The climax when it came, ripped it’s way through me so fast I barely heard Jack as he held me tight to his chest murmuring calming words and sliding his fingers through my hair, keeping me anchored to him.

Afterwards we moved into a tangle of naked flesh, limbs, and sheets, his mouth making love to mine, and then finding my aching nipples. I arched into his kiss, his arms under the bow of my spine, holding me up. His hands and mouth roamed the landscape of my body, searching out all my secrets, creating future fantasies, and coaxing me into a trembling mess of hot torturous need that only existed for some kind of release.

“Please,” I managed at some point.

“I want to go slow for you,” he breathed. He settled between my legs, and I flashed back to our first time, when we’d made love in this same position.

My hands raked through his messy, dark brown hair, and I lifted his face to mine. “I don’t,” I said. The imaginary images of him and Audrey were fading with every moment we spent together, but I wanted them gone. I wanted it to be us I saw when Jack was wild and not gentle. “I like slow … but also fast,” I murmured, echoing his words from the other night.

His lower body surged against mine, hard and heavy against my thigh, so close to where I was aching and needing. Again.

“Soft, but also rough,” I scraped my nails over his skin and up into his hair. He hissed in a breath, his green eyes darkening, watching my mouth, waiting for the words he knew were coming. “Gentle … then really …” I closed my hand firmly in his hair and swallowed, building up courage, looking him straight in his eyes. “Really … hard.”

Jack expelled a rush of air, sharp and deep. Seconds passed, his mouth tightening like he was struggling for control.

I moistened my lower lip and caught it between my teeth, a little nervous at my own boldness, waiting for what he would do.

He lifted his body, a dark carved shadow in the low lamp light and took my hands, pinning them on the bed either side of my head. Eyes blazing, his mouth curving into a lopsided grin, his knees pushed my legs wider. “You asked,” he said finally and slammed into me hot and hard.

I cried out, but he didn’t stop.

I didn’t want him to.

He knew it.

Jack was fierce, and glorious. A face etched with determination, with need, and with an aching reverence that had me shuddering beneath him. An animal, yet also a man. A driving force of nature whose eyes blazed as his skin glowed with sweat, and in that moment, and that moment alone, I became a woman. I was no longer the girl he knew. I was a woman who’d forged her own future, made her own choices, had experienced heartbreak and first love and now demanded to be made love to as an equal. I had wants, I had needs, and right now my need was to watch Jack Eversea, my Jack, my sweet, vulnerable, yet closed and guarded Jack, lose it.

Surging and arching up, I wrapped my legs around his waist and matched him, stroke for stroke. The feel of him overwhelming, and so right.

His eyes closed and his hands gripped mine tighter, his weight pressing them into the bed and his body quaking. “Jesus,” he growled.

“Look at me, Jack,” I whispered through my labored breathing, echoing his words to me when we’d first made love.

He obeyed, his eyes almost black, his pupils were so large, and I felt him slowing.

“No, I need you, Jack. Don’t ... don’t stop.” Please. Don’t ever stop. I arched up further, tilting my hips, the momentum coming from some deeper, primal part of me.

“Ahh, God, Keri Ann, I—shit.” He gasped through clenched teeth, his thrusts coming faster. Harder. “I can’t,” he managed. One hand left mine and thrust under my spine, yanking me up to him so our bodies were flush, skin against slick skin.

The contact made me shudder and cry out, igniting the fuse inside me and pulling me with him as he lost all semblance of restraint. My hands both suddenly free, I clutched his back and my fingers dug in, holding on as we moved, straining against, yet pulled willingly into the tide of release.

Daylight piercing through the slits between the drapes found us still wrapped around each other. I came awake slowly, taking stock of our surroundings and the feel of Jack’s heartbeat thudding steadily against me. Images of all the things we’d done last night, interspersed between sleeping and more talking, replayed through my mind, sending another wave of longing through me. That thing where he’d flipped me onto my belly and run his tongue down my spine … God. And the things he said … I felt like a goddess to Jack. A worshipped, fall-to-his-knees goddess.

He’d never called me any term of endearment, like baby, or sweetheart, always my name. Over and over, my name. Like a prayer falling from his lips. It was raw. A reminder with every sensation that it was us, right there in that moment. Me that was making him feel the way he was feeling.

Jack had been right, our being together was as real as it got. It was more than real. It made everything else, every thought, every idea that didn’t include him, seem muted and faded. How on earth was I going to exist as anything but an extension of us? How the hell were we going to keep this secret?

“Stop thinking so hard,” I heard Jack’s muffled voice next to me.

I gulped guiltily then laughed. “Sorry, I didn’t realize I was so loud.”

His head emerged from half under a pillow, his hair sticking up in all directions. Damn that wasn’t fair.

I sat up and instinctively pulled my own hair back and secured it with the band I kept around my wrist then quickly covered my bare breasts with my arms.

“Are you joking?” he asked with a grin, reaching out and pulling my arm away. “That’s the most beautiful sight I can imagine waking up to.”

I swallowed, feeling heat bloom in my cheeks, and sank back under the covers with him. “I think I’ll have to take advantage of that gorgeous clawfoot bathtub. I’m aching in muscles I never knew I had.”

Jack leaned up on an elbow and turned my face to his, kissing me softly. “Sorry,” he murmured with a grin that said anything but. Then he laid his head down and just watched me, his hand tracing lazy circles over my neck and chest.

I looked back at him, counting the tiny bright flecks among the sea of iridescent greens surrounding his dark pupils. “Sometimes your eyes are translucent like green sea glass and other times they’re dark, almost grey, like a deep forest,” I murmured. “And sometimes, like now, they’re like pools I want to throw myself into.” I smiled at my own ridiculousness.

His hand that had been lazily tracing my skin now took mine and pressed it firmly against the hard smooth skin of his upper torso, like I could ease an ache for him.

My own heart lurched up to thump heavily in my throat, making it hard to breathe. I swallowed, not trusting myself to speak, hoping he could see in my eyes what I couldn’t get out of my mouth.

And hoping I was strong enough to handle this beautiful man and all he was offering and not let my fears break both our hearts.

Jack and I sat on the front porch before we left, eating our scrounged up breakfast of eggs and biscuits. The latter he’d looked at curiously before declaring them freaking awesome. Biscuits were cookies in England, apparently.

My eyes were on the beauty of the ocean before us, but my mind was awash with worry about my art opening. Still being nervous of the attention and not having anything to wear to it was trivial compared to my new concern of how Jack could be at the event without eclipsing everything I’d worked so hard for.