One Night With Her Ex. Kate Hardy

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СКАЧАТЬ and get out of his life as best she could. Tell Max she’d see him at work on Monday, make her apologies to Caroline Carmichael and leave.

      She stripped off her dress and her underwear and tossed them over the edge of the bath. She headed for the shower and turned it on hot and hard and stood and let the water wash away the stench of cowardice that clung to her skin.

      ‘Walk away, Evie,’ she whispered, and set her palms to the wall in front of her and her face to the spray to wash away the sting of tears. ‘Run.’

      And then the shower door behind her opened and Logan stepped in, fully dressed, and reached for her and she went to him without hesitation, wanting to comfort and be comforted, wanting his touch more than she wanted anything in this world. Riding that slippery slope of obsession and longing as the water poured down on them both and he pressed a condom packet into her hands and pushed her back against the wall and started kissing her.

      Rough was the wrong word for what he wanted. Intense was a better word. All-consuming, as she helped him shed his clothes and laid hands to him, learning him all over again. Condom on and then Evie on as she put shoulders to the tiles and locked her legs around Logan’s waist and he was slow and forceful as he entered her, and the skin on his jaw tasted salty and a little bit rough, but his movements weren’t rough, not rough at all. His movements spoke of worship and wonder and a slamming, heartbreaking need as he claimed her body and offered up his own for her pleasure.

      His touch was deft and agonisingly sensual as he cupped her and tilted her just so against him. Such tenuous control once passion came to play, and Evie was no help whatsoever, because wherever Logan led she went willingly.

      He wanted her mindless to everything but his touch; and he succeeded.

      He wanted her convulsing against him, with her mouth on his shoulder her only tether to this earth; and he succeeded.

      She wanted him with her and this time he came when she did, eyes blazing, and his body straining, matching her gasp for gasp, with his mouth on hers, but only just, and his hand on the back of her neck as if he would never let her go.

      ‘Sorry,’ he muttered when his breath had slowed enough for speech. ‘Angie, I’m sorry.’

      ‘Don’t be.’

      ‘For the mess I made of my time with you. For the mess I’m still making.’

      ‘Don’t be.’

      She unlocked her legs from around him and set toes to the floor and he held the condom on and slipped out of her and turned away. No words of affection for her, no smile of reassurance, just a need he couldn’t voice and old fears made new again.

      She stepped on his clothes on her way out of the shower. Looked at them and looked back at him. ‘Impulsive,’ she said with the tiniest of smiles.

      ‘Always.’ As he cut the water and she handed him a towel. ‘Around you.’

      ‘I try to control it,’ he said gruffly, a moment later. ‘I need to control it.’

      ‘Yes, I guess you do.’ An indirect reference to his past. The history that had shaped him. This had been controlled for Logan. He could get way more lost in desire than that. ‘Lots of baggage, Logan.’

      ‘More than you can handle?’

      ‘Are you asking me to have a relationship with you?’ Evie wiped her face down with the towel and started in on her dripping hair.

      Logan said nothing, just slung the towel around his hips and stepped from the shower, avoiding the question, avoiding her eyes so Evie figured that for a no, and wasn’t surprised. He’d retreat now, he always did, and she should have felt used and confused, but she didn’t. Instead she felt sad as she let her gaze wash over his naked form. Sad for him. Sad for herself. But not abused.

      She didn’t even know how he came to have a body like that. What sports he played, what he did to blow off steam. The list of things she didn’t know about this man seemed endless. And the list of things she did know about him was short and anything but sweet.

      ‘Do you play sports?’ she asked, and when he lifted his eyebrow at the inanity of the question she shrugged and tried not to be too distracted by the thin line of hair that ran south from his belly-button and disappeared beneath that low-slung towel.

      ‘I climb,’ he said. ‘Snow and water ski whenever I get the chance. Sail catamarans competitively.’

      That’d do it.

      ‘Does this have anything to do with the amount of baggage I can carry round?’ he asked with the ghost of a smile.

      ‘No,’ she replied with a rueful smile. ‘I just wanted to know a little more about you, that’s all. Something little. Something …’

      ‘Normal?’ he offered.

      It was as good a word as any. ‘I don’t know what to do. From the moment I first saw you again, I haven’t known what to do.’ Truth, and if it signified weakness on her part then so be it.

      ‘You need to call off this wedding, Evangeline.’

      ‘I know that, Logan.’ Evie glanced towards the shower. ‘Is that what the sex was all about? A demonstration of my weakness when it comes to your touch? Because if it was, it wasn’t necessary. I already knew.’

      ‘It wasn’t that.’ Logan turned away to pick up his soggy clothes and wrung them out. ‘It was need.’

      And there was the appeal of this man and the danger in him. That stinging, searing, all-consuming need—and his fear of it.

      ‘What if we start again?’ she offered quietly. ‘I call off this wedding, MEP finds some other way to finance the civic centre bid and you and I, we start again. Clean slate. You might, for example, come to Sydney one weekend and ask me out on a date. We might see a movie or go for coffee in the park. You could bring me a bunch of black-eyed daisies or a paper parasol. I might feed you chocolate-cherry mud-cake with my fingers by way of thank you.’

      Logan’s eyes had darkened again.

      ‘Easy as,’ she said lightly. ‘And your call.’ She wasn’t the one carrying a dead father and a battered mother around. ‘What kind of cocktail party does your mother throw? Fairly formal?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Are you planning to attend?’ she asked next.

      ‘Are you?’

      Evie nodded. ‘Got to try and explain my engagement to Max away somehow.’

      ‘Just tell them my mother made a mistake. Tell them you’re celebrating a business milestone rather than a personal one.’

      ‘Yes. Something like that.’ She eyed him steadily. ‘We could use your help to sell it. You could aim for civilised.’

      ‘Yes,’ he said with a smile she didn’t trust at all. ‘I could.’ And handed her back the towel and stalked from the bathroom and then from her room without another word.

      ‘So what happened between you and Logan?’ СКАЧАТЬ