunch without saying more than ten words to him in total, before evaporating without any explanation or excuse. It was annoying as hell, doubly so because he could hardly force her to talk to him so the chances of things being any different at dinner seemed slim at best.
Because Lily didn’t want to talk to him. Didn’t want to look at him. Didn’t want to be around him. Which was why he was drinking alone—always a good look—and she was presumably holed up in her bedroom, no doubt hating him with every fibre of her being.
His shoulders stiffened as he remembered that moment out in the barn when he’d realised she was crying.
Because of him.
He gazed up into the sun, deliberately letting the white light fill his head so that it would block out the image of Lily’s face and an ache that was stretching from one temple to the other. But that only made things worse because now he could hear her voice.
Not ever.
The phrase batted back and forth inside his head and his fingers moved automatically to tap the union valley point in the webbing between his thumb and finger.
He still didn’t understand what had happened in the barn.
That she had even been there at all had thrown him off balance. She wasn’t supposed to have been. In fact, he had only been there because the tension between them was turning to chaos beneath his skin.
A shiver ran across the bare skin of his arm. Turning to find her watching him with Acrux, he’d never felt more vulnerable, more exposed. Aside from his immediate family and the various therapists he’d seen over the years, nobody knew that he had ADHD. Not officially anyway. His teachers had suspected, his friends joked about it, but Henry had always refused to have him labelled. The family name must be protected at all costs.
Remembering how he’d used to catch his father watching him sometimes, Trip felt his spine tense.
He’d lost count of the number of times he’d been told that coping mechanisms could and should involve family members, and maybe if his mother had been less wrapped up in her own affairs then it might have been different. She might have recognised and praised his ingenuity and energy and his ability to talk to anyone. Perhaps if Charlie had been closer in age and not so scared of displeasing Henry, they might have been friends and his brother could have helped him navigate those confusing early years.
But the Winslows were not a family. They were four individuals who shared a surname, some DNA and a portfolio of prime real estate.
He was ten when, finally, he’d been diagnosed and initially it had been a relief to know why he was different from other people, particularly the father he admired but with whom he so often clashed. The downside was that his father had made it his mission to ‘fix’ him and his relief had evaporated and he’d started to feel like a lab rat. There had been countless assessments, medication tried and abandoned, counselling sessions, techniques to master, some of which helped some of the time. But it wasn’t until one of the therapists had suggested equine-assisted psychotherapy that he’d found a way to make sense of the chaos inside his head.
And because his dad was Henry Winslow II, he hadn’t just sent him to an accredited therapist. Wherever it was possible, his homes around the globe had been equipped with stables and the all-important horses to fill them. On the face of it, his father had gone above and beyond what any parent could reasonably be expected to do.
But it had always felt like just another double-edged sword in their complicated, combative relationship. Because despite the progress Trip had made, it had never been enough.
Not even when he had proven that he was more than capable of running the business, more capable than Charlie in many ways because out of the two of them he was the one who had taken risks. He had gone out on his own without his father’s blessing or guidance. And yes, he had failed initially, but for him failure was part of innovating. He anticipated it, accepted it. His goal was always to fail better right up until the moment he succeeded.
And he had succeeded. Above and beyond what Henry had at the same age.
But still his father had made him wait, had held back anointing him as his successor, and, via those old men back at the office, he was still holding him to account even though he had no right because Henry had not been the perfect man he’d claimed to be.
His eyes moved to where Acrux was standing beneath one of the chestnut trees that stippled the curving green landscape. Discovering his father’s hypocrisy was just one of the reasons why he was struggling to stop his thoughts from stampeding like a herd of wild horses.
He felt the skin on his face tighten.
What he hadn’t fully acknowledged until yesterday was how much Lily was struggling too.
Reluctantly he returned to that scene in the barn, those grey eyes of hers resting on his face. Curious, but soft too. As if she understood him. As if she had crept beneath the barriers he’d built between himself and the world.
