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.

Also by Caitlin Crews

Filthy Rich Billionaires

Teach Me

The Billionaires Club

The Risk

Hotel Temptation

Unleashed

Undone

Untamed

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.

Take Me

Caitlin Crews

Dirty Work

Regina Kyle

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-09953-0

TAKE ME & DIRTY WORK

Take Me © 2020 Caitlin Crews Dirty Work © 2020 Regina Kyle

Published in Great Britain 2020

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

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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

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.

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