About the Authors

USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favorite romance novels in creative-writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally gets to utilize the MA and PhD in English literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com.

REGINA KYLE knew she was destined to be an author when she won a writing contest at age ten with a touching tale about a squirrel and a nut pie. By day, she writes dry legal briefs. At night, she writes steamy romance with heart and humor. She is a two-time winner of the Booksellers’ Best Award. A lover of all things theatrical, Regina lives in Connecticut with her husband, daughter and two melodramatic cats. When she’s not writing, she’s most likely singing, reading, cooking or watching bad reality television.

Lifelong romance addict JC HARROWAY lives in New Zealand. Writing feeds her very real obsession with happy endings and the endorphin rush they create. You can follow her at jcharroway.com, Facebook.com/jcharroway, Instagram.com/jcharroway and Twitter.com/jcharroway.

New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author CATHRYN FOX is a wife, mom, sister, daughter, aunt and friend. She loves dogs, sunny weather, anything chocolate (she never says no to a brownie), pizza and red wine. Cathryn lives in beautiful Nova Scotia with her husband, who is convinced he can turn her into a mixed martial arts fan. When not writing, Cathryn can be found Skyping with her son, who lives in Seattle (could he have moved any farther away?), shopping with her daughter in the city, watching a big action flick with her husband, or hanging out and laughing with friends.

Also by Caitlin Crews

Filthy Rich Billionaires

Teach Me

The Billionaires Club

The Risk

Hotel Temptation

Unleashed

Undone

Untamed

Also by JC Harroway

A Week to be Wild

Her Dirty Little Secret

One Night Only

The Billionaires Club

The Proposition

Billionaire Bachelors

Forbidden to Want

Forbidden to Taste

Forbidden to Touch

Also by Cathryn Fox

On His Knees

On Her Terms

Under His Touch

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.

The Dare Collection May 2020

Take Me

Caitlin Crews

Dirty Work

Regina Kyle

Bad Business

JC Harroway

Under His Obsession

Cathryn Fox

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-0-008-90742-6

THE DARE COLLECTION MAY 2020

Take Me © 2020 Caitlin Crews Dirty Work © 2020 Regina Kyle Bad Business © 2020 JC Harroway Under His Obsession © 2020 Cathryn Fox

Published in Great Britain 2020

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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Table of Contents

Cover

About the Authors

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Take Me

Back Cover Text

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Dirty Work

Back Cover Text

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

Bad Business

Back Cover Text

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

EPILOGUE

Under His Obsession

Back Cover Text

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

About the Publisher

Take Me

Caitlin Crews

“You need to be absolutely certain you want to open this door, Jenny. Because once it’s open, I don’t think you can close it again…”

Random spontaneity is not Lady Jenny Markham’s style. Her blue-blooded self-possession permits her to think with her head—never her heart. It’s precisely why she’s engaged to the perfect man she doesn’t love. And yet Jenny just flew ten thousand miles to Sydney, Australia. On a whim. To see the green eyes and devilish grin of her best friend, up-for-anything Dylan Kilburn…and to forget the words ringing in her head. You’ve never been shagged properly.

Of course, that’s exactly why Jenny’s here. Why Jenny’s body is engulfed by hot, aching need. Because she wants Dylan to show her what she’s missing before she locks herself into a loveless marriage.

Jenny promised that nothing would change between them. Dylan promised that he wouldn’t fall in love with her. But the moment his mouth takes hers, all hunger and raw, molten lust, Jenny knows that there’s no going back. Not from this. And now she’s well and truly screwed. Because just as Jenny finally starts thinking with her heart, she realizes she’s about to lose it…to her best friend.

Harlequin DARE publishes sexy romances featuring powerful alpha heroes and bold, fearless heroines exploring their deepest fantasies.

Four new Harlequin DARE titles are available each month, wherever ebooks are sold!

CHAPTER ONE

IT WASN’T UNTIL she’d landed in Sydney after the long-haul flight from London, pale from all the recycled air and a bit drunk from the mess of time zones, that it occurred to Lady Jenny Markham to worry about her welcome.

“Don’t be silly,” she told herself, astonished by the raspy sound of her own voice in the too-bright corridor, lost somewhere deep in the Sydney Airport. “It’s Dylan.”

And the one thing she knew to be true, no matter what else happened or how life kicked her around, was that Dylan Kilburn was always happy to see her. Always. That was why she always kept her visa to enter Australia current. On the off chance she might pop off down under and visit the man who’d been her best friend since their university days.

In all the years since Dylan had moved to Australia, she’d never done it. But here she was at last. Wilted straight through, but here.

Jenny had packed light, mostly because she’d been in denial about what she was doing. She’d thrown a few things in a shoulder bag in her flat in Central London, that was all, because she wasn’t taking a trip. She’d set off on a happy little lark and could as easily have simply wandered about London for a while, playing tourist. Maybe she’d pretended that was exactly what she was doing.

Though she didn’t usually head off to enjoy the sights and sounds of the city with her passport in hand.

She was being spontaneous, and that felt weird only because Jenny was rarely spontaneous. Make that never. But she was an engaged woman now and her life was changing, and there was no time like the present to do things she’d never done before—because she never would again.

She certainly wasn’t running from anything, she assured herself as she made it through customs and immigration and officially entered Australia for the first time.

Everyone deserved a little time to themselves before getting married. An engagement ought to come with bit of reflection and preparation, surely, before standing up before all and sundry and making vows to become legally bound forever. Some people went off to extreme yoga retreats or some such at times like these, where they could twist themselves into alarming shapes and slug down green concoctions that tasted of mud and self-righteousness. Jenny accidentally found herself at Heathrow.

But thinking about her own impending marriage was depressing, so she busied herself with finding and hiring a cab when she wasn’t sure she had access to her own brain. It was possible she’d left it somewhere over the northern hemisphere.

Once she located a taxi and climbed in, she directed the driver to take her to Dylan’s address. Assuming he still lived in the house he’d bought on the coast, south of Sydney proper.

Jenny doubted he would have moved without telling her. They texted all the time. When Dylan had bought this place, right after what he’d called his wee start up went public, he’d sent her pictures.

Just bought nauseatingly posh bachelor pad, complete with ocean views, he’d written. Guest room always available, should milady find herself in NSW.

Who wants to visit a bachelor pad? she’d texted back. That sounds medically questionable. Also, it’s lovely.

She remembered white, stark, modern lines and a gorgeous view of the sea, everything sunny and sweet and bursting with vivid color. As everything Australian always was when she thought of it. That or the red hot desolation of the outback.

Sydney had always been on Jenny’s list of places to see, but she’d spent most of her time before and after university filling the role of her father’s hostess and companion. Her mother had died when Jenny was twelve, and she’d considered it an honor that she got to accompany her father to his business events. There was a part of her that would always be that grief-stricken twelve-year-old in a pretty dress and her mother’s pearls, pretending to be grown up while her father’s usually dour friends and associates acted as if it was a great privilege to meet her.

Lord Markham was not a man given to having feelings, much less expressing them. Jenny rather thought what few emotions he’d had must have died with her mother. But she always remembered those first few years. And how he’d included her when it would have been so much easier to leave her at home. She always remembered that he’d cared for her as best he could, in a way that had made them both breathe a bit better, for a time.

Maybe it wasn’t surprising she felt duty bound to do the same for him, now it was her turn.

She had gone on all the dates he’d set up for her. She had smiled and had awkward conversation—or, more often, listened in appropriately reverent silence as her date banged on about himself. It was better than subjecting herself to a dating app. At least the men her father set her up with were vetted, in some form or another. They weren’t pretending to be someone else—they really were that boring.

But Jenny didn’t mind. Her passion wasn’t for men, it was for her work. Once she’d left uni she’d gotten a job in a worthy charity—meaning, one that supported something that wouldn’t embarrass her father at a business dinner. Jenny’s provided aid and care to children in war zones. And that meant that most of Jenny’s trips were to places that did not glitter or attract highflyers like Dylan.

She’d always told herself—and him—that it was her work that kept her from coming down under. No matter how many times Dylan told her she was more than welcome to come and make an adventure out of it.

You’re making an adventure of it now, she told herself a bit wryly as she settled into her seat, the cab lurching a bit as it headed away from the airport.

For the first time in years, she hadn’t given the charity a thought. She’d simply…gotten on the plane.

It had to be an adventure because she couldn’t take it back.

She blew out a breath and looked out the window. It was coming up on half six in the morning in Sydney, and the sun was only just making its appearance. Jenny was sure that once it rose, her head would feel less fuzzy. That the strange weighted feeling tugging on all her limbs, and the odd sensation that she was scraped raw, was a gift of her long plane ride. No one could possibly spend nearly twenty-four hours on two planes and not feel like an alien. Even her feet felt as if they belonged to someone else.

You felt equally worn out in London, a voice inside her piped up. It wasn’t the flight.

The voice sounded suspiciously like Erika Vanderburg, her other best friend.

Erika had looked at Jenny almost pityingly the last time they’d seen each other. Jenny had been perhaps too enthusiastic about Erika’s plan to return to Oxford to finish her degree course, all these years after she’d left her degree course.

Geography isn’t going to cure anything but your location, Erika had said gently.

Because the new version of Erika was not the messy creature Jenny was used to, always drunk and inappropriate, scandalous and fun. The new version of Erika was settled in her relationship with the intimidating Dorian Alexander, best friend to Erika’s older brother, Conrad. Easygoing in a way Jenny would not have believed possible if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes. Even having seen it, she wasn’t sure she believed it. How could she? The new Erika was so self-possessed it made Jenny’s lifelong pretense of self-possession look like exactly what it was. A sham.

But as the cab navigated the early morning streets, she stared down at the enormous ring on her hand that she kept meaning to get fixed so it wouldn’t slide about so much, blinding unwary passersby, and wondered if it was as simple as the fact Erika was in love.

Love was something not even Jenny could fake.

Luckily, her engagement—to Conrad Vanderburg, Erika’s chilly older brother, whose success in business made Lord Markham as close to giddy as a man not given to such displays could get—was practical, not passionate. No faking required.

“Dylan will sort it all out,” she told herself, muttering staunchly beneath her breath so as not to alarm the driver. “He always does.”

Erika had always been Jenny’s most vivid friend, the mad one who could go out for chips and end up dancing on tabletops in a different city at dawn. She was ardently loyal, she was passionate about everything and Jenny had wanted to be her, some years. But Dylan had always been her stalwart. He listened. He gave good advice. He’d been keeping Jenny grounded as long as she’d known him.

If he couldn’t help her, no one could.

Not that she needed help, she corrected herself as the cab continued east. She was fine. Her life was carrying on according to plan. Some people—Erika, for example—might think that was a bad thing, but Jenny knew better. This was life.

Dylan would take the rawness inside of her, name it and laugh at it, and in so doing, make it feel better. And make her feel better.

She looked around as they drove, trying to take in architecture that looked both brand new and comfortingly familiar at once. It was like looking at proper British streets, but with a certain overlay that was distinctly Australian. She couldn’t have said what that was. The extra filigreed bits on the gratings and railings, perhaps? Or all the years she’d spent sneaking episodes of Neighbours, more like. Everything was Ramsay Street, if she squinted.

Eventually, the car went around a bend and she realized that wasn’t only sky in the distance, it was the sea. And Jenny had to remind herself, with a kick of wonder, that it was the Pacific, deep and blue. Not the gray North Atlantic she knew better.

And for the first time since she’d jumped on a plane in Heathrow, on a whim, the fact that she’d taken herself off across the planet hit her.

Hard enough that she found herself quite glad she was sitting down.

She worried that huge ring on her hands instead of thinking about all the likely reactions back home, turning it around and around and telling herself that she was exhausted. Obviously. And that was why the weight of the ring, which had never been light to begin with, seemed more like a brick.

The cab wound around through narrower streets, with houses built up high on hillsides that sloped toward the sea. All of them made mostly of windows, to make the best of the view from every angle. And what a view it was, with neighborhoods clinging to rugged cliffs, and sandy beaches stretching in between. It was nothing at all like an English seaside.

The driver pulled up before a sleek white building. The street was at garage level, and the only thing to see was the wooden door to the garage and beside it, a closed entryway. Jenny paid the driver, climbed out with her small case and stood there as the cab drove off.

There were butterflies leaping around inside her, and she told herself she didn’t know why.

It was only Dylan. One of her two best friends from her Oxford days. They’d been first years on the same stair, along with Erika, and Jenny had been close with both of them ever after. She and Erika saw more of each other, it was true, but only because Dylan had relocated here, built himself a fortune and liked to call himself an accidental billionaire.

Before anyone else can, he’d told her when she’d asked him why. And then had texted something incomprehensible about Californian tech giants.

Jenny had spent several hours on the plane thinking about when she’d seen Dylan last. In person. She was sure it had been in Cape Town, a year or so back. She’d been at a charity ball and he’d been in town for business meetings. They’d met up at a lovely restaurant with panoramic views of Signal Hill, had a typically uproarious dinner, had laughed until Jenny had tears streaming down her face and had parted on their usual merry, friendly terms. Because that was Dylan. Always easy and fun, and the most undemanding person in her life.

Which meant there was absolutely no reason for her to be standing there as the rising sun streaked the sky in the colors of candy floss, wracked with…nerves.

But then, though she’d seen Dylan in all sorts of places over the years, she’d never actually come to his home. Not since his home had been a room in college, same as hers.

And even then, now that she thought about it, they had spent most of their time together out and about, studying, or taking in Oxford, eating or drinking, or going on long walks.

It was funny that she’d never really thought about how intimate it was, really, to turn up at a person’s house.

Uninvited.

Ten thousand miles away, without warning.

She took a deep breath, then shivered, because it was cold. It was August, which meant she’d flown out of a surprisingly warmish England straight into an Australian winter. The air was crisp, chilly and almost sweet. Dylan’s house sat across from a green park that ambled its way out to the cliffs and then down to the beach, with nothing blocking the sea air. Or the views.

If Dylan wasn’t home, another very real possibility she hadn’t allowed herself to consider before boarding the plane, she could go down and stick her feet in the water. Then set about finding herself an appropriate hotel.

And the minute Jenny started thinking about hotels, it seemed obvious that she should have started there. She should have found herself a place to stay, had a nap and a bite to eat, maybe not in that order. And then when she got her bearings, maybe even tomorrow, she could try to figure out where Dylan might be.

Instead of appearing on his doorstep, in all her long-haul state.

She laughed, under her breath, staring out at all that gleaming, deep blue. What was she like? She’d told no one in England she was leaving, she had simply gone. She’d been sitting in her flat, supposedly looking through some or other book of wedding-related items, but she couldn’t concentrate on any of it. Invitations, flowers, the lot.

She’d found herself on her mobile instead, texting Erika in Berlin. They’d been discussing one of their favorite television shows, but something Erika had said to her before Jenny’s ornate engagement party had rung about inside her head, like a bell gone mad.

You’ve never been fucked properly.

Jenny had been mulling that over, torn between outrage and curiosity, ever since Erika had said it.

What she’d concluded was that she’d actually never fucked anyone at all. She’d had sex. More often, she been forced to contend with declarations and talk of lovemaking—a word she found deeply embarrassing. The boyfriends she’d had in the past had all been decent enough. But sex had always been a pleasant afterthought. Never the main parts of any relationship.

There had never been fucking.

And the more she thought about what fucking properly would entail, the more she thought about Dylan. Who’d had more sex—phenomenally addictive sex, if the girls who followed him around, desperate for more of his attention, were any guide—than Jenny had had in her entire life.

Dylan, who made women swoony. Dylan of the dark hair, green eyes and wholly Irish, devilish grin. It had never been hard to understand why women got silly around him, but Jenny had always felt a bit smug that she wasn’t a part of that mess. That her relationship with Dylan was purely platonic, always had been and always would be.

But as her wedding date drew closer, it dawned on her that she really was going to be expected not only to marry Conrad in all his icy, intimidating splendor, she would also be expected to sleep with him. It would be her job to produce heirs to the Vanderburg and Markham fortunes and whatever she might have begun to think—or worry—about her own deficiencies in the bedroom, since apparently none of it had been proper, she was absolutely certain of one thing. A man like Conrad, with the personality of an iron spike encased in a glacier, could not possibly introduce her to proper fucking.

Out there in the dawn of a new day in Sydney, Australia, a literal world away from almost everything and everyone she knew, Jenny found herself gripping that stone he’d put on her finger.

Conrad was the man her father wanted her to marry. And luckily, Conrad was not cruel. Erika liked to pretend that he was, but Jenny knew that her friend tended toward the overdramatic. In all the time that Jenny had known Conrad, he had never been vicious. He had always been the same as he was now. Measured. Controlled. And very, very focused—on other things.

All of these things would likely make him an excellent husband. And hadn’t Jenny read a thousand articles about how arranged marriages were far more stable than romantic ones? It was entirely possible that she’d fall head over heels in love with Conrad someday, since they had so much in common and he was her father’s first choice for her. It was just that she would have to see if that was possible after the wedding, not before.

Something inside her shook a bit, and she pressed a hand to her belly, wishing that she’d eaten something a little more substantial than airline food.

And wishing that her first holy spontaneous action in recent recall hadn’t been quite so over-the-top. Surely she could have gone out and hit up a yoga retreat, or gotten quietly pissed somewhere. Rather than leaping on a plane and flying all this way.

Suddenly, she felt foolish. Jetlagged, famished, exhausted, a bit dizzy from all of the above and deeply silly as well.

Had she really flown all the way to Australia so she could quiz her best friend on what constituted proper fucking?

Jenny let out a laugh, and the sound of it was loud on the quiet street. The hotel idea was looking better and better. She tried to stand up straighter, wishing she hadn’t sent her cab off. She raked a hand through her hair, deciding to be kind to herself and not imagine how limp and wrung out she must look. Instead, she tied it up in a knot on top of her head.

She had come all the way to Australia to learn about proper fucking—and to let Dylan bolster her spirits the way only he seemed to be able to do, sometimes. But she was still Lady Jenny, raised to be proper in all ways—except the one.

That struck her as funny too, and she was thinking about how she would have liked so much to horrify her strict governess, back when she’d been a girl, with questions about fucking as opposed to the manners, comportment and ballroom dancing her father had deemed so important. If she could have built a time machine on the spot, she would have.

And if there was time travel going around, she could also go back and turn Conrad down. Then she wouldn’t have to worry about the long, slow dive into an ice bath that she assumed her marriage would be.

But that was disloyal. Not to Conrad so much, as she doubted very much he thought about her much, but to her father.

She heard a sound, then. Low, male laughter. A higher-pitched, feminine voice. Then the door of the entryway next to the garage opened.

The door swung inward, and Jenny was standing right there. On the curb only a few feet away. For a moment, she couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing. She was too tired, maybe. It was as if she was looking through a kaleidoscope, all bright colors and strange shapes…but then she blinked and it all came into focus.

Searing, distinct focus.

She would know Dylan anywhere, even through a cracked open door, with his dark head bent over the woman he had up against the narrow wall of his entryway. She was clinging to him, wearing extraordinarily high heels, and what Jenny thought was a tiny miniskirt, though it was hard to tell. The woman’s leg was lifted in the air, and wrapped around Dylan’s waist.

And they were kissing.

Though kissing seemed a rather tame word to describe what Jenny was witnessing.

It was too…carnal. The heat was so insane Jenny forgot it was winter. The woman was making little noises, moans even, and her hands snaked up to dig into Dylan’s hair. Or maybe the point was to arch her body into his.

For his part, Dylan was wearing nothing but a pair of low-slung jeans. Everything else was bare skin, acres and acres of golden, perfectly packaged male beauty. It wasn’t that Jenny hadn’t noticed that Dylan was shockingly attractive, because of course she had. She wasn’t blind. It was just that he was Dylan. And normally, when she saw women leaving him, she only saw the women looking starry-eyed.

She’d never seen an actual action scene before.

The kiss went on and on. Dylan’s hand, which Jenny had never noticed was so big or quite so strong looking, was on the woman’s ass, holding her in the perfect place for him to—

But surely that was breaking the bonds of friendship. Surely she shouldn’t imagine what he was doing with that part of his body. Particularly not what was making them both make those sounds.

And Jenny felt as if she’d been cast in stone and made into a statue of foolish astonishment, right there outside his house. Because she couldn’t move. She couldn’t pick up her bag and slink off in shame to hide off around the corner, at the very least, until this ended.

One way or another.

The embarrassment was so great that she felt her entire body heat up, and a melting sort of sensation sink through the center of her, seeming to pool down low.

She told herself it had to be shame. Because what else could make her cheeks so hot?

He murmured something into the woman’s ear that Jenny couldn’t hear. It made the woman sigh a little, then nod. The leg she had hooked over his hip slid to the ground, and Jenny watched as Dylan kept a hand on her body, steadying her.

“All right, then?” he asked.

“All right,” the woman said softly, then smiled in a way that made something curl around and around inside Jenny.

All that heat and the melting, too, until she wasn’t sure she could breathe.

Then they both turned, and of course, Jenny was still standing right there. Her cheeks so crisp and bright they hurt.

But that didn’t hold her attention. What did was the way Dylan was looking at her.

Because for a moment, she didn’t recognize him.

There was something in that green gaze of his that she had never seen before. Something fierce. Hot and dark and dangerous, when Dylan was the least dangerous man she’d ever met. His face changed, too. He seemed bigger, harder, wilder—

And as long as that kiss had gone on, this moment stretched out even longer.

Jenny had the strangest notion that she had lost something. That something had shifted, permanently. It was that seismic. It was that terrifying.

Nothing will ever be the same, a voice in her whispered.

But he blinked.

Then he smiled, and was Dylan again.

“Christ, Jenny,” he said, his voice filled with laughter and charm and above all, safety. The way it usually was. “What the bloody hell are you doing in Australia?”

CHAPTER TWO

DYLAN KILBURN WAS used to this dream.

He’d had it enough, though usually when he dreamed of Jenny appearing before him she was wearing a whole lot less.

“I should have told you I was coming,” she was saying, and that was another clue that he wasn’t dreaming this.

Because his fantasies weren’t about Jenny sounding apologetic. Or tired.

They were far more energetic. Athletic, even.

And Dylan was only dimly aware of the woman he’d been kissing moments before. The eager Corrine, who had woken him up with her mouth on his cock, and who, if he was completely honest, he’d closed his eyes and imagined was Jenny at several points last night. Because that was how fucked-up he was. He’d been telling himself he was at a place of peace with how twisted he was, but that had been more convincing when the real Jenny wasn’t…right here.

He shot Corrine a smile, turning while he did it so he could help usher her out of his door, because he’d never been a gentleman, had he?

“You really do have a queue, don’t you?” Corrine asked.

But she sounded good-natured, not jealous or upset. Dylan did pride himself on that. He liked them to leave happy, satisfied and under no illusions about the possibility of any feelings cropping up.

“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.

That fucking ring.

“You must think I’m mad,” she said after she took a slug of her tea.

She kept the mug in her hands, her legs curled up beneath her in the chair, and it turned out the Australian sun loved her as much as the English rain always had. It brought out the hints of gold in her hair, the prettiest brown he’d ever seen. It was longer now, and she’d piled it up on top of her head in a manner he knew most women spent hours to achieve. But not Jenny. Everything about her was elegant and effortless, from that delicate collarbone he could see beneath the collar of her shirt, to those cheekbones that seemed to make her dark eyes brighter.

And that mouth that had made him hungry as long as he’d known her.

“I do think you’re mad,” he agreed, lazily. “But then, I always have. So you turning up at my door on a random Saturday doesn’t change a thing.” She was flushed, he noticed, and it almost seemed as if she was having trouble meeting his eyes. “Are you embarrassed about something?”

“It’s a bit cold, don’t you think?” she asked, after a moment. And then, to his astonishment, fluttered her hand in his direction, as if to encompass his whole body. “Shouldn’t you…put that away?”

If it was any other woman, he would have taken great pleasure in the notion that his nakedness made her…flutter.

