Her Ex, Her Future?: One Night with Her Ex / Seven Nights with Her Ex / Backstage with Her Ex

That acting on what was clearly going through both their minds wasn’t a good idea didn’t seem to matter. That there was so much between them and starting something up again would only make things worse and set them back years seemed an irrelevance.

Kit was drowning beneath a wave of desire that had been absent for so long and lust was hammering through him so strong and hot that it drugged his senses, wiped out his reason and everything but the thought that he needed this and he needed Lily. With a desperation and hunger that was eating him up. And it was the same for her too judging by the way she’d just kissed him back.

With one quick move, before she had time to rethink the wisdom of her choice, Kit had her back in his arms and was then twisting her round away from the door and backing her up against the hall wall. The feel of her, the heat of her blasted into him and a bolt of sheer desire powered through him.

He planted his hands on either side of her head while she threw her arms around his neck and then their mouths met, tongues tangled and his mind went blank.

He’d never met anyone who kissed as Lily did, who threw themselves into it with everything they had and everything they felt. Kissing her had always been intoxicating and it was no different now. It was familiar and hot and made him burn.

As did the little moans coming from the back of her throat and the way she was melting against him.

Moving his hand, he buried it in her hair and angled her head so he could kiss her deeper, harder, and she responded with equal need.

Breaking for breath several long, hot minutes later, Kit pulled back and stared down into her eyes. ‘Are you sure about this?’ he muttered.

‘No,’ she said dazedly, her breathing all ragged and harsh. ‘Are you?’

‘Hell, no.’

‘Then what are we doing? What is this?’

‘Who knows?’ he said, sliding his hand round to her jaw and stroking his thumb over her lower lip. ‘Irresistible chemistry. Undeniable attraction. A disaster, probably.’

‘You could be right.’

‘Want to stop?’ It might kill him but if she was having second thoughts he couldn’t blame her.

‘Don’t you dare.’

She pulled his head back down to hers and started kissing him again. And then things switched up a gear because she was making sounds—familiar, encouraging sounds—that he hadn’t heard for years, and tugging at his clothes, reaching beneath his coat, pulling his shirt from the waistband of his jeans and pushing it up.

He could feel her impatience, but it wasn’t a patch on his, and as she put her hands on the bare skin of his back it sent such a shot of desire through him that Kit couldn’t wait any longer.

Breaking the kiss, both of them breathing hard, Kit lowered his hands to her thighs, slid her dress up and wrenched her knickers down, feeling as he did so how wet, how ready for him she was. He released her for a moment so that she could kick them off while he grappled with his belt. Which, with shaking hands, was frustratingly difficult.

‘Let me,’ Lily muttered, brushing his hands aside, unbuckling his belt and then making swift work of the buttons of his jeans.

As she slipped a hand inside his shorts and caressed the rock-hard, aching length of him he groaned and nearly exploded right there and then.

‘Enough,’ he muttered, removing her hand and planting it on his neck.

‘Hurry,’ she said with an urgency that nearly obliterated his control.

‘Hold on to me.’

She did, wrapping her arms round his neck and her legs round his waist as he lifted her, pressed her back against the wall for support, and with relief, desire and heat rushing through him he drove into her.

At the warm, wet feel of her he let out a groan of pleasure, relief and who knew what else.

Lily moaned, dropped her head back but, honestly, he was too far gone to notice much what she was doing. All he could feel, and all he could think, was that he was in absolute heaven.

Then she moved and as heaven came that little bit closer Kit realised he was in deep trouble. Because he wanted to go slow, savour the moment, make sure that she was with him every step of the way, but it had been so long, so incredibly long, and if she didn’t hold still he’d lose what little control he had left.

‘Stop moving,’ he said roughly, his fingers digging into her thighs in an effort to hold her still.

‘I can’t help it,’ she whimpered.

As he gritted his teeth against the pressure she held on to him tighter, pressed herself closer. He could hear her breathing go haywire, could feel her tight around him, hear those little pants and he began to spin out of control.

