Dear Diary, he’s incredible!
Maddie’s gaze snapped wide, colour poured into her cheeks. Evidently, she hadn’t expected him to notice.
“Why would you think I was a virgin?” She shifted her attention to the ceiling, the wall, the door. When she nudged his shoulders, he complied, giving her the space she wanted.
Grabbing the coverlet, she hid her body from him.
Shame.
He could gaze at her all day. But first, he had business to take care of.
“Give me a minute.” He dropped a kiss on her lips, liking her surprised indrawn breath. “Stay put. This is a conversation we are going to have.” He slid from the bed, stepped over the throw pillows that had fallen to the floor during their lovemaking, and strolled to the en suite.
“Zach, I’m thirty-two. It would be a bit pathetic for me to get to this age and not ... you know.”
He didn’t break stride as he glanced back, smiled. “Not pathetic, sweetheart. Wholesome.” He couldn’t stop grinning. Just the thought of Maddie having never let another man touch her made him want to happy dance as he closed the en suite’s door behind him.
“You have absolutely no evidence on which to base your assumption,” she called after him.
What she meant was he hadn’t encountered a barrier when he’d entered her. He wouldn’t have expected to, given that she took horse riding as a kid. He cracked open the door.
“Don’t need that particular evidence, babe.” He winked and closed it again.
When he emerged from the bathroom, Maddie was sitting up, back ballerina-straight, chin lifted and gaze pinning him with purpose.
“You want the truth?”
“That would be good.” He fell onto the bed beside her. He loved the way her eyes changed colour to deep green when she focused on his lap. He liked it, too, that her neck bore the mark of his lovemaking. Just thinking about how passionate they had been stirred renewed hunger. If he lived forever, he’d never get enough of her.
“Fine.” She fixed the coverlet more securely under her arms, the slight shift of her body sending her sexy essence—light exotic perfume, Maddie and sex—over to him on a heated wave. He breathed it in deeply, letting his eyes drift shut on a delicious memory of sliding into her. “I’ve never slept with anyone, because I was saving myself. I know it’s archaic and totally unbelievable but it’s true. When I was little, Mum used to say: honey, once you give it away, you can’t get it back. Sex is sex, but making love, now that is something else. Making love comes from love. Save yourself until you’ve fallen in love.” Maddie shrugged. “What can I say, I guess Mum raised me to be a good girl and it stuck.”
Her admission arrested his thoughts, stalled the breath in his lungs. “What are you saying, Maddie? Are you telling me you’re in love with me?”
She choked. Coughed. Spluttered. Then stared wide-eyed at him and shook her head rapidly.
“No! Good grief, no. No … no! This is just a casual thing.”
One ‘no’ would have been enough.
“I get it.” Feeling exposed, he threw the end of the sheet across his lap. “So why?” He gestured to the bed.
“I got tired of waiting for the right guy. Honestly, I don’t think he exists.” Maddie bit the corner of her lower lip, flicked her gaze away.
An invisible, heavy object landed in the centre of his chest. “You’ve waited this long. Why do casual with me?”
A doleful expression flittered across Maddie’s face. She wiped it with a smile. “I didn’t want to wait any longer. I can see the headlines now: SEVENTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN BREAKS HIP ON WEDDING NIGHT.” She chuckled. “Can you picture the national shock?”
“You’d be long married by then, Mad.”
“Not if the guys I end up with are any indication.”
“What do you mean?”
“I tend to choose the wrong men. Men fresh out of relationships. Guys who need a friend more than anything else. I think you were right.”
“About?”
She gave him a mock-wounded glance. “I’m not exciting enough to hold a man’s attention. Look at Jack. He took off with your date the first opportunity he got, and didn’t look back.”
“When did I say such a stupid thing?”
“That time I confided my concern that while guys would talk to me, they never seemed to want to date me. In fact, most of them avoided me like a bad infection. You tried to console me, remember? You said—”
“Guys want exciting girls.” Zach groaned as the memory hit him. He dropped his head back on the pillows and scrubbed his hand over his face. Had he been that insensitive? The thought twisted his insides.