But Dylan had the distinction of being Jenny’s friend. Her best friend, she often said, an honor he shared with only one other person on this earth. And he’d always liked crazy, reckless Erika Vanderburg well enough, but he knew full well there was no possible way she loved Jenny as much as he did. Because nobody could.

And the consistent theme in their friendship was that Jenny resolutely refused to see him as a man. He was going to remember the fluttering. And that flush.

“I’m not cold,” he told her.

Which was true enough. The slap of the breeze was a good thing. It helped remind him that this wasn’t one of those fantasies he’d had so many times. That whatever reason Jenny had for being here, it was not to fling off her clothes and climb on top of him at last.

His body needed to calm the fuck down.

“This really is a lovely house,” she was saying, like she was at a tea party. “The pictures you sent years back really didn’t do it justice. I love how it sort of flows, doesn’t it, from room to room, and then of course the view must really—”

“Fucking hell, Jenny.”

She blew out a breath. “I needed to get away. I need to…think about some things.”

He nodded toward the gigantic rock weighing down her left hand. The symbol of what he’d known would come, sooner or later. Jenny was always going to get married, and he’d accepted that, too, hadn’t he? He’d always been a realist.

But accepting it in the abstract was a lot easier than the ring in his face. And her here.

“Marriage is a big step,” was all he said.

“Yes,” she agreed, too quickly. “But Conrad is a good choice. Really. Some of the men my father sent me out on dates with were awful.”

“Do you love him?”

He shouldn’t have asked that. Because he really didn’t want to know the answer.

And he didn’t need to see her look of astonishment. “Love him? Oh, no.” She shook her head. “Certainly not.” She considered her tea for a moment, then brightened. “But maybe someday I will. They say that arranged marriages—”

“Stability isn’t the same thing as love,” Dylan interrupted her. He should know. It was a challenge to remain relaxed in his chair, but he did it. “And I think you’ll find that friendship, however intense, is no substitute for passion.”

Interestingly, that flush seemed to deepen. She busied herself with her mug of tea, once again seeming…flustered.

“You would be the expert on that,” she said softly.

But distinctly.

Dylan hadn’t touched his tea. He thought longingly of the bottle of whiskey he had inside, aged to perfection, but he knew nothing took the edge off the Jenny effect. Nothing ever had, nothing ever would.

“You know me.” He forced the easy grin that would make most of the people who knew him do a double take. Because Dylan Kilburn was edgy, not easy. But Jenny didn’t know that Dylan. “As long as they leave happy.”

“She seemed very happy.” Jenny nodded in the vague direction of the street. “The one downstairs.”

“Mission accomplished, then.”

“What exactly is it that you do?” she asked, and her gaze was direct. “To her. To them. In general.”

He kept the grin going. “Do you want me to draw you a manual?”

“In all the years I’ve known you,” she said, as if she was carefully sounding out her words, “no matter how many women you sleep with or if they overlap, they always leave delighted. And thanking you. Why?”

“That’s a bit hurtful.” He lifted a brow. “Surely even you can appreciate what a piece of eye candy I am, Jenny.”

A shameless attempt to get her to ogle him, he was well aware. But Jenny didn’t take the bait. She kept her gaze on his, which was both disappointing and arousing, a sensation he was all too used to.

“There are a lot of good-looking men, Dylan. But with you it’s something different.”

“Irish charm?”

“There are a lot of Irish charmers, too. Hence the name.”

Dylan had been studying Jenny for years. Today she had shadows beneath her eyes, which he blamed on the long flight. She looked tired, but it was more than that. More than travel, clearly. It was the way she was holding her head, deliberately, as if fighting back some kind of strong emotion. She seemed more fragile than usual.

Dylan had once been called a grinning bloody shark by a business associate—and it hadn’t been meant as an insult—because he could smile nicely while eviscerating his opponents. Because he’d been raised up in a bleak, hard place and it was in him, too, that bleakness. That hardness. It was what made him rich. And he liked his sex the way he liked his many business deals and everything else in this life he’d built entirely with his own hands—completely under his control.

There had only ever been one shred of softness in him. Her.

And she had no clue.

It was almost funny, really.

“Did you really fly all the way to Australia to quiz me about my sex life?” he asked.

“I’m getting married,” she said, and he didn’t make a face or roll his eyes at the unnecessary obviousness of that statement, because she was looking at him so intently. “And I know that many women in my position don’t intend to keep their wedding vows, but I do. Or I don’t see the point of being married.”

He was long past the point where mentions of her boyfriends, or dates or various other relationships with lesser men got to him—but that didn’t mean he wanted to sit around and talk about her marital vows.

Though he would.

“Is he planning to extend you the same courtesy?”

“He said he would.” Jenny shrugged. It was a sharp, almost bitter sort of movement. “But I think we both know that’s easier said than done. For him, I mean.”

“A promise is a promise, Jenny.”

“I don’t think he cares,” she said, then, and not as if it hurt her. As if it was a simple, small truth. “You’re the only one I can say this to. But Conrad is a very cold man. I think if he decides to shut himself off, he will, and that’s that.”

“He sounds grand.”

The look she sent him then was reproving, but that was an improvement, to his mind.

“Part of me thinks that this is the best it can be, given the situation.” She propped her tea mug on her curled-up legs. “Most people with our sort of arrangement wouldn’t dream of expecting fidelity. It’s a lovely bonus.”

Dylan rubbed a hand over his face. “If you say so.”

“I wouldn’t want to be embarrassed.” She frowned down at her mug. “And you know Erika. I think that’s as much embarrassment as Conrad ever wanted. I don’t think he would cause a scandal.”

“Are you trying to tell me that your man doesn’t satisfy you?” Dylan asked, possibly with more edge in his voice than was needed. “Because there are books you could read, or you could have rung up, Jen. No need to go to such lengths.”

“Oh, I don’t know if he… I mean, we’ve never…” She scowled at him. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“You’re going to marry a man who you’ve never had sex with.” He shook his head, though it kicked at him. Or maybe that was his heart, trying to crack his ribs wide open. “I’ll be honest, there’s a lot I don’t understand about you. But this might take the bloody cake.”

“It wasn’t as if the dates we went on were romantic,” she protested. “And then he proposed, very quickly, which would be strange and off-putting if things were romantic—but this was never about that. So why not go along quickly? And what’s the point of trying it out ahead of time? It isn’t going to make a difference. Good or bad, we’re stuck with it either way.”

He wanted to break something. “For fuck’s sake.”

“I didn’t come all this way to debate whether or not I should marry Conrad. I’ve already agreed to do it. It’s a done deal.”

“You do know what year it is? Fathers don’t get to go around selling off daughters. You have a say.”

“Of course I have a say.” Dylan beat down his temper enough to notice she didn’t look upset. She looked annoyed. At him. “If I didn’t want to get married, I wouldn’t. It’s not as if my father would force me down the aisle with a gun to my back. You’ve met him. You know he’s not like that.”

Dylan certainly had met Lord Fuckface, who had sneered down the length of his nose at the likes of Dylan Kilburn, Irish trash, anywhere near his precious daughter.

Or that was how Dylan assumed the man had felt. It was how he imagined he’d feel if he had a daughter—especially a daughter like Jenny.

“Sure, and he’s a real peach.”

“It’s just that once I get married, that’s it,” Jenny said, ignoring his comment on her father. Having lectured him more than once on how shit it was to dislike people simply because they were richer than him—not an issue he had much any longer. “It will be however it is with Conrad, and I’ve already made my peace with that. We’ll have children and a good life. I’m sure of it.”

“As long as you’re sure.”

He didn’t point out that her presence on his deck suggested otherwise.

She glared at him. “It’s something Erika said. It’s something she’s always said, actually. But I guess it feels a little more urgent these days.”

“I’m not sure I would take advice from the likes of Erika,” Dylan said mildly. “Unless you have a hankering to go clubbing. For a year.”

He had no quarrel with Erika. She was a gorgeous little mess and always had been. The only reason Dylan hadn’t tried it on with her back in Oxford was because she’d been so close with Jenny. And Dylan was never going to do anything that might create a wedge between him and Jenny—especially her friend.

“She settled down,” Jenny told him. “Quite seriously, actually.”

Dylan laughed. “Are we talking about the same Erika?”

“I know.” Jenny grinned. “But yes. She’s even going back to Oxford to finish her degree.”

“Is she now.” Dylan laughed, and it wasn’t forced. “I’ll be damned. I wouldn’t think it would matter to a trust fund princess if she finished a degree or not.”

“I told you. She’s turned over a new leaf.”

“I can’t abide people with every advantage in the world pissing it away. Good on her.” He eyed Jenny more closely. “Do you feel you need to turn over a new leaf too? I don’t even know what that would look like. Saint Jenny, queen of good works, got a first, as I recall.”

“I understand academics,” she was saying, with that passion in her voice that made his cock ache, though it was never directed where he wanted it. “And I love the charity. It makes me feel good to help, if I can. To be honest, I still love the role I played for my father. We’re all we have.”

The way she said that tore at him, and kept him quiet. He didn’t understand the bargains she made with her father. Dylan’s contact with his own relatives was limited to their semiannual attempts to extort money from him, which they’d started during his time at Oxford, so he could only assume that having a family member he loved would be a transformative experience that could possibly lead to arranged marriages. Or something.

But they’d spent years comparing and contrasting their families and upbringings without Jenny turning up in Australia. This didn’t quite seem like the time to continue that conversation.

“It’s beginning to feel like you’re leading up to something here.” And it was harder to keep his voice mildly lazy. To produce that friendly grin. “Better get to it. The suspense is killing me.”

“Sex,” she said.

For a curious moment, Dylan thought something must have plummeted from the sky above and hit him in the head.

His ears rung. He was almost light-headed.

But no. He wasn’t imagining it. His Jenny, forever his friend and decidedly off-limits, was sitting opposite him talking about sex.

Not having a laugh about his revolving bedroom door. Not rolling her eyes at his conquests. She was staring at him with what looked like naked sincerity in her eyes, and…blowing his mind.

“Did you just say sex?” he asked, because he had to make sure.

He expected her to laugh. To roll her eyes at him and call him a pervert for hearing sex everywhere.

But instead, she nodded, her eyes big. “Erika says I’ve never been fucked properly.”

Very seriously, God help him.

And Dylan would never know how it was that he stayed where he was. Lounging back in a chair on his deck on a lovely Saturday morning, while joggers ran heedlessly by on the coastal walk, seabirds careened about in the air and Jenny Markham had flown all the way down to Sydney to talk to him about fucking.

He would never know how he remained calm.

“Well?” he asked, casually. As if this entire conversation didn’t feel, suddenly, as if he’d sustained a series of knockout blows and was reeling about blind. And wanting things he couldn’t have. “Have you?”

CHAPTER THREE

THERE WAS SOMETHING about that intent look on Dylan’s face, the patience in his green eyes. The way he asked her a question and then waited. Like he could wait forever, if that was what it took.

It made Jenny feel safe. But then, he always did. She could tell Dylan anything.

Even things she was afraid to tell herself.

“I think maybe I’m bad at it,” she confessed.

Something flashed over his face then, some dark gleam, that reminded her of that moment out in front of his house. When she’d stared at his familiar face and hadn’t recognized him at all.

Deep inside her, something clicked. Then flared into life, but she ignored it. Because she was here, in his house. With him. And wherever Dylan was, she could depend on him to keep them inside his bubble. Where everything was always okay.

And if it wasn’t, he would fight it off.

“Not possible,” he told her, a strange note in his voice.

“You don’t know that it’s not possible,” Jenny argued. “Because here’s the thing. I’ve never staggered off after having sex with someone giddy and filled with joy the way that girl did today. And I certainly don’t leave anyone in that state.”

She expected him to leap in, to contradict her, but he didn’t. Because Dylan let her tell her own story. How had she forgotten how freeing that was? How he allowed to her relax and really, truly say what she felt?

Then again, she was here. Maybe she hadn’t forgotten.

“Everyone talks about sex like it’s a compulsion. Passion and desire. Need. This hunger that takes them over.” She shook her head, and frowned at him. His legs were thrust out before him, highlighting the powerful muscles in his thighs. How had she never noticed his thighs before? Because she doubted they’d cropped up overnight. “Is that what it’s like for you?”

“I wouldn’t bother otherwise, would I?”

“It’s never that way for me.” Jenny took a breath, flipped over that ugly little stone she’d never wanted to look beneath and reminded herself that this was Dylan. That she could say anything to him. “I think maybe I really am frigid. Or broken, somehow.”

He didn’t sit with that in a solemn, concerned silence, as she’d expected he would. He rolled his eyes and didn’t look the least bit shaken by her declaration. “For fuck’s sake. Because that wanker told you so? A hundred years ago now? Real men don’t berate women for their own piss-poor performance in bed.”

Jenny had dated Christopher for two months that had seemed like a lifetime during term time their third year. A relationship—such as it was—that had ended after they’d slept together, he’d informed her that she was crap at sex, and he’d moved on to manipulate a wide-eyed first-year into his bed instead. A real charmer, that Christopher.

But.

“Christopher was renowned for being good in bed, Dylan,” Jenny argued. “You like to pretend you can’t remember, but girls used to go around swooning left and right every time he smiled.”

“When he smiled, sure. After he embarrassed himself in their beds? Not near as much swooning, as I recall.” Dylan crossed his arms, which should have made him look angry. But when Jenny studied his face, his expression was bland. Maybe too bland. “It was his job to make you come, Jenny. Everything else was a load of shite mixed with mind games to disguise the fact he was a selfish prick.”

Dylan had growled the same response at her during their final year at uni, but she couldn’t remember all this…prickly heat.

“No one is good or bad at sex unless they try,” Dylan continued, sounding even more growly. “It’s sex, not surgery. Sometimes people have mad chemistry, which takes it all to a different level. But you don’t need astonishing chemistry to have good sex, Jenny. You can have good sex if you want it. It’s that simple.”

“I can tell you that it is not, in fact, that simple.”

“It isn’t a spot of calisthenics,” Dylan said, and again, there was something about how relentlessly bland he looked that made the back of her neck prickle. Even more than before. “Supposed skill or experience matters far less than what I’d call…” And he smiled then, in that friendly way he had that made her want to smile, too. “Observant enthusiasm.”

She wanted to smile, but she didn’t. “I have no idea what that means.”

His expression didn’t change and yet…there was that strange flickering thing inside her again. “Do you pay attention, Jenny? Do you think about something other than getting yourself off when you’re naked with someone else? I’m betting you do.”

There was no reason for her to be…breathless.

But Dylan didn’t give her time to respond, even if she’d managed to find breath. “But I’d also bet that if you’re finding sex lacking, it’s a commentary on your partner, not you. It was true years ago and it’s true now.”

Jenny frowned and tried to look stern, not prickly and strangely overwarm though she sat beneath a cozy blanket and was bundled up nicely against the cool breeze—unlike some people, who were bare chested and barefoot. “That’s a bit sexist, isn’t it?”

“I’ve seen the men you date. So, no, it’s not sexist. It’s an informed opinion.” He did something with his face that made him look harder. Flintier, even. “And it’s not hard to make a man come, Jenny. That’s why it’s on him to make sure you do, or why bother to have sex with another person? He could just have a wank and be done with it.”

All of this suddenly seemed a lot less safe than it had before. Maybe it was the exhaustion messing with her, but he kept talking about coming and now she was imagining him handling his own cock, that same fierce look on his face she’d seen outside while he—

Stop, she ordered herself.

She was so horrified she was afraid she might spill her tea all over his lovely deck, so she took great care to set it carefully to the side on the table there.

And maybe that wasn’t precisely horror that coursed through her veins then, making her shift beneath the blanket he’d draped over her. Making her aware of her own pussy when normally, she saved such awareness for the privacy of her own bed.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Jenny made herself say in as dry and unaffected a voice as she could manage. “I like sex. Sometimes I quite like it.”

“Damned with faint praise.”

“Let’s talk about you, Dylan.”

She concentrated on him then, and the whole golden sweep of him that she’d been trying her best not to gape at. Without much success. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on the man. He was nothing but ridiculously lean muscle wherever she looked, and for all that he was meant to be a CEO forever in meetings, he clearly spent time in the sun. A lot of time. And then there was the hair that arrowed down beneath the waistband of his jeans, and made her need to shift a bit in her chair. Again.

Her mouth was dry. She told herself it was the sudden immersion in winter, the lack of sleep and all the rest of this strange and endless day.

“You’re doing something different,” she told him, as if she’d conducted an academic study. “I’ve met a lot of men who sleep with loads of women, and they’re all pigs. But you’re not.”

“Careful, or you’ll make me blush.”

“I can’t figure out what it is. Why are all those women so happy all the time? You toss them out, but they’d all gag for another chance. I’ve watched it happen. You’re this…magician.”

“Are you asking me a question, Jenny? Or leaving a review?”

And suddenly, it didn’t matter where they were. How tired she was. All the other things she’d been telling herself this whole time.

Dylan sat there across from her, and suddenly the sweet sea air between them was taut. And his gaze changed, the green of it shaded with a certain glittering thing she couldn’t understand.

But she felt it. And she felt naked, suddenly.

Because the actual reason she’d come here was so clear to her, then.

All the fuss and noise she kicked up around it, telling herself this lie and that lie as she’d gotten on the plane, all the many hours she flew, and then when she’d come to find him, too. Telling herself she was safe and she wanted his advice and she wanted to talk.

So many lies, and all of them boiled down to this. Here. Now.

That look in his eyes like she wasn’t the only one imagining things she shouldn’t.

Jenny didn’t want his advice.

She wanted him to show her.

And he was sitting so still, so intent, that she had the distinct impression he knew it.

Her heart pounded in her chest, so hard she was certain it had to have bruised her ribs.

But she couldn’t look away.

And her mouth was so dry.

Everything inside her was tied in a knot, pulling tighter and tighter and tighter, daring her to open her mouth and say the thing she wanted even if it meant changing them forever—

And that was the thing she couldn’t do.

She couldn’t.

“I’m not leaving a review or asking a question,” she managed to say, though there was a bitter taste in her mouth. “It’s an enthusiastic observation, that’s all. I hear they’re all the rage.”

Across from her, Dylan didn’t seem to move. But he changed, again. That tension dissipated. And she couldn’t help but imagine she saw a shade of disappointment in those green eyes of his.

She told herself she had to be imagining it. That she had to be imagining all of this. Because the alternative was that he was no longer Dylan and she was no longer Jenny, and that meant there was no them—and she could do almost anything. She could make anything work, as her engagement proved.

But she couldn’t lose Dylan. She could survive anything but that.

“I think you should eat something,” he said, quietly. Years could have passed, for all she knew, tangled up as she was inside. “Have a bit of a kip. Maybe even shower off the plane ride. What do you reckon?”

And for the first time in as long as she’d known him, when he smiled at her she thought it might break her heart.

But she couldn’t have said why.

Because you don’t want to say why, something in her retorted.

Either way, she didn’t say it. Jenny only nodded, didn’t quite meet his eyes again and let him lead her back into his house.

Later, Jenny was sure she’d imagined all that tension. Those strange moments out in the bright winter sunlight on the bottom of the world. They all seemed lashed together like a dream, green eyes and the memory of Dylan’s smile, none of it making any sense when she tried to recapture them or think it all through.

Better to forget and move on, she told herself staunchly.

Dylan’s guest room was on the back side of the house. It had its own bit of a balcony, so she could wake in the mornings and bask in all that lovely Australian sunshine. Outside her room she could inhale the fragrance of all the flowers and pretty green things as she peered down the side of the building to see the sea, like a beckoning wall of blue.

She fetched herself a cup of tea from the kitchen and sat out on her balcony quietly. In the space between the buildings, she could imagine she lived here when, of course, she didn’t. And couldn’t. Her life was in England.

Though you’ll be living in France soon enough, the voice inside her pointed out. Still sounding entirely too much like Erika. Conrad’s base is in Paris.

Several days into her impromptu stay in Sydney’s lovely eastern suburbs, Jenny found herself pondering that potential reality. Conrad’s business took him all over the world. Just because he liked to call Paris home didn’t mean she needed to do the same…did it? The automatic relocation expected when people married wouldn’t be expected of an arranged wife, surely. She glared down at the rock on her hand as if it might have the answers, but it was as quiet and overlarge as ever.

And thinking about Conrad and Paris and the rest of the marital decisions she couldn’t quite face made her feel a bit too close to wobbly. She decided she was too restless to stay on the little balcony off the guest room, spiraling into her own unfortunate thoughts, so she padded out into the rest of the main floor of the house instead. It was organized so that the rooms were stacked one in front of the next, with a hallway down the middle that opened up into the streamlined chef’s kitchen. Beyond that, the vast lounge with its spectacular view of the ocean outside ambled out to the deck. And up above, taking over the whole of the top floor, was the master bedroom.

Dylan had showed it to her not long after she arrived as part of his general tour of the house. And maybe it had something to do with those strange moments she was already forgetting, but she’d found it…unsettling up there. That big, wide bed with its four sturdy posters and what looked like wrought iron at the head. And windows all around, floor-to-ceiling high in some places, letting in what felt like the whole of this stretch of the coast and the sweep of the Tasman Sea, until it seemed as if anyone in the room was a part of the sea itself. Or the man who lived there.

She preferred her little balcony downstairs. Or the neutrality of the kitchen, where she headed now. She put the kettle on, and found herself staring out the window, in that half a dream state that seemed to accompany any proper gaze at all that deep, changeable blue.

Jenny should head straight back to England. She knew that. After she’d slept, eaten and showered as ordered that first day, she’d sat down and sent off a raft of emails to explain her absence to all and sundry. She told the charity she needed a bit of personal time, and laid out all the reasons why she thought her second-in-command was more than capable of stepping into the role. She wrote her second-in-command, apologizing for the short notice, but making sure the woman she’d handpicked knew that it was her very competence that had made Jenny so sure she could slip away.

It was true, she’d realized as she wrote it all out, even though she might not have thought it through before she’d gotten on that plane.

She emailed her father—or rather, his personal secretary—and felt badly about the relief she felt because she didn’t have to have an actual conversation with him. Because she already knew what he’d say. Or rather, how he would sound while he said it. And he was far too good at triggering her guilt. That it was unintentional on his part, and always motivated by concern, somehow always made her feel more guilty.

The truth was, Jenny didn’t feel guilty at the moment. She didn’t want to feel guilty.

I’ve decided to take a little break, she had texted Erika.

I support this move completely, her best friend had fired back. I hope a beach is involved. Cabana boys and cocktails.

More or less, Jenny had replied. And it had still been that first night, so that strange fear had washed over her, gripping her tight. I’m in Sydney.

And she’d stared down at her mobile, watching as the three dots that indicated Erika was typing appeared. Then disappeared.

Appeared again. Then disappeared once more.

She’d been sitting in the guest room then, her feet crossed beneath her as she sat in the armchair in the corner of the room. She’d stared at her phone, nervously worrying her knuckle between her teeth.

Tell Dylan I say hello, came the reply, at last.

And that was all.

But it didn’t matter. Erika knew. And if Jenny let herself think about it, it was likely that Erika knew a whole lot more than the two of them had ever discussed directly. Like those moments with Dylan, taut and strange, that Jenny had been pretending not to notice for years now. And yet none of them as intense as what had happened here.

It took her two days to remember that she ought to let Conrad know where she was, too.

Have gone off to Sydney, she wrote him, feeling as stiff as the words sounded when she stared at them on her screen. I don’t expect to be gone too long.

Conrad’s reply had come swiftly. Please update my assistant with return date.

Just in case Jenny had been tempted to romanticize something that had nothing to do with romance. She told herself that what she’d felt, then, staring at his message, was peace. Relief.

She told herself that was what she felt now, too.

“What are you scowling at?” came Dylan’s low voice from behind her.

Jenny jumped, then turned that scowl on him. And immediately wished she hadn’t.

