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The romantic part of her that she had always suppressed, or, rather, smothered after the mess she had made with Cameron, unfurled a little and she felt the world rearrange itself into a place of possibilities. In this new world, Trip would tell her that they no longer needed to pretend that they were engaged. That a year wasn’t long enough because he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.
Abruptly Trip leaned forward and wrapped his hand around her head and kissed her hard.
He straightened then, his fingers still tangled in her hair. ‘You worry too much. Do you want to take a shower before we eat? Because I’d be happy to join you—’
‘No—’ She shook her head, the word rushing out to cover how her body had stiffened at his suggestion. Her body was still rippling from his touch. The last thing she needed was to be up close and personal with a naked Trip rubbing soap over her.
‘I’ll have one later. But I might just go and sort out my hair.’
‘Why?’ She felt another seismic shimmer ripple across the room as he dropped down onto the bed and stretched out his legs. ‘I like it like that.’ That remark, or maybe the slow, assessing gaze that accompanied it, followed the suggestion about sharing a shower to press against a point low down in her pelvis.
‘It’ll get all knotty if I don’t brush it through,’ she said quickly. ‘I can meet you downstairs.’
Inside the bathroom Lily closed the door and leaned against the wood. If only she could go downstairs and climb into the refrigerator, let the chilled air cool the smouldering flame Trip had lit inside her. Because that was the trouble when you played with matches in a heatwave—you started a fire and there was no water to put it out.
Pushing away from the door, she walked over to the sink, giving the mirror a perfunctory glance as she leaned forward to switch on the tap.
She felt the skin on her back prickle.
As she gazed at her reflection, her cheeks grew hot. It had taken a long time but, after they had finally broken apart that last time, Trip had helped her get dressed. But his mouth had kept finding hers so that she hadn’t really been paying much attention and now she saw that, not only were some of the buttons on her top in the wrong holes, but others had simply disappeared.
The heat in her cheeks intensified as she remembered Trip ripping open her blouse.
In that moment she had simply wanted him. Even afterwards as they had lain with their bodies overlapping, she hadn’t thought of what came next. Neither, she was sure, had Trip. But for him, the past, their past, was not so very different from this new arrangement. What was it he’d said?
‘We’re engaged. We’re allowed to have sex.’
And they had. And she had loved every febrile second of it. Only this ‘engagement’ wasn’t real. It was a pretence, so sex was superfluous.
Then again, a year was a long time for a man like Trip not to have sex, she thought dully. She felt oddly fragile then, and exhausted.
But then it was a lot, connecting with him like that, not just physically, but hearing him talk about what had happened in Ecuador. Before, with her anger buffering them, it had been easy to hold back other feelings. Confusing, contradictory feelings that were as reckless as Trip’s decision to visit a smuggling route used by drug cartels.
Only out there in the woods, something had changed.
Or maybe she had changed. She didn’t know if it was the sex or because she understood now how close she had come to losing Trip for ever, but her anger was starting to lose shape, to crack and crumble, and other emotions were starting to seep through.
This engagement couldn’t work, she couldn’t make it work if she let Trip get under her skin. She couldn’t change what had happened but that didn’t mean it had to happen again.
Even if she wanted it to.
Her fingers pressed against the cool porcelain of the sink.
And she did want that.
She might be lying to the rest of the world, but she couldn’t lie to herself, and when he’d leaned over a few moments ago and fitted his mouth to hers, the desire to keep kissing him, to touch his face and press her hand against where she knew his body would be hardening, had been nearly impossible to resist.
And the intensity of that struggle proved to her that she had to stay within the lines because that was the trouble with sex. You had to be intimate, and intimacy combined with hormones fed into that biological need all humans had to be held and touched. But this arrangement was already complicated enough. Casually, carelessly introducing another layer of complexity for something as transitory and self-indulgent as sex had bad idea stamped all over it.
His hand moving against her cheek, the potent blue of his gaze holding her still, captive as his body sank deeper into her in the dappled light...
She blanked her mind.
It didn’t matter that it had felt so right and so real and so perfect with Trip, her judgement was flawed. Cam had taught her that, then Trip had hammered it home and she was still living with the collateral damage from both of those miscalculations.
Staring at her reflection head-on, she rebuttoned her top correctly and smoothed her hair back into another low ponytail and, then taking a deep breath, she opened the bathroom door.
Her pulse skipped a beat.