‘Stop it now, Lily.’

‘No, it feels too good.’

She tilted her hips, pulled him in deeper and that triggered a primitive need in him he couldn’t begin to comprehend, let alone control. His head swam with the urge to take, to possess, to reclaim. His heart thundered and inside him there was simply too much urgency. Too much build-up. Too much everything, and his resistance collapsed beneath the sheer force of it.

His control now history, instinct took over and, with the sound of Lily’s whimpers and sobbing moans in his ear, he started blindly thrusting in and out of her, faster and harder, unable to stop or even slow down.

And just when the tightness gripping his lower body became unbearable, just when he thought he was about to implode beneath the pressure, or die from the intensity of the pleasure, he lost it.

With a great groan he erupted inside her, pulsating and spilling into her for what felt like for ever.

* * *

As hot sexual encounters went that one hadn’t quite delivered on its promise, thought Lily, her heart thumping, her breathing skittery and her body twitching and aching with unfulfilled desire while Kit collapsed against her.

But that was OK. She didn’t have to be up until seven and she had plenty of experience at recovering after burning the candle at both ends. Later she had a ten-hour plane ride during which she could catch up on sleep, and Kit spending the rest of the night making it up to her would be well worth any fatigue she suffered.

‘I’m sorry,’ Kit muttered, his voice muffled against her neck.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said softly, stroking the back of his neck and smiling at the thought of what was to come.

‘How could I not worry about it? That hasn’t happened to me since I was sixteen. I didn’t even take my coat off.’

A sense of pride surged up inside her at the memory of how keen he’d been. ‘Anyone would think it’s been a while.’

‘Anyone would be right.’

‘Really? How long?’ Surely it couldn’t rival the eighteen-month drought she’d had.

Not that she particularly wanted to think of him with a string of girlfriends, but the undeniable fact was that he was gorgeous, about to enter some rich list or another and, according to the gossip columns that she definitely didn’t read, single. A man like Kit wouldn’t lack company.

He sighed and her skin tingled beneath the warmth of his breath. ‘Five years.’

Lily stopped stroking his neck, frozen with astonishment. ‘What?’

‘Don’t make me repeat it.’

‘You haven’t had sex for five years?’

‘Not since our divorce.’

‘Truly?’

He grimaced. ‘You think it’s something I’d make up?’

It wasn’t. Who would?

And because it wasn’t and because of what it meant Lily felt instantly sick. Her blood went cold and her body went numb and her throat went tight.

Not because she’d weakened and let herself fall under Kit’s spell. And not because she was feeling twitchy with need and could feel him still hard inside her.

No. What was making her want to throw up, what was making her suddenly all shivery and achy and what was making her suddenly desperate to get him the hell out of her body and her house was the realisation that the last person he had had sex with before her just now must have been the woman he’d picked up at some work do while their marriage lay in ruins.

The knowledge triggered a deluge of memories. The devastation she’d felt when he’d told her what had happened. The excoriating hurt and agonising sense of betrayal. And then the pain and the disillusionment and the realisation that they really were over.

As the memories hit furious and fast she could feel a great wave of emotion begin to roll towards her, could feel herself about to break apart and she had to swallow hard to free her throat of the lump that had lodged there.

Unwinding her legs from around his waist, she shifted herself off him just as fast as she could. How could she have been so stupid? How could she have thrown away five years of protecting herself with such abandon? She’d fallen back into Kit’s arms without a care for herself. What the hell had she been thinking? How could she have resisted so little? How could she ever have imagined that they might be able to make another go of things? How could she have even wanted to?

Unable to look at him because God knew what he’d see in her eyes or on her face, she pulled her dress down and then used her fingers to smooth her tangled hair.

‘Lily?’ asked Kit, the concern in his voice showing that he’d sensed something had changed.

‘What?’ she said blankly, casting her gaze around the floor for her knickers and dimly aware that he was fixing his clothing and tucking his shirt into his jeans.

‘Are you all right?’

She bent down and swiped them up. ‘I’m fine.’