Because Dylan worked on that marvelous body of his. There was a gym in the house, where he put in at least an hour a day, but he also liked to run. He’d introduced her to the coastal walk that stretched from Bondi Beach to the north down to Brontë in the south, and Jenny had taken to walking it on fine mornings, breathing in deep. Letting the Tasman Sea breeze and the lovely Australian sunshine dance over her face like happiness. Stopping here and there to gaze at the water or take pictures from the rocky cliffs.

Dylan ran it.

She could tell that he’d been out on the run already this morning, because he wore nothing but a pair of athletic shorts, and he was…gleaming.

Sweating, she corrected herself crossly.

She should have been revolted. But he didn’t smell bad. He smelled clean. Male. And the sweat of his exertion only made him look better, somehow. It made his green eyes gleam brightly, and Jenny felt reduced to a stuttering, bumbling mess.

It happened more and more the longer she stayed here. One more reason she should leave.

“I’m not scowling,” she told him, ignoring all that gleaming. “I was thinking about business-related things. I’m so far away I keep pretending England doesn’t exist. But it does.”

“Last I heard, yes.” He sounded amused as he went to the refrigerator, and pulled out the makings of the shake he put together every morning. Several different powders she assumed were proteins and superfoods and whatever else it was health nuts liked to put in themselves to keep up with all the gleaming. Green things and antioxidants and worthy supplements packed with vitamins. The very opposite of the full English breakfast she remembered him tucking into with gusto on hungover Oxford mornings.

There was no reason for her to be here, but she leaned against the counter, her mug of strong tea in her hands and watched. Dylan fixed himself his drink then chugged it down, tipping back his head so she could hardly help but stare at the strong column of his throat. And all the lines, planes and ridges of that body he worked so hard on almost entirely exposed to her view.

She studied the tattoo on his back, the line of Gaelic down his spine and the Celtic knot he wore over his heart. Why did she want to put her hands on him so badly? To trace those tattoos she recognized like old friends, to remind herself how well they suited him and how easily he wore them.

Because you need to go home, she told herself sternly.

“I’m headed into the office,” Dylan said. And when he looked at her, his green gaze swept over her the way it always did, after that first conversation. Friendly. Happy. Not complicated in the least.

There was no reason it should make her teeth ache, so hard that she clenched them.

“The housekeeping service will be in,” he continued mildly, though something about the way he looked at her made her unclench her teeth. “I told them to expect a guest on the premises, so don’t be put off if you wake from a nap to find someone hoovering up the place.”

“I won’t be here,” she said grandly. And without thinking it through. “I’m going to do a bit of the tourist thing.”

“And here I thought you planned to waft up and down the coastal path again.” He studied her. “You should roam about Circular Quay and the Rocks. Take the ferries all over Sydney Harbour. Get a sense of the place.”

Jenny had spent most of her life charging around doing this or that, but not since she’d arrived in Australia. All she wanted to do was stay tucked up in Dylan’s house, or lost in her own head as she wandered up and down what had to be the most beautiful walk in the world. It hugged the coastline, meandering through the beach towns and around a haunting cemetery set into the side of a cliff, over the ocean pools, up the rocks and down again. When the sun was out it could be warm enough to feel like summer while other days it was moody. She loved it either way.

But she’d announced she was off to play tourist, so that was what she was going to do.

“I’ll drive you in then,” Dylan said, with a grin.

And that was how, scarcely forty-five minutes later, she found herself sitting in an outrageously flash sports car, prowling through the morning traffic toward the Sydney Central Business District.

“I have to make a confession,” she said as they waited at a light. She glanced over at him, dressed in his usual uniform of jeans and a T-shirt—which should have looked ratty and casual and student-y, but didn’t. Not the way he wore them. “I had no idea you worked this hard. You underplayed it.”

Dylan laughed. “Maybe I wanted you to think it was effortless.”

“You work all the time,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know when you sleep. No matter what time I wake up, jetlagged and victimized by the time change, you’re always awake. You take phone calls night and day. And yet you still have time to go on runs and toss weights around in your gym. I thought I was busy, but you’re a right superhero.”

“I do run a company, Jenny,” he said, in a tone of mock reproach. But she was caught up in the way he propped his arm up on the steering wheel, and it was difficult to tell which was more powerful, the car or the man. “It can’t run on its own.”

“It’s just so…”

“Surprising?” Dylan supplied.

And he laughed when he said it, but she didn’t think he was kidding.

“Impressive,” she corrected him. “I was going to say it was impressive.”

The look he threw her way was unreadable, but then traffic surged forward, and he put his attention back onto the road. And then, before she could ask him something, or say those things she kept biting back, his mobile rang the way it always did. And he answered it the way he always did, because he was far busier than she’d ever imagined, and he launched himself back into another business conversation.

Jenny told herself she’d imagined her reaction to him when he pulled up to a curb on a city street some time later, told her to walk straight ahead and indicated that she should get out. But when she reached over to open the door, his hand grabbed her arm, stopping her.

It made her feel jagged inside. Scraped up. His hand was big and hard over her forearm and his eyes were so green. And something about Dylan looking at her so intently made her think she might shake. She wanted to, anyway.

“I’ll meet you later,” he told her, gruffly. “At the Opera Bar at the Opera House. Eight o’clock.”

“It’s a date,” she said, brightly.

And immediately regretted her choice of words.

But she didn’t have time to stammer about it, or take it back. Or even qualify what she’d said.

Because Dylan smiled, and it was an edgy thing, wired directly into that jaggedness within her. “I’ll see you then.”

And Jenny found herself out on the street, then walking, oblivious to her surroundings. Because all she could see was that look on his face.

Which is why it took her a moment, after she’d walked down the block and under a rail overpass the way he’d told her to, to realize where she was.

He’d dropped her a block away from a walkway that led around to the iconic opera house itself. And the Sydney Harbour Bridge. And the gleaming, beautiful water of the harbor itself, cut through by the green-and-yellow ferries. And sailboats catching the wind.

It was like standing in a postcard.

And later, Jenny couldn’t have said which one of those things made the tears begin to stream down her face. Only that she cried, and she couldn’t believe that a place she’d seen on television a thousand times was far more beautiful than she ever could have imagined.

And that somehow, even though she was standing there on a bright winter morning, crying her eyes out in the middle of the streams of Sydneysiders and tourists, so very far away from England and the world she knew, she had never felt quite so at home in her life.

CHAPTER FOUR

DYLAN HAD RESIGNED himself years ago to the fact that he clearly loved a hair shirt. He liked to suffer, obviously. What other explanation was there for a hopeless, unrequited love that stretched on past hope, past reason, and insinuated itself into every interaction he had with other women?

Aren’t you just a fecking martyr, his older brother Dermot had sneered at him, there in their grotty flat in the tower block of the estate—now happily demolished—when Dylan had announced that he was going up to Oxford. He might as well have said he was going to the moon. Oxford made about as much sense to his sprawling, vicious family hunkered down poor and addicted in the land of saints and scholars. The more you suffer, the better you feel about yourself.

Dermot had talked a metric ton of shite, but that particular dig stayed with him.

And if he’d ever had any doubt, that was gone now. Because there was carrying a torch, which Dylan had done for years now whether he liked to admit it or not. And then there was Jenny in his house. Living under the same roof. Jenny looking soft and sleepy, shuffling around his kitchen. Jenny lost in thought, gazing out over the rail on his deck.

When they’d been at university together, he’d known things about her. Intimate things that could only come from daily interaction. That she worried a lock of her hair around and around one finger while she studied. Or when she was nervous, she worked a knuckle between her teeth. The way she hummed beneath her breath, always off tune, when she was happy. The awkward, yet endearing, way she danced to the endlessly cheesy music she liked.

Since graduation, those things had faded. When he saw her now, there was always so much less time. A dinner here. Drinks there. He texted her more than anyone else he knew, combined, but it wasn’t the same as those stolen intimacies. It couldn’t be. And he would have said he’d accepted all that, long since.

But she’d been here almost a week and they were building up again, those encyclopedia entries that together made up Jenny. She still twirled her hair when she was miles away, lost in thought. She still bit down on that knuckle.

She no longer hummed beneath her breath, which Dylan felt like a shocking loss. But one morning, when he’d been heading out on the long, hard runs he took to keep his goddamned hands to himself, he’d found himself standing outside the door to the guest room. She’d been in the shower and he’d heard the water running, but that wasn’t what kept him there, frozen still. It was Jenny, singing an egregiously bad pop song from their Oxford days, as tuneless as ever.

His cock had been rock hard and his grin had been wide, and a bigger fool could not possibly have existed on God’s green earth. And the desperate notion he’d formed over these last years when he only saw her sporadically, that familiarity would breathe a little much-needed contempt…

If anything, the opposite was true. It was worse now.

Much, much worse.

Because this time around, Dylan wasn’t the overwhelmed, out-of-his-depth Irish kid on cobbled-together financial assistance, lost in the Bodleian. He was no longer afraid that he might betray himself completely and start tugging on his forelock to the English overlords, or something equally horrifying. He wasn’t crushed under the pressure of his own ambition and need to climb up out of that hole his family had been in for generations, not anymore. Over the years, he’d told himself that if he ever got the chance to spend quality time with Jenny again, he would see that it had only ever been a crush. He’d been a poor kid from the worst estate in Dublin, surrounded by toffs and unsurprisingly drawn to the kindest and prettiest among them.

But the truth was that he had never been much of a kid. Children in his old neighborhood grew up fast, or not at all. By the time he’d gone up to Oxford, he’d been like an old, weary man next to the soft public schoolboys and pampered Oxford dons.

Maybe that was why he still, all these years later, was as destroyed by Jenny as if he’d only just met her.

Something he was sure he would feel more bitter about later. When she left him, the way he knew she would, and fucked off back to England. And that terrible arranged marriage of hers. And bloody Conrad Vanderburg, who was as approachable as a spot of freezer burn and would crush all the joy and Jenny out of her.

He would enjoy this time. Jenny here, now. He wouldn’t expect anything. And he wouldn’t be disappointed. He would enjoy it, if only because he had the distinct impression that this was the last part of her life she would enjoy, too.

Dylan had been whatever she needed him to be for as long as he’d known her. He could do it this one, last time.

Because he knew that it only felt like it might kill him, the weight of this thing he had for her. It never actually did.

That was what he told himself that night, as he dodged tourists on his way to the bar tucked up under Sydney’s famous opera house. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans, glad he’d shrugged on a jacket after his last meeting. He took rather too much pleasure in dressing down, particularly when the client he was meeting with expected rather more of a song and dance.

Jenny was the only member of the landed gentry he had ever bothered to dress up for.

There was a notion to make a man’s blood run cold.

But it told Dylan everything he needed to know about himself—and in truth, he already knew it—that he didn’t tear off the coat he wore and toss it in the harbor. And that when he saw the slim, dark-haired woman standing at a rail near the bar, her eyes on the harbor bridge lit up against the night, he walked faster.

These were the moments he liked the most. The moments right before she turned to look at him. The moments when he could almost believe that this time, when she did, she would finally see him. The real him, which would be some feat, since he’d spent the entirety of their friendship burying the real him as deep as it could go.

He slowed, his eyes locked on her, and it was as if they were all alone instead of in one of the busiest spots in Sydney. She was dressed exactly as she had been when he’d dropped her off this morning, but she didn’t look tired or frazzled. She’d clearly bought a pair of heels to replace the more comfortable shoes she’d been wearing earlier. She’d secured her hair on the back of her head, though tendrils danced in the winter breeze. Because she was Jenny, she’d somehow transformed jeans and a slouchy sweater into something elegant.

She turned her head before he reached her, her gaze finding his in the soft dark.

Dylan forgot to grin the way he usually did. And so did she.

And for the space of a long, slow heartbeat, he was lost in that gaze of hers.

Usually he broke the tension, because that was safer. Because that made sure they stayed right here. On the same ground where they’d always been.

But tonight, he didn’t do it. He went to the rail and bent down so he could rest his forearms on the top of it the way she was doing.

And for a long while, they stood there, not quite touching, staring off toward the bridge together.

“Did you play tourist all day?” he asked, many long breaths and jarring heartbeats later.

“I did.” He didn’t look, but he could hear her smile all the same. “I marched all over the place. I explored the Rocks. I got chocolate from Haigh’s. And I was nearly mowed down by health fanatics jogging around Macquarie Point whilst scoffing it down.”

“Best to stay out of the line of traffic with your sugar and shame, then.”

“I took the ferry out to Manly to have a bit of lunch.”

“A fine beach, that.”

“I rode the ferries all over. Even in the rain. I think I’d quite like to live in a place where I could take a ferry to work. It feels more civilized, somehow. And wild at the same time.”

“Sydney Harbour’s not the Thames,” Dylan said. “But it has its charm.”

“This all feels like a dream.” She was no longer talking about the city, or the water, he knew. “One of those dreams where you’ve fallen, and try to surface again, but can’t. And the longer I stay here, the more it seems as if my life back in England is the dream. I don’t know. Maybe everybody feels that way on holiday.”

He reminded himself that it wasn’t his dream they were discussing here. It was hers. And much as he might like to tell himself different, he knew full well that Jenny was running away from her life. Not taking a holiday. And if he was truly her friend, not just the sad sack bloke who’d mooned about after her all these years, he would take himself out of the equation, wouldn’t he?

“I haven’t forgotten what you said when you arrived,” he said, and he had to look at the bridge because if he looked at her, he wasn’t sure what he would do. Or maybe he was sure. And that was the problem. “It sounds to me that you think you’re missing something. That’s the long and the short of it. But if this marriage is really what you want, the way you say it is, then you’re going to have to accept it. All of it. Not just the bits you can rationalize away.”

“I don’t need to rationalize my marriage,” she said, and he ordered himself not to pay too close attention to how cross she sounded. “You and Erika can’t get your heads around it, but you don’t have to. I know what I’m agreeing to.”

“But you haven’t accepted it, have you? Or you wouldn’t be here. Across the world from where you ought to be right now, calling it a holiday when we both know you’re hiding.”

“I just want to know,” she blurted out. She turned toward him then, and then he was turned toward her as well, and so much for his intentions. “I think this is an act of acceptance. Radical acceptance. I fully comprehend what marrying Conrad will mean. I want one little thing to bring with me. To hold on to, through whatever comes.”

“A different radical suggestion would be not to marry him.”

Jenny’s eyes searched his face, and she sighed a little, then she shocked the hell out of him by reaching over, and taking one of his hands in hers.

“When my mother died, my father and I were devastated,” she said quietly. “My father has never been a warm man, and never will be. But he loved my mother as much as he was capable. And in the years that followed, when it was only the two of us, he made me promise that I would arrange my life with my head, not my heart.”

His system was going haywire because she was holding his hand like that, between hers and up against her chest, and he couldn’t think. He had to force himself to use his big head.

“That sounds like grief talking,” he said, gruffly.

“Maybe so, but it’s not a grief I want to repeat. That’s the promise I’m keeping, Dylan. To my father, first and foremost. He wants me to be safe, not in a position to shatter.”

And Dylan was only a man, after all. He shifted so he was the one holding her hand in his, and it was a kind of agony, really. Her fingers were long and elegant, and he would never sleep again, thinking of the things she could do with them.

But all he did was hold her hand there. Safely. Sweetly, even.

“That you promised your father is all very well,” he said. “But you and I both know that you’ve always been a romantic.”

She pulled her hand away, and he let her, because he had to let her. Her eyes flashed. “I don’t think I’m romantic at all.”

“Please. When that wanker started writing you love poetry, you cried.”

“It was love poetry, Dylan. You’re supposed to cry.”

“It was dreadful. Embarrassing.”

“It was years ago. It was one poem and you were cruel about it then, too.”

“Because you wanted it to be a romance, and it wasn’t. It was an Oxford swot looking to get a leg over. And using pretty words to get the job done.”

“It’s not you who he was trying to get a leg over, so I don’t know why on earth you would care.”

“I don’t care,” he said, and it was a lie. A very old lie, so he said it with tremendous dignity. “I’m simply pointing out that where anyone else would see a right tosser, you saw a poet. You’re romantic, plain and simple.”

“Even if I am, it doesn’t matter, because I’m not planning to act on it. And that’s not why I’m here.”

“Are you ready to tell me, then?”

And he waited, a strange, new kind of energy rising in him as she turned and met his gaze. Looking uneasy, for the first time.

He couldn’t say he minded.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You can hide here as long as you like, Jenny,” Dylan said quietly. “You’re always welcome.”

“I’m not hiding.”

“It’s nothing to me if you wear a groove into the coastal walk while you fret over thinking yourself frigid. Though I will point out that most people, when they want to know about sex, take to the internet. I’m not necessarily advocating that you watch porn, mind. I’m not saying you shouldn’t, either. Maybe you’ll learn something.”

Jenny rolled her eyes. “The last thing I want to do is watch porn.”

“Because you’re too good, is that it?” And he laughed, though he didn’t find it funny. The notion of Jenny and anything pornographic was enough to turn him inside out. “Saint Jenny, Our Lady of Restraint?”

“Of course not.” She frowned at him. “Porn is just fucking. I want to know what it’s like to be fucked properly.”

And he wanted to say something to break the tension inside him. Between them. He wanted to make them both laugh the way he usually did. That was what he should do, and he knew it. It was the only thing that would keep them steady. On even ground, where they needed to stay.

But he didn’t do it.

Jenny stared up at him, and something in her face changed. Maybe it was because he wasn’t grinning. He wasn’t hiding himself. Maybe the truth was, he was tired of all the hiding he’d done all these years.

For a moment, here in the dark with the light of the bridge in the distance and the opera house rising like a wave behind them, he was, for once…himself.

Unfettered.

Unapologetic.

Unleashed, at last.

Jenny made a soft, small noise. Shock, perhaps. Need, something dark within him insisted.

“I didn’t come all the way here to talk about sex,” she said her voice resolute.

“Fucking,” he corrected her, and he really did sound like himself then. Not the happy-go-lucky version of himself he played for her. “The proper fucking you’ve gone without all this time, in fact.”

He watched her swallow, and the way her throat moved. And even that felt like her elegant hands around his cock, holding him. Massaging him.

Driving him fucking crazy.

“I didn’t jump on a plane and fly here to talk about it,” she said, a strange insistence in her words. “I don’t want to talk about it. I want to do it.”

He didn’t help her. He only waited, his gaze on hers, so intent he was sure he must have seemed harsh to her. But she didn’t back down.

“And I don’t want to do it randomly,” she said, her expression every bit as intense as he felt. As he was and always had been. “I want you, Dylan. I want you to show me what it’s like.”

CHAPTER FIVE

JENNY COULDN’T SEEM to regulate herself. Her temperature, the way she shook, her wildly pounding heart.

Because Dylan was still Dylan. But once again, she couldn’t quite recognize the man she knew on the face of the man who stood there beside her.

This Dylan was dangerous.

And the voice that whispered that word inside of her wasn’t Erika’s. Not this time. It was some base of feminine knowledge she wouldn’t have believed existed if she didn’t hear it so clearly. It understood when she didn’t, when she couldn’t, that whatever this was—whoever he was when he changed this way—he wasn’t the easy, lazy, comfortably relaxed friend she knew so well.

“Are you sure?” he asked, and there was that intensity in the way he asked it. And the way he looked at her. And the way he held himself while he did it. “You want me to show you how to fuck?”

Jenny felt her body shift. A shudder turned into a thrill, and wound its way through her as if connected to that same dark intent she could see all over him.

She was aware of her skin, and the way the cool sea air danced over it, soft like a touch. There was some kind of emotion making her eyes feel full, and her breasts scraped against the material of her shirt, tucked beneath her long jumper. Her nipples were so hard she ought to have been freezing cold, but she wasn’t. She was too hot, if anything. A new kind of furnace fanned out from between her legs, where her pussy was a great ache of need and hunger, and all of this would have shocked her if she’d had a moment to process it.

She’d thought she’d been turned on before. She really had quite liked the sex she’d experienced so far. But you knew, something in her whispered. You always knew you were missing something.

And there was no point lying to herself about that any longer. Because she’d come all the way here, hadn’t she? For this. For the way he looked at her now that made her heart stutter. And everything else seem to stutter, too.

Because the Dylan she knew was beautiful, yes, but he wasn’t so…powerful. Not like this. Not as if the Sydney skyline behind him might wink out at any moment, or fade into insignificance, so bright and hot did he burn, just by standing there.

Her breath kept tangling in her throat, there was a kind of weight on her chest and the thing she most wanted to avoid thinking seemed to sneak into her anyway.

Maybe this was the real him. Maybe this was the real Dylan.

She couldn’t ask herself what that meant. If that was true, what that told her about the two of them. About their friendship. About everything.

“Because you don’t seem sure,” he said, and even his voice was different. There was a certainty there. A ferocity. And suddenly, it was all too easy to imagine him as the CEO, owner and creator of a billion-dollar company he’d started on the strength of a couple of credit cards and his charm. She’d found it so funny before, imagining her Dylan in charge of all that. Not now. “You look a bit like you’ve seen a ghost, if I’m honest.”

And there was something drumming in her blood. Jenny still couldn’t name it, but she recognized it as the same impulse that had gotten her out of her flat that night. That had led her, not on a walk from her Kensington neighborhood into Notting Hill to wander the Portobello Road, as she sometimes liked to do, but onto the Tube. And off to Heathrow.

It was what had brought her here, and the more she stared at this version of her best friend wearing the mask of some kind of sex warrior, the louder it got.

“I don’t think you’re a ghost,” she managed to say. “Though between you and me, I haven’t seen a lot of ghosts. I wouldn’t know how to tell.”

There was no trace of that smile of his. So friendly, so engaging. No hint of that bright laugh that put everyone at ease.

So she made it worse.

Jenny reached out across the inches between them that seemed, then, as vast as the harbor she’d spent so much of the day exploring, stretching this way and that, inland and then out to sea. She reached across the distance between them, found the opening of his coat, and slid her hand along his soft T-shirt into the hollow between his pectoral muscles.

She could feel the heat of him, as if she’d slapped her hand down on a stovetop.

And it occurred to her as she stood there, her palm spread against his hard, dense muscles, that she didn’t touch him much. They hugged each other hello and goodbye, but that was usually it. There was very little jostling of shoulders. No offhanded, friendly little touches, here and there. Sometimes, if he was being courteous, he might brush his fingers against the small of her back as he guided her somewhere.

But for all the years they’d known each other, all the intimacies they’d shared, there were never any intimacies involving touch.

And as she stared up at him, she was aware for the first time how she had to tip her head back to look at him. How big he was, so tall and with such wide shoulders. And that he was remarkably beautiful for a man who seemed so rugged at the same time.

Jenny didn’t bother to ask herself why.

She knew.

Because touching him like this was electric.

It surged through her to become a part of that drumming thing in her veins, a restless, insistent rhythm that flooded through her. It went right to her pussy.

She felt slippery. Red hot.

And all they were doing was standing close together, talking. With her hand on his chest, but not even flesh to flesh.

Dylan stood very still. Too still, maybe. And something in her fluttered at the thought, because suddenly she could have sworn that he was looking at her as if she was a meal. And one he intended to savor.

“Let me make sure we’re both very clear about what’s happening here,” he said, and there was something almost gravelly in his voice then. It only made that electric touch seemed to glow. Hot and hard. “We’ve been friends for a long time, Jenny. I wouldn’t want there to be any misunderstandings.”

“I want you,” she said. Again.

“To fuck you.”

And she was sure she didn’t imagine the light in his green eyes then, or the way it made her…quiver.

“To fuck me properly,” she corrected him. “I want to leave giddy and staggering about, like all the rest. Can you promise me that?”

“I’m insulted you would ask.” But he didn’t look or sound insulted. He looked…more, maybe. More intense. More focused. More fierce. And much more dangerous. “Let’s discuss the housekeeping, shall we?”

“Housekeeping?” She frowned at him. “Does that mean you have… Grooming requirements?”

“If I did, I’d expect you to comply with them,” he said, and there was some kind of amusement in his gaze then, but it still wasn’t the Dylan she knew. It wasn’t that laughter. It was something else, something male and demanding, and she had never felt so feminine, before.