He couldn’t remember anyone looking at him like that. Not even his mother. Alessandra Winslow had been too lost in her own thoughts to have ever really focused on his.
Maybe that was why he’d been caught off guard. Why what had happened next had been so shocking that he’d forgotten his frustration and his anger, that dark consuming fury that he couldn’t seem to shift so that it felt as though he’d been furious for almost his whole life. Since before he’d found those letters in his father’s things.
He felt his chest tighten. He wasn’t a total moron. He knew that there was grief mixed up in that terrible fury. But knowing that hadn’t done much to soothe the fury, or staunch the pain, the ache of losing his father, not once, but twice, because that was what it had felt like finding those letters. Reading those impassioned words from Henry’s mistress had made him question everything he’d thought he knew about the man who’d raised him.
It had been like an oil spill inside his chest, spreading slowly, coating everything in toxic, impenetrable darkness. And he didn’t know what to do with all of those feelings.
But then gazing into Lily’s eyes in the barn yesterday, he’d felt the world steady. And something had changed. All the anger and frustration had just disappeared and he’d found himself relaxing. It had seemed so easy, just talking, and then she’d smiled and he hadn’t been able to breathe because it had never been like that with anyone.
Only then she’d told him that she didn’t know how to do this. As if, to her, being there with him in that sun-soaked barn was an effort.
And even though he was used to being made to feel like an unwanted complication, it had stung. More than stung. Her words had pierced like a blade. His hands balled. He didn’t understand or like this feeling of needing her to like him. It made him conflicted and outgunned because to feel anything other than simple lust was so alien. And pointless too because in his family emotions had rarely been expressed. Even his father’s disappointment had been carefully tempered.
But there was no one there for him to rail against and that was a different kind of pain, but, in the moment, he had wanted to hurt Lily, so he had pushed her to admit her desire.
He sucked in a breath, body tensing as he pictured Lily in that dress with the sunlight behind her, revealing what lay beneath the checked cotton. That she hadn’t known what she was revealing had made it even more erotic.
But she had felt it. Felt the shift in the air, felt that quivering, electric thread between them pull taut so that when she’d reached out and touched his chest it hadn’t surprised him. What had surprised him, shocked him, was what she’d said and the way she had said it. Talking about sex as if it was just something functional, a nuts-and-bolts need to be screwed tight with a wrench.
Which it was, he told himself irritably. And he had wanted to respond, wanted to press his mouth against hers and his hand against that maddening indent in the small of her back, wanted to fuse her body with his. Only then he had realised she was crying.
Because of him.
He had stopped it, and then she had changed again, pushing him away, her face small and pale and breakable as if he were a stranger, a threat...
And that wasn’t fair because, surely, she knew he would never hurt her. Had in fact been trying to do the right thing.
Only now she was acting as if he was the one who had started it. As if being his wife were some kind of life sentence. He got to his feet abruptly and walked swiftly back into the house and up the stairs. Her door was shut, and for a few half seconds he stared at the bland, knotted wood as if that were her answer and then he knocked.
Silence.
He knocked again, more irritably this time because that was who he was, how he was. But there was still no answer, and his anger reared up, full-blooded and unthinking, and he twisted the handle and opened the door.
‘Why the hell do you have to—?’
He stopped. The bedroom was empty. Frowning, he checked the bathroom and the dressing room. Both empty. Heart pounding against his ribs, he stared wildly around the room, his head filling with static and then his gaze narrowed on the window.
Through the glass, he could see a figure in shorts and some kind of top moving determinedly through the grass, and then the land curved away and she disappeared.
Trip felt his pulse accelerate. Was she running or hiding? No matter, he would find her. Not that he’d ever even pursued a woman before.
But then he’d never wanted to.
Lily was walking fast.
Back in her bedroom she had tried reading but every time she’d focused on the page, her mind would turn blank and, before she could stop herself, she’d be right back where she’d started in the barn with the tiled roof, making a fool of herself.
