Summer Love: The Best Mistake / Impulse

“Can’t?” He lit his cigar, astonished that they were discussing making love as though it were as casual a choice as what dinner entrée to choose. “Or won’t?”

She drew a breath. Her palms were damp on the glass, and she set it down. “Can’t. I want to.” Her eyes, huge and lake-pale, clung to his. “I very much want to, but…”

“But?”

“I know so little about you.” She picked up her glass again because her empty hands tended to twist together. “Hardly more than your name, that you own an olive grove and like the sea. It’s not enough.”

“Then I’ll tell you more.”

She relaxed enough to smile. “I don’t know what to ask.”

He leaned back in his chair, the tension dissolving as quickly as it had built. She could do that to him with nothing more than a smile. He knew no one who could excite and solace with so little effort.

“Do you believe in fate, Rebecca? In something unexpected, even unlooked-for, often a small thing that completely and irrevocably changes one’s life?”

She thought of her aunt’s death and her own uncharacteristic decisions. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

“Good.” His gaze skimmed over her face, quickly, then more leisurely. “I’d nearly forgotten that I believe it, too. Then I saw you, sitting alone.”

There were ways and ways to seduce, she was discovering. A look, a tone, could be every bit as devastating as a caress. She wanted him more in that moment than she had ever known she could want anything. To give herself time, and distance, she rose and walked to the rail.

Even her silence aroused him. She had said she knew too little about him. He knew even less of her. And he didn’t care. It was dangerous, possibly even destructive, but he didn’t care. As he watched her with the wind billowing her shirt and her hair he realized that he didn’t give a damn about where she had come from, where she had been, what she had done.

When lightning strikes, it destroys, though it blazes with power. Rising, he went to her and stood, as she did, facing the sea.

“When I was young, very young,” he began, “there was another moment that changed things. My father was a man for the water. He lived for it. Died for it.” When he went on it was almost as if he were speaking to himself now, remembering. Rebecca turned her head to look at him. “I was ten or eleven. Everything was going well, the nets were full. My father and I were walking along the beach. He stopped, dipped his hand into the water, made a fist and opened it. ‘You can’t hold it,’ he said to me. ‘No matter how you try or how you love or how you sweat.’ Then he dug into the sand. It was wet and clung together in his hand. ‘But this,’ he said, ‘a man can hold.’ We never spoke of it again. When my time came, I turned my back on the sea and held the land.”

“It was right for you.”

“Yes.” He lifted a hand to catch at the ends of her hair. “It was right. Such big, quiet eyes you have, Rebecca,” he murmured. “Have they seen enough, I wonder, to know what’s right for you?”

“I guess I’ve been a little slow in starting to look.” Her blood was pounding thickly. She would have stepped back, but he shifted so that she was trapped between him and the rail.

“You tremble when I touch you.” He slid his hands up her arms, then down until their hands locked. “Have you any idea how exciting that is?”

Her chest tightened, diminishing her air even as the muscles in her legs went limp. “Stephen, I meant it when I said…” He brushed his lips gently over her temple. “I can’t. I need to…” He feathered a kiss along her jawline, softly. “To think.”

He felt her fingers go lax in his. She was suddenly fragile, outrageously vulnerable, irresistibly tempting. “When I kissed you the first time I gave you no choice.” His lips trailed over her face, light as a whisper, circling, teasing, avoiding her mouth. “You have one now.”

He was hardly touching her. A breath, a whisper, a mere promise of a touch. The slow, subtle passage of his lips over her skin couldn’t have been called a kiss, could never have been called a demand. She had only to push away to end the torment. And the glory.

A choice? Had he told her she had a choice? “No, I don’t,” she murmured as she turned to find his lips with hers.

No choice, no past, no future. Only now. She felt the present, with all its needs and hungers, well up inside her. The kiss was instantly hot, instantly desperate. His heart pounded fast and hard against hers, thunderous now, as he twisted a hand in her hair to pull her head back. To plunder. No one had ever taken her like this. No one had ever warned her that a touch of violence could be so exciting. Her gasp of surprise turned into a moan of pleasure as his tongue skimmed over hers.

He thought of lightning bolts again, thought of that flash of power and light. She was electric in his arms, sparking, sizzling. Her scent, as soft, as seductive, as a whisper, clouded his mind, even as the taste of her heightened his appetite.

She was all woman, she was every woman, and yet she was like no other. He could hear each quick catch of her breath above the roar of the motor. With her name on his lips, he pressed them to the vulnerable line of her throat, where the skin was heated from the sun and as delicate as water.

She might have slid bonelessly to the deck if his body hadn’t pressed hers so firmly against the rail. In wonder, in panic, she felt his muscles turn to iron wherever they touched her. Never before had she felt so fragile, so at the mercy of her own desires. The sea was as calm as glass, but she felt herself tossed, tumbled, wrecked. With a sigh that was almost a sob, she wrapped her arms around him.

It was the defenselessness of the gesture that pulled him back from the edge. He must have been mad. For a moment he’d been close, much too close, to dragging her down to the deck without a thought to her wishes or to the consequences. With his eyes closed, he held her, feeling the erratic beat of her heart, hearing her shallow, shuddering breath.

Perhaps he was still mad, Stephen thought. Even as the ragged edges of desire eased, something deeper and far more dangerous bloomed.

He wanted her, in a way no man could safely want a woman. Forever.

Fate, he thought again as he stroked her hair. It seemed he was falling in love whether he wished it or not. A few hours with her and he felt more than he had ever imagined he could feel.