She’d shaken her head from side to side, sending her blonde hair fluffing in a fair cloud about her face. “I’d like that too. But it’s complicated.” A frown had crossed her delicate features. “I need to be smart.”
He had resisted – barely – the impulse to kiss her. To kiss some sense into her. “We will be,” he’d promised instead.
“And discreet,” she’d murmured, her eyes clouded with thoughtfulness. “I don’t want William to think I’ve been carrying on as he has.”
“Of course,” he demurred silkily, thinking that it would be his gift to reveal to William, when the time was right. “Can Georgia look after your daughter tomorrow night?”
“Ellie?” She fidgeted her fingers. “I don’t know. Hendrix, I don’t know what’s just happened between us. I … I need to think things through. I’ll give you a call in a few days.”
The casually delivered rebuff had amused him, because it was the first time a woman had attempted to hold him at arms length. Usually, he was shrugging free of women who wanted his attention, even if just for a short time. Her careful procrastination fascinated him. And yes, he forced himself to be honest now that he was alone with his dark thoughts. It had endeared her to him. It had pleased him. It had made him want to embrace her in a hug. To be gentle with her. To make her like him. And to like her back.
But that was not his plan.
Everything he was doing was about that moment of revenge. And he could not afford to have his focus pulled from the prize.
Have you done your thinking yet? He sent the text with a small smile, then reclined back in his seat.
Chloe stared at her phone, a frown on her face. The sleeping figure of Ellie curled like a seashell against her stomach. Three months earlier, Ellie had turned two, and she was changing subtly every day. Her legs were getting longer, her footing more sure, her voice a little clearer and her sentences longer. But in the middle hours of the night, when magic was at its thickest, she could wrap her arms around her daughter and still feel the baby that had been. Her breathing was pronounced in the silent air, and her pale hair tickled under Chloe’s nose.
She angled the phone, careful to keep the bright light away from her daughter’s face.
Had she?
The evening had passed in a blur. Relaxed enough, initially, but always with an undercurrent of tension. As though the threads of their desire had been wrapping around them, tighter and tighter with each sentence they uttered.
The watershed moment had been inevitable. They’d piled bucket after bucket of sexual tension into the dam of feelings, and it had burst.
Spectacularly. The conflagration of their desire had singed her. Nerve endings were still on fire in her body, and she hadn’t been able to shut her eyes, for the images that were lingering in her mind.
Her lips were twisting into a smile.
So that was desire. That was chemistry.
She stared at the screen, but she saw only his handsome face, hovering over her, while his hands drove her body to the edge of sanity.
She’d believed love at first sight was a scientific fact, as real and immovable as gravity and condensation. But lust at first sight? Desire? A physical need so great that it pushed everything else aside?
It didn’t fit with her philosophy. Chloe had always thought that sex had to exist against a backdrop of love. That true intimacy could only develop through affection and trust, admiration and devotion.
She’d been all of those things for William, and their sex life had been… it didn’t bear comparison. It had been bland. She pulled a face as she remembered the routine way their bodies had come together. The small tremors of desire that had built in her and then been ignored, when his own satiation was speedily reached.
Her fingers twisted in her hair, and her teeth bit down on her lip.
Was this what sex should be like? Was it like this for everyone? Had it been like this for William and his other women? Her eyes shuttered closed painfully at the realisation that she must have done something wrong. That she must have been so boring in bed that he hadn’t been able to stomach more than a perfunctory roll in the hay from time to time.
Or had it been enough for him?
She knew one thing for sure. It would never be enough for her. Not now she’d opened the door to true desire. Not now she’d felt what her body was capable of.
She needed to keep going, down the rabbit hole and all the way to the other side. Wherever that might be.
I’m not thinking. I’m remembering. She pressed send before she could question the wisdom of engaging in a text flirtation with someone like Hendrix Forrester.
His response was almost immediate. Same here. Let me know when you’re ready for round two.
Her breath hitched in her throat. Round two. More of what they’d shared that night. She put the phone down, and held Ellie more tightly.
She wanted, so badly, to pursue this. To feel what he made her feel. But she wasn’t just a twenty four year old woman. She wasn’t just a website designer. A woman. She was a mother. A mommy, to the most beautiful little girl in the