Chapter 4

AURORA

I pushed back from the table and stood up. My pulse was doing something unreasonable in my throat.

"It might be the grief talking. I know how that sounds." I lifted my chin. "But tell me you wouldn't give anything to see their faces when they find out we weren't exactly sitting at home waiting."

Kieran straightened off the doorframe. The shirt hung forgotten in his fingers.

"An affair." He said the word like he was tasting it.

"Yes. An affair." I kept my voice level. "No feelings. No forever. Two people who got cut by the same knife giving the cutters exactly what they earned."

He crossed the room without hurry. He stopped a foot away from me, close enough that I had to lift my face to keep his eyes.

"And when they find out?" he asked.

"That's the point." My breath was coming shallow. "If they can play this game, then so can we. Only better."

My heart was hammering. Yesterday morning I would have sworn on my mother's grave that I was not the kind of woman who could suggest something like this.

Yesterday morning I had been someone else entirely.

He stared at me. Long enough that I began to think the sane one in the room was going to be him. Long enough that I began to think he was about to put the shirt on and tell me to go home and sleep this off.

Then his free hand lifted. Slowly. His fingers slid under my jaw and tipped my chin a fraction higher.

My breath stopped.

His mouth came down on mine and every scrap of thought in my head went silent.

My eyes slid shut as his lips moved over mine, hot and unhurried and certain, and then without warning he lifted me clean off the floor. A sound jumped out of my throat. My legs locked around his waist on instinct. My arms went around his neck.

He walked me toward the bedroom like my weight was nothing.

The way my sister had probably been nothing yesterday too.

I shoved the thought down before it could spoil what was happening.

He laid me on the bed and I bounced once on the soft mattress and sat up on my elbows, heart smashing against my ribs. Scared. Furious. Wanting this more than I had wanted anything in a very long time.

His towel dropped.

I forgot the English language.

He was already hard. Thick and heavy, a glisten at the tip, and the sight of him landed somewhere low and immediate in my body and I had to grip the sheet in both fists just to steady myself.

He watched me with eyes gone dark.

I pulled my phone from the pocket of my borrowed leggings, which was no small feat since they fit like paint, and set it face down on the nightstand without looking away from him. My hands were trembling. He noticed. He didn't say a word.

His palms wrapped around my ankles and dragged me slowly down the mattress toward him, holding my gaze the whole way like I was the only thing in the room worth his attention.

His fingers slid under the waistband of the too-small leggings. One pull and they peeled off me like a glove.

Then the tank.

The second it cleared my head, Rhett's face appeared behind my eyes. Rhett in a tux at the altar. Rhett pressing his forehead to mine, swearing in front of two hundred people that there would never, ever be anyone else.

Then Noelle's head tipped back against that willow tree.

I shook Rhett out of my skull and locked the door behind him.

Four months. Four months without being touched. Four months of excuses and forehead kisses and promises for later. Maybe that was why my body was already strung tight before Kieran had done anything to earn it. Or maybe it was the rage. The wrongness. The fact that for the first time in two days I was taking something back that was mine alone.

Kieran climbed onto the bed and settled between my knees and every muscle in me tightened in anticipation.

His hand wrapped around the side of my throat. Not pressing. Just there. Warm and sure and in charge in a way I hadn't realized I was starving for. Then his mouth came down on mine again, deeper, slower, like a man who had been waiting all his life for permission.

His lips slid down to the hollow under my ear.

A sound tore out of me I didn't recognize.

I threw my head back and gave up on pretending I was in control of anything.

Both his palms covered my breasts and he squeezed, his thumbs tracing circles over the tight peaks until I was arching into him. His mouth followed, hot and wet, tongue circling one then the other while I buried my fingers in his hair and tried to remember what dignity used to feel like.

I couldn't.

He kissed down my stomach. My hipbone. The crease where my thigh met my body. Each kiss deliberate. Slow. Like he intended to use every second he had.

By the time his lips reached the soft skin of my inner thigh I was already shaking.

He took his time there too. Grazing. Breathing. Avoiding the one place I was aching for him to go until a sound came out of me that was close to begging.

"Please," I whispered.

He pressed one slow, open-mouthed kiss directly where I needed him.

I nearly came apart right there.

Then two of his fingers slid inside me and I did come up off the bed, catching myself on my elbows, staring down at him with my mouth open and my brain completely blank.

He looked up at me from between my thighs and smiled. Slow. Knowing. The kind of smile that ended marriages.

Then his fingers started to move.

"God, you're wet," he murmured, and the sound of his voice there, that low, between my legs, sent another hot wave through my whole body.

