She smiled. “Yup. That’s the dare.”
Shit, that tells me nothing. Dane took her petite foot between his hands and began to knead the arch of her foot, pushing his thumbs up the center of her arch, then massaging the sides and tops and moving his hands up her ankle. Lacy leaned her head back on a pillow.
“Good God, that feels good,” she said in a throaty voice.
He moved his hand up, caressing the soft skin of her calf beneath his strong hands.
“Lace?”
“Yeah,” she whispered, her eyes still closed.
“Truth or dare?” he asked. I’m not going to be the one to break the pact. She had to make the first move; otherwise he’d always wonder if he’d pushed himself on her.
“Truth.”
“Why did you ask me here tonight?”
Her smile faded, and she lifted her head. Her dress bloomed open again as she leaned forward and took a long drink of her wine. “I changed my mind. Dare,” she said.
“I’m not sure changing your mind is fair,” he said.
“You can dare me anything you want,” she said with a flutter of her lashes.
Dane clenched his jaw. God, did he have a list for her. He moved his hands up her calf, past her knee, to the warm skin between her thighs, where he rubbed her skin in long, slow strokes. She leaned back on her elbows, her body open to him. Her head fell back, and Dane placed her leg against the back of the couch and positioned himself above her. She opened her eyes, and he lowered his face until her exhalations were his oxygen.
“I dare you to tell me what you really want from me.” He was hard beneath his pants, and her supple skin called out to him. Her thigh was pinned against the back of the couch by his hip, and as she began to speak, she arched her hips in to him.
“Everything,” she whispered, and slipped her hand inside his pants, then wrapped her hand around him. “Everything, Dane. I want everything from you.”
He lowered his mouth to hers and kissed her hard, pressing her into the cushions. Their tongues pushed their way into each other’s mouths like they were each searching for the last breath on earth. Dane reached over his back with one arm and drew his shirt over his head. His body was on fire as he lowered his mouth to her chin, nipping at the hard edge of her jaw, then taking her neck between his lips and sucking until she pulled at the drawstring of his pants and drew them down with her hands, exposing his hard shaft. Then she used her feet to push them all the way off. Dane moved down her body, tugging her dress down to her waist and trapping her arms against her. He took one breast in his mouth, sucking until she cried out. Then he moved to the other and did the same; her nipple pebbled beneath his tongue. He had to have more of her, every inch of her. He lifted his naked body off of her and untied the silk belt from around her waist, then pulled her dress over her head and dropped it to the floor. Her body was like a sculpture of smooth curves and full, rounded breasts. She pulled him to her, taking his nipple in her mouth and biting—hard.
“Aaah.” He winced.
“You like that?” she asked.
Dane could barely think past the ache to make love to her. “I like everything you do,” he said.
She took the other nipple in her mouth and sucked, her teeth moving roughly over his tender skin. She slithered down beneath him and took him in her mouth.
Dane sucked in a breath. Jesus, he felt like he was going to come. She sucked and licked, using her hand to bring him right to the edge.
“Stop, Lace,” he urged.
She continued sucking until he had to reposition his body and lay down on the couch beneath her, his eyes closed, relishing in the zeal of her lust. She tucked her feet beneath her body, positioning herself between his legs. Then she drew her tongue up his body. She sucked his neck, as he’d done to her, and then her mouth covered his. He felt her reaching out to the side with her right hand, and he opened his eyes. Her fingers returned with the silk tie of her dress. Her eyes alit with mischief, she wrapped the silk around his wrist, then lifted his hands above his head and bound them together with the silky restraint.
“Lacy?” Dane had played bondage games before, but he was always the aggressor. Now, beneath Lacy, he wasn’t sure what to expect, but if he’d allow any woman to tie him up, it would only be her.
She raised her eyebrows and kissed him again. “Yes?”
Too many things were running through his head. He couldn’t weed through them fast enough to make sense of them. Fuck me? Let me tie you up?
“Truth or dare?” she said in a deep, seductive voice.
“Truth?” he asked.
