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Kaden’s eyes flashed, showing Julia a glimpse of the emotion that thickened the atmosphere between them, no matter how he might deny it. “This is desire, pure and simple. We’re two single consenting adults and I want you.”
Julia looked up, helpless to pull away or articulate any kind of sane response. Which should be no. How was it possible that this desire hadn’t abated one bit? That if anything it felt stronger? There were so many layers of meaning here, and Kaden wanted to ignore all of that. As if they had never met before.
He lifted a hand and slid it around the back of her neck, under the fall of her hair, and pulled her even closer. Huskily he said, “I didn’t expect this. I didn’t expect that if I ever saw you again I would feel this way. Perhaps this was meant to be … a chance encounter to burn ourselves free of this insatiable desire.”
Insatiable desire. That was exactly how it felt—how it had always felt between them. Moments after making love Julia had always been ashamed of how quickly she’d craved Kaden’s touch again, and only the fact that it had been mutual had stopped her shame fro
m overwhelming her.
As he said, he hadn’t expected to see her again. And she could well believe that he’d not expected to desire her again. But he did, and obviously resented it. Why wouldn’t he? He’d turned his back on her, and he’d bedded plenty of women far more beautiful than Julia since then. It must be galling to meet your first lover and realise you still wanted her. That made Julia feel acutely vulnerable. But it was too late.
Kaden had pulled her even closer, and now her soft belly touched his hard-muscled form—far harder than she remembered—and his head was lowering to hers. She tried to stiffen, to register her rejection, but everything was blocked out when she felt the explosive touch of Kaden’s mouth to hers. Did it coincide with another clap of thunder outside or was that in her head?
Her heart spasmed in her chest, as if given an electric shock, and as his mouth moved and fitted to hers like a missing jigsaw piece she fell down into a dark vortex of desire so intense that it obliterated any kind of rational thought. Her hands had gone automatically to his chest, but instead of pushing him away they clung. The feel of powerful muscles under his shirt was intoxicating.
Time stood still. Everything stood still except for their two hearts, beating fast. Blood was rushing through veins and arteries, pumping to parts of Julia’s body that hadn’t been stimulated in a long, long time.
Kaden was seduction incarnate. His hands moved over and down her back, cupping her bottom in the tight jeans, floating sensuously over the silk shirt. With an easy expertise he certainly hadn’t displayed when she’d known him before he coaxed her mouth open and his tongue stroked along hers, making a faint mewl come from the back of her throat.
Through the heat haze in her head and her body Julia felt something urgent trying to get through to her. Kaden’s touch was all at once achingly familiar, and yet so different from how she remembered. They’d been so young, and their passion had been raw and untutored. The man who held her in his arms now was not raw and untutored. He was a consummate seducer, well-practised in the art. His body was different too. Muscles were filled out and harder.
It was that realisation that finally broke the spell cast around Julia. Plus the fact that within a mere hour of meeting Kaden again she was kissing him like a sex—starved groupie.
Wrenching herself away in one abruptly violent move, Julia staggered backwards, looking at Kaden’s flushed face and glittering eyes. “I don’t know you. You’re a stranger to me now. I don’t do this … I don’t make love to strangers.”
Something dark crossed Kaden’s handsome features. He drawled, “From what I recall, you found it remarkably easy to make love to relative strangers.”
With the memory of that incident so vivid, Julia lashed out. “It was just a kiss, Kaden. A stupid kiss. It meant nothing … It was just—” She stopped abruptly. Had she really been about to blurt out that she’d only allowed that man to kiss her because she’d felt so desperately insecure after days of silence from Kaden? That she’d pathetically wanted to try and prove to herself that his touch alone couldn’t be the only touch she’d ever crave?
She clamped her mouth shut, burning inside. This man would never know that her experiment had backfired spectacularly—on more levels than one.
She had to claw back some sense of sanity. Some sense of the independent woman she’d become. Her voice was shaky. “This is not a good idea, Kaden. The past is the past and we should not be revisiting it.”
Kaden felt tight and hot inside. With ruthless effort he excised the image of her kissing that man from his mind. What on earth had prompted him to bring up that kiss? The last thing he wanted was for Julia to know that he remembered the incident. And yet it was like the stain of a tattoo on his memory, the jealousy fresh.
She was avoiding Kaden’s eye. He might have appreciated the dark humour of the situation if he’d been in a better mood: merely kissing her just now had had a more explosive effect on his libido than anything he’d shared with a woman in years. If ever. Her chest was rising and falling rapidly. Some more buttons had opened on her shirt, exposing the shadowy line of her cleavage, and his erection just got harder. If that was possible.
The fact that what she said was right irked him beyond belief. He knew with a soul-deep certainly that to explore this desire with this woman had danger written all over it. He had a sense of having escaped the fire years before, only to be standing right on its edge again.
But stronger than that was this life-force rushing through his veins, along with the very carnal urge to sate himself. It was heady, and it made him feel as if he was awakening from a long sleep. He could no more turn back from it than he could stop breathing. He struggled to control himself. The rawness of what he was feeling was rising up, and Kaden ruthlessly drove it down, back to depths he’d never plumbed and had no intention of doing so now.
He crossed the room to where Julia stood. She looked up. Those grey eyes were dark and troubled. A line of pink slashed each cheek, and her lips were full and tender-looking. In a completely instinctive gesture he reached out and tucked some hair behind her ear, only realising as he did it that he’d used to do that all the time. His jaw clenching hard was the only sign that he’d recognised this tell-tale gesture which was at such odds with the dark emotion seething through his gut. Jealousy. He had to distance himself from their past, focus on the present.
“If we had met at any other time we wouldn’t have been available, and yet this desire would still have blown up. It would have made a mockery of the fact that twelve years had gone by. And of our marriages.” He went on, his deep voice mesmerising, “But we’re both free and single now, two consenting adults.”
Julia knew she should run—and fast. Get away and pray to God that she never saw Kaden again. But her feet wouldn’t move. The way he’d casually reached out to tuck her hair behind her ear had broken something apart inside her, bringing with it an onslaught of memories of so many moments when he’d done that. It had been the first physical gesture he’d made to her.
Fatefully, knowing that on some level she was making a momentous decision by not leaving, Julia couldn’t seem to turn away. She felt curiously lethargic—as if she’d been running towards something for a long time, only to have finally reached her destination. She wanted this man with a hunger she’d known only once before … for him.
She’d fully expected that if they ever met again that he would act as dismissively as he had earlier … and yet here she was. He wasn’t pretending not to know her now. He was looking at her as if she was the only woman on the planet. That elusive feeling of home and connection that she’d only ever found with him whispered to her like a siren song, calling her to seek it again.
Desperately she fought it—going that way again could only end in worse devastation. Clinging furiously to some last vestige of pride, to the illusion that she had control, she backed away. “Just because we’ve met again, it doesn’t mean anything, Kaden. It doesn’t mean that we have to end up … in bed.”
For a long tense moment they just looked at each other, and then, after another ear-splitting crack of thunder, the electricity went off.
Julia gasped and Kaden cursed. “The storm must have outed the power. Wait here. I’ll get some candles.”
Julia felt Kaden move away from her and took a deep, shaky breath. The darkness seemed to envelop her in a cloak of collusion. It made her want to forget the outside world, forget to remember their history. To give in to what he was offering. She wanted him so badly she shook.
