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  She took a deep breath. She would start slow with him, let him feel everything as she moved on him. Remi tried not to go over the edge herself as she rode him with each sway of her hips, each undulation. His hands held her thighs, and she let him set the pace of her movements at first, the rhythm of their joining.

  Joining...that was it. She couldn’t think of what they did in this bed together as fucking, although she knew that was what the world would call it. She’d fucked him with her eyes the moment she’d seen him again for the first time in four years standing in his doorway. He’d fucked her with his fingers moments ago as she’d lay splayed open for him against his pillows. He’d fucked her with his mouth, and now she fucked him for the first time in his short life, which could have been so much shorter—a thought that terrified her. But this didn’t feel like fucking to her, even as the room grew warm from their bodies and sweat trickled down her back and his fingers smelled of her arousal and his mouth tasted of her desire. She licked it off his lips.

  For four years their two families had pushed apart from each other—a foolish, drunken quarrel that forced everyone to pick a side and go to war. But here on these pale gold sheets where Julien Brite’s body disappeared inside Remi Montgomery, the rift they’d accidentally caused one foolish night mended inside her.

  Remi pressed her palms onto Julien’s chest and drove her pelvis into his with concentrated effort, clenching her inner muscles tightly around him. She wanted him to feel everything as she rode him. His back bowed underneath her, his length deep in her, hot and hard. She ground into him, against him, on him, with a renewed frenzy while beneath her Julien gasped and breathed and gasped again. He’d lost control of himself and nothing could stop him from lifting his hips in short, hard pulses as if seeking to tunnel as far into Remi as possible.

  Their bodies were slick with sweat. She could hear the wetness that sealed him to her with each movement. The heat grew almost unbearable. She felt light-headed even as a heaviness settled into her lower body. Julien latched onto her right breast and sucked her nipple with desperate hunger. They had promised tonight last names would be banished. She was Just-Remi and he Just-Julien. But in that moment when he was inside her, they couldn’t possibly have been more joined to each other. Even their first names disappeared and they became nothing but a man and a woman driving their needs into each other, taking their pleasure from each other and surrendering their lives to each other.

  Julien’s head fell back onto his pillow, his lower back arching off the bed as he came inside her, filling her up, coating the walls that clasped him. As he came, Remi rode him into the bed with wild movements that brought her to the edge and left her hanging there. Julien emerged from his haze long enough to press two fingers into her clitoris so deep they almost slid inside her. The touch, rough but necessary, sent her falling over the edge. She collapsed onto his chest as her second climax shook her to the core.

  Haltingly and carefully, they disentangled from each other. A pure, pervasive exhaustion suffused her entire being. She could do nothing but roll onto her back and let the night air cool her burning skin. Julien’s wetness poured out of her, glazing her thighs and staining the sheets. She did the math and realized it was nearly six in the morning back in Kentucky. She wanted to stay up all night with Julien, but her body wouldn’t let her. Tomorrow they would do this again and again and again.

  Remi waited for Julien to speak, to laugh or sigh or to congratulate himself in some way for divesting himself of his virginity, and with an older woman, too. It was what she’d expect from any young man who’d fought long and hard to live long enough to experience a night like tonight. But he wasn’t just any young man.

  “You are the only person on earth my parents would hate for me to get involved with. Man. Woman. They don’t care as long as I’m happy and he or she isn’t you. And it’s you,” Julien said with a rueful laugh. “We’re going to get in huge trouble for this, aren’t we?”

  In this torrid hour when he should have been thinking of sex and passion and conquest and everything that had happened and would no doubt happen again between them, instead he thought of her, of them, of what the future held, and what price they’d be asked to pay for what they’d done. Their families were very likely making a lot of money for stoking a very ugly rivalry in the press, and with one act, Remi and Julien had just merged the two families.

  “With who?” she asked.

  “Our—” he began and stopped. She heard his laugh, felt the bed move with it, then felt the bed move again as he lay on his side and rested his hand on her still quivering stomach.

  “No one,” he said. “No one at all.”

  Chapter Six

  A Fool’s Paradise

  Remi awoke with the first light and found Julien already up and sitting by the window. He had something in his hands—a book or magazine. She couldn’t tell. She looked at him sitting in the sunlight. In the glint of the morning she could see every inch of the long pink scar on his chest. Nothing scared Remi—not spiders, not snakes, not jumping horses. But the idea that she’d almost lost Julien before she’d found him again—that terrified her. She said a silent prayer of thanks he’d survived his battle with cancer, which made this morning and every other morning she planned to wake up with him possible.

  “Morning already?” she asked, pulling the covers over her breasts and sitting up.

  “Unfortunately,” he said. In nothing but a pair of pale blue boxers, he walked over to the bed and leaned in for a kiss. “Good morning.”

  “Morning breath,” she warned.

  “Don’t care,” he said and kissed her hard and deep before pulling back and smiling at her. “I woke up without my stupid virginity hanging over my head. You think a little morning breath is going to bother me?”

  “Your virginity was hanging over your head?” Remi asked. “And I thought hymens were weird.”

  Julien laughed and pulled her into his arms. Remi sighed, deeply contented despite the lingering worry in the back of her mind. She couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Julien, and yet she could stay in Paris only so long before everyone back home got dangerously suspicious.

  “Thank you for last night,” he said, kissing her neck and her shoulders.

  “I should thank you. That was amazing,” she said. “It might have been your first time, but it was my best time.”

  “Best time? Are we talking sex or races?”

  She laughed again. “Sorry. Hard to get my head out of the business.”

  “You really run things at Arden, don’t you?” Julien stretched out next to her in bed. He slid his hand under the sheets and rubbed her hips and thighs.

  “I do. At least I thought I did before all this mess. Mom and Dad have been running the show behind my back. I’m more than a little pissed off about that.”

  “I don’t blame you,” he said. “I’m pretty pissed, too. I don’t know how bad this could get, but I know when there’s gambling and race fixing and professional sports involved, it can be—”

  “—a disaster,” she completed for him. “Pete Rose banned from baseball. Lance Armstrong stripped of his medals and jerseys. Reggie Bush giving back the Heisman.”

  “You know so much more about sports than I do.”

  “You’re not a typical guy, are you, Julien?” Remi asked.

  “In the hospital, the nurses would hang out in my room with me longer if I had soap operas on. And my sisters would visit and that’s what they wanted to watch. That and Grey’s Anatomy. I put my foot down over that one. I had enough hospital drama in my own life.”

  Remi almost smiled, but she saw Julien wasn’t joking.

  “That must have been lonely,” she said. “Being in the hospital all the time.”

  “Mom and Dad worked their asses off with the farm. My sisters were in school. I don’t blame them. They loved me and visited me every chance they got. But still I was alone a lot. My brain was my best company.”

  Remi wrapped her legs