A Dangerous Solace

The small square box lay heavy inside his jacket.

Without speaking another word he put her in the car and took her home.

* * *

Ava stripped off her clothes and immersed herself under the water jets in the wet room. She found she couldn’t cry, although the feeling was a pressure in her body, one she couldn’t relieve. As the warm water ran down her back she didn’t make any effort towards washing her hair, which had been her plan, just let the water sluice through it.

She felt fragmented—as if all the pieces of the Ava she had built up so carefully over the years not only to survive but to flourish had broken apart and she now had to work out which parts went where.

I had no intention of doing so with you.

Those words had hurt her. Because they hinted at what she suspected was true—she could have had all this seven years ago and she’d thrown it away because she’d been afraid to reach out for it and have it disappear.

The only delusion, it seemed, had been her own.

‘Ava.’

He was stripped, bigger than her, muscular, his broad shoulders, narrowing to his lean hips, those long, powerful legs. His expression was intent on her.

He often shared her shower, but right now she felt too raw, too exposed to be naked in front of him. She turned towards the splashback, feeling trapped.

She wanted to weep when his hands slid over her hips. As if sex would make everything all right—more likely the emotional turmoil of this afternoon hadn’t affected his attitude to that part of their relationship at all. He was a man—what did she expect? Sensitivity? Cry on another woman’s shoulder for that.

Yet as he smoothed one hand around her inner thigh and the other cupped her breast, and as he played his mouth hot and teasing over the back of her neck, Ava could feel her body delighting in his touch, eager to experience this yet again.

She had never thought herself a sexual creature. She had often wondered late at night when Bernard had gone home—she had never let him stay overnight—if she had enhanced that night with Gianluca in her memory. But now she knew better. Memory couldn’t supply the heat of his body, the scent of him on her skin, the hunger of his mouth, the demand, the way he stretched her with his size and his sheer stamina. Nor could it replicate the gentleness with which he held her afterwards and how supremely female she felt—replete, wanted, loved.

All illusory, of course. It was just the way you felt after good sex—great sex.

She’d never had great sex before, so she was bound to get confused.

Just as her body was confused now, as he turned her in his arms and heat rushed up from her sex and set her whole body alight.

‘Gianluca...’ she said on a sigh, her brain trying to assert itself.

They were toe to toe and his erection nudged her belly.

He kissed her, his mouth hot, wet under the spray. He tasted so good. Her fingers tried to get purchase on the hard ridges of his shoulders, slipped to his biceps, silk over steel. His physicality did it for her—the hardness of his honed body, so different from her own. His hair-roughened chest felt so good riding against the sensitive tips of her breasts.

Too easy—too easy to lose herself in this.

‘Things have been too intense over the last few weeks,’ he explained as his mouth roamed over her neck, her shoulders, found her nipple. His voice was slurred with lust. ‘Let’s just do this—this works for us, tesoro.’

Ava wanted to weep as he sucked her nipple into his mouth.

There was so much to say. But this—for now—would do.

He thought this would do.

He picked up a cloth, soaped it up and began to drag it over her until she was wobbly-kneed and leaning back against the tiles. He slid to his knees and found the soft heat between her legs. Ava shoved a fist to her mouth to stifle the scream building inside her, her other hand tangling its fingers in his hair. She pulled hard as she convulsed, and screamed anyway. He picked her up and, dripping water, took her to the bed, rolled her onto her belly and entered her from behind with a swift certainty that had her senses firing again.

He was impossibly deep inside her and she climaxed with a shocking immediacy.

His expression as he turned her over was almost feral in its wildness. There was none of the gentleness he was usually so careful to show to her, handling her as if she were somehow less robust than him, easily bruised, needed special consideration.

Ava was damn well aware she was going to have bruises tomorrow, and she didn’t care.

He thrust so deeply inside her that she gasped, and then again and again, until there was no room for thought, no doubt, only the tension coiling once more, coming like an earthquake from a long way away.

Her mind orbited separately from her body as she wrapped her legs around him and clung until she was sobbing out her pleasure. He made a deep, gratified sound and then there was just their bodies joined, her heavy breathing as she lay with her head plastered to his shoulder, his harsh breathing as his chest rose and fell.