It was as if she suddenly understood the point of fancy dresses that cinched in at the waist and made a girl breathless, or high heels that made her unsteady, because she was neither tonight and felt both of those things. And it was glorious. She felt shivery and silly. Her breasts ached and her pussy was slick, and she wanted nothing more than to rub all that against him and see what he might do with it. With her.

“Is that part of the Dylan Kilburn promise?” she found herself asking. “Compliance?”

Again, there was that gleam in his green eyes, that hard amusement that made her sway a bit on her feet. His mouth was a stern line, but that only made it better. He reached over and took the thick tendril of her hair in his hand, then tugged it. Not entirely gently.

And everything inside her…bloomed.

Dylan’s mouth didn’t move from that hard line, but she still thought she could see his smile there.

“We’ll get to compliance,” he told her. Promised her. “But first, there’s this. Us. You’ve never had someone turn you out, so you have no idea how you’ll feel in the aftermath.”

“I thought the point is giddiness. Isn’t it?”

“That’s part of it. Sometimes. But the girls you’re thinking about didn’t call me their best friend. The only thing I promised them was orgasms. They didn’t know me.”

“Do I know you?” She was kidding. Or she thought she was kidding when she started speaking. And then, somehow, wasn’t. “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this side of you before.”

“Because you haven’t.” He studied her face as she took that in, blinking because he sounded so uncompromising. “You need to be absolutely certain you want to open this door, Jenny. Because once it’s open, I don’t think you can close it again.”

“Why does that sound like a threat?”

He tugged on her hair again, and it was such a strange sensation. Sharp at the start, but then like a flush as it moved through her. She didn’t understand how the slightest stinging sensation on her scalp could make her nipples pinch and then travel down to make her entirely too aware of her clit.

“You’ve gone to great lengths to set your life up precisely as you like it,” Dylan said, quiet and intense. “As long as I’ve known you, you’ve never wavered from this path of yours. You say you promised your father, but I think we both know you could have fought him if you had a mind to. You don’t. This is what you want. A cold fish husband who won’t ask anything of you but your bloodline. Decorous, polite society sex, genteel and very seldom, until the heirs are properly sorted out. And then you get what you really want. No more demands, nothing but an empty freedom to do what you already do. Charity work. Tending to your father. Closing yourself up tight.”

Her breath suddenly seemed harsh and loud there, down below the great opera house, and echoed in her like it was quiet. When it wasn’t. When there were so many people about she should have found it hard to hear him.

But she heard him all too well. “I prefer to think I’m in a position to do good,” she managed to say, over the mess his words left inside her. “And I plan to. I already told you, Conrad isn’t a bad man.”

“Conrad is the least offensive man your father could find,” Dylan replied, and she might have been outraged if there had been any heat in it. But it was a statement of fact. “At least he’s not geriatric. But you never had the slightest intention of choosing your own husband. You want the arrangement. You want to stay untested. Unchallenged. Because that’s the thing about intimacy, Jen. It’s messy.”

“I came to Australia because you’re the expert on sex,” she managed to say. “Not intimacy. I’ve never known you to keep the same woman around for more than a weekend. And that’s a very rare weekend indeed.”

“Sex is intimacy,” Dylan shot back at her, his hard tone brooking no argument. “Anyone who tells you otherwise isn’t any good at it. But you need to decide if you can handle that. Because the Jenny I know has made it clear, in word and deed since the day I met her, that she wants no part of it.”

“I want a taste,” she heard herself say.

And she wanted to step back and put some head-clearing distance between them. Knock his hand away from her hair. But she rather thought he expected her to do all of those things, and more—that it would prove his point. So she did the opposite. She moved closer, and brought her other hand to his chest. Then angled herself against him, as if they were already in an embrace.

“A taste of me might be more than you bargained for,” he said, as if he could tell that she’d just gone ahead and lit herself on fire. “It will be. And then what?”

“What do you mean? Are your morning afters normally fraught with peril? Because they look very civilized. No broken crockery or rending of garments as long as I’ve known you.”

“For starters, my morning afters don’t normally occur with women who are staying with me. So there’s that to consider. But even if I gave you the weekend option, or even a week, just to make sure you were well and truly fucked properly in every possible way, do you really want that?” Dylan’s gaze was as hard as his chest felt beneath her hands, and twice as hot. “Because it seems to me that it would be one thing to go into your chilly little marriage with no knowledge of what you’re missing. But torture if you do know.”

She wasn’t sure moving closer to him had been her best idea, because he felt so good. Too good. And this close, she could smell him, and that was like a wave of sensation all its own. Something deep and spicy that made her think of forests back home. And something else that reminded her of the abundant sunshine here, even in winter. And holding it all together, him. Dylan.

All the versions of him.

“It will be my torture, not yours,” she said.

“Do you think I won’t care about that?” He took her elbows in his big hands, and held her away from him, almost splayed against his chest. Almost. “Because as we talk about opening doors that can’t be closed, sex does have a way of changing friendship. You must know that. I remember several right tossers trying their hands at befriending you, all for a chance to get in there.”

“They weren’t really friends.” She shrugged. “There was nothing to change. Or to lose.”

“We’ve been friends for years, Jenny. Think about that. If I give you what you want, and it’s everything you imagine it to be, what do you think will happen then?”

She searched his face, trying to figure out what the right answer would be here. What he wanted. Her experience with men had been limited to either the dates her father had sent her on, with men who had hardly noticed she was there. Or the men she’d actually dated, who had been so eager to please that she’d hardly had to express half a wish before it was excessively granted. And every now and again, the odd one who thought insulting her was the right tack to take—and it was certainly different. In all cases, it had always been easy enough to simply sway close, say something sultry, and sort them out with sex.

She didn’t understand why Dylan wasn’t so easily led.

That drumming thing inside her got louder. Longer.

And maybe that was the secret she’d been dancing around all this time. Men who could be led didn’t produce that giddy, begging for more effect. How could they? Standing at a rail looking out over Sydney Harbour as the evening ferries slid past, that answer seemed so obvious. How had she missed it all this time?

“Nothing will change,” she told him. “This will be our secret. An experiment between two good friends and when I leave Australia, everything will just…go back the way it was.”

“Will it now.”

She laughed. “Of course it will.”

Because she couldn’t imagine any other option.

Dylan shifted, one of those big hands moving up to slide along the length of her jaw, as if it belonged there.

But it was like a storm. A hurricane, unleashed from every point of contact. Skin to skin, like something torrential. The heat of his palm, its faint roughness. Everything inside her…rioted.

But she didn’t move. She couldn’t.

“You keep acting as if we’re talking about regular sex. Tepid, faintly embarrassing fumbles in the dark with men who come too soon and act like you should be grateful all the same. But what if that’s not all there is?” He shook his head slightly, his gaze so hard on hers it would have hurt, if she could feel anything but his hand. “I know you think that there can’t be that much of a difference. Not really. You’ve come to conduct your wee science experiment, but in the final analysis, you don’t really think I can rock your world. Change your life. Show you the difference between black-and-white and full-on color. Do you?”

And his hand was on her face like a brand. And he was crowding out the night, and the city, and the whole wide world. And her heart was beating so fast she was vaguely concerned it might turn into a medical issue.

“I think if anyone could,” she managed to say, “it would be you.”

She thought he should look pleased at that. But he didn’t. He looked as if she’d hurt him. “And what if I do everything I claim I can do, and more, and you do the very thing I suspect you think is impossible?”

Her eyes searched his, and she frowned, faintly. “I have actually had an orgasm before, Dylan. You don’t have to be quite so up yourself.”

“I’m talking about love, not orgasms,” he said with a certain brutal directness. And once again, there was that ferocity stamped all over him, so she couldn’t tell if he was about to laugh or shout or take over the world. All of the above, maybe. “It tells me everything I need to know about the sad sex you’ve had that you don’t understand how they could be connected.”

“You think I’m going to fall in love with you if we have sex?” she asked, astonished.

He didn’t laugh. Not exactly. It was all much too intense for that. “I think that if I fuck you properly, there is almost no possibility you won’t fall in love with me.”

“Why aren’t you worried that you’ll fall in love with me?” she demanded. And told herself that was outrage, not panic, that leaped around inside her, then. “Isn’t that just as possible?”

“No chance of that,” he said, and she could have sworn there was something almost sardonic in the way he said it.

She refused to dwell on the little stab of hurt that bloomed inside her then. That panic—that outrage—spurred her on.

“It doesn’t matter if I go head over heels, however unlikely,” she told him hotly. “I’m still engaged.”

“So the worst case scenario is that I teach you what it means to properly fuck.” And there was definitely a sardonic little twist in the corner of his mouth then, though she was too wound up to focus on it. “There will be sobbing, in all likelihood. Begging, almost certainly.”

“I won’t hold it against you,” Jenny said magnanimously.

His green eyes glittered. “I appreciate that. Things may get emotional. Your plan, no matter how emotional things get, is to hop a plane back to England, continue to wave that great bloody ring around the place and marry the man your father personally selected for you. Is that it?”

“You’re the one who just pointed out to me that that’s always been it.” She lifted her chin. “And you’re right. I don’t believe in love, Dylan. I never have. You and Erika seem to think that I’m some great, hidden romantic—”

“Not hidden. You’ve made no secret of it. You read romantic books. You like romantic films.”

“That doesn’t make me a romantic. I like horror films and I’m not a ghoul.”

“You don’t believe that you can have a romance, Jenny,” he said, and he sounded almost tired, then. As if this conversation was costing him something, which made no sense. “Or you’ve decided you won’t. That isn’t quite the same thing as not having a romantic bone in your body.”

“This is ridiculous.” She pushed his hand away from her face then. And the light in his green eyes changed again, but he dropped his hand all the same. “If you don’t want to have sex with me, Dylan, I wish you would just say so. All this poncing about, grimly talking about doors that can’t be closed and emotional states that will be forever disrupted. I’m talking about having sex. You either want that or you don’t. And I won’t hate you if you don’t.” She made herself smile. “Too much.”

And the strangest expression moved over his face then. She couldn’t read it. Still, she found herself holding her breath, and felt something almost like loss when he ended up somewhere…wry.

“Risk assessments are a part of what I do for a living,” he told her, sounding…careful. “The part you don’t like to talk about, as it’s so hard for you to imagine me ordering people about. Isn’t that what you said?”

“I find it a lot less hard to imagine after tonight.”

“You don’t think you’ll fall in love with me,” he said, and surely there was no reason for her heart to turn over at that. “That’s fair enough. I won’t patronize you and tell you, again, that I don’t think you quite know what you’re talking about.”

“Even if I don’t, does it matter? It’s obvious in the way you’re talking about this that you’ve had it happen before. But it’s obviously not real love, or the lady in question would still be here. That means it’s a sexual hangover, or some such. Don’t worry, Dylan. You’re safe.” She smiled at him, and this time, she didn’t have to force it. “I’m not going to relocate to Sydney, start stalking you and scale your wall to boil bunnies on your stove. I’m getting married next spring. And Conrad might not be in love with me, nor I with him. But I don’t think either one of us is interested in the kind of scandal that would ensue if I was arrested in Australia for harassing an old friend. This is about as low risk as possible to get.”

He only stared at her. She sighed.

“I promise,” she said.

“Right.”

And again, she watched him change. There was a flash of the Dylan she knew, almost rueful. Then that intent Dylan again, edgy and dangerous. And breathtaking.

He shifted, turning her around so her back was to the rail. And his hands moved to either side of her so he was caging her there, then angling himself toward her.

“What kind of protection do you prefer?” he asked, blandly, as her whole body ignited.

“Uh… You mean…?”

“Yes, I mean. Do you have a latex allergy? Are you on the pill? Do you prefer the ease and convenience of a coil?”

She was a grown woman. An adult in all ways. And yet the clinical frankness of those questions made her blush.

“I do not have a latex allergy,” she managed to say, perhaps more primly than necessary. “And as a matter of fact, I am on the pill. Thank you for asking.”

His green eyes gleamed, and this time, she was absolutely certain that it was, in fact, amusement. But she couldn’t tell if that was better or worse.

“When were you last tested?” And his head was lowered close to hers, but all he did was smirk. “Or do you not bother with such things, because you’re Lady Jenny, impervious to love, married off for a fortune and unlikely to ever choose the sort of disreputable man who might dare approach you anything less than squeaky clean?”

“For the record, this is the most unsexy and grossly disturbing conversation I’ve ever had when someone wants to get me naked.”

“I find that hard to believe, given the wanker contingent you’ve allowed in your bed.”

“I get tested once a year as a part of my annual physical,” she said loftily. “But then again, I don’t throw it about like some.”

“I’m never unsafe,” he told her. “In terms of protection, that is. But I get tested every couple of months, because I like to be both promiscuous and sure.”

“Am I supposed to be turned on now?” she asked, aware that her hands were in fists at her sides, and not willing to ask herself why. She was supposed to long for open discussions like this. It was supposed to herald her maturity. And she already knew he slept around, or he wouldn’t have been the perfect person for her purposes. There was no reason this should all make her feel a bit like crying. “Because I’m whatever the opposite of that is. And I feel absolutely no trace of anything resembling impending giddiness. In case you were wondering.”

“I know these practicalities are so confronting,” he said, and he did bend his head then. But only to put his face…near hers. As if he was contemplating sinking his teeth into her neck like some kind of vampire.

Jenny had no idea what it said about her that the very idea made her break out goose bumps. And not because the notion disgusted or scared her.

“Are you sure you’re the opposite of turned on?” he asked.

And she could feel his breath in the crook of her neck. He was so close. He surrounded her, and there was something dominating in the way he stood there, holding her in place without touching her at all. She should have hated that, but it was Dylan.

And the fact it was Dylan made it worse. Wrong, and strange, somehow so much better.

Her pussy began to pulse, in time with that same restless beating thing inside her. And her nipples were so hard she couldn’t quite tell if the sensation that washed through her from the tight points was pleasure or pain. Only that it didn’t stop.

“I can’t decide if you’re trying to scare me off or if this is your seduction technique,” she managed to say, aware that she was panting a bit as she spoke. “But I’m beginning to think that the reason all those girls look so giddy is because of some kind of head trauma. Is that your secret?”

She felt the brush of his lips. Or she thought it was his lips, there for a moment where her pulse went wild. Then gone, and it was like being walloped with another storm system.

He was wrecking her. Remaking her.

“Fucking someone through the headboard sounds fun in theory, but no one likes a concussion when all they want is to come,” he rumbled against her neck. She could feel it when he spoke. It danced in her. “Don’t you agree?”

But she was lost in a cascade of too-hot, too-bright images of him and her and that bed of his with all its wrought iron, and all Jenny could do was gape at him when he lifted his head.

“That’s what I thought you’d say,” he said, and even his smile was dangerous.

Then Dylan bent that last little bit and slammed his mouth down on hers.

CHAPTER SIX

THERE WERE VERY few things in life that exceeded expectations.

And it turned out, Jenny was one of them.

Dylan didn’t waste time on niceties. He claimed her mouth with his, finally.

He’d been building up this particular hunger since the moment he’d met her, and he’d long since given up hope it would ever happen with them, so he didn’t hold back. It didn’t occur to him to hold back.

He’d warned her. He’d given her every chance to back out or change her mind. And despite all that, he knew full well he was the one who was going to have trouble closing this bloody door now it was opened.

But he couldn’t care about that now. He couldn’t tie himself up into knots over the future when there was still now. When there was still this.

Her mouth beneath his. The touch of her tongue. And her taste, better than he’d imagined—and sweet Lord, had he imagined it. Over and over again.

Dylan didn’t kiss her sweetly. This wasn’t a fairy tale. He ate at her mouth, holding her face where he wanted it and indulging himself.

At last.

She fit him. He’d imagined she would, year after year, but this… The taste of her surpassed every last fantasy he’d ever had.

Particularly when she kissed him back, hesitant at first, but then meeting him fully. Hot and greedy, just the way he liked it.

Deep and wet and long and perfect, and he had to fight to remember that they weren’t in private. That he had to control himself when that was the last thing he wanted to do. Because it was so good. Because it was Jenny.

Dylan wrenched his mouth away, aware that he was breathing too hard as he dropped his forehead to hers.

“I told you,” he growled at her, and he didn’t even know what he meant. Only that he’d warned her. And there was a madness in him, bright and hot and tangled up deep, and it had her name written all over it.

She was panting and her eyes were closed, and he angled himself back a bit, dimly remembering once again that they were in public. That his cock was so hard already that he was likely in danger of scaring off the tourists, and a chat with the local police was not part of his plans for the night.

Not when he’d finally gotten his hands on Jenny. This was Jenny. He had her taste in his mouth, still. She was in his veins now, the fire in his blood. And God knew she’d been in his bones for years.

She was the ruin of him. But Dylan didn’t feel ruined just then. Or he liked the ruin, maybe.

But her eyes were still closed. And he found himself tensing as he watched her struggle to control her breath. As he waited to see if she’d set him back on his heels the way he’d always imagined she would. That was the way it went between the lady of the manor and an upstart chancer.

It felt like an age or two before Jenny’s lashes fluttered, and she opened up her eyes to look straight at him. The brown of her eyes that he knew so well was shot through with gold. There was a flush on her cheeks that made his cock feel heavy. The look on her face made his fingers itch to tear off her clothes and see where else that flush touched.

“You kissed me,” she said, there was a scratchy sort of awe in her voice. “We kissed. You and me, Dylan.”

“We did.” His gaze dropped to her mouth, that mouth he’d studied, dreamed about, fantasized over. And could now taste against his own. He wasn’t sure he could believe it. “I did.”

She lifted a hand to touch her lips and he couldn’t tell if her fingers were shaking, or if she was simply hesitant.

And he was Dylan Kilburn. He was renowned for his confidence, though his detractors used other words to describe it. Whatever it was, he had it in spades. He could walk into any room, talk to anyone, raise up empires on the strength of his handshake. And yet this slender creature with soft eyes and an elegant neck made him forget that he was one of the youngest billionaires in Australia—and the world. She made him forget that he was normally treated like a man a good ten or twenty years his senior, such was the power he exuded and the ruthless competency he brought to any given situation.

Jenny looked at him and just like that he was once again nothing more than a poor wee lad from the worst neighborhood in Dublin, out of his element at Oxford, and terrified that at any moment he’d cock the whole thing up. Absolutely certain every moment of every day that he was about to be found out and summarily sent down, because the smartest kid in a neighborhood like the one he’d grown up in didn’t mean smart enough for the pampered toffs who swanned about the dreaming spires.

And in the middle of those years of anxiety and ambition, there had been Jenny, who’d been his friend.

It wasn’t lost on him that lusting after her for all these years was a bit of a betrayal of that friendship. Nor was it lost on him that in kissing her the way he had, carnal and raw, he’d made absolutely certain there would be no going back. No matter what she’d said.

But then, she was marrying a man she didn’t love. The way he’d always known she would. The way she’d always said she would. It shouldn’t eat at him the way it did that everything was going along according to plan.

And she might think that a man like Conrad Vanderburg wouldn’t care if she stayed friends with her old pal from her university days, but Dylan knew better. No husband in his right mind would be all right with Dylan hanging about—because a husband would see Dylan for who he really was. He was friendly, understanding, patient, endlessly supportive and undemanding only for one person on this earth. Her marriage was the end of things.

Dylan couldn’t regret kissing her the way he had, no matter what she was about to say next.

But the thing about Jenny was that he could know her inside and out, and she still surprised him.

She did now. Because she smiled. That wide, faintly wicked, fully joyous smile of hers that made him feel as if it was the middle of summer, not winter. As if it was bright daylight, instead of night.

“We kissed,” she said again. “Can you believe it?”

She leaned forward and braced herself on his chest again, tipping back her head with the ease of someone who’d done it a thousand times before. When she hadn’t. Because there had always been barriers. There had always been distance.

Because Dylan had needed to maintain some level of sanity.

But he knew how she tasted now, and the hunger in him felt new. Wilder and sharper than before.

Jenny’s eyes looked more gold than brown. “Would you say that kiss was a proper kiss?”

Dylan felt nearly grim with want, drunk with desire, but he laughed anyway. “It would be hard to find a kiss more proper, in my opinion.”

Her smile widened. “And do you think that was representative of your work?”

There was a teasing note in her voice, and he found himself grinning in return. But not that happy, friendly, toothless grin he’d always given her in the past. Because the door was open, and he had already shouldered his way through it. That was who he was and always had been, in every scenario but this one. And now it was too late. There was no going back to pretending he was her lovable old buddy, Dylan.

Not when she was plastered against him and her lips were still damp from his. Not now.

“A proper kiss is an excellent advertisement for proper fuck, yes,” he assured her, doing nothing to rein himself in. “At least when I do it. What do you reckon, Jenny? Have I scared you off?”

And her smile faded a bit as she gazed up at him, making his heart kick at him again.

Because he honestly didn’t know what he would do if she said that yes, he had succeeded at last in scaring her away from this course of action.

Cry like a bitch, mate, a voice in him said. Caustically. You’ll cry like a little bitch, and who could blame you?

“You haven’t scared me off,” Jenny said, her hands still pressed against his chest and her eyes solemn. “And I appreciate your attempts, but you’re not going to. The only thing that’s going to stop this from happening is if you don’t want to. If you’ve changed your mind. Or scared yourself off.”

Dylan laughed again, but not because anything was funny. “Impossible.”

He jerked her to him and took her mouth again, indulging himself all over again. He sank his hands into her hair, finding it silky and thick, and warm there at her scalp. He tugged her head back, giving himself the angle he wanted, and then it was on. A little rough, a little intense.

All magic.

Because this was Jenny, his Jenny, and he was never going to recover from this. And if she was going to go ahead and marry herself off, he was going to make sure she had something to remember him by.

He was going to imprint himself on her, the way she’d imprinted herself on him at first sight.

Dylan didn’t think that he could ruin her the way she’d done to him, but he could ruin this. Because they fit together like a dream, and this kiss was already better than whole nights he’d spent with other women, none of whom he could ever remember too clearly. Not when there was Jenny. And he’d done his best all these years to get by without her, but he didn’t have to now. Not now. Not tonight. Not for as long as she stayed here in Australia, hiding from her real life.

He could ruin her this way. He could teach her what proper was, and the truth was, he felt as if he’d been practicing his whole life for this opportunity. To worship this woman in every last way he knew, turn her inside out as many times as possible, and let her spend the rest of her life fantasizing about this. The same way he would be doing.

He pulled away again and liked it when she moaned out a protest.

“Come on,” he said. “I’m going to feed you.”

Her eyes were a bit fuzzy, which made his cock pulse. “Feed me? Is that a code for something debaucherous? Please say yes.”

His hands were still in her hair, and he kept them there, because it felt good to have control of her. To hold her like this. To have her right where he wanted her.

Another subject they were going to have to cover, but he’d get there.

“That depends how you eat.” He tilted his head a bit as he gazed down at her. “Are you feeling gluttonous?”

Her gaze sharpened at last, but she was looking at his mouth. “Yes. I believe that’s the perfect word.”

“We need to make sure you can keep up your strength,” he said. Then he reached down and helped himself to her hand, threading her fingers through his.

She stared down at their hands, clasped together like that.

“You’re holding my hand,” she said, with a certain reverence. Or more of that awe, or wonder, that was one more way she was going to kill him. “Dylan Kilburn is holding my hand.”

He opened his mouth to say something wicked, or offhanded. Something to dispel the tension a bit. But she gazed up at him and the words died on his tongue, unsaid.

Because even their hands fit together perfectly, and her taste was still flooding through him, and she wasn’t being silly. If anything, he would have said that look on her face was sacred.

And for once, he didn’t have to pretend.

For once, he could meet that gaze of hers with his own, and acknowledge this thing that was between them. This thing that had been in him, and a part of him, and a defining characteristic of his, for so long now he didn’t know who he was without it.

And it was only holding her hand. But it felt like the world. It felt right. A key into a lock.

Coming home at last.

Dylan could have stood there for another lifetime, but she wasn’t here for his feelings. She was here to fuck. And he had every intention of living up to his promises.

