‘I’ve thought about you, you know.’
She shrugged as if she couldn’t care less but inside she was beginning to shake. ‘Have you?’
He nodded, his eyes glittering, and took a step forwards. ‘A lot.’
‘I haven’t thought about you at all.’
‘Really?’
She nodded. ‘Really. Not once.’
‘Don’t you remember how it used to be?’
‘I remember how it was in the end.’
‘Coward.’ He reached out and touched her hair while his gaze dipped to her mouth, and despite all her protests she shivered.
‘Kiss me and you’ll regret it,’ she said, unfolding her arms and flexing and curling her fingers in warning, but that didn’t seem to stop him.
He tilted his head and looked down at her, his eyes as black as night and so full of intent and desire that she could barely breathe.
‘That’s a risk I’m prepared to take,’ he muttered, and before she could even think of protesting he slid his hand round to the back of her neck then bent his head and captured her mouth with his.
FOUR
Lily tried to keep her mout
h closed and her eyes open, she really did, but the familiarity of Kit, the heat of his mouth, his body and his scent blew away her resistance like a dandelion on the wind, and within a second she found herself succumbing to the drugging desire that swept through her.
Her eyes fluttered shut and she moaned and his tongue thrust into her mouth with devilish intent. The heat and the spark she’d felt earlier and had ignored shot back with a rush and her knees went weak.
Any thought of pushing him away vanished. The fingers she’d been flexing in warning now clutched at his shirt to pull him closer because despite everything they’d been through, everything she’d tried to convince herself of over the years, she’d missed him. So damned much.
She could tell herself that she didn’t want and didn’t need that spark all she liked, but, goodness, she’d missed feeling like this. The heady, delirious rush of simple, hot desire, without any of the angst and anguish that had blighted the latter months of their marriage. She’d missed this kind of need, primitive, pure and fierce.
Just when she feared her legs were going to give way and she’d either fall into him or collapse into a heap on the floor Kit broke off the kiss and lifted his head.
‘So is he or isn’t he?’ he asked roughly, his breathing all fast and ragged and his eyes glazed.
She stared up at him, her heart twisting and tugging, and she could feel herself falling under his spell just as she had the moment she’d looked into his eyes at the bottom of that ski slope in Italy.
The longer she looked up at him, the more her head began to swim with the emotions that she’d kept buried for so long and were now breaking free. Love, hate, joy, despair, desire.
And bewilderment, because had she spent the long lonely weeks, months, years since their divorce hoping for this? Hoping he’d come and find her? Had she been living a lie the whole of the last five years? And if she had, what did that make her? Nuts? Lucky? A hopeless case?
And what did all of this mean? Did Kit still feel something for her other than lust? Something more? Were there still feelings between them? Did they have a second chance?
Her mind teeming and her heart racing, Lily let the weight of emotion submerge the voice of reason bellowing in her head and warning her to be, oh, so very wary.
There’d be time for talk later, time for analysis and perhaps regret, perhaps hope. Right now, though, she just wanted him.
With excitement rushing through her and her pulse thundering, Lily took a deep, shaky breath, then said, ‘Despite what I may have implied earlier Nick isn’t my boyfriend, and he isn’t going to be.’
*
Kit was wound so tight with tension and desire and the expectation of a slap across the face that for a moment he couldn’t work out what Lily was saying.
And then, when his shell-shocked brain finally got round to working it out, couldn’t quite believe it. Couldn’t quite believe that the risk he’d taken had paid off.