He raised his head, their gazes locking, and Kelsey’s breath caught at the undiluted lust she saw in Ari’s eyes, at the tightly leashed power. His body was trembling and she knew he was holding himself in check.

‘All of it,’ she muttered before raising her head off the bed and kissing him.

He met her halfway, swooping down to claim her mouth, to plunder it with his tongue, to dominate it, to own it with every twist of his head. Kelsey’s world turned molten, her veins lava tubes coursing through her body as she clung to him, taking and giving with equal ferocity.

His hips moved too. Slow and steady, butfuck that. She didn’t want slow and steady. She wanted pure uninhibited man. She wanted him to fuck her the way he was kissing her – deep and dirty. She was committing an act that was, in essence, a sackable offence.

For damn sure, it had better blow her freaking mind.

She shifted, arched, squirmed, opened her hips a little further and cried out when he slid in higher and harder on a low, guttural groan. And it was like the chains that were leashing him suddenly broke, the shackles falling away, and he plundered her pussy like he was plundering her mouth – relentlessly.

His hips were a piston, rocking her closer and closer. Rockinghimcloser and closer. His ass tightening, his back bowing, his mouth tearing from hers, his lips pressing behind her ear as he groaned and panted and called out to God.

‘Theé,mou.’

And then he slipped his hands between them, his fingers deftly finding her hair-trigger state, causing Kelsey to also call out to God.

In a much less poetic way.

‘Jesus… fuck!Christ!I’m coming.’

And she was. One stroke of his finger – two – and a violent flare of sensation burst out from the taut bundle of nerves, strangling her breath in her throat. Her body bucked and bowed, subsumed by the tremors of her release, her legs locking tight around his waist as her pussy clamped tight around his cock.

He came too, gasping his release right into her ear with another string of words in his mother tongue that somehow managed to sound like ancient Greek literature and pornography all at once. They spun her higher and faster, pushing her into another realm, a dizzying aphrodisiac as he chased her into the thick fugue of bliss.

* * *

Kelsey lost all touch with time and space for what seemed like hours but what was, in actuality, only a few minutes. When she came back to herself, Ari was easing himself off, rolling onto his back.

Neither said anything for long moments as he removed the condom and disposed of it in the bin. Kelsey was just content to lie in the bliss. Not psychoanalyse what had just happened. Not worry about the potential for career and therefore financial disaster.

Frankly, it didn’tfeellike a disaster. There was no sense of doom lying here next to him, just the feeling that it’d been worth the risk.

And surely a one-off could be contained?

‘My name is Ari George,’ he said suddenly, his voice a low rasp into the quiet of the room.

Kelsey lifted her head, their eyes meeting. A slight smile played on his mouth as if he was as bemused as her by what had just occurred. ‘Kelsey Armitage.’

And they both laughed.

* * *

Ari stared at the ceiling as Kelsey, curled into his side, drew patterns on his chest. He should be chilled out considering the orgasm he’d just experienced, but there was a wildly emotional tug-of-war going on inside his chest right now.

He felt… good. Alive.

Not dead and cold and desolate like he had for so long. But warm and breathing, his pulse flowing through his temples and thumping in his groin. There was a lightness in his chest he’d forgotten used to be normal.

And that was utterly terrifying.

What the fuck? How could three years of darkness just suddenly break into light? He didn’t know how toexistin the light any more. Helikedthe dark.

He knew his way around there.

He didn’t know who this person was whosmiledat cocktail umbrellas and kissed a woman he barely knew –fuckeda woman he barely knew.

Why didn’t he feel terrible? And disloyal. And disrespectful. To Talia. To her memory. Why hadn’t he thought about her even once? When had hestoppedthinking about her every second of the day?