I don’t care about anything but having him. Submitting to him. To giving myself entirely to Jackson, this man who has always been able to take me where I never even knew I wanted to go … but never so far that I can’t find my way back to the familiar.

And now I am so sensitive and close that I hook my ankles together and pull him in, wanting him harder. Deeper.

He takes me right up to the edge—my mind swirling, my body writhing—and then he pulls gently away.

“Jackson—what—no. Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”

He chuckles, the sound very knowing and very sexy. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. I have no intention of stopping.”

Gently, he moves my legs off his shoulders as he stands, then gestures for me to hook them again around his hips. I do, and am rewarded by the erotic sound of his zipper lowering.

“I have to be inside you.”

“Yes. Oh, yes.” I spread my legs, welcoming him. Needing him to fill me up. To complete me.

He is hard and thick, but I’m so damn wet he enters me easily. His hands are on my waist, and I push against him, then hook my arms around his neck so that my ass is against the edge of the table and my breasts rub provocatively against his chest as we move together in a wild and primitive rhythm.

He opens his mouth as if to say my name, but I don’t want words. I only want him, and I claim his mouth in a violent kiss, filling him with my tongue as he fills me with his cock.

I need this, and I know that he does too. This connection. This union. It’s power and strength and solidarity. It’s proof that we can get through everything that has and will happen. That we can weather the gathering storm.

It’s torment and treasure.

And I dread when this interlude will end and I must unleash another kind of tempest.

He is deep inside me, gravity working with his every thrust, and his thumb teasing my clit in time with his movements. I am lost—I am melting. Aware only of the way he makes me feel—wild and lost and so goddamned insatiable.

But even as he pounds into me—even as euphoria spins me higher and higher and I know that this is a coming together that we so desperately need—there’s something counterbalancing it all. Drawing me down. “Jackson.” I gasp out his name. “Jackson, stop. I have to—oh, god.”

He has shifted, and now he pushes me back onto the table. As he does, he lifts one of my knees up toward my waist so that I am even more open to him and he is even deeper inside me. He bends over me, shifting the angle from which he is entering me, so that his pelvis rubs my clit with each thrust, leaving his hand free to cup my ass and hold me steady as he drives into me over and over, so hard and so fast that whatever foolish notion I’d had of making him stop is very soundly knocked out of my head.

“Come with me,” he growls. “Dammit, Sylvia, I want you to come with me.”

I arch up, one hand clawing his shoulder as I clutch the edge of the drafting table with the other. He pounds into me, his body going rigid with release. But it is his face, open and savage with undisguised need, that pushes me over the edge, and I cry out as the orgasm crashes over me again and again like a battering sea in a storm.

I am still breathing hard, still trembling from the aftershocks of passion, when he falls on top of me, his face buried against my breasts. I hook my legs more tightly around his waist so that I don’t slide down, but the truth is that I want to move. I am antsy now. Guilty.

I’ve taken this moment—this pleasure—under false pretenses, and I don’t know what to do now or how to make it right. All I know is that I have to move. That I have to get him off me, because our position is too intimate and far too fragile to support the weight of my guilt.

“Jackson.” I lift his head. “I need to get up. My back.” The lie comes easily, and I feel another twinge of guilt when his brow furrows with concern and he helps me off the table, and even tugs my tattered shirt closed for me as I yank my skirt back down.

“I’m glad you didn’t give up,” he says. “I’m glad you came looking for me.”

“I—” The words seem to catch in my throat, but I have to go on. I have to get this out. “There’s something I should have told you before. I should have told you the moment I found you. But I didn’t,” I say as I look down at the floor. “I didn’t, and I’m sorry.”

I’m rambling. And as I rattle off these meaningless words, I realize that Jackson and I are in the same predicament. I should have delivered the blow at the first opportunity. And he should have done the same with his revelation about Damien.