It's In His Kiss(59)
She wanted what she wanted, and she’d mapped out the course of her life long ago. She’d made it on her own from the derelict foster homes of Mississippi to a position at Sheppard and Sheridan, the top corporate law firm in San Diego. He worried sometimes that sex was all she wanted from him—she’d warned him from the very beginning that falling in love wasn’t high on her to-do list. But he couldn’t resist her, and he’d used sex to help win her love. He kept her sore and aching and in need of him. Still, he wanted her to love him as much as he loved her, and he had a bad feeling that it wasn’t possible, that she could never match his devotion.
The Jeep careened into the driveway at the villa and skidded to a stop, just as her cries reached a fever pitch. She pulsed around him, her nails biting through cloth of his shirt into the sculpted flesh of his back. His groans matched hers as he let go, thrusting deeply, his hands on her waist, pulling her down hard as he slammed into her. Filling her, emptying himself, blissfully captured exactly where she wanted him, right where he belonged.
“You’re an excellent driver,” she said, kissing him, her hands tangling in the waves of hair. “And you’re absolutely right, I am totally down with the whole ‘mad fucking’ scenario!”
*
Charlotte was speechless at the sight that greeted her when she walked through the villa and stood looking out toward the ocean. Dozens, possibly hundreds, of white candles covered the stone terrace and surrounded the pool. It looked like a dream or a painting, it was so perfectly surreal. She turned to Bly and stood on tiptoe to wrap her arms around his neck, turning her face up so that his mouth covered hers in a long, deep, slow kiss.
“Is this your doing, or was it the miraculously invisible house staff?” Charlotte asked, when they came up for air. “I never thought of you as a hopeless romantic, but maybe I’ve underestimated Alexander Bly,” she said, her mind and body still reeling from the sex and the kiss and the fairytale scene laid out before her.
“It was my idea,” he said. “I am hopelessly romantic where you’re concerned, Charlotte. When you were missing, even though it was only a few days, it was like the end of the world. I’m in love with you, I knew it the first moment I met you all those years ago. Why the fuck I didn’t stop you from leaving then, I’ll never understand. After that—after the day I called and you said it was too late—I was sleepwalking through life for the next six years, and nothing and no one could fill the space where only you belonged.”
“Bly, I love you now, and I wanted you then, but you frightened me. I don’t think you have any idea what an innocent I was. Jorgen and I were together, but that entire relationship was so strange it defies logic. I was a dumb little cheerleader from Ole Miss engaged to a star NFL quarterback, and I was still a virgin. It was only supposed to be Jorgen who was photographed for the cover of American Jock, not the both of us. Then the next thing I knew, you—the great and powerful Alexander Bly—convinced me to pose with my boyfriend. I never intended to be the nearly-naked cheerleader, and it haunts me every time I walk into a courtroom. Do you know how difficult it is to inspire respect in the opposing counsel when he probably had pictures of my bare butt on his dorm-room wall?”
“If I could go back and do it over, I would have told you how I felt that day, and I wouldn’t have asked you to pose for those photographs. I was just… how do I even describe it? I was stunned by how beautiful you were, but mostly I was caught completely off-guard by my feelings for you. I’d never met a woman who affected me the way you did, and I suppose I thought if you agreed to do the layout in a magazine I owned, it would bind us together somehow. Something inside me laid claim to you the first moment we met, and I’ve never been free of you since. I don’t want to ever be free of you, Charlotte—you own my soul, and the rest of me, of course. Life is so clear in hindsight. I should have sent the quarterback on his way, and I should have done everything in my power to make you see that you were my destiny and that I was yours.”
“Well, things have a way of working out in the end, don’t they? We’re together now, and I know without a doubt that I love you. What else matters, Bly? Listen, you and I are fine, we’re better than fine. And I don’t know about you but I’m starving. It smells like something wonderful is on the grill, I think we should have some local delicacies and then jump into that candlelit pool. Maybe if we’re lucky we’ll get some sleep tonight—but then again, maybe not,” she said, slipping into his arms, pressing her body against the hard length of his, wondering if they would make it all the way through dinner without pausing to make love.