‘How old is she?’
‘Two,’ he said softly.
She watched, dry-mouthed, as his hand slid up and over Alima’s beautiful muzzle. Above the scent of horse sweat and hay, she caught a whisper of his scent—that mix of skin and salt and sage that made all the air leave her body.
He unbolted the stable door and led Alima out onto the flagstones, and as he walked the horse in small circles she saw instantly what he meant. There was a tension in the way the mare was moving, an uncertainty in her step that made Delphi’s fingers itch to smooth the twitches from the horse’s quivering flank.
‘Any thoughts?’
Glancing up, she met Omar’s gaze. She felt that feverish embrace swell up in her again—not just as a memory but tangible, so that she could feel his mouth, his hands, on her skin.
Flushed with panicky heat, she opened her mouth, fully intending to tell him that she would email him the name of several equine therapists who might help, and that now she wanted to leave.
Only instead she found herself saying, ‘Do you have any boots I can borrow?’
There was a sand school next to the stables and, watching Alima trotting alongside the post and rail fencing, she forgot about Omar, forgot about leaving the fort. All her attention was focused on the little horse.
She was a beautiful animal, but her her tail was clamped in tight. A bird suddenly screamed high up in the sky and Alima shot forward, her eyes rolling white, but Delphi kept her moving, waiting until the horse’s movements softened, and then she let Alima come to a standstill.
‘There you go, little one,’ she murmured, letting the horse sniff her hand.
Breathing softly, she waited until Alima gave a whicker of consent, and then she moved her hand slowly to the horse’s neck, working her way along the mare’s body. As she moved, she kept talking...nothing that mattered or made any sense, just talking softly.
Watching Delphi lean into the horse, Omar felt his heart slow. Last night, just for a few hours, it was as if the past seven weeks had never happened. She had fallen asleep in his arms, the way they’d always slept.
Asleep, it was the one time when she would relax her guard and let him get close to her.
Aside from when they made love.
Jaw clenching, he pushed that thought away, just as he had pushed Delphi away on the bed. He wasn’t ready to go there yet. Instead, he thought back to her face, pale in the lamplight, and the tremor in her voice as she’d told him what he wanted to know. What he’d thought he wanted to know.
His fingers tightened against the railing. He hated picturing her curled up on that cold bathroom floor in London. But it was the exhaustion in her voice that still haunted him.
Waking at dawn in the armchair, with the daylight pressing redly against his eyelids, he’d had a stiff neck and a head full of questions, the answers to which should have been irrelevant at this point in their relationship.
Like why, having eased himself away from her body to go and shut out the sound of that screeching owl, had he not gone back to his own bed? She’d been sound asleep. It would have been the perfect moment to leave.
He glanced over to where Delphi was standing beside the small grey mare, his eyes following the soft, seamless movement of her hand.
But he hadn’t. He hadn’t been able to.
The idea of leaving her had made some kind of earthquake happen inside him, so that he’d had to sit down in the armchair to steady himself.
But why had he felt like that? Their relationship was over. They were getting a divorce. There was nothing left between them.
Liar, he thought, and before he could divert the direction of his thoughts he was back at the kiss he had been trying so hard not to think about. His heart thudded inside his chest. He could keep telling himself it had been just a kiss, but he knew it had been so much more than that.
Last night he had wanted her so badly his hunger had felt like a physical ambush. Truthfully, they had both wanted it—had both been waiting for it to happen since that moment on the field in Idaho when he’d pulled her into his arms. Having failed so spectacularly to do so in his marriage, he had wanted to prove a point—to pin Delphi down not just metaphorically, but literally.
With his mouth.
But, unlike in Idaho, last night there had been no point to prove. It had been simply an acceptance, an acknowledgment, an admission of a mutual need that was stronger than both of them. A surrender to that need to kiss and touch and caress and press against one another that was ever-present, circling them constantly, whipping at their senses and nudging them closer, like the rope Delphi had lightly flicked into the sand to make Alima move.
And she’d tasted so good. Hot and honey-sweet. And the taste of her had gone straight to his head.
In those few febrile heartbeats nothing had mattered except the sweep of her tongue against his and the fierce hunger raging through his body. Five more seconds, maybe ten, and he would have stripped them both naked and slid deep inside her.
That he had not done so, but instead had taken her arms and held her away from him, still stunned him now.