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I’ve sunk your battleship.
    “It’s true, isn’t it?”
    He was silent, his lips a thin line of distaste. The car was entering London, and the traffic had brought us nearly to a standstill. The Great West Road. Not so great.
    He finally turned to me. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe this is a bad idea.”
    I felt all the blood rush to my feet. There were black spots in front of my eyes. Shit. I couldn’t handle this. “I didn’t say that!” I grabbed his arms and made him face me. “Why were you so happy to see me this morning then? Why?”
    He just stared at me. His eyes were dark and intense, almost hypnotic. I felt as though he was examining me, searching through my mind and finding all my secrets. All the events of the past few days came rushing up at me, the dinner, Dave, my determination to avoid thinking about Tristan, my blind panic and fear at the airport, the warm bliss I felt when I saw him smile. The last thought made me smile.
    His eyes lightened when he saw me smile. “You’ve got a secret,” he murmured. “I can tell.”
    I regarded him steadily. He could be so intimidating, so quickly, grabbing all the power out of the air and wrapping it all around himself. But I wasn’t going to let him. This wasn’t the disengaged rock star; this was the beautiful man, the complicated artist, the demanding lover, and…I needed him. But to be with him, I was going to have to take risks. Big ones. What to say? Where to begin? It annoyed me that I still didn’t know what to do, getting in my own way.
    “Yeah, a big secret. And it has to do with you. All the rest of it, my dinner with Dave, what he wanted, what kind of sushi I ordered, the strange stories about the groupies and your weird sex life—that part,” here, I paused for effect, “I’m happy to share. What do you want to know?” I smiled, winningly, I hoped.
    His face changed, and it wasn’t an expression I recognized. Not from the pictures, not from our times together, it was something new—all of those, but different. His eyes looked bigger, more brown and grey, and was there—sadness—in them? He shook his head, his hair in his eyes. Then he raised his hand to my face and ran his long fingers over my skin. Then he was running them down my neck, into my cleavage, over my breasts, and descending to the heat between my legs. I gasped, but he only stopped there for a moment, then carried down across the top of my thigh, and made a line along the outside of my leg, past my knee, tracing my calf, right to the tip of my booted foot. The whole movement couldn’t have taken more than a minute. It woke up my body like the splash of cold stream water in the middle of winter. I was shivering.
    “You’re mine. Ah, you forgot. But now,” and here he took both his hands and placed them on the inside of my knees, and started to spread my legs apart, slowly, “now you remember. And we both have a new reason why that’s so.” He stared at me. “Get on me.”
    He pulled my leg over him, and suddenly it was like the limo in New York, that first time, all over again. The rush of heat that sped through me was an unexpected sensation, and the strange ache, almost painful, sending electricity running down my legs, was getting stronger. He sat me down on him, and I could feel him, hard, gratifyingly so, close to where it hurt. I shifted my hips and pressed against him, and we both groaned.
    “Shit, girl, you drive me crazy. Why do you want to hurt me? No, don’t answer…” And he thrust up against me hard, while his huge hands dug into my ass and held me against him. He got bigger if that were possible, and I could feel him pulsing against me.
    “Hold on,” and he bit my neck and he pressed the intercom button to the front of the long black car. “John,”—I was amazed he could remember the driver’s name, I could barely remember my own, and he was tickling my nipples with one of his fingers while he spoke. “Look, slight change of plans, could