“How long’s it been since you were with another woman? Exactly?” She settled her hips over his. His erection lay between them like a dare.
He closed his eyes. He knew exactly how long it had been. He’d met Lacy fifteen months ago, and he’d stopped sleeping with other women four months later. But he couldn’t tell her that. What kind of man relies on his own hand to satiate a need that’s driven into him night after night by a woman who’s too far away to touch?
“Lace, please,” he said.
She lowered her chest until her nipple touched his lip. “I could give you a dare,” she said. “You’re in a precarious position to carry out a dare.” She glanced down at his erection, then slithered down his body and licked the length of him again. “Exactly how long?”
Dane closed his eyes. “Eleven months,” he whispered.
Lacy sat up and shook her head.
“Eleven months, okay? Eleven fucking months.”
“Eleven months?” she repeated. “If you don’t tell the truth, the punishment might be harsh,” she said in a shaky voice.
“Lace, it’s true. It’s fucking embarrassing as shit, but it’s true. Eleven months. Remember that night you told me about your father? The night you cried?”
She wrinkled her forehead. “Yeah.” Her voice was just above a whisper.
Dane remembered it like it was yesterday. He’d wanted to climb through the computer monitor and hold her until her tears dried and he knew she was safe.
“I knew that night that I couldn’t be with anyone else. Not while my heart was becoming yours.” He looked away, his erection faltering. He lowered his hands and began untying the bindings. “I’m sorry, Lace,” he said. “You’re the last person on earth I ever wanted to hurt.” He reached for his clothes.
“Dane,” she said. “I was trying…to seduce you.”
“You’re a great seductress, Lace. But you don’t even have to try. You had me the minute I met you in Nassau.” His heart ached for Lacy, for the hurt in her eyes and the embarrassment that rose on her cheeks. But mostly, his heart ached for himself and the reality that who he had been would never change—even if he’d stopped being that person eleven months ago.
“I’m sorry I killed the mood. My history is always going to be between us. It’s the one thing I can’t change.”
He handed Lacy her dress, and she held it against her shivering body. Dane put on his pants and went to the glass doors. He closed and locked them, then grabbed a throw from a chair and wrapped it around Lacy’s shoulders.
“You don’t have to stay for the rest of the week, Lace. Nothing I do will ever change the man I was.”
“Wait, please,” she said, stopping him in his tracks. “The other night, when you said you had women all over the world, I thought you had been with them more recently. Eleven months, Dane, that’s almost a year.”
“I’m well aware of every day, every second, every hour.” Dane’s heart was shattering inside his chest. He didn’t need to remember all the nights he’d longed for Lacy’s touch and had to satisfy himself, or the multitude of midnight hours he’d spent staring at the photos she’d emailed him, wondering what it would be like to kiss her. He needed to go away. Far away. Someplace he wouldn’t see Lacy’s face in every cloud.
“I’m not judging you, Dane,” she said. “I asked that question expecting an answer of a few months, maybe two or three. I don’t know. That would have made me feel better. I never imagined it had been that long.”
“Now you know.” He couldn’t change the fact that he hadn’t gone to see her in fifteen months, and he couldn’t change the number of months and years he’d slept with random women—all of which made him too upset to think straight. He couldn’t think clearly enough to comprehend what she was trying to say. He looked away, and Lacy wrapped her arms around him from behind. He felt her cheek against his back.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For?” He should just walk out the door. He didn’t want to spend his life fighting about who he had been.
“For liking me enough to be faithful even when I was too far away to know if you weren’t.”
Dane clenched his eyes shut as relief tore through him. His shattered heart began pulling itself back together, piece by fragile piece. He’d misunderstood what she’d said completely, and the realization knocked the sails right out of him. He turned and reached for her, as much for stability as for the need to feel her with him. Everything he’d wanted for so long was right there, coming together, and he couldn’t find the words to tell her how much it meant to him. Instead, he looked down into the sea of love in her eyes, and he lowered his mouth to hers, kissing her until his heart reassembled, until the pain of thinking he’d lost her melted away and the desire to love her back to being his returned.