He puffed out an agonized breath and reached for her.
“Come here.” He pulled Maddie down beside him, wrapped her in his arms so she rested her head on his chest. He kissed the top of her head, breathed in her fresh shampoo. “You are the most amazing, talented woman I’ve ever met. Back in uni, you were sweet and focused, studious, and destined for success. Most of the guys were only out for fun.”
Her head shot up so she could glare at him. “So you are saying I wasn’t fun.”
Sliding his fingers into her hair, he urged her head back onto his chest. She kept her face angled to stare at him, and he pressed a kiss to her forehead.
“You weren’t the type of fun they were after, sweetheart. You weren’t that sort of girl and I was trying to protect you from the wolves dressed as upstanding young men—males who would’ve plied you with drink until your defences were down, then use and discard you.”
“Guys like you?”
Man, but he was an idiot back then. “I’m ashamed to admit it but yes, guys like me ... and Sam.”
“You had a real problem with me seeing him, didn’t you?”
Pressure built in his head. The memory of Sam making a play for Maddie still had the power to anger him. “He was the biggest wolf of us all.”
“Nothing happened with Sam.”
“I know that now, but that spring you went to Barbados with him was torture.”
“You couldn’t have spared me that much of a thought. When I got back you were hot and heavy with Kimber.”
“I was trying to get over the shock that you were with Sam. That I couldn’t protect you from his influence.” Zach made a conscious effort to relax the tightening band of his arm around Maddie. Just thinking about her with any other man made his blood heat.
She repositioned her head so her face no longer turned up to his. “You needn’t have worried. After the first pass, which I rebuffed, Sam was cool. He had too many eager girls chasing him to waste time with me.”
“At the time I wanted to punch him.” In fact, he’d gotten the opportunity one night soon after and had taken it, but he wasn’t going to tell her that.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were jealous.”
Zach was starting to wonder if she was right. Had he been jealous of her relationship with Sam? If he had, it would have been for no reason other than he didn’t like sharing her friendship with another man. Not because he might’ve had deeper feelings for her.
He absently stroked his hand up and down her arm, smoothing over goose bumps. She shivered, and he liked to think it was in response to his touch.
“Why did you marry Kimber?”
This was probably the question she’d been dying to ask ever since she discovered he’d married Kimberley. For a question he knew was coming, he still felt unprepared for the same guilty feeling of unfaithfulness to Maddie he’d encountered the night he’d told her about his ex-wife.
Unable to temper the self-derisive laugh, he let it out, surprised to find it acted like a release valve for the pressure building in his head.
“She said she was pregnant.”
Maddie propped her chin on his chest to look him in the face again, her gaze curious and alarmed. “The way you say that, sounds as if she lied.”
“Oh, she was pregnant all right.” He kept his gaze on the vase of gardenias on Maddie’s dresser. “Turned out to be Sam’s baby.” And there it was again, the guilt for feeling nothing for his wife, for not caring she’d cheated on him, or that she’d gotten pregnant with another man’s child. The contrast of what he’d felt for Kimber—responsibility—and what he felt for Maddie, surprised him. He didn’t know what he felt for Maddie; all he knew was that it hadn’t bothered him that Sam had slept with his wife. But he wanted to kill the other man for just thinking about touching Maddie.
“Is that why you got divorced?”
Pulling his thoughts from their analytical path, he answered. “No, we lasted five years after that.”
“You must have loved her to stay with her.”
“I stayed because I thought I could help her. Thought she needed me. In the end I had to admit defeat.”
“What happened to the baby? Did you claim it? Did Sam?”
“Kimber lost it when she was fifteen weeks along. She’d been doing drugs, and that’s what caused her to miscarry.”
As if needing time to digest the information, Maddie fell silent and he went back to investigating his thoughts.
“Did you ever...?” Maddie interrupted the quiet with a tentative lead-in and he knew precisely what she was asking.
He raised his brows. “Do drugs?”
