And then he bent over her, his forearms braced on the desktop, the cashmere of his sweater brushing her hard nipples with exquisite softness that nearly hurt because they were so sensitive. Satisfaction glowed so warm within her that her skin was flushed with heat.

Gavin was softening but still inside her, and she tightened her muscles around him again, wanting to feel that intimacy a little longer. He moaned again, his breath feathering over her shoulder. “Mercy,” he murmured.

She sighed and slipped her hands up under his sweater to savor the bare skin of his back. It held a glaze of perspiration from his exertions. “Mmm,” she said. “You worked up a sweat.”

“Just looking at you stretched out on my desk made me sweat. Being inside you set me on fire. It’s a miracle that I didn’t spontaneously combust.”

Allie chuckled. “I can tell you are no longer in the throes of passion. You’re speaking in complete sentences.”

“Me, Tarzan. You, Jane.” He grunted in imitation of a gorilla and then levered himself up on his hands and slid out of her. “I feel like a brute, indeed, making you lie on this hard desktop.” He took her hands and pulled her up to a sitting position, and then his expression softened into tenderness as he smoothed his hands over her hair. “You’re such a surprising sprite. You astonish me at every turn.”

“Is that a good thing?” Without his body heat, goose bumps began to prickle across her skin, and she shivered.

He whipped his sweater up over his head and wrapped it around her back and shoulders before he brushed his lips against hers. “It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

She felt words forming in her heart, pushing their way up her throat, and trying to escape her lips. But she gritted her teeth and kept them trapped inside so they echoed in her interior silence.

I feel the same way about you. I love you, Gavin.

What would he say if she spoke them out loud? Would he be shocked by her naïveté? Horrified at her temerity? Amused by her presumption? Was there any chance he’d take her in his arms and say the words back to her?

She swallowed hard, forcing the words down again. It was too big a risk. She had a few more days in this place of sea, sand, and magic, away from the real world. She would savor them to the fullest before they returned to the city. It would be easier to handle her broken heart there amid the grit and grayness of late winter in New York.

Gavin had disposed of the condom and brought back a cream-colored vicuña throw from one of the sofas. He enveloped her in the soft cloud of extravagant fiber, leaving his own sculpted chest bare. She put her palms against the warm, firm hillocks of his muscles.

“You’ve gotten quiet, sprite. What is it?” He gazed down at her, his eyes clouded with concern.

“Just thinking how much I’ll hate to leave the beach.”

The green of his pupils brightened. “Then we’ll stay here.”

Allie shook her head even as temptation beckoned to her. “I don’t want Pie getting used to this. She’ll be cranky when she has to go back to my apartment.”

Gavin laughed, as she had hoped he would, before he looked down at her hands, pale against the olive of his skin. “So small for such power. They heal, they pummel, they arouse, they soothe.”

She let them slide downward, trailing over the bulges and ridges of his musculature, watching the flexing and contraction as he reacted to her touch. But when she reached the half-open fly of his trousers, she stopped and pulled her hands away.

“Does that mean playtime is over?” he asked.

“My original goal was breakfast, but I got sidetracked.” She lifted her eyes to his. “Something about watching a writer in the white heat of creation turns me on.”

He laughed again, and she realized the tension had eased in him now that he was writing once more. All the pent-up frustration that had wound him as tight as a coiled spring had been transformed into focused eagerness. His laughter was natural, without sharp edges. He leaned in closer. “That proves that you are a true muse. And I sure as hell hope you remain in a state of near-constant arousal.”

“I’ll need to keep my strength up, so let’s go eat.” She wanted distraction from the potent twining of pain and pleasure this intimacy with Gavin evoked.

“A woman of strong appetites,” he said, stepping away to scoop up the jeans and panties he had ripped off her earlier.

Dressed, and seated across the breakfast table from him with a pile of pancakes on her plate, Allie touched on a touchy subject. “When are you going to begin the search for your mother?”

Gavin chewed and swallowed a bite of scone. “I already have. Archer has a friend in the security-and-investigation business, so I hired him for the quest. He expects to have results quickly, given that I had an address for her as a starting point.” He locked his gaze on her. “I told him not to call me until Monday, even if he has news sooner, because I didn’t want to impinge on our time here.”

So he felt it, too, the sense that this was a sort of idyll, that it needed to be protected.

He grimaced. “The writing still feels raw and fragile. I’m not sure how much more outside stress it can handle.”

Disappointment slashed through her, like a blade to her gut. His concern wasn’t for them; it was for his writing. Somehow she managed to sound casual as she asked, “How many pages did you add this morning?”

“None. I tossed out the stuff I wrote yesterday because it was too superficial. I was still nursing my newfound creativity, so I was afraid to go too deep.” He slathered spiced pear jam on the scone. “Today, I tortured Julian quite satisfactorily.” He bit into it with gusto.

“Did you use any of what you felt yesterday?”

“I am not Julian. Julian is not me.” He took a swallow of coffee. “But, yes, I made Julian feel my pain.”

Chapter 26

“Your dress is so perfect for a ball on the beach!” Chloe picked up the skirt of Allie’s dress. “I love the sparkly starfish.”

Chloe’s and Miranda’s dresses hung beside it on a display rack in the walk-in closet attached to Chloe and Nathan’s bedroom. Their huge stone beach house was on its own island, reached by a private causeway. Allie had been invited over so they could all get their hair and makeup done before the gala that night. Gavin had driven her over—in a Ferrari, just for fun, he said—and stayed to talk with his friends. She had been nervous about coming until Chloe and Miranda had swept her and her dress upstairs, chattering as though they were teenagers before the prom.