It had been enough to get her moving quietly through her bedroom door and down the stairs. A glimpse of Trip out on the terrace, wine glass in hard, soaking up the sunshine as if nothing were wrong, had sent her spinning away from the villa and across the green grass like a bowling ball.
She had no idea where she was going but just being on the move made her feel calmer. There were horses grazing on the left-hand side of the paddock so she kept to the right, kept moving.
It was her phone that finally stopped her in her tracks.
‘Lily?’ Her father’s voice was so familiar and yet it was still a shock to hear him.
‘Daddy.’
‘Do you have time to talk? I know Mom told you how happy we are, but I just wanted to congratulate you in person.’ He paused. ‘Although you’re probably still fuming with us, aren’t you? I know you must be because I know how independent you are, but Mom and I just wanted you to have some time with Trip. Private time. That’s why you didn’t tell us about the engagement, wasn’t it? Because you hate the drama that goes hand in hand with being my daughter. But you could have told us, you know,’ he added gently. ‘We would have kept your secret.’
Her fingers tightened around the phone. What she hated was having to lie to her parents. To know that she had made them liars too. ‘Of course I’m not angry. And it wasn’t your drama I was worried about.’ That at least was true.
Her father laughed.
‘He certainly knows how to make an entrance. Looks the part, too. In fact I heard yesterday that somebody wants to make a film of what happened to him. Probably be quite the blockbuster. Your mother would certainly go and see it. She’s quite taken with him. I was too, although I was a little surprised. I always thought you’d choose some penniless artist.’
He was trying to make a joke but Lily’s chest squeezed tight. That her father imagined she had a choice of potential husbands was almost as heartbreaking as his unquestioning acceptance that Trip had chosen her.
‘We did connect through art,’ she said quickly. That was true too, although their connection had been very different from their current situation.
‘You don’t need to explain, darling girl. We’re just delighted that you’ve found someone you love. But I hope he knows how lucky he is, and he is lucky, Lily.’
Suddenly she could hardly breathe, much less speak. Misery was swelling in her throat. Her parents were so partisan, so blind to her imperfections. They would be heartbroken if they ever found out that Trip had picked her to be his wife solely on the basis that she was the woman least likely to spook the shareholders.
‘He does, Daddy.’ She cleared her throat. ‘I should probably be going—’
‘Of course, darling. Now you have fun. Mom sends her love, and Lucas does too.’
Lucas.
As she hung up, she stared down at her brother’s sweet face. He was the real reason she was here. The reason she was going to go through with this sham marriage for however long it took. Lucas needed to be left alone. She couldn’t take back the past, take back the part she’d played, but she could play her part now.
And there were worse places on the planet to be stuck in limbo, Lily thought as she gazed down at the Tuscan countryside. It felt both epic and lost in time, and, truthfully, if she had come here under any other circumstances she would have been enchanted.
And if this were real. If Trip had really proposed...
If. The shortest, cruellest word in the English language, she thought, body swaying forward in the soft sunlight. She was the stupidest of fools to let herself get caught up in this charade. Because that was what this was. Wasn’t it?
For him, yes. But for her...
It was hard being here with him, hard to hate him when he was so close. Harder still when he looked at her as if he wanted to know what she was thinking. Wanted to know her.
But not have sex with her.
She’d been humbled before but what had happened in the barn had been the single most embarrassing thing to happen in her entire life. She could still feel the red blotching her skin. It wasn’t just that Trip had rejected her, she had made it slap-in-the-face clear that she knew he would never have proposed to her for real, and that it hurt.
She hadn’t wanted to wait around to see the pity in the eyes. She didn’t need to. She’d seen it enough times in the past.
The first time she’d realised that she was the ugly duckling in a ballet of swans was when she was seven years old. It had been her mother’s thirtieth birthday. Her father had secretly arranged to have a family portrait painted and she and Lucas had been very excited to be in on the surprise. It had been a huge success, one of those memories that families talked about for years afterwards.
