“What about now?” he rasps into my ear. He’s as breathless as I am, I realize.

“Yes,” I murmur, trying to pull him closer, to pull him inside of me. But he pulls away, standing back up and then pausing in front of me, gripping my legs.

Without another word, he bends down, shoving up my skirt and burying his head between my legs.

As feverish as I am, his tongue brings me to a climax within a minute. The wetness of it rakes over me as his hands ravage the rest of me, sliding, kneading, pulling.

I close my eyes, blocking out the moonlight, the veranda, the lights from the valley. I revel in the feel of being close to him, as close as I’ve been yet. He might not have exposed much to me, but I could see that he wanted to. He’s just afraid. And knowing that makes me feel as though he let me in somehow… just a little.

But now he wants to annihilate me. I can see that in his eyes, as he makes me come over and over again with his mouth. His dark eyes gleam, and they are all I can see of his face as he stares intently at me from between my legs. I try to pull him up, to get him to crawl over me, to kiss me, to plunge into me, but he won’t. He stays down… making me come yet again.

I arch into the air, reaching for him, but he won’t allow it.

“I want to feel you inside of me,” I tell him urgently. Because I do. I want him to fill me up. To give me, for just a minute, what he’s not willing to give me otherwise.

Himself.

Completely.

Not bits of him, not pieces of him, but all of him.

He pauses, staring at me, and I can literally see it as his eyes shutter closed. He’s closed to me now, and whatever progress we made tonight is gone.

He smiles his normal smile, the rakish one, the one that millions of fans have seen and loved.

“Not yet, Princess,” he tells me as he climbs to his feet. “Not yet.”

Dominic

What.

The.

Fuck?

I let the cold shower water run over my body, over my head and my shoulders, down my hips and down to where I really need it.

What the fuck was I thinking?

I was this close to spilling my guts to Jacey. This close to inviting her into my life, telling her my secrets, letting her in.

I blame it on the look in her eyes. The sweet, genuine, I’m-so-concerned-about-you look… and I know that she is. She genuinely cares that something has hurt me. But the problem is… she thinks she can fix it and she can’t.

No one can.

That’s the bitch of it.

I grab a towel and step out of the walk-in shower, before I head to my bed naked.

And alone.

Jacey

I don’t know what to think.

Even though something felt like it changed last night, like our paradigm shifted, Dominic is back to being cool and aloof. He popped his head into my room early this morning to tell me that he was going to the studio, that he’d be back later… and to relax around the pool.

“Make yourself at home!” he’d called over his shoulder in a very polite way as he walked out.

He didn’t kiss me good-bye, he didn’t touch me at all. He stayed in the doorway where he stood, beautiful and graceful but so very distant.

It’s gorgeous here, and the infinity pool that seems to slip right over the edge of the valley is picture perfect. But there’s only so much time I can spend lounging by the pool. I’m alone and I’m restless.

So I go exploring.

I spent quite a bit of time in his library, rifling through his shelves and shelves of books. He’s got everything from the classics to Tom Clancy. None of the books show any signs of wear, so I have no clue if he actually reads them or if they just line the walls.

His large desk is sleek and modern, made from glass and ebony wood. No pictures adorn it, nothing personal at all. The middle drawer is locked, but I’m guessing it just contains checkbooks and such anyway.

The art on the walls, the many paintings and original photos, fascinate me.

I can tell the masculine abstract paintings are original, but the signatures aren’t anyone I recognize. I’m guessing that they’re local artists… that perhaps Dominic just picked out pieces that he liked because he didn’t feel the need to buy originals painted by the masters.

The kitchen is nice, but boring. Granite, steel, marble floor. It’s sterile because it’s never used. I can see that. To me, kitchens should be the hub of the house, the heart, where everyone congregates. But that’s not so here.

There are too many guest bedrooms to count, all of them lavishly decorated, just like the one I slept in last night. After he’d left me on the veranda.

I don’t know what to think about him. He’s a complete mystery, totally hot and cold. It must say something about me that I want to figure him out, that I’m not running in the opposite direction. I probably don’t want to know what it says about me, actually.

I’m needy.

I’m fucked up.

I know these things, so I push them out of my mind. I already know me. What I want to know now is him.

I stand hesitantly outside of his bedroom door. Maybe I can find some answers within, answers that he’d never tell me. Something, anything, that would make his behavior make sense.

If he doesn’t want you to know, my conscience argues, then you should respect that.

But… fuck you, the devil side of my brain answers. And that’s the side I listen to. I turn the doorknob, and before I can even think about it, I’m in his room and it’s done. I’ve officially invaded his privacy.

His room is dark and quiet and decorated in masculine colors… grays and creams and blacks. His bed is enormous, and there isn’t anything odd in here, like I think I was expecting. No sex swings or whips or chains. It’s uncluttered. In fact, it’s incredibly clean. It almost seems as devoid of personal effects as a hotel room.

I feel a little guilty as I open his drawers, but I only find neatly folded clothes. The drawers all smell like cedar, like him. I take a deep breath, inhaling the scent, as I eye his closet, and before I can talk myself out of it, I get to my feet and open the doors.

It’s enormous and contains a dressing room inside. A wall of shoes, loafers, and sneakers, and neatly hung slacks, jeans, shirts, and suits. It’s a closet worthy of a king. I’ve never actually seen such a thing before. I sit on a cushioned bench for a minute, just to take it all in.

Like the bedroom, his closet is neat to the point of sterility. There’s nothing here to indicate what he’s actually like. Not one thing… except for the clear fact that he has a lot of shoes and clothes.

But as I stand up, I notice the bench I’m sitting on has hinges. They’re cleverly concealed, but they’re there. Hesitantly, I open the lid and I find myself staring at a shallow black velvet box. The rest of the bench is empty.

Breathing quickly, I lift the box out and stare at it. It’s very light so it can’t contain much. I don’t waste time pondering it. I take the top off.

Inside, there’s a stack of cards and letters, banded together with a rubber band. There’s a little jewelry box, which I quickly discover is empty, and an unopened envelope with Dominic’s name on the front. It was clearly written by a woman and says simply, Dom.

The ink has begun to fade and there’s something hard inside, like cardboard or plastic.

I’m utterly frozen as I stare at it, because I can sense the significance of what must be inside. It was written by someone who knows him well, someone who calls him Dom.

But whatever it is, Dominic doesn’t want to hear it. He doesn’t want to see it. So he closed it away in this bench, away from the light, away from the world, away from him. But even still, even though he can’t force himself to read it, he also can’t force himself to throw it away.