As she straightened he reached out to touch her face and she recoiled as if he’d struck her. Frowning, he pulled back and stared at her. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I think you’d better go.’

She needed space. Time. Privacy to examine the wounds, the scars of which had just been ripped off.

‘Not until you tell me what’s the matter.’

‘Nothing’s the matter,’ she said flatly. ‘You got what you wanted. Now go.’

He blanched at the bite of her tone. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t wait.’

As if that was what was upsetting her. ‘Forget it.’

‘No.’

‘Look, I was wrong,’ she said, bracing herself and looking up at him. ‘This was a mistake. An awful mistake that should never have happened and now I’d really like it if you went. Please.’

He must have heard the finality in her voice, must have sensed her weariness or something else, because for a long time he just looked at her. Then he nodded. ‘OK, fine,’ he said with a frown. ‘I’ll call you in the morning.’

And with that, he turned on his heel, opened the door and left.

* * *

Lily was avoiding him. That was the only explanation for it.

Kit sat at his desk in his office in the penthouse apartment of his London flagship hotel and the place he called home, and glowered at his phone, which might have been broken for all the use it had been so far.

All morning he’d been trying to get hold of her, but infuriatingly her home landline just rang and rang before the answer machine eventually kicked in, and her mobile went straight to voicemail. The brief email he’d fired off asking her to call him had also gone annoyingly unanswered.

Rubbing a hand along his jaw, Kit reflected back to the way things had ended last night and thought he could sort of understand why Lily might not want to speak to him. He’d had the time of his life and she hadn’t. She must have been disappointed. Frustrated. Exhausted. It had sounded as if she’d had a busy night even before he’d shown up, and what with such an anticlimax perhaps everything had simply got too much.

In his albeit out-of-date experience, Lily’s way of dealing with an emotional overload had always been to shut down, so actually the way she’d responded hadn’t been all that unusual.

Nor had the way he’d responded to her. As he’d done so often in the past, he’d given her the space he thought she needed and left her to it, even though he hadn’t really wanted to.

But that wasn’t the right way to play it. With hindsight it probably never had been. It was entirely possible that the fact that she’d always withdrawn whenever things had got too heavy going and he’d basically let her, under the guise of giving her space, was how things had got so bad so quickly between them.

He should have been firmer all those years ago and insisted that they face things together, however hard. Lily had been right when she’d said that they’d neither talked nor listened; they hadn’t.

Well, whatever had happened in the past, things were going to be different now, he thought, clicking on his inbox for the dozenth time in as many minutes to see if she’d replied. Now he was going to insist on both talking and listening, and that was why her going off grid was so frustrating.

Because apart from deciding that their inability to communicate needed to be fixed, over the course of the night he’d been struck by a truckload of realisations, reached a dozen new conclusions and had come up with a whole load of questions, some of which he wouldn’t mind putting to her.

Such as, what had Lily meant by saying that if he’d asked she might have given him an apology for what she’d done? Why had she let him think that she was going out with someone when she wasn’t? And why the abrupt change in her demeanour in the minutes before he left? One minute she’d been all warm and soft and then next she’d gone all cold and frigid on him, and he wanted to know why.

Mainly, though, he’d realised that whatever he felt for her, and whatever she felt for him, they weren’t over. Not by a long shot.

Setting his jaw, Kit reached for the phone again and was about to hit the redial button when he paused as a thought occurred to him. Despite it being a public holiday, maybe Lily was at work. Maybe that was why there was no answer from home. Maybe she was on the tube and her mobile out of range of a signal. Maybe she was in a meeting. It could be that she wasn’t avoiding him. Merely busy.

Filling with renewed resolve, he looked up her company’s details then punched the number into his phone and sat back to wait while it rang. His stomach churned and his mouth went dry, but that was probably down to the fact that it had been a while since his last coffee and he’d been too preoccupied to bother with breakfast.

‘MMS, good morning.’

‘Zoe?’ he said, recognising the voice of his former sister-in-law.

‘Yes. How can I help?’

‘It’s Kit.’