But her memory of the moment was different from everyone else’s. Staring at the perfectly rendered versions of all of their faces, she had suddenly realised she wasn’t beautiful. It had been like a thundercloud breaking over her head.
She’d never raised the subject of her otherness. She hadn’t known how because her parents had never treated her differently or made her feel less loved, less valued.
But other people did.
Some did it snidely. Others more openly. She had learned to deflect, to ignore, to not draw attention to herself, to keep her head down. Which had some positives. She had outperformed all her peers at school, and then in college, and after a few years overseeing her parents’ charitable trust she had started her own philanthropic advice platform. Her success hadn’t completely stopped the trolls, but she’d been busy doing something she loved.
And then she’d met Trip.
Her eyes stung. There must be something wrong with her. After what had happened with Cameron, she should have kept her distance. There was no need to get involved with another handsome, outwardly charming but inwardly self-serving man. Once bitten, twice shy. Or, in her case, spiky.
But Trip had smoothed out all those prickling insecurities.
He had made her feel hungry, lithe and bright with a need that transformed her from flesh and bones into quicksilver.
He had made her beautiful.
But in many ways sex made you as blind and foolish as love did. That was what she hadn’t realised before. On the contrary, she had congratulated herself for keeping things contained with Trip in a way she hadn’t managed with Cameron.
Because people like her didn’t end up with men like Trip. Not in real life. This sham marriage was all that was on offer.
In New York, the sun always felt harsh but here she liked the soft lick of heat and the tease of the breeze. She stood for a few moments, breathing deeply, letting the light play across her face and then she took a step forward between the leaf-covered branches, and touched the cluster of dark purple grapes. They felt firm and warm. But, of course, what really mattered was how they tasted, and, tongue tingling, she pulled one loose and lifted it to her mouth...
A shadow fell across her. A bird? No, it was bigger than a bird, and she turned to glare at the cloud that had dared to spoil this most perfect of moments.
She gazed up, hand frozen mid-air, the foliage around her suddenly watery at the edges, her vision shuddering just as if she really were suffering from the migraine she had been pretending to have.
It wasn’t a cloud. It was the beautiful chestnut horse she had seen in the barn yesterday. Acrux—was that his name?
Yesterday, she had thought he looked like a rocking horse, but he seemed a lot bigger this time. Probably because he was standing closer to her. Or maybe it was because Trip was sitting on his back, his broad shoulders blocking out the sunlight.
‘Try some if you want, but you might be disappointed,’ he said, shifting forward slightly on the horse’s back so that his face suddenly slammed into focus, all dazzling blue eyes and glossy brown hair and that body, solid and humming with that energy that instantly made everything around him feel hyperreal.
‘The berries are smaller than with table grapes and the skins are much thicker so there’s a much higher ratio of skin to pulp. So you can eat them, but you have to chew a lot and then spit out the skins and the seeds.’
That he was riding without a saddle or bridle was mind-boggling enough to a non-rider like her, but now she watched, muted by a slideshow of emotions, some contradictory, each more intense than the last, as he dismounted, dropping to the grass with the same smooth grace with which he did everything physical. He removed the rope from the horse’s neck and gathered it in one hand.
‘We do grow some grapes for the table over here.’ As he started to walk away, the horse followed him and, after a moment, she followed too.
‘These are Italia Muscat. They mostly grow in Puglia commercially, but my father always likes...’ He paused, his eyes leaving hers briefly to scan back to the villa. ‘He always liked to have table grapes, so when he bought the estate they started growing this variety, too, just for the family. I think they taste like wine before it’s bottled.’
She felt her nerve ending twitch as he held out a small bunch of golden-skinned grapes. ‘Don’t worry. They’re seedless so you won’t end up in the underworld for half the year,’ he added as she hesitated.
Her eyes jolted up to meet his. Trip knew about Persephone and the pomegranates?
‘Are you comparing yourself to a Greek god now?’
That smile. The one she knew by heart.
‘Just try one. Please,’ he said softly, but there was a tension beneath the softness.