So he made himself look away, gripped her hand harder and led her away from that dark railing and the bright crowd at the Opera Bar.

He led her around the quay, climbing up into the narrow, cobbled laneways that rose up opposite the opera house, and comprised the oldest part of Sydney.

“Are we really stopping for food?” she asked as they climbed a set of stairs between two buildings. “Do I get a vote?”

He slanted to gaze down at her. “No.”

“Just…no. No explanation. Just straight up, no debate, no.”

“I don’t think I stuttered, did I?”

Jenny was laughing as he escorted her toward a deceptively old-looking building that was only accessible down a long, cobbled alleyway. The door was painted a bright red, and that was its only distinguishing facet. That and the keypad next to the door. Dylan punched in the code, and the door clicked open, instantly giving away the fact that the building had been gutted and refurbished inside, though it looked quietly historic from without.

“What is this place?” Jenny breathed. Her eyes sparkled as she looked up at him, her fingers still wrapped up tight in his. “Is this some kind of secret club? For sex?”

“I don’t need a secret club for sex.” He shook his head at her. “Sex is a group sport for some, sure. More power to them. I’m more of a singles player, myself.”

He ushered her inside. Then he led her down a set of stairs, lit up with a buttery golden light. At the bottom was a discreet welcome desk staffed by a smiling attendant.

“Good evening, Mr. Kilburn,” the man said in a plummy British accent. “Will you be dining with us tonight?”

“A table with a view,” Dylan replied. “And we’ll make our own way up.”

“Very good, sir,” the man said, and typed something into the tablet in front of him.

Dylan led Jenny farther into the building, making his way through the various lounges, bars and nooks and crannies alike that made up this particular club.

“It is a club,” Jenny said, as if she’d caught him out. “I’ve always wanted to spend time in an illicit sex club, populated entirely by deviance.”

“I hate to ruin the fantasy, but this club is more for business connections, entrepreneurial fantasies and high profile meetings that need to remain strictly private. There are deviant sex clubs out there, and there’s sex here, too, but not of the public variety. The club provides rooms for weary travelers, and doesn’t much care who fills them.”

“That’s a lot less fun.”

“The truth about highflyers is that most of them are boring,” Dylan said. “Because the reason they’re highflyers is that they work themselves half to death.”

“And here I thought the point of making shedloads of cash was to fling it about indiscriminately, laughing all the while.”

And years ago, Dylan would have let that go. This morning, even. But everything was different now.

“The difference is whether or not you’ve worked for said shedloads.”

He expected Jenny to stiffen, but her expression only turned rueful. “Unlike me, you mean.”

“Not everyone is born rich.”

“And not everyone born rich is automatically evil,” Jenny replied. She squeezed his hand as she held it. “Something you’re going to have to come to terms with should you create a new generation some day. Will they grow up pampered and spoilt? Or will they learn they have a responsibility to do what others can’t?”

He found his thumb moving back and forth over the back of her hand. “You don’t make money at what you do, do you?”

“Of course not. I’m a career volunteer. It’s what makes swanning off to Australia on a whim possible.”

She peered past him into one of the salons off the hall, where a scrum of finance types were boozing it up like they were down at the local, except what they were quaffing would qualify as a mortgage payment in some places. All she did was smile, but Dylan was suddenly uncomfortable. He’d been there once, in the first flush of his first million. And the notion that Jenny might have looked at him then as he was looking at the pack of them made something twist inside.

“That’s the trouble with money,” he said darkly. “If you’ve never had a lack of it and don’t understand what a gift that is, you don’t cherish it. You grow complacent.” He nodded toward the pack of idiots, but pulled her along past their room. “And you find yourself using it to help yourself feel things you wouldn’t otherwise.” Like entertaining the wrong women for years because the right one was permanently out of reach. But he remembered himself. “Like leaping out of planes, which the lot of them like to do on the weekends. Regularly. But no one’s a thrill junkie if they can feel things on their own. They wouldn’t need it.”

Jenny was looking up at him again as they walked, that rueful expression turning to something more pointed. “Have you already become bored? So quickly?”

“I don’t believe in boredom,” Dylan told her, growling it out as if she was hitting hard into the very heart of him. “That’s one more privilege I never had.”

“You seek thrills for the hell of it, then.”

She wasn’t quite frowning at him, but there was a challenging light in her eyes. And Dylan didn’t want to debate class differences with the one person who had always treated him as if there weren’t any. As if he was grand as he was, always and forever.

And she was going to leave him, soon. He didn’t want to tell her that she was his model for how a very wealthy person ought to behave, because he didn’t want to admit how much he thought about her, felt about her, changed himself for her. Start discussing one part of it and who knew where he’d end up?

Jenny never hid her wealth, but she never flaunted it, either. She gave back quietly, without fanfare. And she was unfailingly kind. He fell short of these things daily, but she was always there as a goal. He was good at goals.

But then, there were other, more attainable goals tonight. He could work on being a better version of himself in all the lonely years ahead of him.

Dylan stopped at the next door they passed, seeing the discreet green light that indicated it was empty. He coded them in, then leaned back against the door when he closed it. And locked it.

“Does that mean you don’t feel anything?” she was asking, paying no attention to what he was doing as she walked into the lounge area, then turned back to him. “And, crucial follow-up question, if you can’t feel anything, are you really the best tutor when it comes to sex?”

“Jenny.”

“I’m no expert myself, but I did think it had a lot to do with sensation,” she said, shaking her head at him. “Feeling. All those things you just said—”

“There’s only one thrill I’m after,” Dylan told her.

He hauled her into his arms, where she belonged, and he got his mouth on hers once more.

And this time, in private.

CHAPTER SEVEN

IF JENNY HAD ever had the slightest idea that kissing could be like this, her whole life would be different.

Dylan was addictive.

The scrape of his tongue, the way he moved that hard jaw of his… She couldn’t get close enough. Her whole body was flushed, hot, ready.

She felt needy, filled with greed, and some part of her thought that this experiment was going to take a bit longer than planned. Because she could kiss him forever. Calling what he was doing kissing seemed to do it a disservice, in fact. He tasted the way she imagined heroin must feel. An impossible, magical lift, and then a beautiful storm.

And she felt dizzy, but it took her a moment to realize it was because he was moving her, backing her up until something prodded her at the hips.

She pulled away from him, which made her want to cry. But she looked around, and realized they were in a sitting room of some kind. There was the door to one side discreetly marked with an embossed WC. There was the door they’d come in, and then a third with no markings.

“Is this a hotel?”

“After a fashion,” Dylan said, in a perfectly normal voice that was at complete odds with the ferocity in his gaze. The contrast made her skin feel too tight. “These are considered day rooms. They are most properly used for members fighting off jet lag when they come in on one of those early flights. A nice place to have a bit of a sleep, freshen up and then head straight to a business meeting.”

“Are we having a business meeting?” Jenny asked, there where he’d backed her up against a sturdy little antique secretary.

But he only smiled. Like a wolf. And then he was shifting, going down on his knees before her.

And suddenly, she didn’t care what took place in this building. All she could see was Dylan, his eyes blazing and his face set. Hungry. Very nearly feral.

She felt the same. And she wanted to ask him what he was doing, but her mouth was too dry.

Then his hands were on her. He smoothed his way over her hips, then went straight to the fastening of her jeans.

“I’m going to feed you,” he told her, and his voice sounded thicker. Darker. “But first, I need to taste you or I’m not going to make it.”

She wanted to laugh at that, because it seemed like the right thing to do. To make this less intense. Less overwhelming. But he angled a look up at her when he said it, green and hot, and she was terribly afraid she might shatter.

And she didn’t know if she meant she would come—or come apart. Or both.

There was a noise in her ears, some kind of ringing. And maybe that was her breath, heaving in and out of her.

Dylan unbuttoned her jeans, then worked her zipper down.

And she wanted to tell him not to bother. That she’d never cared that much about this thing that all women were supposed to find so delightful. That in her experience, it was always a bit messy and embarrassing. The boyfriends she’d had were always so proud of themselves, so bound and determined to prove something, that she’d felt nothing but enormous pressure to scream and carry on and make out as if she was transported. When really, a person’s head was between her legs while an endless spiral of anxiety traipsed about in her head—

“Hey. Jenny.”

Dylan’s voice snapped her out of the cycle, and she found his gaze. There was something in the way he was looking at her, then. Some kind of charged patience. As if he knew exactly what she was thinking. His hands were busy, even as that gaze of his was still. He tugged her jeans down over her hips, and she would have protested, maybe. But his hands were so big and they skimmed over her legs easily, and it was easier somehow to let him tug one leg free.

And besides, she liked it when he touched her.

His gaze caught hers, almost stern now. “This is for me.”

“What?”

“This is for me,” he told her, and there was that patient thing there in all that green, and a light she didn’t quite understand. “This is what I need. All right?”

She nodded, because she couldn’t speak.

“Good.” His mouth seemed stern, then, too—a word she never would have used to describe Dylan. Her Dylan, so funny and happy and bright… But she liked this side of him. Something about that hard line of profoundly male lips and his finely cut jaw made her shudder inside, and her pussy feel wet and swollen. “I want you to think about that, please.”

“Think about what? What you want?”

“I told you I was hungry.”

He smoothed his hands up to her hips again, and pulled one leg wide as he went, making space for himself. He kept going up her thigh, until he reached the edge of the panties she wore.

And when he flicked his gaze to hers again, she understood that both of them were feeling that same wild heat. She was lit up with it. With him. His palms were against her skin, and as he knelt there, she could feel his breath against the lace that covered her pussy.

“I’ll buy you more,” he growled, and she had no idea what he meant.

Until he tore her panties off her.

And she couldn’t help but gasp at that. She even rocked forward with the jolt of it, up on her toes.

Dylan’s hands moved around to grip her ass. As if he owned it. And her. Then he pulled her forward, straight on to his mouth.

He didn’t seem to care what she did with herself. Where she put her hands or how she was propped up against the secretary. He dipped his shoulder so that one of her legs fell over his back, and his hands gripped her, holding her right where he wanted her.

And he ate at her as if she was a ripe fruit, and he didn’t give a shit if she ran all over his face.

She tried to brace herself against the secretary behind her, but he was too intense. His tongue, his teeth, that jaw.

It was like he was truly feasting on her. Eating his fill, and so wholly focused on the task, so deeply unconcerned with her reaction, that she felt herself…unravel. Or let go, at last.

She dug her hands in his thick, dark hair, and stopped trying to anticipate which way he would rock his head, or angle that chin.

And all the while, he licked into her. He scraped at her gently, and then not so gently, too.

And it was his intensity that rocked her. His total focus, and his fingers digging into the flesh of her ass, kneading gently from time to time to increase the sensation.

Jenny didn’t have to do a thing. Dylan wasn’t checking to see what her reaction was. He’d told her he wanted this, and he was taking it, and she believed that he truly didn’t care about anything but pleasing himself. He was hungry, she was his appetizer—

And that was what threw her over the edge.

She’d had orgasms before. Some quite delightful ones, she would have said. By her own hand, with a partner—they’d been sweet little finishes, like a cherry on top.

But this was nothing like that.

This was a gut punch.

This was a seismic event.

She felt everything in her seize, and this had nothing to do with cherries, and she was shaking everywhere, inside and out, and a noise was coming out of her throat that scraped.

And she heard a deep, male rumble, that she knew—though she’d never heard anything like it before—was the sound of his pleasure. His satisfaction.

That made her come even harder.

And he didn’t stop.

He kept going. He sucked her clit into his mouth, making her arch and sob, and she couldn’t get her head around the fact it was Dylan.

Or what her body was even doing. She thought her eyes were closed, though she couldn’t tell for sure, and there was moisture leaking out of them. And she could hear the sounds he made, and the sounds he made her pussy make.

And everything was bright red, muscular and physical, and she was too hot. But she couldn’t seem to stop the noises she was making, or the way she lifted her hips toward him. Because she wanted more. Because she couldn’t think. Because she didn’t know what was happening to her, how she was expected to survive this.

Dylan was eating her alive. He was devouring her.

He’d tripped off a series of explosions, and they didn’t stop. She couldn’t stop. One led into the next, and everything was wet, hot and just this side of painful. All the places he wasn’t touching hurt, too. And the hurt was an ache, and it bled straight down into the center of her, hurtling its way through her and into her clit, and he knew it.

Oh, yes, he knew it.

Because he teased her. And he took her. And he consumed her with that voracious mouth of his, making a mockery of her belief that this was something she didn’t like. Because this wasn’t about like, it was about need—

And she came so hard again then that she saw stars, but she couldn’t make any more noise. Because everything was too bright and searing. And it was all shattered to pieces.

Jenny was only vaguely aware of him moving, pressing a kiss against her inner thigh, and then leaning her back against the secretary she’d forgotten was even there.

She had to breathe, but it was hard to make her lungs work. She had to concentrate on the act of breathing, and only when that had gone on awhile could she take notice of her surroundings. And the fact Dylan had slid her back on the secretary when he was done with her, leaving her slumped there with her jeans at her ankles, like a crumpled doll.

An image that surely should have horrified her, but instead made another spear of bright, thick heat wind its way through her.

It seemed to take an hour or so, and enough effort to climb a mountain or two, to turn her head to the side and watched Dylan as he bent over the sink tucked into the wall outside the WC. He splashed water on his face. Then he ran his hands through his hair. And when he looked at her, clearly completely aware of her and what she was doing, Jenny thought her heart stopped.

She wanted to say something arch. Amusing.

But all she could do was slump there, entirely wrecked, until the corner of his mouth kicked up a bit.

He reached down below the sink and pulled out a fresh towel, then he moved over to her. She expected him to hand her the towel, but he didn’t. He cleaned her up instead, with a brisk efficiency that made her breathless. There was something about how at ease he was with her body. As if every inch of her was his. It made her a bit light-headed.

When he was done, he tossed the towel in a basket, then set her on her feet. She was boneless and useless, so she did nothing when he squatted down, fed her foot back into the leg of her jeans, and tugged them back up. And she was only aware that she’d kicked off the flashy new heels she’d found in a boutique this afternoon when he slid them back onto her feet.

“Are you with me?” Dylan stood, then buttoned her jeans. Then he held her hips there, looking down at her.

All she could manage to do was nod.

“I’m going to need a word or two, I think.” He lifted one hand, and ran his thumb beneath her eye, collecting that moisture she couldn’t seem to keep from spilling over.

“I’m with you,” she whispered.

Though in truth, Jenny didn’t know what that meant. Or where they were. Or her own damned name.

Dylan smiled, but it wasn’t that friendly smile she knew so well. This one was darker. And far more satisfied.

He laced his fingers through hers again, and led her out of the room. And she couldn’t seem to concentrate on anything. Not really. It was like a dream. He was leading her down another hall, then into a lift. And all she could think about was his hand in hers, and how sensitive her pussy was now, swollen and still molten, brushing up against the seam of her jeans because he’d left her with no panties.

He ushered her out of the lift, and then to a table on a rooftop patio festooned with walls of plants, heaters and clever lighting that managed to make every table seem private—even though she was fairly certain there were other people about. And it wasn’t until they sat down, and she looked out at the stunning, sparkling view laid out before them from the Harbour Bridge to the Opera House and the skyscrapers of central Sydney, that she could place the way he touched her.

It was proprietary.

Something inside of her curled up at that, shivering in delight.

Dylan didn’t ask her what she wanted to eat. He had a quiet word with the waiter. Another thing she wanted to find a little outrage about, and yet when the food arrived she was not only ravenous, she couldn’t have chosen better for herself.

“Good?” he asked, sounding far too entertained.

“Surprisingly, yes.”

“What’s the surprise, Jenny?” And he sounded like her Dylan again, lazy and careless, but she couldn’t quite believe it anymore. Not when she’d seen what lurked beneath. “I’ve known you a donkey’s age or two, haven’t I?”

She ate what he’d ordered her, but she kept getting distracted by thoughts of him feasting, on her. Watching him eat food seemed like a sensual act. His green eyes seemed so amused, lit up in a new way, as he watched her. Jenny ordered herself to make clever conversation. The way she always did, in her role as her father’s hostess. But for the first time in as long as she could remember, the words didn’t come.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, when their mains had been cleared away. Dylan picked up her hand again to toy with her fingers, and that didn’t exactly help. “It’s as if I lost the power of speech.”

“You’re welcome.”

And surely she shouldn’t have found such smugness appealing. She heard herself laugh. “Why would I thank you? I thought that was all for you. It had nothing to do with me.”

“You can consider it an object lesson, then. I’m greedy. I want what I want when I want it.”

He was playing with her fingers, making her right hand feel like an erogenous zone. She leaned closer to him, propping up one elbow on the table. “Is this it? Is this the famous speech?”

“Do I have a famous speech?”

“I figure there has to be something. Some careful line you throw out there to manage expectations. It doesn’t make any sense that out of all those women, not one was ever under the impression that whatever they had with you meant more.”

“I like to be clear.”

And there was that ruthlessness about him then, and a hint of those hard, stern lines to his face that had undone her earlier. She squirmed in her chair, and when his gaze got that much greener, she knew he saw it. And knew why.

“Hit me with all your clarity, then,” she dared him.

His smile was not reassuring. “There are only two things you need to know. I’m going to tell you exactly what I want. You don’t have to worry. You don’t have to wonder if I’m liking something or not liking something. You don’t have to concern yourself with whether or not I’m having fun. I’ll tell you.”

She blinked, her mind reeling as she tried to connect that to her supposedly easygoing best friend. “Do people normally worry?”

But even as she asked that, she knew better. Had she ever not felt self-conscious during sex? Had she ever not tried to imagine what was going on as if she was crouched on the ceiling, looking down? And she’d certainly been guilty of checking out a partner’s face to make sure he was still enjoying himself. Or to see if she could move things along.

“All you have to do is what I tell you to do,” Dylan said, and his voice was easy. Almost lazy. But she could see that look in his eyes and she knew he wasn’t kidding.

“That’s a bit bossy, Dylan. Don’t you think?”

“I’m a bit bossy, Jenny. As it happens.”

She laughed, but he didn’t. And suddenly her own laugh made her feel much too restless. “Oh. Well. How bossy?”

His eyes seemed greener, then. “Very, very bossy.”

“What if… What if I don’t like being bossed about?”

But he only smiled. “You liked it well enough when I had your pussy in my mouth.”

And once again, he didn’t laugh. He didn’t break. This wasn’t her Dylan, something in her whispered. This was someone else altogether, and she couldn’t possibly figure out how she felt about that. Because she felt too many things at once. And her pussy was hot and wet, and it pulsed.

“This is your secret?” Her voice was far huskier than it had been before. She couldn’t seem to help it. “You’re… I mean, are you a…?”

“I’m a man who likes to be in charge.” Another dark, stirring smile. “And I like my sex the way I like everything else, Jenny. I like it when it’s mine.”

“Oh,” she breathed, in a sudden rush of understanding. “This is the talk.”

“It is.”

“So what happens if a woman says she’d rather not let you boss her around to your heart’s content, thanks very much?” She frowned at him. “Is that it? Sex off the table?”

“I never take sex off the table.” Again, there was that little crook in the corner of his mouth that was so different from the friendly grin she associated with him that she honestly couldn’t tell if she wanted to smack it off his mouth, or put her own lips against it. Maybe both. “Usually I offer a wee challenge, to see if she likes what I have to offer.”

“And what if she doesn’t?”

“I wouldn’t know.” That little crook deepened. “It’s never happened.”

She blew out a little huff of something that could as easily have been outrage as lust. Or as seemed to be the case with Dylan, all of the above. And everything had already shifted between them, outrageously. Why not take it further?

“I accept this challenge,” she told him, grandly. “You can try to convince me.”

She didn’t expect him to laugh, then, but he did. And this laugh, she recognized. It was vintage Dylan, delighted and long.

“Why is that funny?” she asked, flushing.

“I’ve just had my face between your legs,” he replied. “And unless I miss my guess, that’s not something you’d say you much enjoy, generally.”

“What does that have to do anything?”

And the laughter on his face turned too quickly to stern intent. “I already know that you like to be told what to do, Jenny.”

Her flush got worse. Red and hot. “If you already know, then why are we having this conversation?”

“Because you don’t know what you know,” he said with a shrug, as if that was simple. “Your whole life has been filled with sorry wankers who made you work to get yourself off. It took me moments.”

“I’ll have that challenge now,” she said, trying to sound icy.

Now the laughter had moved into his green eyes, making them brighter, which didn’t help. “Right. Are you sure?”

And she wanted to scream, but they were in public. Jenny leaned forward instead. “I’m beginning to think that you’re stalling, actually. What’s the matter, Dylan? Are you afraid that after all this talk you won’t be able to handle your end of the bargain?”

She could only describe the look on his face then as pitying.

“We covered number one, which is that I’m in charge,” he said by way of a reply. As if she hadn’t spoken. “I wouldn’t want to forget number two.”

“What’s that? I fling myself prostrate at your feet and call you master?”

“You can call me anything you want.” There was still laughter in Dylan’s eyes, and that pitying thing, as if she was already over her head and she didn’t know it.

And too many things rolled through her, all at once. Maybe that outrage she’d been reaching for all along. Or maybe something worse. Less palatable.

Maybe something like longing, something in her whispered.

“As I said, I’m a greedy fucker,” Dylan told her, calmly. Much too calmly. “I’m not always gentle. I like it hard and I like it rough, and when I say that I want you to let me be in charge, that also means I want you to trust me. But that goes both ways. I have to trust that you’ll tell me if something’s too intense for you.”

She lifted her chin. “It won’t be.”

“That’s big talk, Jenny. But it’s easy to think you’ll feel one way now, then find you feel a completely different way later. You don’t have to make a speech. All you have to do is tell me. Stop. No. Raise a hand. Push me off. No matter how far we’ve gone, or what’s going on. Do you understand that?”

“I understand that once again, there’s a whole lot of talking and explaining and anticipation, and yet nothing happens.”

“This is nonnegotiable.”

There was that kick to his voice, and the cool, certain way he looked at her. She remembered, yet again and with that same flood of awareness, that this person she was discussing sex with was not the easygoing friend she knew so well. This was the other Dylan. And the other Dylan was one of the most powerful men in the world.

And he wasn’t kidding around.

“I’m beginning to think I trusted you more before all of this,” Jenny said.

“We don’t have to do it then,” he replied, too easily for her liking. He even shrugged. “It’s entirely up to you. I’m happy to go on home, sleep it off and wake up tomorrow as if none of this ever happened.”

Jenny wanted to punch him. Hard, right in his annoyingly gorgeous face. She felt distinctly violent, and it seemed connected to all the other sensations dancing around inside of her. “I have to tell you, so far I don’t really understand how you’ve managed to talk any woman into sleeping with you. Much less legions.”

“Most of them aren’t you,” he replied. Wholly unbothered, it would appear. “I’m not the one who’s stalling, Jenny.”

Ouch.

“I will tell you to stop if I want you to stop,” she said, very directly, and she knew that he was right. That she was the one who’d been stalling, because her pussy was still swollen, she was too wet and she couldn’t get her head around what happened already. She could feel his shoulder against her thigh and his ravenous mouth, devouring her. And that flush was a part of her now, betraying her and heating her in turn. “And now I want that challenge.”

A different sort of smile played around Dylan’s mouth, then. “Last opportunity to keep that door shut,” he said softly. “To keep it at a crack. Not throw it wide open.”

“Now who’s stalling?”

Dylan didn’t look away. He kept that green gaze trained on her and as she watched, it grew more intense. Until she felt as if his intensity overtook her pulse, then moved through her veins. “There’s a bathroom in the hall,” he said quietly. “We passed it on our way in. I want you to go there. I want you to take off all your clothes, though you can leave your shoes on. I like the heel.”

She was mute. Overwhelmed. But she couldn’t tear her gaze away from his.

By contrast, Dylan looked perfectly relaxed, save for that glittering in his green eyes that made her clit throb.

