AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The only problem was she didn’t feel good about what had happened in Dane’s office and later in his apartment. She felt edgy and tense and vaguely guilty—thoughts and emotions still colliding in her brain three hours later, like a troop of toddlers on a sugar rush.
She smoothed aloe vera moisturiser over the red skin on her face which, fresh from a long hot bath loaded with the hotel’s luxury bath salts, beamed like a stop light. If only she’d seen that warning before she’d let Dane devour her, because stubble rash was the least of her worries.
The memory of his rough, frantic handling sent an unwelcome shiver of awareness through her exhausted body. Firm, sensual lips subjugating hers, that marauding tongue plunging deep and obliterating all rational thought, solid pecs rippling beneath her grasping fingers, his teeth biting into her bottom lip and sending need arrowing down to her core...
She gripped the sink, her thighs turning to mush. Again.
She shivered, even though the bathroom’s central air was set at the perfect ambient temperature. She needed to sleep. And forget about this afternoon’s events.
But sleep continued to elude her.
She’d had some success in distracting herself for the first hour after Dane’s driver had deposited her at the striking modernist hotel on Manhattan’s High Line Park by doing what she did best—formulating an extensive to-do list and then doing it to death.
The first order of business had been to book herself on the evening flight to Heathrow tomorrow and bump herself up to first class. After today’s ‘episode’ a lie-flat seat was going to be a necessity.
With her flight booked, she’d messed around for another thirty minutes selecting designer jeans, a fashionable T-shirt, fresh underwear and a pair of flats online from a nearby boutique and getting a guarantee that it would be express-delivered by tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. No matter how washed out she felt, at least she wouldn’t have to look washed out, wearing her creased silk suit on the flight home.
Unfortunately while actioning her to-do list she’d got a second wind that she didn’t seem able to shake—even after soaking for twenty minutes in the suite’s enormous bathtub.
She just wanted to turn her brain off now and get comatose. But she couldn’t. Maybe it was the jet lag kicking in? It was close to dawn now in the UK—the time she usually woke up to get ready for work and have her morning caffeine hit while sitting on the balcony of her luxury flat by the River Thames, allowing herself five minutes to enjoy the sun rising over Tower Bridge.
Her body clock had obviously decided that habit wasn’t going to change, no matter what time zone she was in. Or how shattered she felt.
Unfortunately, being unable to sleep had given her far too much time to dissect all the things that had gone wrong this afternoon. Her fainting fit, the shocking revelation that Dane had assumed she’d aborted their child, but most of all her ludicrous reaction to Dane’s come-on.
And she’d come to one irrefutable conclusion. When she got back to London she needed to look at options to get back in the dating game—because all work and no sex had clearly turned her into an unexploded bomb. She hadn’t had a date in three years, no actual intimate contact in at least four, and she hadn’t gone all the way since...
Xanthe watched the frown puckering her brow in the mirror deepen into a crevice.
Since the last time she’d made love to Dane.
No wonder she’d lost it with him. Her physical reaction to him had nothing to do with their past—or any lingering feelings—and everything to do with her failure to find another man with the same orgasm-on-demand capabilities as her ex-husband.
Since Dane, she’d always taken care of her own orgasms. At first she had put it down to some kind of perverse physical loyalty to the man who had abandoned her. Whenever another man touched her, her body had insisted on comparing him to Dane. Her failure to get aroused hadn’t bothered her too much—in fact she’d begun to think it was a boon. After all, she never wanted to be a slave to her sex drive again—so in thrall to a guy’s sexual prowess that she confused lust with love.
But apparently her sex drive was still a slave to Dane’s sexual prowess.
Don’t go there. It doesn’t mean anything.
Dane wasn’t unique. He didn’t have some special mojo that made her more susceptible, more in tune to his touch than to any other guy’s. She just hadn’t found the right guy yet—the right ‘other guy’ to hit all her happy buttons—because she hadn’t been looking.
She’d got so used to taking care of her own business the loss hadn’t become apparent until she’d walked into Dane’s office this afternoon and had some kind of sexual breakdown. Triggered by Dane, who—in his usual in-your-face style—had decided to demonstrate exactly what she had been missing.
Of course she’d responded to Dane with all the restraint of a firecracker meeting a naked flame. She’d been running on stress and adrenaline for three days, and working herself to the bone for a great deal longer.
Dane had always known how to trip her switch, how to touch and caress and take her in ways that gave her no choice but to respond. And that obviously hadn’t changed. But only because she’d been holding herself hostage for ten years...not exploring the possibilities.
After the trauma of their marriage, she had convinced herself in the last ten years that an active and fulfilled sex-life wasn’t important. But clearly it was important—to her sense of self and her sense of well-being.
When she got back to the UK she was going to remedy that. Why not check out a few dating websites?
She shuddered involuntarily.
But until then she needed to get rid of all the sexual energy pumping around her system and stopping her from dropping into the exhausted sleep she so desperately needed.
She touched her fingertip to the tender skin on her chin, then trailed the nail down, inadvertently following the path Dane had taken three hours ago. Parting her robe, she sucked in a breath as the cool satin brushed over the tender skin of her nipple. Hooking the lapel round her breast to expose herself, she circled the ripe areola, still supremely sensitive from Dane’s attentions. Her nipple rose in ruched splendour, the air cool against heated flesh. The gush of response between her thighs settled low in her abdomen, warm and fluid and heavy. She pinched the nipple, remembering the sharp nip of his teeth, and the coil of need tightened into a knot.
Untying the robe’s belt, she let it fall open, revealing the neatly trimmed curls at the apex of her thighs, and spotted a small bruise on her hip. She ran her finger over the mark, remembering the feel of Dane’s fingers digging into her skin as he boosted her into his arms.
