Billionaires: The Rebel. Кейт Хьюит

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СКАЧАТЬ her lonely early adulthood, the end of her marriage and her new role as Damian’s mother and sole source of support. Her whole life had been a series of had to be.

      Anais wasn’t an idiot. This man had abandoned her. The likelihood was he’d do it again, probably before dawn. But she wasn’t the naive creature she’d been back then, so shocked and destroyed when he’d turned on her, and the only good thing about that was that he wasn’t likely to surprise her with that kind of betrayal a second time.

      She didn’t have to trust him to want him.

      And she’d always wanted him. He was the only man who had ever touched her, the only man she’d ever let close to her, the only person she’d ever let inside. No matter how many dates her aunt and uncle and well-meaning friends had sent her on, no matter how many nice men had said nice things to her, no matter how many times she’d told herself that she wasn’t really married despite the fact she also wasn’t divorced—she’d never been able to bring herself to let another man close. She’d never let them know her at all, much less put their hands on her.

      She missed it. She missed him.

      He’s still your husband, a dangerous voice inside of her whispered, as seductive as the whole of this long, perfect evening. Whatever else happened between you, you loved him once. Maybe he loved you, too. Maybe nothing else matters but that.

      So she swayed closer to him and told herself it didn’t matter what happened later. Tomorrow, two weeks from now, whenever. Nothing mattered but this. Here, now, where nobody could see them and no one would know.

      She was so tired of being so alone. Maybe that made her weak. She decided she didn’t care what it made her. Not when he could make it all go away.

      He could. She knew he could. He’d made whole cities disappear with a laugh, the whole world with a kiss. He was far more magical than he deserved to be. She just wanted to taste a little of that oblivion again.

      Hell, she’d earned it, hadn’t she?

      Anais reached up and wound her arms around Dario’s neck, angling herself against him. His hands moved up and down the length of her spine in a lazy rhythm, tracing her. Relearning her. Sending a wild heat spiraling all through her until it pooled between her legs, a swollen, delirious ache.

      And she was the one who lifted herself up and pressed her mouth to his.

      She kissed him with all those dreams she’d kept pent up inside her across so many long years. She poured all the rants she’d aimed at her reflection instead of to him into it, all the tears and the fear and the loss. She kissed him with her broken heart and her new mother’s terror. She kissed him and she kissed him, lonely and resolute, as strong as she was afraid, two sides of the same coin.

      Finally, all these years later, she kissed Dario goodbye.

      And he let her.

      He slipped a hand around to the nape of her neck and he met her, as if he knew exactly what she was doing, what this was.

      Anais was shaking. That might have been a tear that scraped its way down her cheek. She didn’t care. This was a bloodletting. A ritual of loss and leaving, six years overdue.

      And when she was finished, she pulled back, not exactly meaning to rest her forehead against his as she gasped for breath. But she didn’t pull away when she realized she was doing it.

      “Better?” he asked in a rough voice that hardly sounded like his.

      It didn’t occur to her to tell him anything but the truth, as if the Hawaiian night that brushed against her skin was its own kind of confessional. “No. Not really.”

      “Good.” A small laugh, entirely male, snaked its way down her spine and made her shiver. “My turn.”

      And then he hauled her mouth back to his, and took control.

      * * *

      Dario should have felt triumph wash over him. He should have been wild with his victory, with a sense of accomplishment. He’d set out to seduce his errant wife and he’d done it.

      But all he could concentrate on was the taste of her mouth beneath his, and better, the way she pressed her sweet body against his. Her breasts underneath that soft cream silk were like torture against his chest. Her arms were around his neck as she arched into him and it still wasn’t close enough.

      He couldn’t get close enough no matter how he kissed her, and he couldn’t pretend what he was feeling then had anything to do with revenge.

      Dario shoved that unnerving truth aside and threw himself straight into the lightning storm instead.

      He took her mouth with a ruthlessness that might have concerned him if he’d let himself consider it too closely, but he was lost in the storm. The electric burst of sensation between them. There was nothing but this slick perfection, the tangle of her tongue with his, the sensation of Anais in his arms again at last. It didn’t matter why or how or what needed to happen next.

      It only mattered that he possess her, totally. Now.

      Forever, some traitorous part of him whispered.

      Before he lost her all over again.

      He didn’t know how he managed to pull his mouth from hers when it was the last thing he wanted. He hardly heard the band as they rolled easily into another song. He barely knew where they were and he didn’t much care. He only knew he needed her naked and that no matter how accommodating the resort had been so far, they’d likely take a dim view of it if he stripped her here and lost himself in her against the nearest palm tree.

      Which meant they needed to go somewhere else.

      Immediately.

      Dario swept her up and into his arms without a second thought. He begrudged every step he took as he held her high against his chest and strode down the path toward his villa. Every second that he wasn’t deep inside her, braced above her, wrapped around her the way he ought to be, was torture. The weight of her against him wasn’t enough. The way she looped her arm around his neck was little more than a tease. The way she tipped back her head to watch him with that solemn expression that did nothing to hide the stark, unmistakable need in her gaze made the hunger inside of him threaten to take him to his knees.

      It wasn’t until he’d shouldered his way back into his villa, striding across the living room and into the sprawling master suite, that he faced the fact that he wasn’t acting according to his hastily hammered out plan at all. This was no deliberate seduction, designed to tear her into a thousand pieces and leave her inert and destroyed and unable to lift a finger to stop what happened afterward. This was mutually assured destruction, and he had no idea what the hell he was doing.

      He knew he should back off. Stop this right now. He set her down on her sleek red shoes at the foot of his platform bed and forced himself to let go of her. This was the perfect moment to rethink. Regroup. He wasn’t in control here and that was unacceptable.

      But he couldn’t seem to care about that.

      Because all these long years after he’d given up imagining any way it could ever happen again, Anais was standing there before him. Her smooth perfection was once again marred by his own hands, and he was so hard it bordered on pain. He reached over and dug СКАЧАТЬ