“I’ll want you bent over, bracing yourself on your elbows. Eyes closed, hair down. And I want you to wait for me.”

“With the door unlocked?”

“I want you to wait for me,” he said again, with that pointed patience that made her feel weak. And something like bubbly. “Can you do that?”

“I…” But her throat wasn’t working properly. And her mouth was so dry she thought she might go up in flames.

Maybe she already had.

“You don’t have to tell me about it, Jenny,” Dylan said in that quiet, powerful way of his. It hummed inside of her. “You don’t have to find the words. You can either get up from the table and make your way to that bathroom, or you can sit here. We can discuss the weather, or the football. Old stories from uni. And everything will go back to normal. It’s entirely up to you.”

The breath in her lungs felt too hot. It took up too much space, and was much heavier than normal breath. Jenny was shaking so hard she worried she might fly apart at the seams, but when she looked down at her hands, she wasn’t shaking at all.

And she wanted to find the words, to find something to help her gain her footing again—

But something washed over her as she gazed into the quiet, unmistakable challenge in his green eyes. It wasn’t quite peace. It was too jagged and edgy for that.

Still, it helped.

And he was Dylan. With new and surprising facets, but still her Dylan. He would keep her safe. He would keep that bubble of his around them, and whatever happened there, it would be okay. She knew without a shred of doubt that he would fight to keep it that way.

Jenny pushed her chair back. She stood and tossed her linen napkin on the table.

Then she turned, and walked off to take his challenge.

And she had every intention of acing it.

CHAPTER EIGHT

JENNY MADE HER way through the rooftop restaurant, only vaguely aware that there were other people tucked away in their own little pockets of privacy in the soft, close dark. Because all she could think about was Dylan.

All versions of Dylan.

She found the door that led into the building, then down the same hallway they’d come up—while she’d been reeling from his mouth and barely aware that she was upright and walking.

Sure enough, there was another door with a WC slapped on the front. She stood in front of it for a moment, wracked with indecision, and then swallowed. Hard. She looked around, but there was only the one. No chance that she might arrange herself fetchingly in the wrong bathroom.

She laughed a little bit at that, but when the laugh was done, she was still standing there in the hallway. Definitely stalling, and after all that big talk at the table.

“Right, then,” she told herself bracingly, as if that could launch her forward.

As if what she really needed here was a stern talking to, and then what she was about to do would all seem normal.

But it was Dylan. And she’d come here for this. And even though everything that had happened tonight was so far out of the realm of what she’d imagined or anticipated, it was all right, somehow. Because it was Dylan, and if she believed nothing else, she believed in him.

She always had—but maybe this wasn’t the right time to dig into her long friendship with a man who’d apparently had all of this inside him all the while.

She pushed her way into the bathroom. It was small, but still managed to seem infinitely luxurious the way everything else did in this place. There was only one stall, but it was behind its own full door and it was empty when she checked.

There was dim, inviting light from a sconce on the wall. The sink was ornate, with fluffy towels on the counter and a selection of not only soaps and lotions, but a variety of toiletries.

Including condoms.

And it was only when she could hear the way she was panting—actually panting—that she realized there was no music piped in. It was hushed and quiet here.

“There will be no hiding,” she whispered, to test it. And her own voice seemed unduly loud.

She felt drunk, she realized then. That was different than shakiness, and better, in a way. It made her feel less fragile, and more liquid.

Jenny stared at herself in the mirror that took up the whole of the wall over the sink, and there was absolutely no doubt in her mind that Dylan knew it was right there. And more, that she would be doing exactly this as she decided whether or not to do what he’d asked.

And just as she found him difficult to recognize tonight, she looked like a different version of herself, too. Her eyes were wide and her pupils were dilated. Her hair was full and wavier than usual, because his hands had been in it. Her mouth felt overly sensitive, and her lips were more swollen than before. He’d done that, too.

And the Lady Jenny Markham she had always been would never do something like this. She would never so much as consider it. Lady Jenny Markham was unfailingly polite, scrupulously well mannered, and she did not create scenes. Ever. She did volunteer charity work. She facilitated conversations between the kinds of businessmen who frequented clubs like this, and made them run smoother. She was a credit to her bloodline, as her father liked to tell his friends.

But Lady Jenny Markham was the one who was going to dutifully marry Conrad and live out the rest of her glacially polite days in precisely the manner her father wanted. Quiet gentility, companionship without emotion, like well-appointed rooms in silent houses. It would be a very pretty grave she was walking into. She knew that.

Tonight, she was only a woman. And Dylan had already done things to her that didn’t make sense, that she couldn’t even begin to process, and that had taught her that she was more alive and more hungry than she’d ever dreamed possible.

And she wanted to take this challenge, not because she thought that she wouldn’t like the things he wanted to do to her. But because she wanted him to do them. Now.

She pulled off the soft shirt she wore that managed somehow to look a lot fancier that it was. Then she shrugged out of the tighter tank she’d worn beneath it, that kept her breasts in place without too much fuss. She sighed a little as she pulled it up and over her head, because the fabric dragged against her nipples and it was like lightning stormed through her in response. And it turned out her nipples had a direct line to her clit, and she couldn’t tell the difference, anymore, between what hurt and what might just make her come again.

The bathroom floor was covered in a thick, gorgeous rug, so she kicked off her shoes, then stripped herself of her jeans. Remembering all the while that he’d done it once tonight already.

And he’d already ripped her panties off, so that was it, she was naked. And the sheer illicitness of it, to stand in a bathroom, of all places—naked, in public, when anyone could walk in—

Jenny had to steady herself with a hand on the counter. She stepped back into her shoes, carefully because she kept shivering, and moved to the sink, as ordered.

As ordered.

The words seemed to take on weight and heft, and she was glad she was bending over because she could prop herself up. And maybe not topple over, that way. The heels made her hips hitch up higher, leaving her angled toward the door to the hall that was directly behind her. Whoever walked in—and God help her, it could be anyone—would see her spread out before them.

Her ass and her pussy were on full display, and there was nothing she could do about that. There was no hiding it, or pretending for a moment she wasn’t doing exactly what she was doing.

The heat inside her leaped into a bright flame, and burned.

Hot. Long.

Jenny dropped her head, letting it droop down toward her elbows. Her hair fell all around her. She shut her eyes.

And then she waited.

And she was shivering, though she wasn’t cold. She could feel the air all around her, and she had never been naked in a public place before—because of course she hadn’t. And anyone could walk in. And even if the only person who did walk in was Dylan, that was its own problem, surely, because what did he plan to do—

The door swung open and a flash of ice cascaded over her, dousing her with a thousand pinpricks of pure fear.

And then in the next moment, the stunning heat of shame.

Jenny was frozen. There was no sound. She heard the door swing shut, and it had to be him. Surely it needed to be him, because anyone else would react to the sight of her. A stranger would make some kind of a sound, some kind of embarrassed cough or laugh—

But there was nothing but silence.

And her breathing was beginning to sound high-pitched and labored. She couldn’t tell if she was hot or cold, but she was sweating either way. Her toes were curling up in her shoes, which was making her hips lift higher, and if it wasn’t him, would whoever it was think that it was an invitation—

Of course they would think it was an invitation—

“Very nice,” Dylan said, and the relief that swamped her then was as sharp and thick as what had come before. It almost knocked her sideways. “I wasn’t sure you could follow directions, Jenny. I’m proud of you.”

And he was behind her, then. She even thought she could feel the heat he generated, though he didn’t touch her.

“Look at you. That pussy is so wet. So needy. There’s only one thing for it.”

Jenny had lost the power of speech. She’d left it somewhere in that neat pile of her clothes, and she thought she would die… If he touched her. If he didn’t. If he didn’t do something with her, because the fact he’d even mentioned her pussy made it throb. And she could feel a surge of raw, molten need overtake her again.

Then he touched her at last, coming up flush behind her so she could feel the scratchy material of his jeans against the curve of her ass. And his hands moved, running up the length of her spine, then down again. As if he was memorizing her. Then down the length of her arms, too. One hand moved to the nape of her neck, his thumb moving in a restless sort of demand, and she didn’t understand how this small a touch could undo her so completely.

She felt moisture in the corners of her eyes again, and she knew that it was tears. Though she was nothing so simple as sad. Jenny couldn’t contain all the things she felt inside. They wouldn’t fit.

He shifted again, and reached out. She heard him pick up something from the array beside her. He let go of her for a moment, though he still stood close behind her. He unzipped his jeans and the sound of it was like a scream, there in the hushed confines of this bathroom.

Then she felt him, silken hot and hard like steel against the curves of her ass.

And this was Dylan. That was Dylan’s cock, huge and hard behind her, and it was Dylan who she’d come all this way to see, when she had no idea what she was asking for. Just as he’d told her she didn’t.

Dylan, something in her screamed. As if maybe she should stop this.

But it only made her wetter.

She heard the sound of the condom packet ripping, and some movement from behind her. Then one of his arms came beneath her hips to angle her up higher, even farther onto her toes.

“Tiptoes, please,” he said, and the fact he could sound so normal made her shudder.

And then he was there, the broad, wide head of his cock pushing into her folds. She was glad she was so sodden, so hot already, because he was already a stretch.

He didn’t wait. He didn’t let her get used to him. He pushed into her, relentless and sure.

And worse, somehow, slow.

Inexorable.

All she could feel was that stretch, that radical fullness. He was too big, and she wanted to panic, but all she could do was pant.

Still he pushed in, inch by inch, crowding her. Taking her over.

And when she thought she might move her hips a bit to make it better, to ease that initial penetration, she realized that he was holding her fast. He was making her take it. Forcing her to accept him, all of him, just as he liked.

She cracked, then, the orgasm walloping her, though she was not entirely comfortable, not sure she could be, and she was bent over a sink with her ass in the air and he was inside her—Dylan was inside her—and she was entirely full of his cock, so big and so hard she didn’t understand how she’d spent all this time in his presence and never noticed that he was huge—

When he was fully inside her, thrust deep, he stopped. She kept clenching and shuddering around him, but he stayed still and hard.

And something flipped over inside her, some kind of awe, as it began to dawn on her that he was totally and completely in control of himself.

“Stand up,” Dylan said, and his voice was huskier. That was it. “And you can open your eyes if you like.”

But his arm was still tight around her hips, so as she straightened, she had to arch.

And that was what she saw as she rose. Her body arched toward the mirror, her breasts high and her nipples tight, and some other woman’s face where hers ought to have been. Wild and abandoned and drunk on sensation.

While behind her, Dylan loomed dark, hard and everything.

His cock was lodged deep inside her, and he kept himself there as she came up, his other hand moving around to the front of her. He traced a light line down the front of her, trailing fire, then pressed hard where they were joined, letting her know without a word how well he knew her clit already. How easily he commanded it, and her.

And satisfaction glinted in his gaze when she let out a soft cry, another punch of something not quite an orgasm slamming into her. He moved his hand up over her belly, letting her feel her own moisture as he slowly dragged his way across her skin. And he held himself still, his cock hard and deep, as his hand found her breast. He weighed it in his palm, then dragged his thumb over her nipple, making her moan as the sensation punched through her again.

Still his hand rose, while his green gaze pinned her in the mirror as surely as his cock was buried inside her. His hand kept moving, until it came up to circle her throat.

“I don’t want you to forget where we are, slip off your tiptoes and choke,” he told her, dark and low. His hand almost a collar, but not quite. Dylan and not Dylan, all at once, and that was its own punch. “But that might take work. I want you to do that work.”

And she could see herself. She could see that dazed look on her face and the way each breath she took made her breasts bounce a little. More than that, she could see the intensity in his gaze, and the absolute certainty.

It made her, if not certain on her own, willing to trust that he was.

She nodded, but she couldn’t access her voice. And she couldn’t keep her hands from coming up to grip onto his strong forearm.

“If you don’t want my hand there, that’s fine,” he told her, his green gaze direct. So intense she was sure that he could see straight through her, as deep as that giant cock of his was, buried inside her. “Pull it away. All right?”

Again, she nodded, and she could feel his hand strong at her throat. Not tight, but the faint suggestion of restriction made a new kind of sensation prickle down her back. Her clit seemed to swell.

“Up on your toes, Jenny,” he said again, darker this time.

And then he fucked her.

There was no other word for it, and with each deep, raw slam of his cock deep into her body, she understood the difference in a way no one could possibly have explained to her.

If there was a rhythm, she couldn’t catch it. There was no way to move her hips, either with him or against him.

It was a hammering.

He held her at her hips and at her throat, and it was up to her to grip his arm. To stand up on the very tips of her toes—because if she didn’t, she would collapse against him and maybe choke for a moment. Or worse, he would stop.

It was a storm. It was magnificent, it was terrifying, and he fucked her hard.

And he changed her, every time his cock slammed deep.

Because his green gaze never wavered. He kept it trained on hers, and he watched as she sobbed. As she cried out. She hung on for dear life, he hammered into her and her body exploded.

Over and over again.

And it wasn’t just her clit. Her whole body seem to come, not just her nipples and her pussy, but everything. Every inch of her, a clenching and a shuddering, inside and out. He fucked her relentlessly, so hard it was like he was making her new.

He fucked her while she burned and fell apart, and he fucked her on and on until she couldn’t tell the difference between the fucking and the coming, a sob and a sigh.

And when she finally drooped a little, still trying to hold on to his forearm but no longer able to make her fingers grip, he shifted. He pulled out, then tumbled her down with him onto the ground. And that was part of it, she understood—that it was a bathroom. That no matter how nice the rug, it was on a bathroom floor.

And she didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything but Dylan coming down over her, still fully dressed, except for the jeans he’d opened to let himself free.

She had a glimpse of it, his huge, hard cock. And the look on his face, almost like an agony, as he stretched out over her. He pulled one of her knees up high, then sank deep into her again.

Then, if it was possible, he fucked her even harder. Even deeper.

And Jenny was sure she was done, that her body couldn’t take any more, but he dropped his head to her breast and sucked her nipple deep into his mouth. She came, that easily. Once, then again. And when she was positive that this time, she really was finished, he grinned at her. All wolf.

Dylan reached down between them and pinched her clit, hard.

Jenny screamed, but his other hand was there, covering her mouth. Taking the sound. Making it part of her coming again, in a wild, clenching rush.

Then he was groaning too, and she could feel him shudder as he came. His whole body shook as he pumped himself into her, it seemed to go on forever, and that was even hotter.

For a long while, there was nothing but breath. Both of them, breathing heavily and loud in the quiet little room.

He was crushing her down into the plush rug, and she could feel his cock inside her, semihard still. Dylan stirred, after what seemed like another long while, and lifted his weight off her.

And when his eyes met hers, she could have sworn that for the first time in as long as she’d known him, he looked guarded.

Jenny didn’t think. She lifted her hand, and took his face in her palm. She wanted to ask him if he was all right, but there was something in his face that kept her from it.

So instead, she kissed him, and not one of those carnal, impossible kisses from before.

This was sweet. Soft. It made her want to cry.

And maybe it did something to him, too, because he looked away. His breath came heavy again, but then he was rolling off her, and she had to cope with how empty she felt without his cock so deep inside her.

He moved to the sink and handled the condom, then he zipped himself up. And when he looked back at her, she could only imagine how she looked. Sprawled out naked, save for a pair of heels, utterly and completely debauched on the bathroom floor.

It was Dylan who had done this to her.

Her Dylan, and Jenny could feel a reckoning gathering around her. She understood that there was no possible way that she could process any of what had happened tonight, maybe ever. In that moment, she didn’t care about that, either.

He looked down at her, and he had that stranger’s face on, and now she knew what it meant. Now she knew all of him.

She lifted her arms up over her head, and she stretched. She felt sleepy, comprehensively used in the best kind of way, and the smile that took over her face felt silly.

Giddy, even.

But she let it. She didn’t try to hide it.

Because there might be hell to pay later, so there was no point pretending now.

“That was nice enough, Dylan, thanks,” she told him, in a voice that sounded cracked and torn and as thoroughly debauched as the rest of her. “But is that really all you’ve got?”

CHAPTER NINE

OF ALL THE mistakes Dylan had made in his lifetime, most of them concerning Jenny, this one was the worst.

The absolute worst of all. He knew it, and there was nothing for it.

It was done.

He helped her get to her feet, unable to keep himself from grinning as she fell against him, and laughed uproariously. For all intents and purposes, she looked drunk.

On him.

“I understand you’re underwhelmed, Jenny,” he murmured. “But any reasonable person would have to describe your particular behavior just now as a bit giddy, don’t you think?”

He was already hard again, because this was Jenny and he had years to make up for. He watched her as she pulled her clothes back on, then did nothing more with her hair than run a hand through it. And like that, she was once again the very picture of casual elegance.

“I’ll concede what happened was indeed a fucking,” she said, as if they were back in Oxford, studying something boring. She even managed to look prim, as if he hadn’t just been inside her. “But whether or not it was proper, I couldn’t say. I don’t have any context, do I?”

“I think your whole life until now would qualify as context,” he said dryly.

“You’ve taught me the difference between a shag and a fuck.” She sketched a little curtsy that was so cute he thought his chest might crack open. “But now I think we need to turn our attention to what makes for a proper fucking, which as you may recall was what the doctor ordered.”

He was leaning back against the counter, near her but not touching her. Because if he touched her again, he would repeat what had just happened. And as tempting as that was, he had a powerful need to put this woman in his bed, at last. Then take his sweet time. Over and over again, until he lost track.

And before she woke in the bright light of a new day and thought better of all of this.

“Your wish is my command, as always,” he told her.

She laughed at that, as if it wasn’t the humbling truth of his entire adult life. His guiding star, even. His true north had always been Jenny, and he suspected it always would be, whether she was married or not. But that was one more thing he kept to himself.

He threw open the door, watching Jenny turn red as she noticed that he hadn’t bothered to lock it. And he liked the way she blushed so much that he decided not to tell her that there was no need to lock the door when the staff was perfectly well trained to take care of any possible interlopers. Why ruin her fantasy that she could have been walked in on at any time?

Dylan led her out a different door than the one they’d come in, this one higher up the hill, where a car waited for them. Because he didn’t feel like driving them home tonight, as that might require he take his hands off her.

And he might only have this one night. He couldn’t let himself forget that for a second. He had to make the most of it.

But when Dylan settled in the backseat beside her, he wasn’t prepared for the way Jenny melted into his side. She snuggled into him, then dropped her head to his shoulder. As if they’d done this a thousand times before and she knew she would fit next to him so well. As if it was normal for them to cuddle up in the backseat of a car, or anywhere else.

And what killed him was that it felt perfectly normal. It felt right. Everything with Jenny always did and always had. That was just one of the many ways she’d ruined him from the start.

Because there was no having her. There was only losing her.

He’d made a decision a long time ago to make himself over into whoever and whatever she needed, even if that meant not getting what he wanted. That meant he got a hell of a lot more than any of those idiots who’d tried to be her boyfriend.

Tonight he’d crossed every last line he’d ever drawn.

He could boss everything around as he pleased, and did, but he had no control over his own damned heart.

And he had to sit with that, staring out the window as the lights of Sydney blurred together in front of him. Jenny was a soft weight against him, her breath slow and even and her face buried against his shoulder.

For once in his life, he had everything he’d ever wanted. And more than he’d imagined was possible.

Enjoy it, mate, he told himself darkly.

Because it wouldn’t last. It couldn’t last.

Her hand was on his leg, and the light spilled in from the streets outside. It made her look even prettier, which shouldn’t have been possible.

It also illuminated that great bloody boulder she wore on her hand. The ring that reminded him that she wasn’t his. That this was an interlude from her real life. That she’d come here because she knew exactly what she was getting herself into with this marriage her father wanted, and this was her last chance to taste how the other half lived before she surrendered to it.

He knew her too well. She might come to the other side of the globe to experiment, but she was going to go straight back. Jenny was going to lock herself away in her lonely little life, by choice. She was going to stay there, getting more brittle and far away by the year. He could see it all spin out in front of him.

She was never going to give him what he wanted from her.

Everything had changed and nothing had changed.

And at least Dylan could say he’d chosen his own ruin. At least he had that.

That was what he told himself when they arrived at his house. She was still so sleepy that he had to lift her into his arms, then carry her inside, the way he’d longed to do a million times before.

He didn’t take her into the guest room. He headed up the stairs to the master bedroom instead, because he could feel time slipping away from them. And he didn’t want to waste any of it. He lay her out on his big wide bed and helped her off with her clothes. He expected her to wake up, but she didn’t. She murmured something when she was naked, then curled up on her side, burying her face in his pillow.

Dylan didn’t have it in him to pretend that he was anything but shaken.

He didn’t have to pretend, because she was asleep. And he could take the opportunity to acknowledge that for all he’d tried his best to scare her off, or prepare her, he was the one who was losing it. Who’d already lost it. Who could do nothing but sit in a chair next to his own bed, staring at this woman who was every single one of his dreams come true.

Only while she slept, unknowing, could he think about the fact that she’d obeyed him completely. That he’d fit inside her, perfectly. There had been no wincing in pain. No adjustments.

It was as if Lady Jenny Markham had been put on this earth for the express purpose of taking his cock deep inside of her.

Dylan knew that not a single one of those little wankers who’d put their hands on her before him had ever treated her like that. They’d bored her silly. They’d made her imagine she was frigid when she couldn’t stop coming.

She was supposed to be his.

Dylan had known that from the start. And he’d already spent a lifetime seeing her when he closed his eyes, so tonight, he didn’t want to.

He wanted his eyes wide open. He didn’t want to miss a single moment.

The way she breathed. The way she looked in his bed.

The way her face softened. The way she trusted him this much.

Dylan wanted all of it.

Because none of it was ever going to be enough. And it was more than he deserved. It was as if he’d only just found her, and he had to let her go.

The real problem was, he didn’t know if he had it in him.

How could he possibly let her go when he knew, now? Exactly how good it really was. Far, far better than he’d dared imagine. And he had an epic, detailed, innovative imagination.

So Dylan sat where he was. He didn’t move. He let the night grow later and later, the hour smaller and smaller, and he didn’t care when his eyes began to feel gritty and his body began to protest.

He stayed where he was, because he wanted every single second of this. Every last second.

When Jenny’s eyes fluttered open, hours later, she looked around in confusion for a moment, then landed on him.

And smiled automatically, big and sleepy.

This is how you’ll do it, mate, he told himself. You’ll do it for her. You’ll make her smile and wave her off.

And he’d deal with the fallout later. When she’d gone.

When she was finally lost to him forever.

CHAPTER TEN

WHEN JENNY WOKE UP a great many hours later, she was naked again.

Better yet, she was in Dylan’s bed. And Dylan himself was slumped out in the chair nearby, his brooding gaze on her, while outside there was the faintest suggestion that light might come again. Someday.

“Last thing I remember we were getting into a car,” she said. And that giddiness she’d been after swelled in her, sharp and syrupy and everything she’d imagined it would be. She wriggled a bit, trying to really feel it. And ignoring the other parts that threatened to swamp her with unpleasant recollections that this wasn’t hers to keep. Not really. “Is that your real secret, Dylan? Are you the reason I blacked out?”

He rubbed his hand over his face, grinning. “I get that a lot. My cock is a well-known roofie.”

Jenny sat up, not bothering to clutch at the sheet, and watched the way his gaze dropped to her breasts. And more, made them react. Her nipples pinched tight, and suddenly she remembered when she’d been sprawled out on the floor of that bathroom, his cock pounding into her and his mouth moving over her. His tongue and the hint of his teeth, there on that sensitive point.

Her whole body seemed to shiver into awareness.

“I don’t remember what conclusion we reached.” And she was aware of everything about him, now. When he tensed in the chair, though he was still slouching there as if he thought that made him look relaxed. The way his cock pushed at the front of his jeans. “Do I only get a night? Or am I a weekender? I don’t dare to hope than I might have scored longer than that. Not to mention, I’m not entirely sure it would be physically possible.”

“You can have as long as you like, Jenny.” The remains of his grin were still on his mouth, but his eyes were in shadow. They seemed darker now. And connected to all those things inside her that she wasn’t looking at. That she didn’t want to process.

