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  Her breathing quickens. She relaxes into my hold, and her eyes shift from mine to my lips. I slide my hands down over her tight arse and pull her against my stiffening cock. I lean forwards, my mouth so close to hers I can feel and taste her breath. She moves with me, letting me bend her back towards the dance floor. She drops her head, and I support her with one arm, my other hand drawing down her sternum, her stomach. She moves one leg to the outside of mine, and her hips start to move, cautiously at first, then she lets go and we move together to the beat. Her body fits mine. She feels fucking amazing rubbing against me.

  Matty comes out of nowhere and knocks me off my feet. My arse hits the floor, and he comes at me again. I stagger to my feet and lunge at him, dropping my shoulder into his waist, driving him back. He lands a fist in my side and swings for my head as I stand. I duck, then smash him with a hook in his jaw that rocks his head back and forces him to take three unsteady steps into the crowd.

  Georg suddenly appears with one of the bar staff. They each grab one of Matty’s arms and pull him off the dance floor. “Calm it down, Clark, or you’ll have to go,” Georg shouts above the music.

  I hold up a hand and nod, my other arm wrapped around my waist.

  “Have you lost your fucking mind?” Dayna screams at me.

  I grab her by the wrist and drag her off the dance floor, down a corridor that leads to the toilets. I pull her into an alcove and push her back against the wall. “I have lost my mind. Over you.”

  I waste no time in pressing my mouth against hers, but she pushes me back with more force than she ought to have, and her hand swipes straight across my cheek with a sting. I stand dead on the spot, my arms at my sides. She said she’d do it. She warned me what would happen if I tried to kiss her again. That she followed through on her threat makes me want her all the more.

  She says nothing but takes a breath that lifts her chest, her breasts pulling her dress taut across them. She wants this as much as I do. I take her wrists and pin them above her head so she can’t slap me, then I kiss her again. I wait, counting down nanoseconds that feel like an eternity. Finally, she opens her mouth and groans into me, her tongue reaching out to mine.

  No memory could live up to the feel of her, the taste of her. I get lost in her, forgetting where we are. I let go of her wrists and hold her face in my palms as she runs her fingers through my hair, gripping tightly as our mouths move faster, our tongues deeper. I run a hand down her body, her curves fitting exactly into the span of my hand. As I round the globe of her arse she flexes her pelvis against me and no doubt feels my erection against her. Jesus, that feels fucking good. A guttural sound leaves my throat and matches her moan as her body begs for more.

  She tightens her fist in my hair and bites my lip. I shift my body to shield her from anyone passing by the alcove and slip my hand under her dress, climbing her thigh, then the soft flesh of her arse.

  “Clark, not here,” she whispers into my mouth. But she doesn’t stop me. Instead she increases the intensity of her mouth over mine and the roll of her body against my crotch. I have to make her come. I need to see how much she still wants me, too.

  I slide my hand to her centre, cupping her over her thong, waiting for a response. Her back arches, giving me permission. I push my fingers past the delicate fabric.

  “You want me,” I tell her as I draw my fingers through her slick lips. “You’re so fucking wet for me, baby.” It makes my cock painfully hard. I want to strip her down right here and drive my dick into her until she’s full of my come.

  She bites harder on my lip, fighting herself, I think. I know the feeling of your body, your heart and your head pulling in different directions. I know the frustration she’s feeling, and I let her bite me and pull my hair, whatever she needs, because I want to see her orgasm. I want to remind her how I can make her feel.

  I thrust two fingers inside her warm, wet cunt and relish the sound of her groan — carnal, desperate. She drops her head to my shoulder and bites down through my shirt as I work my fingers against her inner wall, stroking her G-spot. I remember exactly how she feels, how she likes it, as if we were never apart. I press my lips to her neck over and over, absorbing her scent and the taste of her skin I’ve missed so much.

  I move my thumb to her clit and circle it, driving my fingers deeper into her, feeling her press back against me, trying to take more. She pushes her thigh harder against my crotch as her insides start to clench. She’s close, and so am I, without even being inside her. The promise, the memories, the sound of her desire, take me to the edge.