His tongue joined his fingers, his lips closing around that aching spot and sucking while his fingers curled deep and found something inside me that made every nerve in my body light up at the same time.

My thighs trembled against his shoulders. My head fell back. I was making sounds I would never be able to look him in the face about and I did not care.

He kept going. Relentless. Patient. Reading every sound I made and giving me more until there was nowhere left for me to run.

I fell.

Hard.

It hit me in a wave that didn't stop at the first crest. Just when I thought the worst was over he pushed his fingers deeper and curled them in a different way and something else happened inside me, something I had never felt before, a flood of sensation so sharp I cried out and clutched at the sheets and felt myself let go in a way my body had never let go for anyone.

The sheets beneath me soaked through.

I lay there, chest heaving, mortified and reeling at the same time.

Kieran raised his head from between my thighs. His eyes were half-dark with satisfaction and half-wild with hunger that had not even started yet.

That, I thought from somewhere far away, is why Noelle Vale was never good enough to breathe the same air as this man.

He hooked his arms under my knees and dragged me to the edge of the bed. My legs locked around his waist and my arms found his neck without being asked. One of his hands gripped the back of my thigh. The other guided the thick, blunt head of him to me.

He pushed in.

Slowly.

I stopped breathing.

Nothing in my whole life had ever felt like that. The slow, deep stretch of him. The way we fit, like two halves of something that had been made in the same workshop. Like my body already knew him from somewhere I had never been.

My mouth fell open.

"Oh my God." It was barely a sound.

He didn't speak. He just watched my face and pushed deeper until there was no deeper to go and I could feel him in the base of my spine.

Then he started to move.

His thrusts were hard. Deep. Steady. Hitting something inside me I had not known about until this exact moment. I couldn't tell if I was moaning or sobbing. My eyes were wet. My throat was raw. It didn't matter.

Rhett had never once made me feel what this stranger was making me feel.

The thought came and went in a flash because Kieran changed his angle and the room went white at the edges.

He gripped me by the hips with both hands and set the rhythm himself, pulling me down to meet every thrust, taking me so thoroughly that the sound of us filled the whole room and I lost track of what day it was.

The second wave built faster than the first. Deeper. It started somewhere behind my ribs and spread out through my whole body. I buried my face in the hot curve of his neck and held on while every muscle in me seized and clenched and shook around him.

He groaned against my ear.

His pace picked up. His breath went ragged. He drove into me harder, faster, his fingers digging into my hips in a way I would feel for days, and I wanted every second of it.

Then he stilled with a low, broken sound. I felt him throb inside me. His arms tightened around me so hard I could feel his heart slamming against my chest.

We stayed like that. Both wrecked. Both breathing like we had just outrun something.

Then he laid me carefully back on the mattress and sat down on the edge of the bed with his back half turned to me.

I stared at the ceiling.

Wow.

I kept it to myself. Some things don't need to be said out loud.

I turned on my side, suddenly aware of all of it. What I had suggested. What I had done. How much I had wanted it when wanting had never been part of my plan.

The shame came quietly. Not because of him. Because of how completely and willingly I had come apart in the arms of a man who wasn't my husband, and how little of me regretted it.

How was I supposed to look at him now?

"I'm sorry." His voice came from behind me, low. Careful.

I felt his palm settle lightly on the small of my back.

"I shouldn't have finished inside you. I got carried away and—"

"It's okay," I cut in. "I have an IUD."

A pause. "Why?"

I almost laughed. Rhett had wanted children "someday." Someday had kept moving further out. I had quietly made my own peace with it.

I rolled onto my back to answer him.

My phone lit up on the nightstand.

Kieran was closer. He glanced at the screen and lifted it with two fingers, holding it out to me.

"Your husband is on the line."

The warmth drained out of my face in one slow pull.

Rhett.

I took the phone. I looked at Kieran once, just for a second.

Then I answered. I put it on speaker. I set it between us on the bed.

"Good morning to the most beautiful woman alive."

Rhett's voice filled the room. Warm. Tender. Flawless.

I opened my mouth to answer.

And Kieran's lips landed on that spot beneath my ear.

I hadn't braced for it. I hadn't even seen him lean in. The heat of his mouth on my skin shot through me and my head tipped back before I could stop it and the sound that came out of my throat was unmistakable, raw, and loud enough to carry.

The line went dead silent.

Then Rhett spoke again. Every drop of warmth was gone.

"Aurora." His voice had gone flat. Cold. Something new underneath it. "Is there a man in that room with you?"