Because she wouldn’t give him everything. She couldn’t. Not again.
And yet, as pleasure swamped her, consumed her, it was his name she cried out, drowning in the intensity. Wes dropped his forehead to her shoulder and gave in to the same pulsing drive that had caught her in its maelstrom. He swore as his hips jerked with his own release. The low, guttural curse imprinted on her brain.
Somewhere at the edge of her consciousness, she knew everything was different between them now, but with her eyes closed his body felt the same, and Vivienne let herself stay there a moment, clinging to memories, as she dragged air into her lungs and settled back into her body.
He lifted his head as her feet touched the floor, and the scrape of his beard against her jaw vanquished the haze of nostalgia and catapulted her back to the present.
Because the Wes in her head didn’t have facial hair.
The Wes in her head didn’t exist anymore.
Viv loosened the arm she’d anchored around his broad shoulders, and his fingers dug into her waist for a moment before his touch disappeared altogether.
He pushed a hand through his disheveled hair and set to work on the buttons of his shirt as Vivienne slipped her arms through the sleeves of her dress and pulled the top into place, readjusted the skirt so it covered her thighs.
Less than an hour alone with him, and this had happened. It was a tale as old as time—an addict and her fix. Six years of personal growth down the tubes, and all she had to show for it was an orgasm.
The soul-melting kind that erased time and space, leaving her wobbly kneed and desperate for more.
God. She needed to get her clothes back on before she begged him to do it again.
“Could you...?”
She turned her back to him, glancing over her shoulder in question. He finished tucking his shirt in before giving her a brusque nod, stepping forward to tug her zipper back up.
Vivienne made a swipe to move her long hair over her shoulder and out of his way, momentarily forgetting she was currently rocking her sleek, angled bob.
The past version of her, the one with long hair, didn’t exist anymore either, she reminded herself, ignoring the rasp of her zipper and a thousand memories of other times his big, capable hands had skimmed the curve of her spine...before moving on to more interesting places.
Wes stepped away from her, bending to pick his suit jacket up off the floor. She faced him as he pulled it on.
He frowned, reaching out to tip her chin up and to the left.
“I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
Vivienne shook her head, dislodging his finger and tucking her hair behind her left ear. It wasn’t completely a lie. She was fine, except for the lurch of her heart when he touched her, but that was entirely of her own doing. Romantic residue that she should have put out of its misery long ago.
Wes’s eyes shuttered in the space of a blink. “I should have used a condom.”
His words were a jarring crash back to reality.
It was silly to be upset by them, to have wished, for just a brief, foolish second that he’d say something dreamy and quixotic instead.
Vivienne straightened the seams of her dress and notched her chin up, brushing off the bleak reminder that they weren’t lovers anymore. Just people who’d given in to baser passions. Strangers. To counteract that weakness, her tone was brusque and businesslike. “Is there anything I should know?”
His head snapped up at that, brows drawn together, and his eyes turned to blue flame...not lust anymore. Anger. “You think I would’ve—” He cut himself off, shook his head. “No.” The word reset his expression to neutral, like he’d flipped a switch. “I’m clean.”
“Same. And I’m protected,” she added, hating that she’d lost control. Despite her IUD, it bothered her that she hadn’t learned her lesson all those years ago. Despised that he still held the power to override her better judgment. That she still liked it when he did.
He gave a curt nod.
She ran her hands over her stomach, smoothing imaginary wrinkles from her dress, hating the sympathy clench of her abdominal muscles over the tragic consequences of the last time one of their fights had devolved into a bout of vertical-surface rage sex.
The doomed pregnancy that had heralded the end of them. And Wes didn’t even know.
Guilt gnawed at the lining of her stomach, acidic and vile, as it always did when she remembered her own cowardice.
She should have told him. Should have told him before there’d been nothing to tell.
Wes’s gaze remained steady on hers as he fixed his collar. It felt for a moment like he could see into her soul, read her darkest secrets and most painful memories. She dropped her eyes, in case he could, and busied herself with retrieving her handbag from the floor. But when she stood up, she could still feel the weight of his stare.
“What?” She wished the question had sounded defensive at least. Not so...searching.
Wes dropped his hand to his side, shook his head like he was clearing the lingering cobwebs of a dream. “Nothing. You just...you kiss different now.”
She wanted to ask how. To tell him that he did, too.
To understand exactly why he’d met her mouth with an edge of desperation that she’d been compelled to match and what it meant that kissing him still made her weak in the knees.
Her fingernails dug into her palm around the leather handle of her purse, just enough pain to bring her back to reality. “That’s a pretty nuanced take on a hate fuck in an