  “Come for me, baby,” I whisper into her ear. The sound is a beg. I need her to climax otherwise I will.

  She lifts her head and kisses me fiercely as her muscles start to pulse. She comes around me, her pleasure running down my fingers. She whimpers into my mouth, and I have to hold everything still. I stop kissing her, take my hand back and lean my forehead on hers, my eyes closed, forcing back my own orgasm.

  “I want you in my bed,” I tell her through gritted teeth.

  WE LEFT THE club in silence but hand in hand. We’ve made it to the chalet, still in silence, still hand in hand. I just don’t know what to say. There’s not a coherent thought in my head, just a frenzied mix of lust, love, hurt, passion, hatred. I promised myself I’d never be back here again, eating out of the palm of his hand, playing the role of someone he can use. Except it’s not like that. I tell myself he’s toying with me, because I want to despise him for breaking my heart. But when we’re together, even rough and ready in the corridor of a club, he’s right there with me, in it with me. He always was.

  “It was never the sex that was the issue,” I mumble at the entrance to the chalet. I tug his hand so he stops, and I look up at him, pleading, with myself, with him. “Clark, I can’t do this.”

  His eyes look… hurt. But he nods and raises his palm to my cheek. I lean into him. His touch is so natural.

  “I know. It’s okay. It got a little crazy back there.”

  I liked it. I wanted it. I needed to come and for him to be the reason for it. But I know I shouldn’t have wanted it at all. I part-laugh, part-cry, a noise of complete confusion. Exactly how I feel. “The cold is pretty sobering.”

  He lifts my chin to face him. “Look at me. I want to make love to you, Dayna. There’s nothing I want to do more. I know I hurt you, and I know you can’t turn that off overnight. I get it. When you’re ready, I’ll be here. I’m not going anywhere.”

  His devastating eyes drown me. He used to look at me like this. He looked at me like this that final Saturday night, when we made love, or rather, when he took me, brutally. Because whatever his father had done to him that day made him need a release. I knew he had a temper, but I hadn’t seen him like that before. He was out of control, and I wanted to be the person to comfort him and give him what he needed. And from the way he looked at me — the same way he’s looking at me now — I thought I was the most precious thing in the world to him. I told him I loved him and meant it with all of me.

  And the next day, he left. He didn’t call; he didn’t text. A day later I was on Little Princess for the last time. He still didn’t call. And when I was in hospital getting checked over, when the scale of the explosion was broadcast around the globe, the phone still didn’t ring.

  I take his hand from my face and turn towards the door, looking at my feet. We walk inside to find Amy holding a bag of ice to Matty’s chin. I stiffen in anticipation of another showdown.

  Matty takes over holding the ice but he makes no move to stand.

  “How about we give them a minute?” Amy says to me.

  I’ve known Matty much longer than I’ve known Clark, and Matty’s always been there for me. Yet it’s Clark I’m concerned about, and Clark I turn to now, silently questioning him. There’s a shift in his face and in his demeanour. He’s lost the sparkle he had just minutes ago. But there’s no fight in him either.

  “Okay,” I say, following Amy to the kitchen
. She sits on the bench and I stand opposite, leaning against the island. “Are the others back?”

  “No, they stayed. Dayna, I know you didn’t invite Clark here, and I know he messed you around and still does mess with your head. But… it’s not fair that Matty got caught up trying to look out for you. Since you are both here, maybe now is the time for you and Clark to talk it all through, each say your piece and see where you end up.”

  Guilt racks my body. I really haven’t thought enough about how Clark and I are affecting the others. “I didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt.”

  “I know, babes, we all know that.” She puts her hand on my arm and kisses my brow. “I’m going to bed.”

  She’s right, we need to talk, really talk. In the past Clark has locked things up and lashed out, but since we’ve been here, maybe there is something different about him. Even the way he spoke to me on the doorstep — old Clark wouldn’t have said that.