She moved her head against his chest in a single nod.
“Hell no. I wasn’t into that kind of fun, Maddie. I thought you knew that.”
She dropped her gaze. “I hoped not. But you were so—”
“Wild,” he cut in. “That you assumed recreational drugs were part of my party life.”
“I’d seen some of your friends smoking ... stuff ... and presumed as Sam smoked it, you did too.”
“Well you presumed wrong. Only a cretin gets into that stuff.”
How did they manage to get from hot sex to aggravation in the space of half an hour? He didn’t want to talk about Kimber, and he definitely didn’t want to talk about Sam, or anything to do with his messed up life. He only wanted what Maddie could give him—blissful oblivion.
In a polished move, he had her astride him, his hands sliding from her hips up over her ribs to palm her full breasts.
“I don’t want to talk about the past anymore.” One caressing stroke from the pads of his thumbs over her nipples had them hardening. The picture of her straddling him naked, her back straight, aroused flush staining her breasts, hair mussed from his hands, tumbling over her shoulders in tangled curls was enough to make him lose control.
She looked down to where she sat on his straining erection. How he didn’t explode right then, Zach didn’t know.
“What did you have in mind as an alternative?” Maddie asked on a somnolent note.
“I was thinking along the lines of action.” A subtle shift of his hips, and he rubbed against her liquid centre, making them both groan. “How do you feel?”
She lightly clawed her short nails down his chest and over his abs, fired his blood with a sexy smirk and a hungry glance from beneath her lashes.
“Like a lot of fun.” She held a hand against his chest to stop him from moving. “But first I want to find out how you knew? The way I hear it, men can’t normally tell if the hymen isn’t in place.” Her cheeks turned a deeper shade of pink. Her skin still glowed from their lovemaking, and she watched him with a sexy, pensive frown.
Just because he loved the sensation of her silky hair, he captured a tawny curl, caressed it between his fingers. “Some men are more perceptive than others.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
He gently tugged her hair to coax her closer. “Come here and I’ll show you.”
She resisted. “How did you know?”
If she wouldn’t come to him, he’d go to her. He sat up, wrapped his arms around her, and drew her forward until her breasts pressed into his chest. He heard her tiny mewl as the terminal hair came into contact with her nipples. He brushed his lips across hers in the lightest touch when in actual fact he wanted to slam his mouth down on hers and devour her.
His heart galloped.
Desire coiled low in his pelvis, threatening his control, but he forced himself to take it slow. He was going to make this incredible for Maddie.
“I knew because you were so”—He nipped at her kiss-swollen lower lip, felt her squeeze her knees snug either side of his hips; dig her fingers into his shoulders—“incredibly”— he nipped again, his hands travelled a sensuous path over her back, traced the dignified line of her spine to the back of her neck where he massaged the supple muscle. Her lips parted on a lust-filled sigh as she rolled her pelvis and melted in his arms.
“Tight.” He finally allowed his mouth to fasten on hers in a deep, drugging caress before he moved on to thanking Maddie properly for the fabulous gift she had given him, even if she wasn’t in love with him.
That suited him fine, because he wasn’t in love with her either.
~*~
ZACH WAS incredible.
Making love with him was unbelievable and either she was extremely out of shape or Zach had just given her an earth-shattering orgasm that had thrown them out of the space/time continuum, because she just couldn’t get her breath back. She listened to her heart’s loud belaboured rhythm and her out-of-breath pants for several moments, too spent to muster the energy to move.
“That was...” She turned her head toward Zach. His breathing was only slightly heavier than normal.
He lay on his side propped on one elbow, his head leaning on his palm, looking delicious and rumpled. He flashed a helpful smile. “Amazing?”
“Unreal. I had no idea it could ... Is it always like that?”
He leaned over and kissed her. “I hope so.” His heartfelt whisper on her lips strummed through her. He pulled back, stared into her eyes as he finger-combed her hair off her face. “It’s never been like that for me with anyone else.”
At the revelation, her insides danced with pleasure. “Really?”
