Page 21 of Modern Romance January 2025 1-4

Nic laughed again. ‘I think you’d have to be a contortionist to get out of it alone.’

The first few hooks began to loosen the fit of the gown. He might have big hands, but he had precise fingers, she recognised as the lacing tightness round her ribcage eased, fingertips swiped smoothly across her shoulders, and without warning the whole dress was dropping, pooling round her feet like a statement, leaving her clad in the tasteful bits of nothing much that were all the dress design had allowed.

‘A garter.’

Nic knelt down behind her, making her ludicrously aware of her wispy lace strapless bra and knickers and the pull-up pale stockings, over one of which was layered a ‘something blue garter’, a gift from Mel, even though her friend was aware that she was not a real bride. Mel, as Lexy had become, was a cynic and had agreed that this might be Lexy’s only ever wedding.

‘I didn’t think you’d even be wearing one.’

‘You don’t know that much about me,’ Lexy said, enjoying that truth, enjoying that he didn’t know how much tougher she had got, how much she had changed from that gentle, forgiving person she had once been.

‘I’m willing to learn,’ Nic husked, trailing the garter down to a dainty ankle, freeing her foot from her shoe to thread it off, pausing only to gently extract her other foot from its shoe. Had she been the kind of woman who still believed in her fairy-tale prince she would have been swooning, weak at the knees from his aplomb and smooth words. Only now she wasn’t that naïve.

He vaulted upright again, snapped loose her bra and it fell away. His hands rose to cup her breasts, her nipples straining in the cooler air...and from his touch. She realised that as she had stood there thinking ever more bitter thoughts, on one level she had been trying to talk herself out of getting intimate with him again. He filled her with indecision and she was not an indecisive woman. Yet still her body hummed and throbbed that close to him, pulsing with a hunger she could not suppress, and thatwasa humbling acknowledgement.

Slowly,veryslowly, as though he knew what was inside her head, Nic turned her round and claimed her parted lips again, swallowing what she might have said, utterly silencing whatever indecisive thoughts she might still have been feeling in his radius. When he kissed her, when he held her close, there was only him and the wild, insane attraction of him, and he drew her down on the bed with gentle hands. In that instant she was lost because he didn’t push, he didn’t demand, he was everything that she remembered...the guy whocaredabout how she felt.

The span of his hands over her breasts, which were fuller and rather less pert than they had once been, turned her inside out with anticipation. She was all woman, all in the control of desire in an instant, wanting, needing what he could offer. Her nipples tingled and prickled, hunger like a dam burst threatening to break penned up within her, so that her spine arched to deepen that pressure and a faint moan escaped her.

‘I’ve never wanted any woman the way I’ve wanted you,’ Nic husked.

And she didn’t believe him, didn’t care because she wanted him more than her next meal, which in times gone by, when she had gone hungry for her children, meant more than he could ever have appreciated in his gilded world of privilege and excess. He was laying her down on the bed and she almost felt like telling him that subtlety of the type he was offering was unnecessary because she was definitely a sure thing. He was the guy that had taught her, that very first night they had been together, that even when she was sore and exhausted, she could still want him with the fire of a thousand suns. And he hadn’t been careful and, fool that she had been in her innocence of what a disaster an unplanned pregnancy could be, she had acquiesced. In reality, Nic Diamandis was only reaping the seeds he had sown.

‘I want you too,’ she admitted without the smallest embarrassment, watching him peel off his shirt, revealing a chest that belonged in a sculpture gallery, lean, honed abs and tight, taut musculature of the type rarely seen in ordinary men. No, there was nothing ordinary about Nic Diamandis, he was absolutely the dream and the fantasy she remembered, and no longer did she marvel that she had succumbed to all that pure, bronzed temptation. So what if she was looking at him as a sex object? Hadn’t that only been how he must have viewed her that long ago night?

‘I wasn’t expecting you to be so...open,’ he muttered unevenly.

‘I’m not the same woman you met eighteen months ago,’ she warned him.

