An Innocent, a Seduction, a Secret

All she could make out was ‘Por Dios!’ and ‘No!’

He was gasping now, caught in the grip of whatever nightmare was in his head. Edie tentatively reached out a hand and touched him on the shoulder. His skin was burning up.

Suddenly he went very still, his breathing laboured. Edie could see his focus coming into the room. She wasn’t sure if she should have touched him, but he’d sounded so anguished...

‘Sebastio...? You were having a dream.’

Sebastio was still somewhere halfway between that horrific night and the present moment...holding Maya’s lifeless body in his hands while hearing Victor scream in pain from the car...and there had been nothing he could do.

Slowly it receded and the room came into focus. And something else. Edie’s voice. Cool and calm. Her hand on his shoulder.

It was too much. He couldn’t bear to look at her and see the way her eyes would fill with something he couldn’t accept. How could he ever accept anything but condemnation?

He jerked away from her hand and pushed back the covers, getting out of bed. His legs were pathetically weak. He said curtly, ‘Go back to your own bed, Edie. I’m sorry I disturbed you.’

He couldn’t even look at her. He went straight into his bathroom and closed the door. He stood in the dark for a long moment, letting his heart come back to normal... He hadn’t had that dream for a long time. And he’d never had it in the presence of a lover.

Edie... It wasn’t her fault he’d had the dream. Nightmare. But she’d got under his skin to a raw part of him where too many wounds lay in wait. He could still feel the touch of her small cool hand on his shoulder. Like a balm. A balm he didn’t want or need.

He cursed and ignored the urge to go and check to see if she’d gone back to her own room. He flicked a light on and looked at his reflection in the mirror. His messy hair and stubbled jaw. Eyes still wild after the dream.

Any measure of peace he might have felt over the past thirty-six hours had been just an illusion. A by-product of sating his lust for the first time in four years.

And Edie wasn’t solely responsible for that, he told himself with not a little sense of desperation. Any woman would have made him feel the same way. It was purely biological.

The awful tentacles of the nightmare still clung to him like a grey mist, mocking him.

He cursed and went into the shower, flicking it on. The water pummelled his body, but not even that could dispel the lingering horror...

Edie sat on the bed, torn even though Sebastio had told her to leave. He’d looked...tortured. She heard the shower. She got up, intending to leave and give Sebastio his space, but then from inside the bathroom she heard the sound of a guttural cry.

A shiver went through her. It sounded animalistic. Pure pain.

Knowing he might not thank her for it, but unable to leave, Edie tentatively opened the bathroom door. She saw Sebastio in the huge walk-in shower. His back was to her and his hands were on the wall. Water ran down the planes and muscles of his back and buttocks. There was no steam. He had to be standing under a cold shower.

No. Her heart squeezed. She went in and dropped her robe to the ground. She went over to the shower and it was freezing. She reached for the control and turned the water to warm.

Sebastio looked around, and the pain etched on his face nearly felled her.

He said roughly, ‘I told you to leave, Edie.’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

The water was warm now, steam starting to rise. Edie stepped behind Sebastio and put her arms around his waist, resting her cheek against his back. She could feel the tension in his body, the rigid rejection of compassion or comfort. But she just held on tighter. Water was plastering her hair to her skull, running down into her eyes. But she didn’t care.

He brought his hands to hers and she thought he was going to pull them apart. But after a long moment he covered them with his and a shudder racked his body. And then another.

After long moments of just standing like that Sebastio switched them round, so that Edie was standing against the wall and he was in front of her. He put one arm on the wall behind her head and his other one on her hip.

The pain on his face had turned into something else. Something more primal. His eyes burned and a whole new tension came into the space between them. A tension she recognised and that made her nerve-endings sizzle.

‘I need you, Edie. Now...here. But I don’t think I can be gentle... If you want to go, go now...’

Edie understood in an instant. It resonated inside her. He needed to expel whatever darkness held him in its grip. He needed her. Her heart expanded in her chest before she could stop it. She knew the wise thing to do would be to walk away, but she could no more do that than stop breathing.

She put her hands on Sebastio’s chest and felt his heartbeat thundering. ‘Take me. I’m yours.’

He looked as if he was wrestling with himself inwardly for a moment, and Edie reached down and took his erection in her hand, slowly stroking him. His eyes became glazed, his breathing laboured.