Page 64 of The Wedding Proposal
Lucas wasn’t sure who reached out first but in an instant hot naked woman was jammed up against him and his only recognisable thought was that he must get inside her.
* * *
Elle knew it was unlikely that she’d die of pleasure but when there was so much of it, it was difficult not to at least cry out as if wounded. After the initial urgency, Lucas had created a breathtaking rhythm, pulling oh-so-slowly out of her, to pause, then push urgggggh-so-slooooowly back in. Another pause until she was grinding against him, then he started all over again.
The intensity, the concentration, was ferocious. Despite the air conditioning, the cabin pulsed with heat.
She gasped as he pulled out of her. ‘This would be almost frightening’ — he slid back inside her and she groaned — ‘if it didn’t feel so good.’
Sweat shone on his cheeks. He screwed up his eyes. Then his control broke and the urgency flooded back and Elle couldn’t make her breathing sync with her heartbeat to even say his name.
If it were possible to die of pleasure, she realised, she didn’t care.
* * *
Slowly, their breathing calmed. Lucas had rolled onto his side, done the gentlemanly thing with the condom and pulled Elle against his skin, holding her as their sweat dried.
Elle’s phone chirped. She’d abandoned it with her purse on the floor by the door. She managed to open her eyes. ‘That might be Charlie or Kayleigh. They’re off for a romantic dinner but they asked us if we’d go for a drink first.’
‘Right.’ Lucas’s eyelids flickered but didn’t completely open. ‘Are we going?’
Elle stretched. ‘A drink does sound good. Then we could come back to the boat for dinner. I bought the food.’ She hoped she sounded normal, but her heart shivered. Over dinner. That’s when she had scheduled telling him the rest of the Ricky story. She’d even put the romantic meal idea into Charlie’s head to try and prevent him and Kayleigh turning up at the boat or suggesting that they all ate together.
Although she was bone-deep thankful to have at least this one time with Lucas, she repeated, ‘A drink does sound good,’ creating a reason to get out of bed. Once she was no longer tangled in the sheets with him, it wouldn’t be so tempting to put off the conversation she was dreading. But if she put it off once she’d put it off again and again and sooner or later the indecision would come back to bite her rear end.
‘Better shower, then.’ He pulled her a little higher up his body so that he could kiss her.
Elle was trying not to dwell too much on the evening before them. But it was hard not to let various scenarios run through her head. ‘Do you m-mind—’ She took a breath. ‘Do you mind if we don’t tell Charlie anything, just for now?’
Lucas looked faintly surprised.
She pressed an apologetic kiss on his neck. ‘I’d just rather not have to face a barrage of questions about this.’
He tipped her face up, frowning into her eyes. ‘Before you understand what “this” is?’
‘I suppose so. I know you don’t like secrets, but—’
After a thoughtful stare, he shrugged. ‘But you’d be more comfortable keeping our business as our business?’
She smiled, gratefully. ‘At least for now.’ And if ‘this’ was all over by the end of the evening, then it would be a hell of a lot less embarrassing not to have accepted Charlie and Kayleigh’s congratulations and exclamations. Especially for Lucas.
Chapter Twenty-One
Lucas loved his brother. He’d loved him since he’d visited his mother on the maternity ward and she’d shown him the baby in the plastic cot. ‘This is your brother.’
He’d taken the ‘your’ part of that sentence seriously and spent the next years alternately ordering Charlie around and looking after him. They’d grown up close.
Two days ago, if someone had told Lucas that his little brother would turn up in Malta and they’d be able to sit around a table in the last of the evening light, drinking beer and talking, he would have been delighted. If he could have held Elle’s hand and fended off Charlie’s jokes and hoots because Lucas and Elle had got it together again, he would still have been delighted.
As it was, Charlie and Kayleigh were the ones holding hands, while Lucas and Elle occupied individual spaces.
Any idea he might have had of protesting against Elle’s request that they keep a lid on what was going on between them had died when he’d looked into her eyes and seen her uncertainty. What he’d been chewing over had crystallised forcibly.
Elle was acutely uncomfortable when she was pushed into revealing things she’d rather keep to herself, and just because he liked everything out in the open didn’t give him the right to expect her to feel the same. She was a private person. So what? That was allowed.
In the past, maybe he’d been blinded by his white-hot need to possess. It had taken a while but now he was finally beginning to see that ‘your brother’ would always be your brother, but ‘your girlfriend’ was only yours for as long as she wanted to be.
A lot of past aggro had been created by allowing his suspicions to feed on Elle’s natural inclination towards reserve. That didn’t make him particularly proud of himself.
