“Can I tell you a secret?” I ask.
“You can tell me all of them.”
I drag my hand through his torrent of waves, and he turns his head to kiss my wrist. “I liked it back then, too. When we first got them. Do you remember that morning?”
His eyes flash. I think he knows what morning I’m talking about, but I add, “In the kitchen.”
“Yeah. I remember.”
“That morning, I thought, ‘Oh fuck, George is kind of sexy.’ ”
His brow crooks, and he presses against me. “Just the once?”
I shake my head.
George sinks inside me, retreats, and pushes in all the way. He begins to move, and my mind goes blank. Every part of me is throbbing. I pull him into me, wanting more, deeper, harder. He gets the idea.
“Tell me, Frankie.”
I shake my head, my eyes falling closed. I don’t want to talk. George slows, then flips us, so I’m straddling him.
“Tell me,” he says again once I’ve found my rhythm. Somehow, it’s easier to collect my thoughts when I’m in control, when I can see how the way I move affects George. The muscles in his neck strain. His fingers clutch my hips like they’re keeping him afloat, and power floods me with such force I feel like I could cast a spell.
“I heard you once when you brought someone home.” The woman was obnoxiously loud, even with my head smothered by a pillow. After her third orgasm, I sat up in disbelief. And then George’s groan vibrated through the wall. He stares up at me now, his gaze ravenous.
“I don’t think you realized I was there,” I say. “At first I was irritated, but then…it was hot.”
George sits up, resting his back against the headboard, and pulls me down onto him. I grip his shoulders.
“What was hot?” George asks as he pulls a nipple into his mouth, greedy. He must have more wherewithal than I do, because his thumb is moving between my thighs and all I can do is arch into the sensation, eyes closed.
“Tell me,” he says again. “Be specific.”
“The sound you made when you came,” I say. “It was just…so sexy.”
He curses, and moments later, he shudders with a roar like the one I heard that night. The sound is my undoing. We fall together.
• • •
We spend therest of the day like this.
No part of the villa escapes our wrath.
We rip the sheets off the bed. We make use of the desk in the corner of the room, and the mirror in the bathroom. The couch becomes our playground. The kitchen is home to another kind of feast. George goes down on me in the glass shower while I watch Mother Nature ravage the coast. The waves are gunmetal silver. The sky is a palette of slate and black and yellow.
We’re frantic for each other, as if we have years of desire to burn through in one day. And maybe we do. At one point, my teeth ache with need, and I sink them into George’s shoulder. I spend an entire hour with my mouth on his scar, his tattoo, him. We use every item in the romance kit.
“What about you?” I ask him. We’re lying on our sides, naked, our fingers drawing lazy paths along curves and muscles. “Did you ever think of me before?”
A wicked grin pulls at the corner of his mouth. “Once or twice.”
“Is that it?” I ask, but I know he’s lying.
He shakes his head and traces a line with his index finger from my collarbone, down my breast, to my waist, and over my hip. “I imagined all of this. Seeing you. Touching you. Having you.”
I crush my lips to his, drunk on the power of this knowledge.
By evening, rose petals are all over the place. I find several in my hair and one pressed to my ass cheek like a pout of red lipstick. My body is flushed and pink. Sore but not sore enough.
