Holding the blanket a little higher with one hand, I watch him drink his wine out of the corner of my eye.

I think of all those long dreams I had, only to wake up alone in bed. Needing. Needing him. And now my shoulder touches his. I sit helpless. I should move away but I’m stealing this touch and I can’t stop myself.

He reaches out to grab a new wine from a passing waiter.

“Do you want to take a break upstairs or do you want to stay here for a while?” he asks me, his tone casual, but his deep stare is somehow not the least bit casual.

“I’m enjoying the terrace very much right now.”

He smiles. And god, that smile.

“Do you want to try this one? It’s a cabernet, ’sixty-eight.” He offers the wine to me.

“I’m heading into the woozy department, so maybe not,” I admit.

“Just a taste?” He watches me with those eyes full of mischief and dips his thumb into his glass. I watch as he lifts it. My heart stops when he rubs my lips with it and at the wet caress, desire drizzles over every corner of me, every shadowed place.

“What are you doing?” I ask breathlessly.

“Something I shouldn’t,” he husks out, his eyes dark and somber but with a devilish glint.

Holding my breath, I part my lips and suckle a little. His eyes darken even more, and my body contracts when the taste of him—Sin, the only guy I’ve ever wanted, ever cared for—reaches me. Opening up my every memory, my every need.

His voice like silken oak, he whispers, “One more, Rachel?”

We’re playing with fire and we both know it. I can see the devil in his eyes and I can feel the heat that’s going to turn me to cinders and I can’t stop it; I won’t stop it. I nod, but then, when a little fear screams at me that he’s going to hurt me, I say, to protect myself, “Just one.”

This time when he dips his thumb into the wine and brings it up, I suck it delicately, not wanting him to know how much I crave his taste more than anything.

I give it just a tiny suck, as if I’m only interested in the wine slipping down my tongue. But it’s his thumb, square, clean, familiar, that I want to bite into, that I want to kiss, taste, make love to. There’s a moan in my throat, trapped there. A need inside me, trapped there. A love inside me, so very trapped there he might never get to know how much, how very much I’ve come to love him.

Watching me for a moment in disappointment, as though he wanted me to latch on to his thumb longer, he sticks it into his mouth and sucks the rest with one pull. Then he whispers at me, “This one’s sweeter than the rest.”

“I . . . yes.”

There’s a silence after this is done. He’s looking at me with a bit of amusement and a strange yearning I’ve never seen in his eyes and I’m flustered to death.

My voice is thick when I can finally manage to speak. “What those men said . . . about your father.”

“They were business associates of my mother’s. They know my father.” His lips curl sardonically, and his eyes shutter until there’s no more of the fleeting tenderness I just saw. “Don’t worry. I don’t associate with friends of his.”

He brings out his phone. Changing topics.

“Remember this picture?” he asks and turns the screen to me.

I’m both ashamed and excited at the discovery as I peer closer to see. “You still have it.”

With the click of a button, he’s showing me a picture of me on his yacht, The Toy. I was staring out at the water the first time I was there, thinking of . . . well, how endless the water looked. And wondering why I was so distraught over watching some floozies feed him grapes and hearing about all the fun he’d had at an after-party I was never invited to.

There it is—that picture of me, my profile pensive as I stare out at the lake. “You were supposed to erase it!” I accuse.

“I erased the one I showed you. I took two.”

“Two, not four?”

His smile appears, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. His eyes, instead, look endlessly deep and thoughtful. Then he clicks and there’s another one of me. I’m sitting on a street bench with a magazine on my lap. The magazine. In which I published the article about him. I’m staring down at it with a look of such loss—as if I lost my whole world that day and all I had left was that single magazine with his picture on it.

I don’t understand where he got it but I’m surprised, embarrassed, and in my heart, so very sad that that picture—that moment—exists at all. “Where did you get it?”