There was a long silence. Then a faint, ‘Oh.’

‘How are you?’

‘Fine. Yes. Good... Kind of surprised to hear from you, to be honest.’

‘It’s been a while.’

‘You can say that again. How are you?’

‘Fine. Happy New Year.’

‘You too.’ She paused. ‘So...were you after Lily?’

‘Is she there?’

‘No. But then I’m at home. The office is closed today so your call was diverted to my mobile.’

‘Right.’ He frowned. That blew his theory that Lily was at work out of the water. Of course she wasn’t. Who was? It was New Year’s Day. So was she avoiding him after all?

‘Is there a problem or something?’ asked Zoe and he snapped back to the conversation.

‘She’s not answering either of her phones or replying to emails.’

‘No, well, she wouldn’t be.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because she’s on a plane.’

Kit frowned, a bit taken aback. A plane? She hadn’t mentioned anything about going away. Not that she’d been under any obligation to, but still... ‘When will she be back?’

‘Not for a couple of weeks.’

A couple of weeks? He wasn’t sure he could wait that long. Patience had never been his strong point—probably one more contributory factor to the breakdown of their marriage—and right now it was wearing increasingly thin.

‘Right. I see,’ he said, switching to his agenda with a couple of clicks and seeing that there wasn’t anything that couldn’t be moved or dealt with by someone else for a couple of weeks. ‘Where is she?’

‘I can’t tell you that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, for one thing, she’s on a job and the work she’s doing requires a certain degree of anonymity and a low profile.’

‘And for another?’

‘And for another I don’t think she’d thank me if I told you where she was. Do you really think she wants to see you after everything?’

Kit set his jaw and took a deep breath. ‘She was happy enough to see me last night.’ Which was a slight stretch of the truth, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

There was a pause. ‘Last night?’

‘We spent it together.’

‘Really?’

‘Part of it.’

He heard Zoe blowing out a breath. ‘Jeez.’

‘I need to talk to her, Zoe.’

‘She’ll be back in a couple of weeks. You can talk to her then.’

‘I can’t wait that long.’

‘After five years, you can’t wait two weeks?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Do you still love her?’

Kit felt the totally unexpected question hit him like a punch to the chest.

Did he?

He’d spent the last five years thinking he didn’t, but who knew? Seeing her again last night had thrown everything he’d always assumed about their relationship and his life for the last five years into question, so how he felt about Lily or anything for that matter was now up in the air.

The only thing he was sure about was that they weren’t done. Quite apart from all the questions he had for her, he hadn’t apologised for what he’d done all those years ago and for basically blaming her for it. He hadn’t told her of the guilt he carried or asked her for her forgiveness, and the need to put all of this right burned inside him like a hot coal.

Last night had opened doors he’d never imagined would ever open again, and now—even if they were only slightly ajar—he wasn’t about to let them close. Not only did he seek redemption, he also had the feeling that he was hovering on the brink of a second chance with Lily here, and even though it had never crossed his mind before, had never been something he’d thought he wanted, he now realised he wanted it more than anything, and if that didn’t tell him that he still had feelings for her he didn’t know what would.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, erring on the side of caution because how he felt about Lily still needed further analysis. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, there are things we need to figure out. Please, Zoe.’

There was another long silence while Zoe presumably weighed up the pros and cons of telling him and he held his breath.

‘Oh, OK,’ she said eventually and Kit felt the tension drain from his shoulders. ‘But look, she really is working so you can’t go barging in there right now.’

‘When, then?’

‘She finishes next Sunday. Afterwards she’s staying on for a few days’ holiday until the following Saturday.’

He rubbed a hand along his jaw while his brain raced. He could wait a week, couldn’t he? It would give him time to think. Plan. Delegate. Figure out exactly what he wanted to say and how he was going to say it, and how he was going to persuade her to give them the second chance he thought they had. And actually, neutral territory, without any association to the past, might be just the thing.

‘Fine,’ he said, ‘I’ll wait. You have my word.’

‘Hmm,’ said Zoe, sounding as though she didn’t think his word counted for much.

