“That doesn’t mean you were in love with me.”
I pushed my hand through my hair. “Wren, I was in love with you. I wanted to be with you. When we were on that placement I couldn’t imagine not being with you or anyone else having you.”
“What about Jonah? Don’t tell me you started feeling like this when I was still with him.” She looked cross, angry. So fucking hot with her eyes blazing.
“I don’t know when I started falling in love with you. I just ended up there. You came home one day from the farm where we’d been and you had mud splattered up what you were wearing and you looked freezing but you were still smiling because you’d saved a horse, correctly diagnosed it. I remember thinking that if I never spoke to another woman let alone fucked one, that would be fine because all I wanted was you.”
“Callum…”
“When you kissed me in Zimbabwe, what were you thinking?”
“I don’t know. I just wanted to kiss you.”
“Do you still want to kiss me? Because I want to kiss you. Problem is, I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop.”
She didn’t say anything, just bit her lips together, looked around the room. “You want me to take your mind off everything?”
“I don’t know, Wren. I never fucking know where you’re concerned. I say things to you and feel stuff I’m numb to everywhere else. I was scared of seeing you for this programme; I didn’t know how I’d feel when I saw you.”
“And how do you feel now you’ve seen me?”
“The same way I felt when you came in from the cold with mud everywhere.”
She moved towards me, on her knees, to the end of bed and gestured me close. Kneeling up she held my face with both her hands and brought her lips to mine.
The kiss was tentative, slow, as if she was testing how we tasted.
I didn’t touch her, leaving the moves to her, letting her have control because Wren always needed control.
She tasted of beer and sweetness and mint, she smelled of suntan lotion and something musky, something that was her. If all we did was this, I could live with that, maybe even be a happy man because I fell in love with a girl when I was twenty-two and never took my heart back from her.
Her lips left mine and she pulled back. “Sit down. Next to me.”
I did, feeling as if I was a virgin again and needed instructions.
“Let’s have one night. We can see how we feel after because this -” she gestured between us. “Might just be because we could never have it. Forbidden.”
“One night.”
Wren nodded. “To start with.” She pushed her hands up my t-shirt, sliding them over my abs, resting them there. “Callum, this might just be because you need to lose yourself for a night. Marie, being away, all of that.”
Music piped through the open window, the dull sound of chatter. Steam from the heat of the day. Doe eyes looked up at me.
I was a bastard. I’d never claimed to be anything more than that. The woman I’d wanted, needed, was on her knees in front of me. Tonight might be because I needed to forget the conversation I had, it might be because she’d been my best friend, forbidden fruit, but I wanted to lick and suck the fuck out of that fruit and make her fucking realise what she’d missed the last ten years.
Everything stiffened; my cock, my back, my resolve.
“I don’t think you can take me.” It wasn’t just Wren I was speaking to. Fire flashed in her eyes, a burn I’d never seen before.
A burn I wanted to feel.
This time I touched.
I took hold of her waist, pulling her to me, my mouth taking hers the way I’d wanted to.
She didn’t become pliant or submissive like I’d half expected, instead she took back, her hands everywhere, pushing away my t-shirt, cupping my cock. She bit the skin of my neck as she travelled down my body and I pulled off her top, using one hand to undo her bra and grinning like the fucker I could be. Needed to be.
“I haven’t had sex for weeks.” Her hand was inside the loose cotton pants I wore, gripping my erection.