She was still working to breathe but now she glanced up at him, caught off balance by the hook in his voice. It wasn’t an olive branch or even a pomegranate, but it was a peace offering...or an attempt at one. And the strangeness of that, of Trip Winslow following her here to broker peace, allowed her to take the grape from his hand and bite into it.
It was sweet and the flesh melted in her mouth so that she had to press her hand beneath her lips to catch the juice.
‘Good?’ Watching her nod, he seemed to relax a little.
He ate a couple and then held out his hand to Acrux.
She frowned. ‘I didn’t know horses ate grapes.’
‘They love them, which is why I don’t normally bring him up here.’ His eyes found hers. ‘But needs must.’
Needs. The word quivered between them and his gaze felt heavy and hot, like the earth beneath her feet.
The sky felt as if it were pressing down on her head and yet something in his eyes made her feel as if she were being lifted. But that was the trouble with Trip—he made her feel two often contradictory things at once.
She cleared her throat.
‘How much wine do you produce here?’ It was just something to say. She didn’t much care, nor did she expect him to know the answer, but he replied immediately. ‘Around five hundred cases. We’re what you might call a micro-winery, but we’ve won awards for our rosato . According to Stefano, the vineyard manager, we have high hopes for this year’s crop. He dropped by this morning. Apparently, they’re days away from harvesting, so you’ll get to see it, which is lucky. Although I’m guessing you probably don’t feel lucky,’ he added after a moment or two.
She stared up at him, her heartbeat jamming her throat.
‘It’s just I didn’t think about that until yesterday. When you got upset.’ He frowned. ‘And I know that you hate me right now, but I didn’t have a choice. You see, I was never a contender.’ She could see that his anger was back—no, not anger, she thought a moment later. It was frustration and pain too. He was wrapped in it.
She waited, watched him regain control.
‘It was always going to be Charlie and then suddenly it was me and I knew a lot of people had their doubts, but I knew I could make the business work harder, smoother, leaner. Just better. And I did, but then I went to Ecuador and when I got back everyone was freaking out and I had to do something because I couldn’t lose control of the company. I couldn’t prove them right. Not after everything that I’d—’
He broke off, his gaze scanning across the vines, and she knew from the slight rigidity in his shoulders that he was no longer in Tuscany, but back in Ecuador. Her own body tensed as her brain tried to imagine what it must have been like to face violence and death alone. And if she hadn’t been here, he would still be alone, she thought with a jolt.
‘I don’t hate you,’ she said at last. Because she didn’t. ‘But you do stupid things sometimes.’
Thinking back to that moment when the police car had appeared from nowhere and Lucas’ pale, frightened eyes had met hers in the rear-view mirror, she cleared her throat. ‘Everyone does. And the reason I’m here is because you were right. There will be other, better times for us to break up. Any point, really, when the world isn’t fixated on your return from the jungle.’
Trip was gazing down at her in silence and there was something about the expression on his beautiful face, almost as if he hated hearing her say that. Which made absolutely no sense.
Now he was nodding. ‘That’s true,’ he said after a moment. ‘But what’s also true is that I’m only here because of you. You’re the reason I got out of that jungle alive.’
Trip felt his chest tighten. Lily was staring at him, a small, puzzled furrow between her eyebrows. Her hair was tied neatly at the nape of her neck and she was wearing shorts and a cropped white blouse that seemed to hide everything and yet still hint at what lay beneath in a way that both confused and excited him.
‘I don’t understand.’
Watching her frown, he felt his hands ball into fists.
He hadn’t either. He still didn’t, which was why he hadn’t told anyone what had happened, what he had seen, why he had planned on never telling anyone. But he found that he wanted to tell Lily.
The memory of it was suddenly clearer and more real than the vines and the earth. ‘The guy who was in charge of tying me up drank—I could smell the alcohol on him—and one evening I realised I could get my hands free. I waited until they fell asleep and then I took off the blindfold and I managed to get away.’