He nodded.
Still she found that hard to believe. Come on, this was Zach. The earth moved when he walked into a room. “Not ever?”
Zach traced the shape of her eyebrow. “Not until tonight with you.”
Too tired to make much of an effort, Maddie knew her smile was drowsy. “I don’t believe you.”
His smile widened, turned self-satisfied, and a little bit roguish. “I could try to prove it. Want to see if we can make it happen again?”
When he launched for her, Maddie tried to make a run for it but in her lethargic state, she wasn’t fast enough. He caught her easily and pinned her to the bed.
“You can’t be serious. We only just—”
He cut her off by moving between her legs so she felt the shocking evidence. “And I want to do it again, because I just discovered something astonishing tonight, Maddison.” He kissed her. “I can’t seem to get enough of you.”
“There’s a name for men like you.”
“Insatiable?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of depraved.”
That earned her a thorough tickling.
Maddie tried to wriggle free, pushing at Zach’s hands and his head. As if his fingers weren’t bad enough he had to use his stubble as well.
“Zach, please,” she panted.
“Please what?” He brushed his bristly cheek with feather-light precision across her ribs.
“Stop!”
“Tell me sorry.”
“I’m sorry...” He let up. She waited until he released her. “I’m sorry you’re depraved.”
“Little minx.” He dove for her again.
Maddie cackled until it hurt even her own ears. She couldn’t do ladylike laughter when being tickled unmercifully.
“Okay, okay. Sorry for real.” Unable to breathe for laughing, she was sure she was about to faint from lack of oxygen.
Zach released her after a sound kiss. “And just remember that the next time you feel the urge to get cheeky with me.”
“That was torture.” She’d forgotten that tickling was his preferred method of retribution.
He settled her back with him against the pillows, raised his arm in invitation for her to lay her head on his shoulder.
Maddie pulled the coverlet over them and got comfortable in his arms.
“Want me to make it better?” he offered on a low, husky murmur into her ear.
“I can’t think how.” She could, but she wasn’t letting him get away so easily with making her suffer.
Zach chuckled. “I’m sure you can. Let’s just say they don’t call it slap and tickle for nothing.”
“How would that be better?”
“Give me a minute, and I’ll show you.”
“I thought you were ready to go.”
He rewarded her with a chuckle and a swat to her bottom. “He may be ready, but I’m shattered.” He stifled a yawn. “Back to back meetings all last week and more of the same to come.”
She tightened the arm resting across him and snuggled closer, delighting in the protective feel of his embrace.
As much as Maddie enjoyed being held while the minutes drifted by and Zach’s breathing grew more relaxed, she knew the afterglow was over. He didn’t do sleepovers and she’d hate herself—and possibly him—in the morning if he waited for her to fall asleep before leaving. She’d rather him go now while she was still strong enough to play it cool. Put on her nonchalant act and wave him off at the door as if in the space of a few hours, he hadn’t changed her forever.
“Zach?”
“Hmm?” He sounded half-asleep.
“Are you going home?”
A measured pause, then. “Do you want me to?” Did that mean he planned to stay?
As wasted as she knew it to be, she couldn’t help the tiny fizz of excitement at the possibility. Realistically, what were the odds that Zach had changed his number one rule?
“I know you used to have a rule about never staying the entire night. I don’t want you to sneak out while I sleep.”
He took so long to reply, she started to think he was looking for an excuse to take off.
“If I pop home for necessities, will you let me come back?” When he finally spoke, she started.
“Tonight?”
He wanted to spend the night with her? Could a heart sing with joy?
“Yes.” He tipped her chin so he could give her a long, unhurried kiss. “Just give me ten minutes, and I’ll be back. I’m not done with you yet.”
The possessive way he delivered the statement and the feral promise in his eyes should have thrilled Maddie, but her elation plummeted as her mind stalled on the subliminal meaning of his words.
He wasn’t done with her yet. Sooner or later Zach would be finished with her. His relationships never lasted long.
And then what would she do?