“Oh, I’m not in any queue,” Jenny said, in that posh voice of hers that had haunted him for years now. Though it sounded a bit more frantic than usual. “To be clear. We’re just friends. Old friends, that’s all.”
“Steady, love,” Corrinne murmured, with a bawdy little laugh. She gave Dylan a wink, then stepped around Jenny and started down the street on the astonishingly high heels they’d made use of last night, in a variety of ways.
Dylan forgot her in the next breath.
Because Jenny was here.Here.And that probably meant something bad was happening to her or around her, but he would care about that in a minute. Right now, there was the fact of her outside his door. Jenny in the winter light, with a breeze blowing in from the sea.
You’re pathetic,he told himself, but that wasn’t a shock.
“I really am sorry to bust up your morning,” Jenny was saying, worriedly, with that little frown between her eyes that Dylan had dedicated whole years of his life to erasing.
“No worries at all,” he told her, which had the benefit of being true. “She was leaving anyway. There was nothing to bust up.”
He reached over and wrapped her in a hug. And nothing ever changed. There was always that kick in him, deep and hard. His chest tight, his cock so hard it ached and that same old reaction to her he always had like a full-on wildfire, sweeping over him.
But if it was only that, he would have done something about it years ago and moved on. It was the other part that got to him even more. The sense that the world snapped back into place when he held her.
Holding Jenny was like coming home, that was the curse of it.
If Dylan knew anything in this life, it was that getting what you wanted was unlikely at best, and if it came to you, it was never in the form you wanted it. His friendship with Jenny was a prime example of that principle and he didn’t care, because there was this.
Jenny snuck her arms around his waist, let out that little sound of contentment the way she always did and squeezed him back, hard.
And there it was, that moment that had haunted him almost from the moment he’d met her, and led to so many of his twisted, fucked-up nights with other women that were never her. That indescribable moment Jenny was in his arms and everything was as it should be. When she buried her head against his chest with perfect trust and he could pretend he was the man she thought he was.
Better yet, just for that moment, he could pretend that she was his.
Dylan took a breath and stepped back, because he had to let go first. That was part of the bargain he’d made with himself a long time ago to control his little addiction to this woman.
“You didn’t answer my question.” He grinned down at her in the morning light. “What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know,” Jenny said, and laughed.
That same laugh had done his head in—ruined him, if he was honest—the first week of his first year at Oxford. He could remember it so vividly. He’d come out of his room, overwhelmed that he’d made it out of his shit neighborhood and to this storied place, and there she was. She’d been talking to someone else whose face he never recalled. He’d only seen Jenny.
That laugh had gotten inside him then, and there was no getting it out.
“Better come in then,” he told her.
He took her bag from her and indulged himself when she moved ahead of him, allowing his fingers to graze the small of her back.
Dylan loved sex. His appetite was intense, and his preferences more so. He loved women. He loved the journey of it, the breathless distance between a flirtatious look and shaking, screaming woman clamped down hard on his cock while she came for the third time.
He loved every step along the way, from a naughty striptease to a sudden shock of intimacy that could change a bit of fun into a real moment in an instant—then change back.
But nothing got to him as much as Jenny Markham, and in case he kidded himself into imagining that might change, there were moments like this. Where the brush of his fingertips against the back of her jacket wiped out all memory of the night he just spent making another woman come and cry all over him, again and again and again.
Dylan came from a long line of addicts, and all things considered, he preferred Jenny to heroin.
A junkie is a junkie,he told himself sharply.
Not that it helped.
He took her inside, leading her up the stairs to the main part of his house. It was all arranged to take in the sweeping views of the coast, so he sat her down on his deck, wrapped her in a blanket to keep off the winter chill and then sorted out cups of tea. Then he dropped down in the chair opposite and let himself look at her.
Jenny. In his house. At last.
She smiled at him for a moment, then lifted her mug of tea, and that ring she wore caught the light.