almost sore as they flattened against him, into him, and everywhere they touched felt like a fever, and she was kissing him back because he tasted like sorcery and for one brief, searing, shocking moment she wanted nothing more than to lose herself in an incantation she could hardly understand.
But she
wanted
. She
wanted
almost more than shehad ever wanted anything else, the inexorable pull of his mouth, his taste,
him,
roaring through her, altering her, changing everything—
He broke the kiss to mutter something harsh in Spanish, and reality slammed back into Dru. So hard she was distantly amazed her bones hadn’t shattered from the impact.
She shoved against his chest blindly, and was entirely too aware not only that he chose to let her go, but that it was as if her very blood sang out to stay exactly where she was, plastered against him, just as she’d done once before and to her own detriment.
She staggered back a foot, then another. She was breathing too hard, teetering on the edge of a terrible panic, and she was afraid it would take no more than the faintest brush of wind to toss her right over into its grip. She could see nothing through the haze that seemed to cover her vision but that hooded, dangerous, dark amber gaze of his and that mouth—
that mouth—
She should know better. She
did
know better. She could feel hysteria swell in her, indistinguishable from the lump in her throat and the clamoring of her pulse. Her stomach twisted and for a terrifying moment she didn’t know if she was going to be sick or faint or some horrifying combination thereof.
But she sucked in another breath, and that particular crisis passed, somehow. He still only watched her. As if he knew exactly how hard her blood pumped through her body and where it seemed to pool. As if he knew exactly how much her breasts ached, and where they’d hardened. As if he knew how she burned for him, and always had.
Dru couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t stand
here.
So she turned on her bare heel, and bolted from the salon.
She picked up speed as she moved, aware as she began to run up the grand stairway toward the deck that she was breathing so heavily she might as well be sobbing. Maybe she was.
You little fool,
some voice kept intoning in her head.
You’re nothing but a latter-day Miss Havisham and twice as sad—
She blinked in the bright slap of sunshine when she burst out onto the deck, momentarily blinded. She looked over her shoulder when she could see and he was right there, as she knew he would be, lean and dark and those hot, demanding eyes that looked almost gold in the Adriatic sunshine.
“Where are you going?” He was taunting her, those wicked brows of his raised. That mouth—
God, that mouth—
”I thought you didn’t care about a little kiss?”
It’s the devil or the deep blue sea,
she thought, aware that she was almost certainly hysterical now. But her heart was already broken. She couldn’t take anything more. She couldn’t survive this again. She wasn’t sure she’d survived it the first time, come to that.
Dru simply turned back around, took a running start toward the side of the yacht one story up from the sea, and jumped.
CHAPTER THREE
SHE had actually thrown herself off the side of the damned boat.
Cayo stood at the rail and scowled down at her as she surfaced in the water below and started swimming for the far-off shore, fighting to keep his temper under control. Fighting to shove all of that need and lust back where it belonged, shut down and locked away in the deepest recesses of his memory.
How had this happened?
Again?
And yet he was all too aware there was no one to blame but himself. Which only made it worse.
“Is that
Dru?
” The voice that came from slightly behind him was shocked.
“‘Dru?’” Cayo echoed icily.
He didn’t want to know she had a casual nickname. He didn’t want to think of her as a person. He didn’t want this intoxicating taste of her in his mouth again,
Justine Dare Justine Davis