‘Where is she, Zoe?’ he said, ignoring the sting of his ex-sister-in-law’s scepticism because right now he had more important things to focus on.

‘On her way to the Indian Ocean. Santa Teresa Island. She’s staying at the Coral Bay Lodge.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Look, Kit, Lily hasn’t had a holiday in years. She’s really looking forward to it. It took her ages to get over you. Tell me I’m not going to regret having told you where she’s going.’

‘You won’t regret it.’

He’d make sure of it.

FIVE

As jobs went, this one hadn’t exactly been a hardship, thought Lily, settling on her sun lounger and preparing herself to test the customer service levels of the beach-bar staff, although this time for her own personal pleasure.

Some were, some weren’t. That was the way it went, and had gone, right from the start. MMS had started off offering customer satisfaction surveys before expanding to include services such as employee performance analysis, consumer demographic studies and bespoke training programmes, all in the name of driving service excellence. Their clients came in all shapes and sizes and temperaments.

This particular—easy—client had been with them since their inception and had grown with similar speed. Somehow, as the by-product of a much larger deal they’d ended up with a portfolio of assets that included the island of Santa Teresa. They’d offloaded the assets they didn’t want, but had decided to keep Santa Teresa with its once five-star luxury resort to see what they could do with it. They’d hired MMS to conduct a thorough analysis of how to turn the business around on the consumer side of things.

Normally MMS contracted the fieldwork out. In their business anonymity was key, and employing a small band of discreet, trustworthy, reliable freelancers to go wherever they were needed allowed Lily to concentrate on the marketing, sales and client side of the business and Zoe to focus on the numbers and data analysis.

On this occasion, however, the woman they’d hired to spend a week assessing the performance of staff and the overall consumer experience at the Coral Bay Lodge had slipped on ice and broken her ankle over Christmas and couldn’t fly. At such short notice, especially over the holiday season, they hadn’t been able to get anyone else so Lily had taken on the job.

Actually, she’d been heartily grateful for the distraction. January in London was typically on the quiet side and if she’d been there twiddling her thumbs she’d have had hours in which to dwell on everything that had happened on New Year’s Eve. Instead she’d been so busy working, concentrating on the details and reporting back to Zoe with her findings that she hadn’t given Kit a moment’s thought.

Well, hardly a moment’s thought, she amended, picking up the cocktail menu and wondering whether five in the afternoon was too early for a sundowner.

He had slipped into her head on the odd unguarded occasion, but whenever he did hot on the heels of it came the instant realisation of just what a bad idea Sunday night had been, how much what he’d done still hurt and how stupid and deluded she’d been to even imagine that him showing up on her doorstep might mean anything other than the need to scratch an itch.

Thank goodness the sex had been lousy or she’d be in serious trouble, she reflected, glancing down the long list of cocktails. If it had been as mind-blowing as she knew it could be, she’d now undoubtedly be wondering what she’d been missing all these years. What she’d been thinking when she’d decided to pursue relationships with men who didn’t affect her pulse rate.

She might also well be letting good sex get in the way of good judgement and telling herself that maybe she’d overreacted on Sunday night. She might be thinking that perhaps everything that had gone on between them before was now water under the bridge and why on earth shouldn’t they try again?

Despite the heat of the day Lily felt a shiver run down her spine. Wow, what a lucky escape she’d had.

And continued to have because thankfully since the day following the night before she hadn’t heard from Kit. Oh, that Monday he’d called. Repeatedly. At least, she assumed it had been him; she didn’t have his number in her phone, but he’d said he would, and she couldn’t think of anyone else whose number her phone didn’t recognise who would keep popping up with such persistence.

By the time the tube to Heathrow had emerged above ground, she’d seen she had half a dozen missed calls but, feeling too tired and too emotionally on edge to deal with the conversation she could imagine he’d want to have, she’d switched her phone off.

She’d switched it on twelve hours later and braced herself for more missed calls, but they seemed to have dried up. Which she was delighted by. Really, she was.