Not now, maybe not ever.

“Good thing you’re not worried about falling in love, Dylan,” she said lightly, teasing him. “You look a little wobbly there.”

And she couldn’t say she regretted saying it, precisely. But there was something in the air of the sprawling room, suddenly. Something like grief, raw and encompassing. Powerful and thick.

But she forgot about that when he rose to his feet.

“I told you,” he said, his voice low enough to be a growl. “No chance of me falling in love with you.”

And she had to wonder why she’d brought up the subject again, when it hurt to hear him say that just as much as it had the first time. More, if she was honest, because she knew better, now. He had been right. He’d been upsettingly right, in fact, about how little she knew about the things that sex could do.

But Jenny still wasn’t thinking about that. Not now.

Not while he was stripping off his clothes, tossing them into the chair behind him, and then standing there a moment when he was done, astonishingly naked.

She buzzed a bit, all over, as if her skin couldn’t contain all the things her body did in response to the sight of him. It was different to see him naked, even if she’d seen so much of him before. In his running shorts, for instance. And it was certainly different to look at that huge cock, standing away from his body, and understand not only that she’d taken all of that inside of her, but remembering precisely how it had felt.

She heard a greedy little noise, and was only dimly aware that she’d made it.

Jenny didn’t intend to move, but she did. And next thing she knew she was kneeling down before him, her hands moving over his strong, muscled thighs.

“Kneeling already, Jenny?” he asked, in that dark, commanding voice that she was sure she’d never get used to. It seemed so unlike the man she’d known for all these years—and then again, it was the man she’d met last night, and he made her shiver, hot and ready, and it was all Dylan. All the sides of the man she knew best. “You’re taking to this quickly.”

“I want to taste you,” she told him, solemnly.

And she kept her head tipped back, so she could watch his face as she reached up and wrapped her hands around his enormous cock. Her mouth watered, but she maintained eye contact as she tipped herself forward, then licked the broad head.

Gently, like the first, sweet taste of an ice cream cone.

He muttered something filthy.

“Is that a yes or no?” she asked. Then she took a moment to suck him, deep into her mouth, so she could play with suction. And the flat of her tongue. Then she grinned at him. “You’ll have to speak up.”

Dylan laughed, then, a dark and wondrous thing.

She felt him move, though she didn’t understand what he was doing for a moment, because the taste of him was rolling through her, male and salty and a hint of what she thought was her, too. The blaze of it surged through her, igniting a new fire and making her pussy clench.

But then his hand was in her hair. He twisted it around, until she realized he was gripping her hair like it was some kind of leash. And something about that made her feel almost sluggish with longing. As if she might not be able to bear it—she wanted this so much.

She dragged her eyes back up the perfect, beautiful length of his body, and found him watching her.

“Hands behind your back,” he told her, softly.

“Behind my back?” She didn’t understand. “But then I can’t—”

“Use them. Or control a thing. I told you I was bossy.”

She couldn’t tell if it scared her or she liked the challenge of it. Or something in between. But it didn’t matter, because when he looked at her like that, with his cock so hard, she rather thought she would do anything he asked. Anything at all.

Jenny let go of his cock, though she didn’t want to. And she slid her hands behind her, lacing her fingers together. The position made her arch her back a bit, so her breasts jutted forward, and she saw the appreciative gleam in his eyes.

Worth it right there, she thought.

She liked it even better when he smiled. And Jenny liked it best of all when he tugged a bit on the hair he held in his fist while his other thumb tracked over her mouth.

Not entirely gently. Rude and rough, and it was like a coarse fire consumed her.

“I remember you and Erika trading stories about the dicks you’ve sucked.” There was a faint, dull ache from how tight he held her hair and that drugging glory of his rough thumb against her lips. “She always loved sex, and we know you didn’t, but both of you wielded blowjobs like weapons.”

“I wouldn’t say that. Exactly.”

His thumb pressed over her lips, silencing her.

“I’ve spent years wondering what it must have been like to be one of those undeserving gobshites, too bleeding stupid to realize you were literally leading them around by the cock.” His head tilted slightly to one side as he regarded her, and her stomach quivered. “Is that what you think will happen here? You’ll suck me off and reduce me to a blithering mess like all the rest of them? Prepared to follow you to the ends of the earth, desperate for one more lukewarm touch?”

But his thumb was over her mouth, so she couldn’t answer. And that was just as well, because she didn’t know what she would say. Because he had always talked about her sad love life as if she had all the power when Jenny hadn’t exactly seen it that way.

Though tonight she had only the driving need to taste him. That made a stark difference from how she’d treated getting a man off in the past, admittedly.

Men are easy, Erika had declared long ago, dancing with a bottle from the off-license in the street, just begging for trouble. All you need to do is gaze up at them, beg them for their cock and they’re yours.

Jenny had never done it because she’d found men easy. She’d done it because they were complicated, and wanted things from her she’d had no intention of giving. And because sometimes sex itself didn’t do the trick.

Men were visual—wasn’t that what everyone always said? They liked a girl kneeling in front of them, or crawling down the length of them on a bed. Until tonight, she’d never really understood the appeal of oral sex. Personally.

She did now.

Back then, however, she remembered giggling wildly with Erika as they’d shared their thoughts on how best to go about handling the boys who’d followed them around. Had they really admitted to that in front of Dylan?

But he was Dylan. He’d always been right there. She might have said anything at all.

“Keep your hands behind your back,” he told her, another quiet command. “If you lift them up, I’ll stop. Do you understand?”

She nodded, and as she did, he worked his thumb between her lips. It was rude. Obvious. And even so, she sucked on him anyway, and her pussy clenched tight.

“Tell me, Jenny. How’s your gag reflex?” Dylan laughed, with his thumb against her tongue. “That gets you all wide-eyed, does it? I guess we’ll see.”

He pulled his thumb from her mouth and she felt herself sway, even though that shouldn’t have been possible. Not with him holding her like that. A fist in her hair, his cock huge and hard between them and that implacable look on his face.

He made it impossible to remember all the sharp and clever things she’d planned to say. All the ways she’d intended to make him laugh, and remember that she wasn’t just another one of his giddy, disposable girls.

But her mouth watered, because his cock was so beautiful, though she had never used that word to describe that part of a man’s anatomy before. It was different when it was Dylan. Or maybe because it was so big.

“You can have it, Jenny,” he promised her, in that low, insinuating way of his. “You’ll have to beg me.”

And before she’d gotten on that plane, Jenny would have laughed at the idea that she would ever kneel before anyone and beg. For this or anything else. Even earlier tonight, as she’d waited for him by the opera house, she would have rolled her eyes if he’d sauntered up to her and predicted she would beg for the privilege of taking him in her mouth.

But he’d been right about that, too. She felt like a different person. Like a stranger to whoever that Jenny had been.

Because this Jenny knew that if she didn’t get the chance to taste that cock, to feel him in her mouth, she would die.

“Please,” she said, with no hesitation. “Please, Dylan. I want it.”

“You want what?”

She gasped a little, but she couldn’t have said if it was her breath tangling in her throat or the sudden understanding of what it was he wanted her to say. And she didn’t care. She could picture what she looked like, kneeling here on his floor, her head pulled back with his faintly cruel hand in a fist there. And his cock close, but not close enough.

Jenny pictured it, and she didn’t understand how that could make her clit ache, but it did. Oh, how it did.

She shifted, trying to get her thighs closer together to give herself some relief. And was somehow not surprised at all when Dylan stopped her, putting his foot between her knees and holding her legs apart.

“You come when I let you come,” he told her. “I thought you understood.”

“Please, Dylan,” she heard herself say again, more frantic this time. It was no longer clear to her what she was begging for, only that he needed to give it to her. Whatever it was.

“Tell me what you want,” he said, all dark command.

“I want you to fuck my mouth.” Jenny felt her nipples get even harder at that. Just as her pussy felt soaked. And her clit pulsed with a need like pain, but better. Much better. “Make me come, Dylan. Please.”

“You’ve come a thousand times, by any estimate.” As he spoke, he wrapped his own big hand around his cock, then worked it, and it was an agonizing thing to watch. And not only because it was so like that image she’d had of him doing precisely this. “What makes you think you deserve more?”

“Please,” she begged him.

His eyes no longer looked green at all. They were black and fierce, and she was all fire and flutter, and she made a sobbing sound she didn’t recognize.

Then she didn’t care what she sounded like, because he was pressing his cock between her lips at last.

She half expected him to thrust in deep, the way he had earlier, but he didn’t.

He wasn’t gentle, exactly, but he started slow. He let her taste him. He made a rumbling sound of approval when she used her tongue, teasing that ridge that separated the head from the shaft, then taking him in deeper.

And it was different. It was wildly different from anything she’d ever known, and she couldn’t understand why. But her clit kept pulsing, she was soaking wet and as he moved, his thighs brushed against her breasts. That sent delicious spirals of pure sensation arrowing through her. Once again, there was moisture in the corners of her eyes, as her mouth stretched wide to take as much of him as she could.

He used his grip in her hair to guide her, or to hold her still. Whatever he wished. He surged into her, backing off if he went too far, but then—once he knew how far he could go—he did exactly what she’d asked him to do.

And fucked her mouth.

It was a lit match, then a wildfire. It was an ecstatic, glorious thing, so much sensation crashing over her and through her that she almost felt skinless. There was his dark gaze. The implacable wall of his gorgeous body. His hard hand in her hair and the other at her jaw.

There was the ferocity on his face, and in between all of that, part of it and because of it, there was her.

And that was it, she understood as she tipped herself over and gave herself up entirely into his hands. Less a surrender than a becoming.

She wanted to taste him, and she got that, raw and real.

And when he gave a shout and flooded her mouth, she felt her own body convulse, and realized she’d pressed her greedy pussy against his leg. And the sheer joy of tasting him, that intense punch of salt and man, made it go on and on.

He pulled her off his cock, and for moment he stared down at her, his chest heaving.

And she thought she recognized him at last, in that wild expression he aimed at her—

But something in her shied away from naming it.

And then he was lifting her up, hauling her into his arms again, then carrying her into his en suite. He set her down in his shower that was three sides glass, and when he turned the water on it was as if they were standing in the Tasman Sea itself.

The water beat over her, she found herself speechless as she slumped there against the wall, watching him.

She’d had a mouthful of Dylan. And that thought was so wrong and so perfect at the same time that it almost sent her over that edge again.

And maybe she’d made some kind of sound, because he looked over then, and she understood in a flash why it was that sucking Dylan’s cock—a sentence she never would have allowed herself to think before in all her life—was so different. She couldn’t remember ever doing something like it before.

Because she hadn’t.

Because she’d always done exactly what he’d accused her of doing. She’d kept a blowjob in her back pocket to change the conversation. To end a fight. To make unpleasantness go away with a little bit of suction.

This was different, not only because Dylan had taken complete control. In such a masterful fashion that it made her breasts feel heavy and her belly feel unbearably light. Shivery. This was also different because she hadn’t thought of what she would gain from it at all. She’d wanted the taste of him, but more than that, she’d wanted to make him happy.

She’d wanted to please him, far more than she’d wanted to please herself.

That struck her as the kind of revelation that if she thought about too closely, might make her curl up into a ball somewhere.

And she was naked in Dylan’s astonishingly luxurious shower, and it was no time or place for the fetal position.

“Look at me,” she said softly, all too aware of the rough scrape of her voice. “Trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea. Literally.”

“Very droll.” He moved closer to her, and he didn’t ask as he took some of his shower gel and began to lather her up.

He didn’t ask, but she didn’t mind at all, because that meant his hands were all over her, but extra slippery. And there was a wickedness in his gaze as he tended to her breasts with particular care, until she was rising up on her tiptoes, arching her back, pressing herself even more fully into his palms.

And by the time they were both squeaky clean, she was panting again, with this maddening need for him that only seemed to get worse.

He took her out of the shower, toweled her off and then he led her out into the bedroom again, where it was still night, but barely. And they were both a bit damp as they rolled together on that great bed of his, and Jenny moaned out loud with sheer delight at the feel of his full, naked body stretched out against hers. All the places they were the same, and far more places where they were different.

Dylan brushed her wet hair back, and he took her mouth, and still they rolled this way, then that, as he kissed her with the same raw power he’d done everything else. And she could feel him again, hard and ready.

He pulled back, and then went for his nightstand, but she’d had him in her mouth. She didn’t want to feel anything between them. She wanted the full experience.

“I’m on the pill,” she panted at him. “I told you already. And I fully trust your test results. We’re both gloriously adult, we’ve had a frank discussion and I really, really want to feel you inside me. Just you, Dylan.”

It seemed to take him a long, long time to look back at her. And when he did, she felt everything tremble. The way he looked at her made her quake.

He reached for her, and then pulled her over him, settling her into place astride him.

“Go on,” he said as she braced herself against his chest, and looked down at him with delight. “For that, you can play awhile.”

“I’m on top. Does that mean I get to be in charge?”

There was a flash of his grin, but it was a sharp, edgy thing. “I said you can play. Make yourself come, however you can. See how long it takes you.”

She was in the grip of that fever that never ended, so she didn’t waste time asking for clarification. She didn’t care. Dylan was sprawled out beneath her and she lifted herself up, canting her hips back so she could find the broad head of his cock with her pussy. Then she began to work him inside of her.

She was wet and slippery, and so hot he hissed a little as he slid into her.

And she had half a mind to tease them both, to draw it out.

But he felt too good. She wanted him too desperately. And his hands were looped around her waist, part of this but not helping her, as she settled herself down and took all of him.

And then she began to rock herself silly.

His cock was a wonder, so big it rubbed up hard against that spot inside of her that made her feel loopy. And every time she rocked herself against him, the hard wall of his abdomen rubbed against her clit.

And she was shaking and sobbing as she moved, faster and faster, using every part of her that she could to make it better. Worse. Whatever those words even meant when it was this good. This hot. This wildly intense.

And then she was coming again, in a great, shuddering, tight wriggle of sensation.

Jenny thought she heard him laughing, dark and low.

She slumped against him, tears streaming down her cheeks again. She was gasping for breath, aware of too many things even as the aftershocks ripped through her.

The way he cradled her head against his chest. The way his other hand tracked down the length of her spine, as if to remind her where she was.

But best of all, he remained hard as steel deep inside her.

When she lifted her head, his green eyes were glittering.

Dylan wrapped his arms around her, shifted slightly and then he took control.

He fucked her, hard.

The harder and wilder he went, the more she felt like liquid gold with the rush of it. She was lost again. She was part of him. Coming and coming, until she couldn’t tell the difference between coming and not coming, when there was only him. And the relentless way he drove inside of her.

On and on, until there was no difference between the way she sobbed and the way she shuddered. It was all Dylan.

And when he came again, he shouted out her name.

Then held her there, still sprawled on top of him. She tucked her face against his chest, and listened to his heart thunder beneath her ear.

Outside, dawn was breaking.

And Jenny knew that she’d gotten exactly what she’d wanted. What she’d asked for.

She’d been properly fucked, finally.

And more than that, she was well and truly fucked, in every other sense of the word.

Because somewhere during that last, abandoned sprint into the deepest joy she’d ever known, the truth had slammed into her along with yet another orgasm.

She’d been keeping this door shut tight as long as she’d known him. And there’d been a reason for that.

Because now that door between them was wide open, and it was far worse than she’d thought it would be.

She was in love with Dylan Kilburn. She suspected she always had been.

But he’d made it clear that he wasn’t going to fall in love with her.

And Jenny had no earthly idea how she was going to live with that once she left Australia, returned to her life and married Conrad, as planned.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

HE EXPECTED HER to leave, but she stayed.

She stayed, and they fell face forward into one of those dreams Dylan knew all too well. The dream where Jenny lived here, with him. She slept in his bed and left her things cluttering up his countertop in the bathroom. Bizarre female things that he found fascinating, given the size of her collection and how little she used them. She started to hum again, tuneless little ditties beneath her breath as she moved around the place, and the big, heartbreakingly bright smile she gave him when he joined in made them both laugh.

Dylan knew it couldn’t last, that it wasn’t real. That was why he didn’t do anything truly foolish, like tell his office he would be unavailable for the foreseeable future. And while he thought that his daily forays into reality would make this stolen time with her better, it didn’t.

Because if he’d holed up with Jenny on a deserted island somewhere, it would have been a holiday for both of them. And he knew full well that holidays couldn’t last. They never did.

Instead, he just…had Jenny. In his life. The way he’d always wanted her.

Sometimes she met him out in the city, and he took her to his favorite restaurants. New flash bars and local dives. His club, when he couldn’t make it home without having her. Other nights, he met her back at his and cooked for her, if he had a mind to. Or sometimes, he came in to find her throwing a dinner together for the two of them.

It all made his heart do strange and terrible things inside his chest.

Having Jenny in his bed made it far too easy to imagine what it would be like if this was real. Jenny, there in the mornings. All that texting they did, but with Jenny actually there to pop in for lunch. Or to walk the coastal path with him. Jenny to reach over and hold his hand while they talked, as if that was the most natural thing in the world.

And in between all those sweet, domestic moments he’d never wanted, and yet found he hungered for, he got his hands on her. His hands, his mouth, his cock. And he got to live out every last fantasy he’d ever had involving this woman. From cranky morning sex to long, slow, torture for them both. He got to experiment with tying her up to his bed, bending her over the furniture, and watching how melty and sweet she got when he ordered her about.

He kept waiting for a hitch. For something to change, and ruin this thing they had going on. He expected that sooner or later, the fire would dim a bit.

But it only got stronger. The more he had her, inventive and mad, or intense and quiet, the more he wanted her.

He didn’t see how he would ever be over it. The clutch of her pussy on his cock, the eagerness of her mouth. And that virgin ass he’d claimed as his, and his alone.

One night, he came home after a particularly long day filled with irritating meetings and the kind of bad mood that even the thought of his Jenny couldn’t alleviate. That was what he thought, anyway, as he came in and saw her curled up in the chair in his bedroom, a book in her lap and her gaze on the sea outside.

And she made his heart flip around inside his chest, but today that made his temper kick in.

Because the longer she stayed, the easier it was to forget that this was only temporary. Dylan couldn’t let himself get used to the lift he got when he walked in his house to find her there, because soon enough there would be nothing there but memories. For all the talk they’d had about proper fucking, he knew full well who it was who was getting well and truly fucked here.

“You don’t look happy,” she observed, quietly.

“I don’t want to talk,” he told her, his voice a low growl. “I want to fuck.”

Jenny stared at him a moment, but she didn’t snap back at him. Instead, she stood. And as he watched, peeled off the long-sleeved shirt and flowy pants she wore. Then, still holding his gaze, she walked over to the bed with all her natural elegance, and sat there on the foot of it.

Like the bloody queen.

That only made him angrier. Dylan stalked toward her, that raging thing in him a drumbeat against his ribs. When he got to the foot of the bed, he reached out and hauled her toward him. He tipped her back so that her legs were in the air, her head was back on the bed and he could pull her hips to the edge.

He reached down, yanked the zipper of his jeans open, and his cock was already hard. Ready. Because his cock was always hard and ready when Jenny was around. That was the problem.

And she was already wet for him. Because she was always wet for him, and that was one more thing that wouldn’t matter when she left him.

Dylan slammed into her with no foreplay and no kind words, just her hips high and her legs splayed open.

She screamed with that same bright joy that lanced through him, arching up off the bed. He gripped her hips and hammered into her, because she was coming already. She was coming over and over, her pussy milking him, hot and tight.

And when she opened her eyes, her gaze was steady. Adoring.

Dylan reminded himself that was a lie, too. Or it wouldn’t last anyway, so it amounted to the same thing.

He pulled out and flipped her over, so she was bent there over the bed. And he didn’t have to look at those beautiful brown eyes so filled with emotion and pretend he didn’t know what he saw there.

Dylan slammed back into her from behind. He watched her dig her fists into the bedclothes as he pounded into her, their bodies making a delirious sort of slapping sound every time he sank himself to the root.

And he could feel it every time she constricted around him, shuddering and shuddering. He went harder. Deeper.

And when he came, he yelled her name the way he always did. He let himself fall down over her back, fully clothed except for his cock. And because she couldn’t see him, or what might be written all over his face, he buried his head in her neck.

Dylan tried to breathe. He’d spent all these years fucking other women and pretending they were her. He’d made a hobby out of it. But now he knew better.

Now he knew.

And he didn’t see how he was going to go fooling his cock into thinking that anyone else was her. That anything else was this.

His breath sawed in and out of him. Everything hurt, and not from exertion. Jenny’s lips were parted as she did her own bit of panting, and her eyelashes were dark against her cheeks. He would remember this, too. It would haunt him.

Her lashes fluttered as she opened her eyes, and then she smiled over her shoulder, intimate and soft. Dylan pulled out and turned her over, lifting her up so he could get his mouth on hers.

And he kissed her, haunted already while she was still right here, until they were both a little dizzy. Then they both lay there, breathless again, as the ocean crashed around outside and absolutely nothing changed between them.

Because it never would. Why couldn’t he hold on to that the way he should?

“You’re going to have to go soon,” he said, because not saying it was no longer doing the trick. “Have you sorted out your plane ticket yet?”

He turned his head to look at her, stretched out beside him, and there was something stark and awful on her face. But she looked away before he could look too closely. And Dylan didn’t like the fact that she was hiding something from him, or that she was feeling something she didn’t want to share.

He wouldn’t wish the hurt in him on anyone, especially not Jenny.

But he couldn’t say he hated the idea, either.

If she hurt a little more, maybe she’d hurt him less.

And maybe you’re a bleeding idiot, a caustic voice in him snarled.

“I keep meaning to do that,” she said softly. To the ceiling.

Dylan sighed. “You can’t hide forever, Jenny.”

“On the contrary.” And when she looked back at him, there was something wise and weary in her pretty eyes. It made the ache in him deepen. “It turns out you can hide forever. All you have to do is pretend to be blind.”

“People are blind for a whole host of reasons,” he countered. He wanted to pull her close. Or jackknife up, then storm about the room, pacing out this mess in him. But more than that, he wanted to pretend. He wanted to keep on pretending, because that was how this worked. That was how this had always worked. “And those reasons aren’t going to go away simply because a person takes a long holiday and engages in a little unexpected intimacy with an old friend.”

“It’s not unexpected to you,” she said quietly. “You told me it would happen.”

And there was a part of Dylan that wanted this so badly that he thought he might break out in blisters from the wanting.

But he wasn’t made of steel. And he knew what that look in her eyes meant. He was sure it was in his, too—the only grace in that being that it had always been in his eyes and all over his face. She wouldn’t see any shift because there hadn’t been one.

You’ll have to be fine with this as is, he told himself stoutly. Bloody martyr that he’d always been. You always thought that given the chance, she’d be head over heels in love with you. And so she is.

But he couldn’t celebrate his rightness, because it didn’t matter. It changed nothing. She was Lady Jenny Markham. And he might have put a shine on things since he’d left university, but he was still nothing more than one of those Kilburns. He’d made a silk purse out of the proverbial pig’s ear, but that didn’t change what he was. Who he was.

Money would never change where he’d come from.

And a few weeks in sunny Australia, taking in the Tasman Sea, didn’t change everything he knew to be true about Lady Jenny. Or, more important, Lord Fuckface himself.

Jenny might not want her arranged marriage any longer, when this was said and done. But when she got away from Dylan and flew back to England, reality would trickle in. She would remember who she was. Who she’d always been. And the complexities of the life she’d planned out long before she’d decided to come down under and see what she was missing.

Dylan knew that all he had to do was give her the faintest signal, and she would tell him every last thing he’d waited his whole life to hear. That she loved him. That finally, finally, she loved him.

And there was a part of him that wanted that almost more than he could bear.

He reached over and smoothed her hair back from her face. He saw her eyes get glassy, and he felt that same emotion land on his chest like a block of concrete.

In a way, he’d always known she loved him.

Because she hadn’t treated him like all those other boys back when. Because he was the one she called her friend.