He could still remember the fear that one of them would wake or, worse, shoot him. His heart had felt hot and slippery in his chest and he’d had that same feeling of being in a game so that even though it had been the most intense situation he’d ever been in, it had also felt as if it were happening to someone else.
‘How did you know which way to go?’ Lily’s grey eyes were light like summer storm clouds and, suddenly and overwhelmingly so that it winded him, he wanted to bury himself in their softness.
‘I didn’t,’ he said simply. ‘I was just making it up as I went along. One day, I was trying to climb up to the top of this ridge when everything just collapsed under me. That was when I lost my water bottle.’
The memory rolled over him like a cool mist, barely there but still enough to chill him to the bone.
‘Everything got a bit harder after that.’ Catching sight of her pale, stunned face, he forced his mouth to curve at one corner. ‘I was so thirsty and I drank from this pool. I don’t know what was in the water but afterwards I could hardly walk. I was shivering so much I kept biting my tongue.’
Backed up against a tree, skin burning, canopy closing in on him, he had offered up a prayer in desperation.
‘That’s when I saw you. You were wearing a cream dress like the one you wore to that lunch meeting the first time we met, and you held out your hand to me—’
He felt his fingers tighten around the rope in his hand. Even then, he’d known he was hallucinating, that Lily was in New York. But he had still reached out for her hand, stumbling forward, heart slowing with relief as her fingers had closed around his and suddenly he had been blinking into the sunlight.
After so many days of near darkness and delirium, he’d thought he was still hallucinating so that for a moment he hadn’t even realised that there were people moving towards him. All he’d cared about was Lily and he’d called out her name but, as the dark foliage had fallen away from him and his eyes had adjusted, she’d disappeared, breaking apart into petals.
He blinked away the image. ‘That’s how I found the village. Because of you. You were there with me—’
She was gazing up at him, an expression on her face that he didn’t understand but that turned his heart into a pinwheel beneath his ribs, and he reached out and touched her cheek, grazing his fingers against the skin.
‘I didn’t mean to make you cry,’ he said hoarsely. ‘And I didn’t not want you yesterday.’
Did that even make sense? Did it matter if it didn’t? It was just words, a collection of sounds that were just a step up from the babbling of a child. It didn’t come close to what he meant, to what he was feeling. But there was something taking shape between them, something tentative and precious and fragile, and he was scared that if he tried again, he would get it wrong and that newly formed shimmering thing would burst like a bubble.
Maybe Lily felt the same way because instead of replying she swayed slightly, the movement making her lean into the curve of his hand, and he felt his body react instantly. Hungrily.
Her chin jerked up and round towards the rumble of an engine and he followed the direction of her gaze to where a tractor was cresting the brow of the hill. He swore inwardly as Lily stepped back into the shadow of the vines and the air opened up between them.
‘It’s just Maurizio. He works here,’ he said, unnecessarily, because why else would Maurizio be driving a tractor across his land? But he wasn’t thinking straight. Correction: he wasn’t thinking at all. His mind was just heat and hunger.
Maurizio must have spotted him, because the tractor came to a stop and suddenly it was silent. Trip watched him climb down from the cab. Maurizio had worked on the estate since he’d left school and was now well past retirement, but after his wife’s death he had been so lost, so in need of occupation, that Trip had kept him on.
He turned to Lily to explain all of that but she was moving between the vines in that delicate, precise way of hers. At the dark fringe of woods edging the field, he watched as the trees seemed to move apart a little to receive her and then, in the blink of an eye, she was gone.
Something between loss and panic spiralled up inside him but it took another five minutes before he could extricate himself from the old man. By then Lily had long since disappeared. But he had to look for her.
And he knew he would find her. He could feel every single cell in his body, each breath and beat of his heart arrowing in on her location.
It was cool and light and green in the woods. Heart pounding, he followed one of the twisty paths, picking the wider one when it split in two, only to backtrack a moment later to take the one that was more overgrown. And that was when he saw her.
