‘We’ve got all night, all week to take our time. I’ve been imagining you since that morning, I just need you now.’
Her voice cracked before she could say any more but it didn’t matter. It was as if she’d uttered the magic words. Told him what he’d been waiting to hear. With a groan Louis shifted, testing himself against her, his face tightening at her slick, wet heat. It filled her with old Alex courage, a kind of mischievousness, an impulse, and she raised her legs to wrap them higher around his body, drawing him in faster than he’d intended.
She didn’t know whether the guttural sound came from Louis or from her. In truth, it made little difference. He was thrusting into her, filling her, stretching her in every direction, but there was no discomfort. If anything, it felt as though they were made for each other.
The perfect fit.
He drew back and thrust in again. A deliberate, lazy rhythm that drove her half-mad with pleasure and frustration. Again and again he slid in and out of her, and just when she thought she couldn’t take any more teasing, he picked up the pace, leaving her little choice but to grip his shoulders and let him take her with him, meeting him thrust for glorious thrust and trying to remember to breathe.
Shudders were already beginning to burst through her when he slid his hand between their bodies and down to her core, expert fingers dancing over the very centre of her desire, heightening everything and propelling her towards the edge. Then she catapulted off, bursting apart under his skilful touch and crying out his name.
She hadn’t even come back down when she realised he hadn’t followed her. He was still inside her, still in control of himself, if only by a thread.
‘Louis...’
‘Shh,’ he growled, a dark, deeply satisfied smile lifting his mouth. ‘Hold on tightly.’
Before she could answer, he was moving inside her again. Thrusting harder, faster, deeper, his fingers still playing with her, sending her hurtling back over the edge. And this time when her body shattered into a thousand fragments, her muscles rippling around him, he toppled with her.
It took her long, long moments to come back to herself again, and when she did, Louis was cradling her as though she was the most precious jewel in the world.
‘You’re so beautiful,’ he murmured. ‘So perfect.’
‘So are you.’ Still in a haze of bliss, Alex barely heard the words slipping so naturally from her lips. ‘I love you.’
Beside her, Louis froze. And then her world came tumbling down.
* * *
‘You do not love me.’ Louis bundled her off him so fast that she almost fell and he nearly put a hand out to catch her, only just stopping himself in time. ‘You cannot. That isn’t what we agreed.’
If he’d thought she was going to crumble, to fall, then he’d thought wrong. But a part of him had known that she wouldn’t. Not his Alex. He admired the way she tilted her chin, meeting his eyes even as she tugged the tangle of sheets over her chest to protect what little modesty she had left. It made his chest tighten with something that felt dangerously close to regret.
‘No.’ Her soft voice wrapped around him, hot and tight, just as she’d wrapped around his sex only minutes earlier. ‘it wasn’t what we agreed. And yet here we are.’
‘I won’t accept that.’ He tugged his jeans on furiously.
That, surely, was the point. Sex. She was confusing sex with love. And so, to some degree, was he. Why else did he want to pull away all the barriers between them and crush her body until they were so close he didn’t know where he ended and she began?
Alex merely shrugged lightly, her hurt evident, and yet she refused to apologise.
‘It isn’t your choice to make, it’s mine. And it appears I’ve made it. But tell me, Louis, what are you so afraid of?’
He snorted. An ugly sound.
‘I’m not afraid of anything. Or anyone.’
‘I think you are,’ she pressed. ‘I think you’re afraid of the one person who truly counts. Yourself. You’re afraid to be that good surgeon version of yourself because, for some reason, you can’t allow yourself to be happy. And so you keep throwing the two-dimensional playboy side out for the world. Why do you do that? Are you afraid you won’t measure up to the man you ought to be? And so you won’t even try in case you fail?’
It was too close to the mark. He couldn’t bear it.
Every time she talked to him like this she made him feel more and more like he could be the man he should have been from the start. She made him want to be. If only for her. But now it was too late. He was too like his father. He destroyed things, he didn’t create them.
‘You think you know me, just because we slept together?’ He shook his head. ‘How many other women do you think have been exactly where you are now, Alex?’
It was cruel. He had to slide his eyes away so that he didn’t see the pain clouding hers. But it was the only way. He couldn’t give Alex what she wanted. He wouldn’t.
She hoped he would take on the Lefebvre Group, guide it, nurture it. In her mind, he could build the Lefebvre Group into the force that the Delaroche Foundation could have been if not for his father’s ego. How was it she couldn’t see that his own ego was just as out of control? That, despite every choice he’d ever made—because of every choice he’d ever made—he had turned himself into the one thing he most loathed. He was his father’s own son.