Dylan had always held that as a sacred trust.

Because he’d never been one of the wankers. He’d truly been her friend—that part hadn’t been pretending. And that meant that now, he had to be a better friend to her than she was to herself. If he bailed on her when it mattered most, he’d be no better than every last one of those tossers who’d tried to use her for their own ends.

Dylan would bloody well love her enough to let her go.

He was sure he’d seen that shit embroidered on a tea towel somewhere.

She was still gazing at him, everything he’d ever wanted right there in her eyes—but he knew it wasn’t what she wanted. He never had been.

“I told you what would happen,” he agreed, and made himself sound kind. “It’s a byproduct of proper fucking, remember? I did warn you.”

Her eyes were glassier, then. And he knew he’d hurt her, he hated that he’d hurt her, but it couldn’t be helped.

“A byproduct,” she repeated, her voice thick. She cleared her throat. “How long does it take for it to go away?”

His hand was still on her face, and he couldn’t bring himself to let go. “Not long.”

“But what if—”

“There are some people in this life who’ve always known exactly what role they had to play,” he said, gruffly. “And how to play it. You’re one of them, Jenny. You’ve never wavered from the path you’re on. As you’d normally be the first to tell me.”

“This feels very far away from that path.”

Dylan wanted to break things. He frowned at her instead. “If you don’t want to marry Conrad, don’t. But you and I both know that you should never make decisions that will impact the rest of your life when you’re taking a vacation from that life. Go home, Jenny. Figure out what you want there, not here.”

“What happens if I go back to my life, marinate in it for the appropriate amount of time and still find that it doesn’t fit?”

And he hated the anguish he could hear in her voice. The little crack in it, the darkness in her gaze.

“You have a life already. It fits you perfectly. You’re the one who told me you needed to arrange a life around your head. Not your heart. And certainly not what’s between your legs.”

“Sometimes I think what’s between my legs is the most honest part of me.”

“Coming feels like honesty,” he agreed, gritting the words out. “But in the end, you can make yourself come with a vibrator. With your own fingers. And if it’s just wanking in the end, you don’t want to make it into something more.”

“Dylan.” His name was like a sob. “You have to know that I—”

But he moved his fingers to cover her mouth, because there was only so much of this he could take, and he’d passed that mark some time ago.

“I want you to imagine explaining this to your father,” he said, his voice stern. And he tried to keep all that fury and hopelessness locked tight inside him. “The honesty of your pussy, for example. Will you sit down in his sodding great hall and tell him that? To explain why you’ve suddenly changed the whole of your life?”

“No,” she whispered. “I certainly will not. And thank you for the…clarification.”

That last word was a blow, aimed straight for the gut, but he made himself stay where he was. Jenny rolled up, then sat there for a moment with her back to him.

Then she got up and walked away.

Dylan let her go.

Because it was high time he started practicing for the real thing.

CHAPTER TWELVE

JENNY DIDN’T BOOK her ticket home the next day, as Dylan had been certain she would.

Another week rolled by, still glorious in all the same ways, but there was an edge to it now. Something dark in the midst of all that glory. And Dylan found he missed the sheer joy of his fantasy come true, but he told himself this way was better. Because this was the truth.

There was an end coming. He knew that as well as he knew his own name. Better, maybe.

But on some nights it was all too easy to forget.

Tonight, Jenny met him at his office. She smiled politely at his secretary, looking entirely too elegant and pulled together to be the same woman who, a few nights back, had met him in this very same office, and come away with rug burn on her knees.

She’d laughed that heart-stopping laugh of hers, still there on her hands and knees, and called her marks badges of honor.

Tonight it was cold and rainy. Jenny shivered in the coat she wore as they made their way down the street toward the restaurant Dylan had picked.

“I keep forgetting it’s winter here,” she said.

“Winter has a way of reminding you it’s around,” he replied. “Like it or not.”

And he was trying so hard to remember different things, now. While she told him stories from her work at her charity, he watched her hands. And that ring she’d never removed in all the time she’d been here. Despite the things they’d done. The ring that told the truth about her intentions no matter how confused she imagined she was.

It’s only a matter of time, he reminded himself. She’ll be gone before you know it.

Still, when their dinner was finished, he had every intention of taking her home, getting her naked and indulging them both. Letting their bodies say all the things he wouldn’t let them say in words.

But his mobile chimed in his pocket on the street outside the restaurant, and he swore when he saw the message. “I’m going to have to go back to the office.”

“That’s all right,” Jenny said. With another one of those smiles that killed him. “I’ll wait for you.”

And once again, Dylan was torn. Because he had to make an unpleasant call—and possibly deal with a whole host of other calls after it—and the part of him that had been ruined for this woman pretty much at first sight loved the idea of her waiting for him. Sitting on the couch in his office like another page out of some sweet, domestic book he would’ve laughed at, had he ever read such a thing. That she wanted to spend time with him even when it wasn’t all about her made his heart seem to thud a little harder.

But on the other hand, it was one more thing he would have to forget when she was gone.

And he was weak, because he took her with him back to the office. And debated making the call he needed to after all, because she was so happy to wave him off and turn her attention to what she told him was a massive library on her mobile. He thought of other women he’d spent time with, and how little they would have understood him cutting a night short. And Dylan really didn’t need more reasons to think that Jenny was perfect.

He already bloody knew.

When he checked in on her later, between disasters, she’d fallen asleep. She was curled up on his couch, her pretty shoes kicked aside. He pulled her coat over her like a blanket. Then he kissed her on her temple.

And he wished he was less her friend and more the ruthless bastard he was in every other area of his life. He could take that ring off her finger and smash it. He could spirit her off somewhere and maroon her there, until the next thing she begged for was his ring. He could marry her, get a few kids on her and indulge this fantasy of his in every possible way.

A bastard like that wouldn’t care how she’d feel some years down the road, when the enormity of how hugely she’d disappointed her father would kick in. He’d weather it, not giving a shit, because he’d have her. Having her would be the only thing that mattered—not how she felt about it.

And not how the world would view it. They would tut and smirk and no doubt get far nastier, if it suited them. No one would ever accept that their beloved Lady Jenny should fall so far, and end up linked forever to a bit of Irish trash.

He couldn’t help but wish he cared more about the end result and less about how he’d get them there. It would make everything so much easier.

But Dylan had learned a long time ago that there was no profit in wishing. The only thing that mattered in this world was what a man did.

So he kissed her, then he left her and went back to tend this empire he’d built. Because his business was the only thing that was real. And it was the only thing he would have left when she came to her senses.

He didn’t finish until the early morning.

He went into his office again, and woke her this time. As much because he thought he should take her home as for the simple pleasure of watching her blink at him, then smile the way she always did. As if waking up to see him before her was a gift.

God help him, but he was going to miss that.

“Well?” Her voice was foggy as she pushed herself up to sitting position. “Have you staved off disaster?”

“After a fashion.”

“I believe in you,” she said, still smiling.

Dylan couldn’t keep himself from leaning forward and capturing her mouth. And as usual, he didn’t know how to kiss her…appropriately.

Because a simple taste of her was never enough.

It got raw, fast. He found his hands in her hair, and he was angling his mouth over hers for better depth. And he didn’t know what would have happened if she hadn’t pulled back, her eyes dilated and her breath all but gone.

“Are we alone here?” she asked.

Dylan muttered a few choice swearwords. Because they weren’t. “No. Half my staff could walk in at any moment.”

Jenny smiled again, and maybe he was only imagining that it was more muted than before. Something like sad. She reached over and ran her thumb over his mouth, for a change.

“I’m up for anything,” she told him. “It surprises me how true that is, in fact. But I think I’d rather not expose myself to your entire company.”

Dylan had a better idea. He stood, pulling her up with him. He grabbed her coat, tossed it to her and then took her hand in his.

“Where are we going?” she asked, laughing, after he hustled her into the lift, and then, when it took them all the way down to ground level, hurried her out the door into the cold early morning street. “Am I going to take a car home?”

And he loved that she called his house home. Just like he loved that her being there made it feel more like a home than it ever had before. Because that was Jenny, really. Always his homecoming, no matter where she was or why. And no matter how soon she might leave him again.

He intended to celebrate that in the most carnal way possible today, and as quickly as possible.

“You’re not taking a car home,” he said. Shortly.

“You thought a kiss like that was a good precursor for a brisk walk?” But she was laughing as he hurried her down the street, away from his office building.

“Pick up the pace,” he advised her, steering them toward the Rocks.

And he could see she understood where they were going the minute they turned into the laneways. She laughed. And she was still laughing when he took her in through that same red door. And when he nodded and murmured something to the man at the desk.

But Dylan couldn’t wait to find an open room. He needed a taste to tide him over while he dealt with such practicalities.

He swept her into the first alcove they passed, hoping that the early hour meant that no one really saw the way he was kissing her. And maybe also not caring too much if they did.

He pressed her back against the wall, and she wound herself around him instantly. His hand moved of its own accord to get a good grip on the plump curve of her ass, and he loved the greedy little noise she made in return. Lust and encouragement. Need.

It was never enough.

It was never, ever enough, no matter how he kissed her, no matter how tightly she pressed herself against him.

And she was still laughing whenever he pulled away to catch his breath, but he wasn’t laughing at all. Dylan had forgotten entirely that he was meant to be her friend first, because she tasted like fire and rain at once. Because she inflamed him and she soothed him, all at the same time, and it only made him want her more. And he had loved her so long now that each new layer was less a revelation and more a confirmation.

She was the love of his life. She always had been.

She always will be, something in him said, like a dark prophecy.

And at some point he realized that someone was standing there, much too close to their not-so-private alcove. He assumed it was a staff member, come to gently suggest they find a private room, so he pulled away from Jenny. Little as he wanted to stop kissing her.

He automatically twisted to block her, because the staff here might have been paid handsomely to maintain their discretion, but he didn’t particularly like anyone looking at his woman.

His friend, he corrected himself acidly.

But when he looked at the man standing there, it was instantly clear that he was no staff member.

He stood tall and faintly disapproving, and he reeked of power and consequence. Though what he wore was not in and of itself particularly telling, it was the way he wore it. Dark trousers. A dark shirt. And the coldest gray eyes Dylan had ever seen.

Something clicked in him. This man was familiar.

Next to him, half behind him, Dylan heard Jenny pull in a sharp breath.

In distress.

And he knew. If he thought about it, he could even see the family resemblance to Erika.

He fucking knew.

And in that rush of recognition, he had to face the unpalatable fact that it was a lot easier to think about what a great friend he was in the abstract. Because it felt a whole lot more like dying now that it was happening. Now that he had the opportunity to prove it.

The man before him kept his gaze trained on Dylan for a long, frigid moment. Then he shifted it over Dylan’s shoulder, and Dylan could feel Jenny’s whole body jolt.

And he wanted to come out swinging. He wanted to teach the rich fuck standing before him exactly why he shouldn’t tangle with a man who’d been an Irish brawler before he’d ponced off to Oxford with the rest of them.

But that was the sort of thing a man who was in love with Jenny would do.

Dylan’s job was to be Jenny’s friend. Her best friend. That was the promise he’d made.

When that glacial gray gaze tracked back to him, Dylan didn’t react the way he wanted to. He made himself stand still.

He forced himself to do nothing at all.

“You must be the famous Dylan Kilburn,” the other man said, his voice precise. And frigid. “I believe you were at Oxford with my sister.”

“Guilty as charged, mate,” Dylan managed to say. And while he didn’t strike the easy, friendly note he was going for, he also didn’t sound entirely like he was chewing on broken glass, so he chalked it up as a win.

“I’m Conrad Vanderburg,” the other man said, as if Dylan might not have figured that out already. “And it appears you’ve already met my fiancée.”

“Conrad…” Jenny began, pushing out from behind Dylan’s shoulder.

And everything in him demanded that he pull her back. That he handle this. That he do whatever he needed to do—beat his chest, roar. Come over like the raging Neanderthal creature he’d always been, just there beneath his skin.

He ached with the need to beat Conrad back, using whatever means necessary to get him away from Jenny.

But no matter what happened here, he knew where this would end. Where it was always going to end.

“If you don’t mind,” Conrad said, with such scrupulous politeness that it made Jenny flinch and Dylan want to break things—more things—“I’d like to have a word with my future wife.”

Jenny took a deep breath, and Dylan could see what she was about to do written all over her face.

And he was the best friend she would ever have. He loved her more than he would ever love anything in this life or the next. Dylan knew that, because, instead of standing there between Jenny and her future, he stepped aside.

Literally.

“Of course,” he said.

He nodded at Conrad as if they were exchanging business cards. He forced himself to look at Jenny, and it was worse than he’d expected. She was staring at him, shock and betrayal on her face, because she already knew what he was doing. That was the trouble with all this friendship shit. There was no goddamn mystery, and that was one more thing he was going to make certain to beat out of himself as he got home.

He nodded at her, too. “Take care, Jenny.”

Dylan thought he heard her say his name, but he made himself walk away. He imagined them retreating back into texts as the weeks went by. There would be fewer and fewer of those as time went on, he imagined. It would be easier to forget. To pretend. To head back to England and plan her wedding, the way she should have been doing all along. She would invite him, no doubt, and he would go and smile and toast her happiness, because that was what friends did. And in a handful of years it would be like none of this had ever happened. He would be nothing more to her than an old school friend she saw rarely, if at all.

He figured he was already more or less a memory by the time he pushed through the doors, back out into a bright, cold Sydney morning.

And there was nothing he could do about his heart. He’d lost that too long ago now to imagine he’d ever get it back.

But he was a proud Irish man, a saint and a scholar through and through, and well did he know the cure for a spot of heartache. If not for what ailed him, then for what he was going to have to live through now that it was done.

It was finally done.

And Dylan might not find what he was looking for in the bottom of a bottle, but he planned to do a whole lot of asking anyway.

Until what hurt was his head—not that gaping, empty hole where his heart hadn’t been since Jenny had claimed it with a happy laugh when they were both eighteen.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CONRAD ORDERED TEA.

On the list of things that were epically wrong with this moment, this engagement of hers and her entire life, Jenny had to place that at the very top.

The world was ending and Conrad ordered tea. As if he was a proper Englishman when she was the one with the British title and the bloodline to match.

And the word proper kicked around inside of her, spiked and mean, until she felt more or less bloodied, inside and out.

The tea service arrived, and Jenny had been entirely too well taught to sit back listlessly. Or to slump over and wail, the way she had half a mind to do. So she busied herself pouring out steaming cups, asking muted questions about sugar and cream and then sitting there in the little study Conrad had led her to, staring across a fine antique table at this man there was no possible way she could marry.

He gazed back at her with absolutely no expression on his face.

Clinically speaking, he was a handsome man. Jenny knew that, even if she didn’t feel the way a prospective wife likely should. Erika had spent the whole of their friendship moaning about how cold her brother was, how cruel, but Jenny had never seen any of that herself. He was simply…expressionless, always.

But what she hadn’t understood until now was that he had never truly focused all of his attention on her before.

It was…intense. Something very nearly alarming.

The full force of his attention made her want to squirm. But she didn’t.

“This is very awkward,” she said instead, because it seemed better to say it than to continue to sit there in silence.

Conrad only gazed back at her, as unreadable as before.

“I certainly never anticipated that you would see…that.” Jenny knew she should start apologizing, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Because she wasn’t sorry. If anything, she was sorry that Conrad had interrupted them. “I realize that we never spoke directly about fidelity, but it can’t have been pleasant to look up and see…” She blew out a breath and stared down at her tea, not remotely tempted to take a sip. “I take it you’re a member of this club?”

“I stay here often when I arrive in Sydney too early to conduct business,” Conrad said, his voice as devoid of emotion as the rest of him.

Jenny lifted her gaze to his. And even as some part of her told her she didn’t owe him anything, that theirs was an arranged marriage and surely he couldn’t expect anything of her, another part of her cringed in shame. Because she’d promised to marry him, and the promise had meant something to her. And then she’d gone to such lengths to tell herself that promise didn’t matter when she was down here in Australia.

Was that really who she was now? Just…a liar?

Once Jenny started questioning the lies she’d told, they all seemed to crowd in on her. Stretching all the way back to a beautiful Irish boy with eyes of the deepest green, who’d appeared in front of her out of nowhere one day when she was barely eighteen.

And had stolen her heart in an instant.

But Jenny had never planned on falling in love. It was the one thing her otherwise indulgent father forbade her—and she’d agreed, because she never again wanted to feel the way she had after her mother had died. She’d done everything she could to make sure she never would.

And yet here she sat, with a cup of tea she didn’t want and a sea of grief inside her anyway.

Jenny had ended up right where she’d never wanted to go.

“We have no sexual relationship,” Conrad was saying, his voice as remote as the rest of him. “As little as I might enjoy seeing a woman wearing my ring in the arms of another man, I can’t claim the sight hurt me in any way. I do not feel betrayed.” He studied her for a moment. “I do feel curious, however. Do you plan to continue this affair after our marriage?”

And somehow, that made it worse. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

She cleared her throat, then tried again. “I haven’t actually given the matter any thought.”

One of Conrad’s eyebrows rose. “I don’t object. In theory. But there’s the issue of paternity.”

Jenny could remember, so vividly, standing out there near the Opera House Bar, blithely assuring Dylan that this would all be fine. That even if she fell in love, ha ha ha, she would scamper back off into the arms of the husband her father had arranged for her, and all would be well.

How had she ever imagined that she could do that?

She barely knew chilly, controlled Conrad. And she couldn’t imagine, now, allowing a man she barely knew to touch her body. To pull out his cock and put it inside of her. The very notion made her feel ill.

Which put rather more of a damper on the issue of the paternity of their potential children than she thought he meant.

And Conrad was a decent man, as she told anyone who dared question her on her choices. Kinder than she’d imagined, if this calm response to finding her with Dylan was any indication. Then again, perhaps that only meant he was significantly more controlled than she’d thought.

But most of all, he was Erika’s older brother. And even Erika had softened toward him recently, mostly because she happened to be shacked up with Conrad’s best friend.

Whatever the reason, Jenny found herself leaning forward, over the table between them, so she could take his hands in hers.

Something flashed over his face and made those cold eyes of his look silver for a moment. She had the shocking notion that there was a different man in him, too. And one she would likely never see.

“Conrad,” she said softly. “Why do you want to marry me?”

“You’re Lady Jenny. Who wouldn’t want to marry you?”

Jenny could think of one person who didn’t want to marry her. One person who’d looked at her with something like torture in his eyes and talked to her about how to let go of him.

“You mean, because of my father,” she said, concentrating on the man before her. Not the man she’d already lost.

The faintest shred of amusement moved across Conrad’s face. “If you mean your father’s money, I have my own.”

“Then why?” Conrad’s hands were warmer than she’d expected. And a whole lot tougher. “If I’m not mistaken, this is the first time you’ve ever really looked at me.”

Conrad turned her left hand over, and fiddled with the ring he’d put there.

“In the spirit of this sudden attack of honesty,” he said, and his voice was so dry that she couldn’t tell if he meant to sound that sardonic, or if it was simply a byproduct of the chill, “I didn’t need to look at you. You were good on paper. And I wanted to make the right choice. To live up to what was expected of the head of the Vanderburg family.”

“Ah, yes,” Jenny said. “Expectations.”

For a moment, they both stared at her ring.

“You don’t seem at all angry,” Jenny ventured. She peered up at him. “You don’t even seem mildly irritated, if I’m honest.”

His gray gaze touched hers and she didn’t know how she kept herself from flinching.

“I’m not pleased,” he said.

Jenny blew out a breath. She thought about her father and how disappointed he would be with her.

But then, that was all about his fear. And she’d let that fear and her own grief hang over her for so long now that she’d accepted that it was simply…how things were. She’d decided long ago she could never be with someone she loved. And she’d never tried, so she’d assumed she could handle a loveless life.

She knew better now.

Jenny had no idea if she could make Dylan love her, all these years later. What she did know was that she’d never forgive herself if she didn’t try.

She pulled off the ring that Conrad had given her, and she met his gaze—and held it—as she placed it back in his hand.

For a moment, he only stared back at her. As unreadable as ever.

“My sister tells me that Dylan has been your best friend as long as she has,” Conrad said then. “Though she claims she’s your real best friend, because he’s not really a friend at all, is he?”

“No,” Jenny said. At last. “I’m afraid Dylan has always been a lot more. Even if he did walk away today.”

Conrad smiled, then. And his eyes had gone back to that frigid gray. He let the ring roll forward and back in his palm before he closed it up in his fist.

He stood, tucking the ring away in his pocket. And it struck Jenny as funny, almost, that she was yet again in a supplicant position, staring up a man.

But not the right one.

“He wanted to tear me apart with his bare hands,” Conrad said, gazing down at her. “I thought he was going to try to put me through the wall. Instead, he walked away. Why would a man do that?”

Jenny only stared up at him as her heart began to pound at her like a battering ram.

“I don’t love you, Jenny,” Conrad continued. His voice was matter-of-fact. “If you married me, I never would. Love is not something I have to offer. But even a blind man could see that your friend does not suffer these same restrictions.” He inclined his head, cool and unbothered, and she couldn’t tell if that made it better or worse. “If you’re not content with our arrangement, if you feel even half the things I can see all over your face, go. Find him. I don’t think you need my blessing, but you have it.”

And Jenny stayed there, still leaning out over the small table, while the man she’d intended to marry turned and walk from the room.

She stayed where she was, there beside a lovely tea service she didn’t have the slightest urge to touch.

She thought about all these years since her first sight of Dylan at Oxford. And it was a temptation to think of them all as wasted. But when she set all those years of friendship next to the past few weeks of absolute joy, she knew, somehow, that she couldn’t have had one without the other. That it had always been leading here.

What she had to ask herself was whether or not, had Conrad not turned up the way he had today, she would have called off this wedding herself.

Jenny tried to imagine walking down an aisle in the spring, and seeing Conrad standing at the head of it.

And it was wrong. It was just…wrong.

There was only one man she’d ever wanted to see smiling at her, from the head of an aisle or anywhere else.

Her breath left her in a rush. She dug into the pocket of the coat she hadn’t managed to take off and pulled out her mobile. Then she called a number she knew by heart, though it was ten o’clock at night there and she knew her father didn’t like late night calls.

And in fact, he sounded typically put out when he picked up the phone.

“It’s me, Papa,” Jenny said. “I know you’re asleep or on your way. But I have something to tell you and I know you’re not going to like it. I need you to love me anyway.”

And when her father sputtered, Jenny told him the news.

Then repeated it when he fell silent.

“Do you love him?” her father asked. He sounded old, for the first time that she could recall. And it made her sad, but it didn’t make her change her mind. “Do you really love him?”

“I think I always have, Papa,” Jenny whispered. “But I tried not to. For your sake.”

“Does he love you?” her father asked, sounding almost severe. As if he couldn’t bear to think about it.

“That’s the thing,” Jenny said with a quiet conviction she hadn’t known, until now, was there inside her. “I think he’s loved me even longer.”

And when her father sighed, she knew she’d won. Or that he would support her, anyway. It felt much like the same thing.

“You don’t have to love him,” she told her father. “I don’t require it.”

“I love you, Jenny,” her father replied gruffly, and she knew those weren’t words that came easily to him. Bringing with them, as they did, the potential for so much loss. So much grief. But she’d never doubted the truth of it, no matter how little he said it. “If this is what you want, I support it. Your mother would have flayed me alive for making you think you couldn’t love the man you wanted to love.”

And Jenny didn’t know when she started crying, but she didn’t stop. Not when she ended the call. Not when she sat there a moment, thinking of the mother she’d lost, the father she still had and all these years she’d tried so hard to keep herself from feeling.

But she couldn’t cry forever, not even if the tears had more to do with the acknowledgement of emotion—and the sheer relief that she was no longer expected to marry a man she hardly knew and didn’t want. She took a deep breath. She wiped at her eyes. She stayed where she was and finally drank her tea.

And then she set off into Sydney to find the love of her life, and convince him that they had never been meant to be friends.

By any means necessary.

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