She climbed onto the bed and crawled towards him like a lioness hunting her prey.
Beth’s heart was hammering so hard and fast it had become an indistinct burr. The bedroom’s dim, romantic lighting perfectly accentuated the piratical darkness of Xavi’s features and turned his body into light and shade. The only movement of his features and body was the flaring of his nostrils and the pulsing of his hooded eyes.
She fought for breath as she took in the changes time had made to his glorious body. So much was the same, but so much was different, too. He’d filled out more than his clothing had revealed, his wiry body far more muscular than it used to be. She didn’t need to touch his washboard stomach to know it was harder than it had been when she’d been the most important person in his world, and she squashed the swell of misery that rose to wonder how many other women had already enjoyed this version of him.
She couldn’t think about them. Mustn’t. Not here in this bed. Not when the one thing that hadn’t changed about him was standing proudly to attention, the tip practically touching his belly button.
Before Xavi, she’d always imagined she would find a real-life penis disgusting. Raised in a culture where pornography was rife and the boys of her school thought it hilarious to send dick pics to unwitting girls—a practice eventually stamped out by a determined headmistress and police liaison officers—she’d felt so violated and grossed-out at the unwanted pictures sent to her phone that she’d been in no rush to get intimate with anyone, certainly in no rush to see a male naked in the flesh.
That had all changed with Xavi. Oh, he’d been as horny as the male dogs in her school, but he’d been horny forher. He’d wanted Beth, not her vagina. She hadn’t been the port in any storm to him.She’dbeen his port. He’d wanted to knowher, all of her. He’d made her feel beautiful and sexy, and his delight in her body had banished any hang-ups she’d had about the size of her hips and backside. His penis, huge though it was, was something she’d learned to love and not fear. When they’d made love the first time, he’d taken such care of her that there had been hardly any discomfort, let alone pain.
She would have walked on burning coal laced with glass for him, and it killed her to know there was a tiny part of her that still would.
The texture of his skin was another thing that hadn’t changed, and she trailed her fingers up his legs, marvelling and despairing that she remembered it so perfectly. Marvelled and despaired, too, that she was burning up to taste and touch him and to feel the exquisite joy of his possession.
He crooked a finger. Heat was blazing from the hooded eyes locked so tightly on hers. ‘Come here,’ he said thickly.
Suddenly furious with herself for letting her thoughts take control of her when she was on the first stage of her mission to take control ofhim, she ignored his beckoning finger and took hold of his cock.
‘Beth…’ His protest cut off when she closed her lips around it.
She could have cried. It even tasted of the same Xavi cleanliness as she remembered. It felt the same, too, a hard, almost glassy-smooth warmth on her tongue. She’d never been able to take it all in her mouth, but that had never mattered; she’d learned to drive him insane using her hands, too, even masturbating him between her breasts. She’d been shameless and wanton in her need to give him pleasure, and as she began to pleasure him now, his reactions fed the burn inside her, turning her on as effectively as if he’d been the one bestowing pleasure on her.
Fingers dove into her hair, his stomach brushing her forehead as he cradled her bobbing head with low groans until he gently lifted her face and gazed down at her.
Meeting his stare, her heart punched hard into her ribs, and the part of her that still loved him wanted to punch him as hard as she could for the way he was looking at her, as if she were his dream come to life and not the dream he’d only picked back up off the reject pile because she had something he wanted.
She was barely aware of being pushed onto her back until she was flat on the mattress and he was lying over her, still gazing at her in the way that made her heart sing and cry all at the same time.
Gently, he smoothed her fringe out of her eyes and then with her name a whisper on his tongue, he kissed her.
Although she’d spent so much of the evening aching to feel Xavi’s lips back on hers, the crying part of her heart instinctively resisted his kiss. She wanted to make love to him, not the other way round. She wanted…needed…to control all of this, just as she’d controlled the intimacy that had brought them to this point.
His face lifted off her, his concerned stare locking back onto hers. ‘What’s wrong?’
To her utter horror, the tear ducts she’d spent eight years believing had run dry filled, the pressure that had been missing all these years burning the back of her eyes. The terror that they would spill out and he would see her cry and so see all the things she’d sworn to never let him see again was even stronger than the terror of losing herself in the pleasure of Xavi, and she speared the back of his head to pull his face back down to hers.
Their mouths fused, and in an instant she was close to being lost in the hunger of his kiss. Lips moving in a lusty, possessive dance, their tongues entwined, and Beth was helpless to do anything but cradle his head and drag her fingers through the soft, dark hair she’d once spent hours of her life stroking.
His weight lowered onto her, and then it wasn’t just her mouth being crushed but her breasts and her stomach, sensation burning like a greedy flame through her as they became a tangle of entwined limbs.
‘Dios, I have missed you,’ he muttered into her mouth, words to make her want to cry and want to smash her fists into him, but then his lips dragged over her cheek and down her throat, and she fell back into her Xavi bliss.
The softness of his beard scraped her sensitised skin, a brand-new sensation that heightened the thrills, and when he took the hard peak of her breast in his mouth, her cries came from a place she had no control over.
Xavi had never considered himself a breast man until Beth had come into his life. He still didn’t. It wasBeth’sbreasts that turned him on so much, not just the weight and fullness of them but the way she writhed and moaned at his slavering worship of them. They were like marshmallow-filled pillows and tasted even sweeter, and he would gladly take his last breath suffocated in them.
He would gladly take his last breath anywhere so long as it was with her. Making love to Beth was like making love to a hedonistic heaven condensed into soft, womanly form.
He would never forget the first time they’d made love. He’d never known himself capable of exerting such control, and he would need similar control to draw strength from to stop himself falling back into the Beth spell that had once captured him so completely.
Breaking that spell had taken such focus and strength that he’d broken a part of himself in the process, a side effect of breaking her heart he’d always accepted.
All the years spent without her had been lived with the hazy thought far in the back of his mind that when the time was right, he would bring her back into his life.
That time was now, but this time, he would not allow her spell to capture the whole of him again.
Here and now, she was exactly where he wanted her, in his bed and in his arms, and he closed his mind of all thoughts and sank back into the heaven of Beth.
