He took her with one thrust, and when he hit home, Katie felt…unleashed.
She rocked her hips up into him, pressing her mouth against the curve of his neck.
Armin wasn’t deliberate anymore.
He took her hard and fast, his strokes powerful, and Katie gasped for breath. Her need pulsed through her from her fingertips to her toes, radiating out from a supernova at her core that was pushed along by Armin’s body. She was melting around it, exploding, and Armin caught her cries on his tongue.
He changed angles so that his hips brushed against her clit with every thrust, and Katie’s orgasm rolled over into another one, a wave that kept lapping and lapping at the shore. Armin growled into her neck with his own release. The storm that was his body broke over her and she was swept up in it, the wind howling in her ears.
It took several minutes for her to come down.
Armin broke apart from her at last, catching his breath faster than should have been humanly possible. He saw to the condom, then stretched his arms over his head before bending gracefully to pick up his boxers from the ground and tug them back up to his perfect hips. He stalked to the edge of the balcony, then turned back to look at her, bathed in the gentle light from the lamps.
Katie struggled to catch her own breath.
Armin sat on the edge of the lounge chair once again and reached for the puddle of her clothes on the ground next to them. He lifted one of her ankles in his hands and began to slide her panties back onto her legs. “How is it,” he said, his tone idle and warm, “that you came to be a nanny when you should be working as a journalist?”
Katie was instantly on alert. The question seemed to have come from nowhere, but it couldn’t have. It must have been on Armin’s mind for some reason or another. “My last job didn’t work out,” she said, before the silence stretched on too long. She lifted her hips again to let Armin tug her panties the rest of the way up. Then he started on her skirt.
“I want to know.” His eyes met hers in that glowing creamy light. “I want to know more about you. How did you come to be in my life, when you could have been in a very different life, somewhere far away?” He pressed a kiss to the inside of her knee before offering his hand so she could stand up on shaky legs and rearrange her skirt. Then she sat down again, her limbs heavy and loose. “I want to know who you are, Katie Crestley.”
Katie let out a deep breath. “If you really want to know…”
“I really do.”
Armin picked up his glass of wine, returning hers to her.
“My first big job was at…a tabloid. There’s no sugarcoating it. We dealt in celebrity gossip, things like that.” She took a sip of the wine. It was incredible. “And I was miserable.”
“Miserable?”
“It wasn’t what I wanted to be doing, reporting rumors like that. But it paid the bills while I searched for my big break. I wanted a story big enough to make a name for myself. A story so big that papers would fight over me.” She smiled ruefully at the memory of her former, more naive self.
“What happened?” Armin sipped his own wine, considering her.
“I found the story.” Katie shifted on the chair, remembering. “I thought I did, anyway. It was about a pair of American celebrities who’d been married for a decade. They were ending their marriage, and I learned that it was because of infidelity.”
“How sordid.”
“Very sordid. It was supposed to be very hush-hush, but my source was reliable.” Katie’s cheeks went hot at how stupid she’d been. “It was my job to get that kind of story, so I did. But at the last minute, my source got squirrelly. She didn’t want to confirm her quotes.” She shook her head. “I started to get spooked and wanted to pull the story.”
“That had to have been simple enough to do.”
“It should have been.” A spike of anger and shame stabbed through her heart. “But my editor ran the story anyway. The day it was printed—and posted online—the source recanted everything. It turned out, she had a grudge against the couple and she’d made the story up before getting cold feet—not that she’d admit that. She claimed that I took quotes out of context and invented most of the story.”
Armin cocked his head to the side. “But you’d tried to have it pulled. There’s no way you could have been held responsible.”
“Oh, but I was.” Katie loosened her grip on the glass of wine so she wouldn’t break the glass. “Everyone was willing to believe the worst of me. My editor let me face the criticism instead of taking responsibility. The celebrity couple was furious, and sent lawyers after the tabloid. And the higher-ups at the company were even worse. For the owners of a tabloid, they were…well, they were very upset. They fired me the next day. Not only was I out of the job, I was out of any credibility I might have been able to scrape together.”
“I’m sorry, Katie.” Armin sounded utterly sincere. “But…I’m not altogether sorry if it’s what sent you my way.”
“It didn’t at first.” She gave him a sheepish smile. “I tried my best to find another job in journalism. I came all the way across the ocean to do it. But nobody…nobody would have me. And while I might have been able to sell some pieces as a freelancer, I found myself completely blocked on writing. So I was a little desperate when I came here. I never thought I’d have to take a job as a nanny again, but…”
“But what?”
“It’s been…nice to take a moment to rethink who I am. To separate what happened from who I am as a person.”
“I can understand that.” He held his glass easily in his hand. “We all need to know how to separate our jobs from our souls.” Armin leaned forward and kissed her again, so gently she thought she’d cry. “If you figure out how to do that, I’d like very much to know.”