Sounds sane enough. I’m pretty good at handling ex-lovers, but I also realize I’m unusual in that way. Some people need to lock the doors behind them. Clean breaks aren’t the worst idea.

But then Jonah adds, more quietly, “I’m trying to do things differently with you.”

Wait? When we break up?

No, of course not. Jonah invited me to join him here in Scotland. He brought me into another part of his life. I’m the one he wants to change for.

He slides his hand across the table until our fingers touch. I take a deep breath and look into his eyes. The intensity of the desire I see there—the need to own me not just in bed, but in every possible way—it thrills me. And terrifies me. I can’t say which emotion is more powerful.

This is the moment when I realize what tonight means. Jonah won’t want to play out a scenario tonight. The sex won’t be any fantasy rape. It will just be us, him and me, literally and emotionally naked.

Either I’ll have to fake my way through it, or I’ll have to tell Jonah the truth.

It shouldn’t be scarier than the dark fantasies Jonah and I have shared—but it is. It is.

Twenty-four

As soon as Jonah and I enter our room, he closes the door and reaches for me. Neither of us even turns on the light.

I sink into Jonah’s embrace and feel his lips brush against mine. As he winds his arms around me, our kiss intensifies. This isn’t the hard, punishing kiss he first gave me, or the gentler one we’ve shared after sex or at my front door after our first date. This is desire without violence. Passion that comes not from any fantasy but from the emotions we’ve kindled in each other.

Jonah’s hands slip beneath the hem of my sweater, and I feel his fingers brush along the small of my back. “I never get to tell you how beautiful you are,” he murmurs. “How much I love just looking at your body. Do you know how fucking gorgeous you are?”

“You’re the gorgeous one.” Which is true. I’m attractive, but no more so than any number of women the average person sees on the average day. Jonah? He’s a breed apart.

Like no one else, I think as I unbutton his shirt—pausing only to let him lift my sweater over my head and toss it aside. The firmness of his abdominal muscles, the unreal disparity between the broadness of his shoulders and his taut, trim waist, even those storm gray eyes—Jonah is extraordinary. Anyone attracted to men would want him desperately.

But they couldn’t share his fantasy. Couldn’t give him what he really needs in bed. That’s only me.

Jonah’s fingers find the front clasp of my bra and click it, so that the lacy cups slide sideways, exposing more of my breasts. He pushes the straps over the curve of my shoulders. “Look at you,” he whispers as he starts caressing me. “I don’t get to do this enough.”

I kiss the line of his jaw, his throat. His stubble is rough against my lips. “Mmm. Do what, exactly?”

“This.”

Jonah lifts me just enough to toss me on our bed, then impatiently pulls off his shirt and lets it fall. He crawls onto the bed, his arms and thighs caging me beneath him. His kisses are warm against my skin as he moves from my neck to my breasts.

I whimper as the warmth of his mouth and tongue close over my nipple. Jonah sucks—he licks—he kisses—and he keeps going, drawing out the pleasure. Too many guys rush this; not Jonah. By the time he shifts to my other breast, I’m already writhing beneath him. Even as he sucks harder, his hand reaches for the button of my jeans.

“So—fucking—beautiful,” he murmurs as I help him get my jeans past my hips. Jonah sits up to tug them away, then sits there at the foot of the bed for a moment, gazing at me. I lie naked in front of him, my nipples hardened and glistening, my breaths coming fast. Slowly, so slowly, he slides my legs apart and stares at me even more intently. “I never get to do this either.”

Which is when he lowers his mouth to my clit.

Oh, God, he’s good at this. He’s really, really good at this. Jonah’s tongue laps at me, circles me, and then he starts to suck in a rhythm that brings me to the brink almost instantly.

But it’s not going to make me come.

Only the fantasy does that.

Pretend, I tell myself desperately. My entire body trembles. Pretend he’s forcing you to do this. That he told you to lie here and let him do whatever he wants or he’d make you sorry.

Usually that works, but tonight I can’t convince myself. Jonah’s face is buried between my legs—and I can tell he’s lost to anything but the desire to taste me, to make me come. The broad muscles of his shoulders work beneath my knees, nearly as sexy as the slight bob and turn of his head. He’s giving everything to me. Serving me. And I love it, I do, but even as I hover at the dizzy edge of orgasm, I can’t let go.

“I want you inside me,” I moan. “Please, Jonah, fuck me.”

He pulls back a bit, kisses my cunt one more time, then shoves himself off the bed to get rid of his jeans. I lie there, splayed out for him, panting hard. Jonah can’t move fast enough.

Then he’s atop me again, the hardness of his erection pressing insistently against my belly as we kiss. I take his cock in my hand and guide it downward; Jonah closes his eyes in pleasure as he feels how wet I am.

“Now,” I whisper, and Jonah pushes all the way inside me with one long, slow thrust.

Yes. I arch my back, close my eyes. Now I can imagine anything I want.

“You feel so good,” he murmurs. “So fucking tight. I love feeling you wrapped around me.”

I ought to enjoy hearing him say that. On some level I do. But his praise only cuts into the fantasy I need.

As Jonah begins driving into me, I fill my mind with images of what we’ve done before. If—if maybe that first night at the hotel, when he threw me on the bed—if he hadn’t ended the scenario then. If he’d kept me there, calling me a whore and a slut, until he could fuck me again—

—it might have felt like this—

As I get close, my entire body tenses against his, and he feels it. Jonah starts thrusting harder. Answering me. I fill my mind with the memory of that hotel room, the savage way he took me, not so unlike the way he’s inside me now. I can’t think anymore, can’t see. I belong only to him, only ever to him.

The world goes white-hot as I clench around him. My orgasm hits me so hard I think for a moment I’ll pass out. I manage to stifle my cry of ecstasy against Jonah’s shoulder, and I hear him sigh with satisfaction.

“Vivienne,” he groans, and then he’s there with me. Pleasure shudders through Jonah’s body as he grips me closer, and there’s nothing better than this.

Or there shouldn’t be.

But I can’t forget that I still had to fantasize about rape to get myself all the way there.

“At last,” he murmurs as we lie together in the aftermath. Jonah spoons behind me, drowsily kissing my neck and shoulders. “I got to take my time enjoying you. Now I get to sleep beside you.”

“I should warn you—sometimes I talk in my sleep.”

Jonah chuckles, the vibration of his laugh resonating against my back. “What do you say?”

“Nothing intelligible, apparently. Just mumbling.”

“Doesn’t matter. I could sleep through a tornado.”

“My perfect guy,” I say. I mean it as a joke—thinking of how Geordie used to grumble about my waking him up in the middle of the night. But once I’ve said the words, I realize how true they might be.

Some men would hear that and instantly panic. Jonah simply kisses the nape of my neck and holds me tighter.

I should be so happy right now. And I am—in so many ways—but the dark weight of doubt lingers deep inside. Whatever else my sexual relationship has been with Jonah, it has been completely, utterly, honest.