“So, tell me.”

Dylan lifted his head, and the bleak expression in his eyes scared her hard. She wrapped her arms around him, her mouth close to his ear.

“Nothing you can tell me will make me run, Dylan.”

He shook his head lightly and kissed her shoulder. “You don’t know that, English.”

She straightened in his lap, took his hands, and placed them over her breasts.

“You’re right. I don’t know that.” Her nipples hardened as he circled them with his thumbs. “But I don’t trust easily Dylan, and everything in me knows that I can trust you.”

“You show me with the way you listen to me.” She ran her hands down his arms, down the hard, lithe muscles from his shoulders to his elbows, grasping them to move herself even closer over the heat of his crotch.

“You show me with the way you touch me,” she breathed, closing her eyes for a second as he measured the weight of her breasts in his hands, his eyes on her curves. She moaned a little when he dipped his head to close his mouth over one nipple and then the other, almost reverential.

“And you show me with the way you fuck me,” she said, a catch in her breath when he moved his hand down between their bodies.

“I trust you, Dylan Day. Her mouth was just a breath from his. “Simple as.”

Kara tilted her mouth over his and kissed him. Brandy, sugar, and Dylan Day, just about the most erotic flavour she’d ever tasted. The heat inside his mouth made her moan, his tongue slow and searching.

His kiss gave him an unfair advantage. If her hugs could stop wars, then Dylan’s kiss was his secret weapon. His fingers stroked between her legs as he deepened their kiss, as natural as breathing and bone-deep sexy.

“Touching you makes me forget the bad stuff,” he murmured, sliding two fingers inside her to the knuckle. Kara gasped, opening her eyes wide, breathless.

“So touch me some more.” Suddenly this was an urgent priority, whatever the bad stuff was.

Dylan smiled against her lips, his other arm around her waist holding her close. Kara’s mouth opened on a groan when his thumb covered her clitoris.

“Like this?” he said, massaging. He wasn’t asking because he was unsure. He knew exactly what he was doing.

“Like that,” she squirmed on his hand and tightened her legs around him as he thrust inside her.

He kissed her again and again, his tongue and his thumb moving in rhythm. She opened her eyes and looked into his, dark green glitter and more emotions than she knew what to do with.

“Let go, English,” he said, screwing his fingers deep inside her, his thumb faster on her clitoris. “Let go.”

And she did, and it made her yell his name and clutch him close until they were skin to skin. The weight of his arm around her waist held her down on his thrusting hand, making her come harder, longer, louder, and he kissed her right through it until she fell against his chest, spent.

Dylan smoothed her hair back from her face when she lifted her head again a few minutes later. She swam back slowly into the moment, recalling the unfinished conversation.

“Feel like talking, Sailor?” she said softly, needing him to let her in.

His eyes moved from her face and settled on the distant lights of a boat out at sea.

“I guess so.”

His words sounded resigned, and twilight closed in across his expression. She wasn’t even sure why she was pushing him, except for the need to be able to help him, to know what put those shadows beneath his beautiful eyes so she could chase them right away again.

He’d shared barely anything with her aside from the fact that his brother had passed away. Was he still grieving? She couldn’t begin to fathom the magnitude of a loss like that.

She laid her hands on his shoulders, massaging.

“Is it your brother?” She prompted him gently, offering him a hook to make the conversation easier to start. His eyes flicked to hers, unreadable.

“Billy.”

One small word, and a whole world of longing. Kara’s heart broke a little watching Dylan search for the words to tell her whatever he needed her to know.

“He died because of me.”

Shit. Her heart didn’t just break a little, it cracked wide open.

“What happened?” She wasn’t massaging his shoulders any longer, she was gripping onto them. Onto him.

“I let him down. Didn’t see he was in trouble. I was going up, and he was going right down, and I never stood still long enough to notice.” Dylan shook his head, his eyes far away, remembering. “I’d got everything I thought I ever wanted. Flashy club. Fancy home. Fast cars.” He made no mention of fast women, but it was pretty obvious that they would have been part of his lifestyle back then.

“You sound like Lucien used to,” Kara said softly.

Dylan shrugged. “Lucien is far more sorted than I ever have a hope of being. I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, Kara. Always in scrapes, all of us, but Billy always seemed to come out of it smelling of roses. I guess I let him fool me he was okay because it was easier than asking questions.” He looked back at Kara. “He got himself into all kinds of trouble. Dabbled in drugs, but gambling was his downfall. Debts up to his neck.” He paused, looking down and sighing heavily. “He was my best friend, and yet he couldn’t come to me when he really needed my help. What kind of a brother does that make me, Kara?” He shook his head. “Don’t bother answering that.”

He scrubbed his hand over his eyes. “He was found hanging. They say he did it himself, with his own belt.”

Tears filled Kara’s eyes as she stroked the back of Dylan’s neck.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“As good as,” Dylan said, desolation clear in his every word. “Ignorance is no excuse. I should have been there for him, and I wasn’t.”

Few situations left Kara lost for words, but the injustice that Dylan had served on himself left her reeling.

“From what you’ve said of Billy, I’m sure he wouldn’t want you to do this to yourself.”

“No. He would have wanted me to save him. I’ll never know for sure if he hung himself or if the bastards did it to him, and I don’t know which is fucking worse anyway. He died alone and desperate, or he died terrified at the hands of someone else… either way my mother had to bury her firstborn son.”

