Page 70 of Hot Greek Summer

‘No one’s ever looked at me that way before,’ she whispered.

A small half-smile tipped his mouth. ‘Yes, they have. Everyone does, Winnie. It’s just you that doesn’t see it.’

She caught her breath, enjoying the way his hands pressed her close against him.

‘You know what I see when I look at you, Jesse?’

He lifted one eyebrow, amused. ‘A bloody sexy Aussie?’

She laughed, but shook her head. ‘Well, yes, but I see other things too.’

‘This was about you,’ he said, already mentally closing down in that way he did.

‘And now it’s about you,’ she countered, stroking his cheek. ‘I see a man who’s hiding behind smoke and mirrors.’

Robbed of his smile, he looked wary and momentarily vulnerable.

‘You’re wrong,’ he said, his light-hearted tone an unintentionally perfect example of those smoke and mirrors. ‘What you see is what you get with me, Legs.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Well, what I see is a man who wants to believe his own mantra that love is complicated and difficult and counter-productive, but his eyes didn’t get the memo because they tell me that he’s emotional, and sensitive, and romantic to the core.’

‘You’ve got the wrong guy,’ he said, cupping her face tenderly and proving her right.

Winnie turned her face and pressed a kiss into his palm.

‘I did have, for a long time.’ She hadn’t realised how wrong until lately.

‘Finally something we can agree on,’ he said.

‘We should probably stop talking now while we’re still friends,’ she said, her fingers moving over the warm, firm skin at the back of his neck.

‘Friends is good.’ He pressed his mouth against her forehead. Winnie closed her eyes and leant into his body, inhaling the scent of him down into her bones. His hands moved in her hair, and it was impossible not to tip her head back into his massaging fingers, and it was nobody’s fault when his lips found hers and they kissed. It wasn’t the kiss of friends. It was no brief peck or absent-minded see-you-later. It was the culmination of their sensually charged conversation; his affirmation that she was quicksilver in his blood, her confirmation that he was all of the good things he so hotly denied. When he opened her mouth under his to slide his tongue in, his kiss said all of the things he couldn’t.

‘I can’t stay away from you,’ he murmured, slipping his hand down to cup her backside and lift her into him. ‘I need to, and I can’t.’

Winnie wrapped her arms around his shoulders. ‘You don’t need to,’ she whispered, holding him. ‘Please don’t try.’

His slow, lust-laden kiss told her that he didn’t want to. His restless, searching hands all over her body told her that he didn’t want to. Yet his stubborn as a damn ox brain wouldn’t let him go.

‘I have to,’ he said, lifting his head. His dark eyes couldn’t have been more regretful, or his parting kiss more bittersweet or drenched in longing.

‘Come to bed,’ she whispered. ‘Please, Jesse. I want you to.’

His eyes flickered to the bed behind her, and when he looked back down at her a moment later he looked pained enough to cry tears of blood.

‘I should go.’

She shook her head. ‘You should stay.’

Jesse slowly slid her hairband from around his wrist, gathered her hair at her nape and tied it loosely back. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Good as new.’

He was leaving. Winnie didn’t ask him to stay again; she knew he wouldn’t. He might think that she was as good as new, but that wasn’t how she felt right at that moment. Jesse was putting her back together again with one hand and pulling her apart with the other.

She shook her head and then opened her door and led him downstairs and back out into the warm island sunshine.

‘Bye then,’ she said, frustrated, a few minutes later, drawing a pattern in the sand on the terrace with her toe.

He nodded, almost leaving, looking down at her with complicated eyes.

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