  I put a pan on the hob and half-fill it with milk. As I’m looking for the cocoa that I know is in one of the cupboards, Matty comes into the kitchen. His jaw is already bruising, and red from the ice.

  “Does it hurt?” I ask.

  “Nothing I can’t handle,” he says with a forced smile. “Hell, it wouldn’t be a proper birthday weekend if no one got punched.”

  I move towards him for a closer inspection and gently run my fingertips over his stubble. “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugs. “I shouldn’t have got involved. Amy told me a few things, filled in a few blanks about you two.” He flicks his head in the direction of the lounge, where Clark is standing in front of the fire, watching us. “I should have stayed out of it like the others, let you two run your course.”

  I nod. Whatever that course is. “Thank you for looking out for me.”

  “I’ve always got your back, Dayna, you know that.” As warm as those words should make me feel, they hammer home the feeling that I’m responsible for bringing this mess on him.

  I stand on my toes, too short even in heels to kiss his cheek otherwise. “You’re a knight in shining armour, Matthew Jonson.” I put my palm on his chest. “I’m just not a princess.”

  He covers my hand with his own. “Poetic. You really tried, didn’t you?”

  I laugh. “I really did try.”

  He pulls me into his big, muscular arms and hugs me tightly before heading upstairs, leaving me looking at Clark. “Hot chocolate?”

  “Sounds good.”

  I get back to the hob and stir cocoa powder into the milk.

  “When you told me you loved me, I panicked.” Clark’s words make me pause, holding a ladle full of hot chocolate above the pan.

  “I didn’t know what to do with it. I… I didn’t know how to be loved. I was pretty certain I’d fuck up loving you back. And… I admit, I didn’t know if I could be…” His inhale is audible. I start to ladle the hot chocolate into two mugs. “I was afraid of how I felt about you. It was like everything hurt when I wasn’t with you, and when I was. I knew, or I thought, you would be the rest of my life, and I was foolish enough to think I wasn’t ready for that. I had a ridiculous seed of doubt that grew and… I listened to people I shouldn’t have.”

  His words sting, and yet they give me that light feeling in my chest I used to get around him — the sickly sweet drop of my abdomen, like I’m free-falling from a plane, terrified but high on adrenaline, on him. It wasn’t all in my head; what we had was real. I loved him so much I’d have moved heaven and earth for him, done anything for him, been whatever he needed. Now he’s telling me he listened to other people. He walked away instead of talking to me. He didn’t fall as hard as I did. But he felt something. Something strong enough to scare him.

  I stir the hot chocolate in the mugs until the glaze disappears from my eyes, then I hand a mug to Clark. “That took you four years.”

  He takes the mug. “A regret to put all others in its shadow.”

  I wrap my hands around my drink and move to the sofa by the fire. I unfasten the straps around my ankles, take off my shoes and lift my legs up to the sofa. Clark comes to join me, lifting one knee onto the cushion and facing me, his mug in one hand, his opposite arm propped on the back of the sofa.

  “I don’t want to make excuses, but I want you to understand that me leaving wasn’t about you. It was my failing. You were everything. You did and said everything right. I wasn’t ready for you then. I didn’t deserve you.”

  I don’t know whether to be grateful for the sentiment or insulted that he thought I’d blame myself. “And you think you deserve me now?”

  “I couldn’t presume to deserve you, Dayna. That’s your call. But you changed me. It took me a long time to realise it and even longer to actually do things differently. But you were the catalyst. Nothing was the same after you. Fun wasn’t quite as fun. Jokes weren’t as funny without your laugh. And… women, sex… they didn’t compare to you.”

  I wince at the mention and thought of him being with other women, but I know the feeling. Being with someone else after Clark was robotic; it was necessary fuel but never an indulgence that I felt through my veins or rushing to my head. I don’t tell him that. Instead, I do what Doctor Holland does to me; I leave a silence for him to fill. He’s talking, really talking, and I want to hear it, I think.

