Page 57 of Hot Greek Summer

Winnie stared at him. ‘I know.’

For a moment he closed his eyes, and he looked at Winnie like a man on his knees saying his prayers.

‘It’s not a conscious thing,’ he said, opening his eyes again. ‘You still need to let yourself feel everything, to experience it all, to be in the moment.’

She nodded, otherwise completely still, and then he dipped forward and placed a kiss over her navel. She felt the heat of his mouth, and the brush of his hair on her skin as it fell forwards, and then the skim of his lips as he drifted up over her ribcage.

‘Don’t move,’ he murmured, raising his eyes to hers as his kissed the lower swell of her breasts. She watched his mouth, his slow tenderness, breathing in sharply when he closed his lips over her nipple. His eyelids drifted down, a dark sweep of lashes on his cheek as his tongue slid over her flesh, making her moan lightly because it felt so damn good to be this wanted.

His fingers moved to close over her other breast, giving her more, enjoying her more.

‘See?’ he said, when he opened his eyes. ‘It’s OK to feel good, Winnie.’

He held her breasts in his hands as he spoke, his tanned skin stark against hers as he watched her face. He took his time, and suddenly it wasn’t enough any more and Winnie swung herself around and dropped to her knees on the floor in front of him. Wordlessly he pulled her up against his bare chest and pressed his mouth into her hair, then filled his fists with it, twisting his fingers in the strands to tip her head back and kiss her, all at once fierce and hot.

‘Jesse,’ she breathed, loving the hardness and heat of his shoulders and back as she explored him at last with her hands. The press of his naked body against hers had changed everything. From tender to hot, from measured to frenzied, from thinking to feeling, from sensual to sexual. His chest heaved against hers, his hands stroking down the rise and fall of her spine to cup her ass and move her forwards to straddle his thighs.

‘I want you,’ he whispered, holding her to him with his arm around her waist. ‘More than you know. More than I should.’

She knew how much he wanted her; the hard heat of him nestled between her thighs told her so.

And then he kissed her again, changing down through the gears to barely moving and open-mouthed, his sighs on hers, more exquisite and honest and raw than Winnie knew kisses could be.

She wrapped her arms around his head, closing them into a warm, intimate space where only their mouths mattered. It wasn’t just kissing. It was giving, and feeling, an intense, overwhelming closeness, all-encompassing and spiritual, the slow slide of his tongue over hers. He spoke her name, stroked her breasts sometimes. She cried a little, but it didn’t matter, and when his fingers moved between her legs she rocked with him, biting his lip when he found her rhythm. There wasn’t any conscious thought in Winnie’s head. Just sensation, just bone-deep pleasure, just heat and need and want and then almost painful need again, because she was so close. He knew, of course, holding her steady, licking into hermouth when her body clenched around his fingers.

Cradling his hand around the nape of her neck, he massaged her as her hips began to jerk.

‘Look at me,’ he whispered, and when she opened her eyes he met her gaze with deep, abiding understanding of what this was to her. The end, and the beginning. The hint of an incredulous smile tipped his lips, and then hers too, until she almost laughed with the giddy, exhilarated, hell-yes thrill of it all.

‘I told you,’ he said against her hair, wrapping his arm tightly around her body until there was no space. ‘Didn’t I tell you that it’s better?’

Winnie buried her face in his neck, her mouth moving over the warm crook that smelled of pine needles and picnics at dusk and of him. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

She said yes because he’d made her feel like a goddess, and because she’d never felt so in touch with her own body before, and because for probably the first time in her life she’d completely let herself go.

The realisation came at a cost; the life she’d thought was perfect with Rory had been only half-lived. And the realisation gave her release, because from here on in she wasn’t going to do anything by halves. Life was here, and now, and heady, and goddamn brilliant. It was blue skies and sand beneath her toes, it was an adventure with the best friends she’d been lucky enough to have beside her all her life, and it was embracing life gasp by delicious, exhilarating gasp.

‘Thank you,’ she murmured, wrapping her arms around the firm, solid breadth of Jesse’s deeply tanned shoulders, somewhere between holding him and clinging to him. ‘I feel like you should hang a best orgasm medal around my neck.’

Laughter rumbled in his chest as it pressed against hers. ‘Solid gold, Legs. Solid gold.’

Bright shafts of moonlight lit the dusty path when Jesse walked Winnie back to Villa Valentina at a little after eleven.

‘The skies here seem so much bigger than they are back in England,’ she said, looking up at the vast, star-studded velvet overhead.

‘Same skies,’ he said. ‘You just can’t see it for all the other crap. Another of the many reasons I stay here.’

She nodded. The list was getting longer every day.

‘Can I ask you something?’ he asked, shoving his hands deep in the pockets of his jeans.

Winnie nodded. ‘Shoot.’

‘Do you ever miss your old life?’

She thought about it. ‘I don’t think it’s been long enough for me to answer, really. I don’t miss living back with my parents and sleeping in my single bed, but I’m not sure that’s what you’re asking me, is it?’

He shrugged, kicking a brick along in front of him. ‘It’s a big thing, being married, that’s all. And it’s a big thing when you’re suddenly not any more.’

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