Page 23 of Hot Greek Summer

He shook his head, his fingers sliding her hairband out until he could muss her hair down around her shoulders and her jaw.

‘You have real pretty hair,’ he said, and then wished he hadn’t because it was a physicality of hers he didn’t care to acknowledge. ‘I’m gonna kiss you now,’ he said, and her eyes widened in alarm. ‘I’m going to show you how a kiss can just be about your mouth and mine, and about pleasure, and hedonism, and nothing whatsoever to do with love, or your heart, or even your brain.’ He slid closer until her body was almost but not quite pressing his. He’d never seen a woman look more like she was staring down the barrel of a gun. ‘Are you OK with this?’ he asked, stroking his hand over her hair once, and then again when she gave him the tiniest of nods. ‘Good girl,’ he said. ‘You can say stop whenever you want.’

What in God’s name was he doing? This wasn’t his plan. He was way off track and somewhere in the back of his mind an alarm sounded, but the bell was drowned out by the loud drum of his heartbeat and the soft sound of Winnie’s shallow breathing. Was she trembling? Jesus, she was. Had he pushed her too far?

‘Do it,’ she murmured, like a determined sixth-former telling her first love to take her virginity on the back seat of his car. It was enough to make him tip his head to hers until their lips touched and her eyelids drifted down. He didn’t close his eyes. He couldn’t, because the pure crack of electricity that flowed from his mouth to his groin wouldn’t let him. He watched her instead, saw the single tear slide down her cheek at the same time as her lips began to move tentatively against his, the smallest of movements, parting to let her sigh slide into his mouth.Christ.It really was like kissing Sleeping Beauty, as if she’d spent a lifetime waiting and this was the moment he woke her up. And then she snaked the tip of her tongue along his top lip, and she stopped being a fairytale princess and turned into a siren instead, and he lost all sense of sentient thought and slid his hands into her hair and kissed her mouth hard and open. He heard her gasp, and then her arms moved around him and pulled him into her, both of her hands sliding into up his hair at the back of his neck.

‘Holy God,’ he muttered, ragged against her mouth, and then he stopped thinking and took his own advice to shut the hell up and just enjoy it. God, she was too responsive, he couldn’t control himself or her. He licked his tongue inside her mouth and felt himself spiral, the sensual kick of her intimate reaction pulsing all the way through his body. Could you kiss someone for ever? Because he wanted to. He wanted to spend the rest of his life right there on that bench without even coming up for air, because this was the most sensational, mind-bending, unexpectedly better-than-any-sex-he’d-ever-had kiss he’d known in his entire life.

‘Jesse,’ she gasped when he broke the kiss to tilt her head back and slide his open mouth down the centre ofher neck, licking her skin, inhaling the scent of her into his lungs. Her clothes were in his way. His clothes were in hisway.

‘Jesse,’ she said again, a little louder, her fingers tightening in his hair so she could hold his head and lower her gaze level with his. ‘Stop.’

He nodded, both of them breathing harder than if they’d sprinted a hundred metres, staring into each other’s wide eyes, speaking without words.

What the hell was that?

Did you feel it?

Did you know that would happen?

Winnie pressed her still trembling fingertips against her lips, and Jesse wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

‘Well?’ he asked, and she half laughed shakily.

‘Well what?’

Jesse concentrated on counting his own heartbeats to slow them down. ‘Do you see now how a kiss can be a physical pleasure in its own right?’

She shook her head slowly. ‘No. No, I don’t think I do.’ Picking his hand up, she laid it flat over her heart. ‘Here, feel how fast my heart is beating.’ He could feel it racing, but he could also the feel the swell of her breast and it made his own heartbeat quicken again too. ‘And in here,’ she tapped her finger to her temple, ‘my brain felt as if someone was letting off party poppers. So no, I can’t kiss for physical pleasure alone, and for the record, I don’t think you can either.’

Oh, she was wrong there. He shoved his hands through his hair and concentrated on tracking the lanes criss-crossing the island while he marshalled his thoughts.

‘I’ll level with you, Legs, you caught me off guard. I expected that kiss to be a little more … well, chaste, shall we say. You blindsided me when you put your tongue in my mouth.’

She sucked in air, affronted. ‘I did not.’

‘You so did. It was meant to be five seconds max, not a full-on pash.’

‘Pash?’

He flicked his eyes to the side like a teenager caught smoking. ‘Call it what you like. Point is, it wasn’t supposed to give you a heart attack or me blue balls.’

Winnie’s eyes dropped momentarily to his crotch, and he scowled and fired her a tiny sarcastic smile.

‘I think we can safely conclude that you just proved yourself wrong with your own experiment,’ she said, prim and just a teeny bit superior.

‘Not exactly.’ He jerked his chin towards his lap. ‘My junk is on the outside, strictly speaking.’

‘Junk?’

‘Do you have to keep repeating my words?’

They both stared dead ahead. For his part, Jesse was confused how to play it. On the one hand, Jesus bloody Christ, that had been one hell of a kiss and a big part of him wanted to take her home, fling her on his bed and rip her clothes off, because if that was how they kissed, what would sex be like? On the other hand, Winnie didn’t conform to any of his rules. She wasn’t passing through. She was his new neighbour, and she’d come here to recover from a crapshoot of a relationship, and if he really, truly examined his feelings, there was an element of nostalgia in play here. She reminded him of Erin. That hair … those eyes … she was different but cast from the same mould, and it was a mould he’d deliberately denied himself any right or access to. He should never have kissed her.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and he found that he meant it. She’d cried, for fuck’s sake. Was he such a selfish man as to let his own desire override common decency? Had he kissed her against her will? ‘I shouldn’t have kissed you.’

She sighed and crossed her arms, leaning back against the bench.