  “I was angry, too. Really fucking angry. I’d always been a commodity to my family… my parents at least. I was something they had to do — a legacy, nothing more. I wasn’t loved like you were. I wasn’t even loved the way Kathryn and Spencer are. God, if I ever have a family of my own, I’ll do everything in my power to show them how much they mean to me. It wasn’t like that for me. I was just something to be moulded into what my father needed. I didn’t know how to love or be loved, how to really appreciate something. And I listened to them. I took their crap on board.”

  He sips his hot chocolate. A tactical pause before he tells me more that I have a feeling I won’t want to hear but that I need to understand.

  “My mother and father didn’t approve of the Cross name. They still don’t. My father’s prejudice is from oil, I think.” He glances up at me sheepishly. I know exactly what the industry thinks of Roger “cost-cutting” Cross. “My mother’s dislike is fuelled by my father, or that you aren’t second-in-line to the throne.”

  I actually laugh. “The female oil mogul who didn’t go to the nation’s best private school, who swears and who comes from a split family. No, I can imagine that wouldn’t sit too well in discussion over lunch in Knightsbridge.”

  His lips curve slightly in a sad smile. “I realised too late that I shouldn’t take orders from my dysfunctional parents. But I did realise.”

  “But you never came back.”

  He looks at me over the rim of his mug. “No. I wanted to. More than once. Then my father had a heart attack.”

  I watch my fingers turning my mug in my lap, ashamed. “I know. What the industry didn’t tell me, Teddy did. I asked him about it, but I never called you or came to visit.”

  “Don’t you dare apologise to me. I did a lot worse. It’s a wonder you even cared enough to ask Ted.”

  I look up at him. “I never stopped caring, Clark.”

  “Neither did I.” He lifts his knee an inch higher so it’s touching mine, and he turns the ends of my hair in his fingertips. “My father has a heart condition. The risk of him having another heart attack was too high.”

  “That’s why you got made up to CEO so quickly.”

  His blue eyes are troubled. It could be from talking about us, but I suspect I’ve also hit a nerve and the real motive behind him wanting the Persian Gulf well. “The board of directors went with it, despite my age, because they knew he would be behind me, in my ear for every big decision. With the exception of Ted, they’re still my father’s board, not mine.”

  “Is that why you want the well? To do something that’s yours?”

  He smiles. “You see me. You always did. You saw through all my bullshit like nob
ody else could.”

  “Maybe there’s something under all that bullshit you don’t realise is there.”

  “Only you would try to see something good in me after everything. You’re the only person who’s ever had faith in me. What a mess I made.” He shakes his head and swirls what’s left of his drink in his mug. “When I got made CEO, my father said things had to change. I had to settle down, start behaving like a man, forget what dreams I had and do what was right by the family name. That night, at the dinner eighteen months ago, when we slept together, I was already set to take Connie out the next day. She was apparently what I needed. Our families have known each other for years. Jay, you remember him? He’s one of… was one of my best friends. He’s also Connie’s brother.” Clark pulls his hand away from my hair and takes a gulp of hot chocolate. “I’m not trying to twist things. I did want to take her out, but that was before… Connie, you know, she’s a good woman. A man would be lucky to have her.”

  “But not you?”

  “At the dinner, you were upset. I shouldn’t have slept with you. I mean, I wanted to, God did I want to, but I shouldn’t have taken advantage of you like that.”

  “You didn’t do anything I didn’t ask you to.”

  “I knew I’d walk away, Dayna, and I still slept with you. The thing is, I can’t resist you. That night was the beginning and the end of Connie and me. It was always a relationship that I’d settled for. I did what was expected of me and asked the woman who was right in so many ways, all ways but one, to be my wife.”

  “What was the one?”

  “I loved her. I do love her. But I wasn’t in love with her.”

  I finish my hot chocolate and hold my still-warm cup against my chest while I process everything he’s told me, wondering whether that statement can really be true. Can you love a person enough to want to marry them and not be in love with them? I feel him watching me, waiting for a response. He eventually puts his cup on the floor, breaking the palpable tension between us.