Kara brushed her fingertips tenderly over his cheeks, not sure he even knew his tears were there.

“And then there’s Justin.”

“Your younger brother?”

Dylan’s mouth set in a grim line and the look in his eyes altered in a way that chilled Kara’s bones. She saw the he didn’t just dislike Justin. He hated him.

“You’re not close?”

“He’s my brother, and I never want to lay eyes on him again.”

“Oh.” Kara didn’t want to say anything to stop him talking now he’d begun.

“Shall I tell you something really terrible?” Dylan’s anguished eyes settled on Kara’s, and she wasn’t certain she wanted him to say his next line. Not because she feared it would change her opinion of him; rather that she feared how he’d feel after letting the dark thoughts out.

“I wish it had been him.” His quiet, hollow words hung in the air. “I wish he’d been the one swinging from that fucking tree, not Billy.”

Kara considered this, studying his face.

“Do you expect me to think badly of you for that?”

He half-laughed, a harsh, humourless sound. “Don’t you? I just wished my baby brother dead.”

“No. No you didn’t. You wished that Billy wasn’t dead.” Kara placed her hands flat over Dylan’s collarbones. “You’re a good person, Dylan, but you’re only human. You’ve lost someone you loved, and it hurts like hell.”

“How do you know I’m a good person Kara? We’ve only known each other a couple of months. I could be anybody.”

It stung to hear him diminish their relationship, and he was wrong, in part at least. They might not have known each other for a long time, but they knew each other well. It had been like the speed date that never ended since the moment she’d met him: so much intensity crammed into such a short time. Never in her life had she met a man who felt so effortlessly right. The fact that they were having this conversation while she was naked and wrapped around him on a beach was testament to that. She followed where he led, because she trusted him not to take her anywhere she didn’t want to go, and she trusted him to follow her when she wanted to lead, too. She felt utterly herself with him, free to be as bold, as brazen, as womanly as she wanted.

“You’re right,” she said, almost exasperated. “Sure. You could be anybody. I could be anybody. There are no guarantees that this won’t all go spectacularly wrong, but right now it feels spectacularly right to me. And to you.”

Kara ran her hands over his hair and down the back of his neck.

“Spectacularly right,” she whispered again, feeling him coming back towards her from the dark places in his head.

“There’s other stuff I should tell you,” he said, making her heart twist with the pain and vulnerability in his eyes.

“Tell me another time,” she murmured. She didn’t want to wring it out of him. She trusted him to tell her in his own good time. “There’s no rush.”

He reached out then and traced his fingers down her face.

“But…”

Kara placed a finger over his lips. “Shh. Look around us.” She glanced around the tiny bay, at the glow of the fire, and then back to the incredible man beneath her. “We might never get this kind of perfect again.”

Dylan’s eyes tracked around as Kara’s had, taking in all of the magical details. “Spectacularly right,” he said softly, and she turned her mouth into his hand and kissed his palm.

The gesture was all it took to tip the emotionally charged conversation over the edge, sending it spiralling into back into the roiling deeps of desire. He gathered her against him and kissed her breathless with hot, hungry kisses that sent intense, sexual throbs shooting through her body. She didn’t just want him. She needed him in a way that bordered on primal.

He shifted position when she reached for the button of his jeans, taking her with him and lying her down on her back, settling over her as he kicked his jeans off and ripped the silver foil on the condom.

She swallowed hard around the sudden ache in her throat as he positioned himself, wanting him more than she’d ever wanted anyone in her life. He paused then, lowering his head and closing his eyes to give her the slowest, sweetest of kisses as he held her hands in the cool sand beside her head.

She heard the catch in his breath as he lowered his hips down onto hers, and the answering gasp in her own as he sank himself all the way inside her. Kara felt in that moment how intense pleasure could be almost painful: so excruciatingly, mind-numbingly good that it filled every cell with a fierce yearning for more, and for sweet, sweet release.

She wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders when he let go of her hands, and they moved in slow, sacred union.

Kara opened her eyes. “I could love you, Dylan Day.”

He kissed her again, open-mouthed, his hands in her hair. “I could love you too.”

Lit by the firelight and bathed in the warmth of the deepest intimacy, they eased each other’s weary hearts with a meander through the best cocktail menu in the world.

A supremely slow, comfortable screw.

A gasping, mind-blowing orgasm.

The most incredible sex on the beach ever.

Chapter Twenty -Six

Lucien poured wine first into Sophie’s glass and then into his own, watching her as she watched the sunset. They’d discovered the laid-back beach restaurant on their last visit to the island, a sultry open air place hewn from the rock with mellow music, fabulous cocktails and great food.

“About being married, Sophie…”

She turned her attention to him, and for a second her gentle smile and the sunset gleam on her bare shoulders made him forget the conversation he wanted to initiate and contemplate taking her home to fuck her instead.

“What about it?”

He dragged himself back to the matter in hand. “I don’t want it to change things.”

Sophie smiled. She’d been half expecting this conversation; marriage had always been low on his agenda and she recognised that he feared what it would do to their relationship. She didn’t share his fears.

“Lucien. We’ve been together for years. We have a child. Being married won’t change any of that.”