Lily was standing in the middle of the path, her grey eyes wide in the half-light crisscrossing her face, a flush of pink highlighting her cheekbones.
His pulse jumped. They had looked into each other’s eyes a hundred times or more over the last few days but there was something different this time, an intensity, an anticipation that made his mouth dry and his stomach tremble.
It was the single most erotic moment in his life. And he hadn’t even touched her.
In the distance he could hear the quiet rumble of the tractor, but here in the woods there was nothing but the sound of insects and his breath rising and falling in time to the pulse beating in her throat.
‘You waited for me,’ he said hoarsely.
Her gaze fixed on his face. ‘You came to find me.’
For a moment, neither of them spoke. He felt as though they were underwater, that he was holding his breath. He could hardly bear to move in case he was hallucinating and then she held out her hand and he walked swiftly towards her. As his fingers found hers, she pulled him away from the path, through the undergrowth into a shaded clearing dotted with tiny yellow and blue flowers.
The air was different now, warm and still and shimmering with light and shadow and the static hiss of anticipation.
His heart stopped beating as she stopped and turned and they stared at one another, palms still pressed together.
‘Are you going to tie me up?’
It was as if she’d slapped him. He stared at her, his pulse raging. ‘What?’
She gestured wordlessly to the rope still coiled around his other hand.
‘Is that what you want me to do?’ he said hoarsely.
Her pupils flared. ‘Yes. But first I want you to kiss me.’
The rope slithered to the grass at his feet as, breathing unsteadily, he leaned forward to cup her chin and his mouth found hers. They kissed, tasting one another, pushing back and forth, each time a little deeper until she pulled back and turned her head to touch her lips to his hand.
‘I want you, Lily.’
He found the band at the base of her neck and he pulled it loose, weaving his fingers through her hair.
‘And I want you—’
She leaned into him, grazing her body against his, her mouth maddeningly light now against his mouth and then, as his hands reached for her, she pushed him backwards.
‘Watch me undress.’
She kicked off her sandals and began to unbutton her blouse, slowly, deliberately slowly, and he watched, his body pulsing with a hunger that seemed to magnify his heartbeat so that he could feel his pulse throbbing through him.
Suddenly losing patience, he pulled her closer, yanking the blouse apart, tearing the fabric as he tugged it away from her arms. She wasn’t wearing a bra and he cupped her breasts in his hands, body hardening as she gasped, and then he lowered his mouth to lick the soft skin there, teasing her nipples until they stood proud from her body.
She pushed him back. ‘I said, watch me.’ Behind her, the trees shivered in the dappled light as she unbuttoned her shorts and let them slide down her legs to pool around her bare feet.
Now she was wearing only a pair of pale peach-coloured panties.
For a moment he thought he might black out and then, toeing off his shoes, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her closer.
‘Now undress me,’ he said.
Shaking inside, he let Lily pull his shirt over his head and run her hands over his chest, his stomach, sliding her fingers beneath the waistband of his trousers. He felt her tug down on the zip, grunting as she freed him, and then his body turned to iron as she dropped to her knees and took him in her mouth. His breath shuddered in his throat, and he reached down to slide his hand through her hair. Shock waves of desire were rippling over his skin and he jerked his hips backwards.
‘Not like that. Not this time.’
Pushing his trousers and boxer shorts down, he knelt in front of her and, running his hands over her breasts and waist and legs, explored every curve, every inch of skin until finally he slid his fingers inside her. She moaned against his mouth and the sound was gasoline to the fire of his hunger and he tore off her panties, shuddering as she wrapped her legs around his kneeling body and lifted herself against him.
He pushed up and into her, and groaned. She was so slick and hot.
‘Lily—’ He breathed out her name as she pulled him closer, her hand a small, splayed encouragement at his hip, and now he was pushing into her, moving rhythmically, his breath ragged against her throat as she arched against him and he tensed, thrusting upwards, the grip of her muscles sending him over the edge, his climax colliding against hers like a runaway train hitting the buffers.