‘I see that,’ he conceded, an uneasiness to the admission that pulled at her, making her wonder what he was thinking until she reminded herself that she really shouldn’t care at all what he was thinking. After all, he was her husband now and where his thoughts or his heart went now was no business of hers because she wasn’t looking for him to love her or essentiallycarefor her. She was expecting him only to help care for their children and ensure a secure future for her and the kids. All that romantic stuff? She was done with that. The romance stuff had burned her down to the bone because she had fallen in love with a guy who truly didn’t exist, not a guy who would have shied away from her and turned his back when she’d turned up inconveniently pregnant and desperate.

He unbelted his narrow-cut trousers and she rejoiced in his masculine beauty like a groupie, ashamed of herself and yet still wanting him so much. Bitterness and resentment didn’t provide the barrier she had expected, she conceded ruefully, heat pulsing at the heart of her, because surely no woman had ever reasonably wanted a man as much as she still wanted him? The trousers dropped, so did the boxers and she was enthralled, because these views were what she had not seen that first time in the shadows and the darkness of the bedroom.

‘I love the way you look at me,’ Nic confided hoarsely, his glittering golden eyes holding her fast. ‘Like you want me as much as I want you.’

‘Ido,’ she confided without self-consciousness, because that wasn’t a weakness, not the way she had learned to consider it. She was merely separating wanting from love and that was easy after the battles she had lived through.

‘It bridges our separation,’ he breathed, coming down to her, all husky, muscular, supremely aroused male, and she was mesmerised by him, no longer marvelling at the manner in which she had succumbed to him before. He was something else in terms of looks and charisma, the perfect ten if such a list of male attributes existed.

He claimed her mouth with erotic expertise, parting her lips, skating along them, only finally delving deep, and she fell into that kiss as if there were nothing beneath her, only a swirling, ever heightening world of pure sensuality. Yes, he was unbelievable in bed, she told herself, lying prone on the bed as he dallied over the swollen buds of her breasts, kissing a line down from that area to the next. Playboys didn’t get to be what they were without lots of practice, she reasoned absently, struggling now to stay in touch with her brain.

‘I dreamt of doing this again. Your body, it’s so perfect,’ he groaned.

‘It’s not perfect any more,’ she heard herself say, wondering if he hadn’t picked up on the stretchmarks on her abdomen and her breasts and even her thighs, because her body had behaved badly when she’d been pregnant with the triplets. There wasn’t a part of her that hadn’t swollen up way beyond perfection.

‘But it’syou,’ he emphasised, as though she were still the hottest female on earth that had ever been seen.

‘And it’s you,’ she whispered, small hands lifting to frame his high cheekbones, fingertips drifting off into the lushness of his black hair. Heavens, he was gorgeous.

Skilled fingers traced the heart of her then, probing, exploring, and he followed with the heat and expertise of his mouth. Within seconds she was lost in what he was doing to her, lost in sensation and need. Hunger burned in her pelvis like a flaming torch and she was arching and gasping and moaning and racing into climax without any input of her own.

‘I want you to enjoy this,’ Nic husked thickly. ‘I want you to be like this with me...always.’

Chance would be a fine thing, she thought, struggling to get her brain back because, really, he wasthatgood in bed. Not that she had anyone to compare him with but, even so, honour where it was due. She was sure there were plenty of men who left women wanting and unsatisfied, because she had listened to Mel, a veteran of several failed relationships, and she knew that the brand of sexual joy she was receiving was not universal. She knew exactly why she was putty in his expert hands: Nic knew what he was doing in bed with a woman.

He slid over her and even her sated body reacted to that provocative move, the buds on her breasts tightening again, the burn at her core reawakening, because she already knew that he could deliver... Oh, boy, could he deliver.

He lifted her legs over his shoulders and a kind of blissful anticipation enfolded her, damp heat turning her inner spaces to liquid welcome. Her heart picked up pace, the blood in her veins racing in concert, and he entered her, and there was a slight burn and a stretch. Even so, he felt amazing. Her body gave way to his as though such an intrusion was welcomed and itwas, it was everything she had recalled in the dark of the night in private, because nobody policed her dreams.

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