Chapter 125

Lexi stared up at him, and something in her face changed. Maybe it was because he wasn’t grinning. He wasn’t hiding himself. Maybe the truth was, he was tired of all the hiding he’d done all these years. For a moment, here in the dark with the light of the bridge in the distance and the opera house rising like a wave behind them, he was, for once… himself.

Unfettered. Unapologetic. Unleashed, at last.

Lexi made a soft, small noise. Shock, perhaps. Need, something dark within him insisted.

“I didn’t come all the way here to talk about sex,” she said her voice resolute.

“Fucking,” he corrected her, and he really did sound like himself then. Not the happy-go-lucky version of himself he played for her. “The proper fucking you’ve gone without all this time, in fact.”

He watched her swallow, and the way her throat moved. And even that felt like her elegant hands around his cock, holding him. Massaging him. Driving him fucking crazy.

“I didn’t jump on a plane and fly here to talk about it,” she said, a strange insistence in her words. “I don’t want to talk about it. I want to do it.”

He didn’t help her. He only waited, his gaze on hers, so intent he was sure he must have seemed harsh to her. But she didn’t back down.

“And I don’t want to do it randomly,” she said, her expression every bit as intense as he felt. As he was and always had been. “I want you, Tyler. I want you to show me what it’s like.”

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Lexi couldn't seem to regulate herself. Her temperature, the way she shook, her wildly pounding heart.

Because Tyler was still Tyler. But once again, she couldn’t quite recognize the man she knew on the face of the man who stood there beside her. This Tyler was dangerous. And the voice that whispered that word inside of her wasn’t Lily's. Not this time. It was some base of feminine knowledge she wouldn’t have believed existed if she didn’t hear it so clearly. It understood when she didn’t, when she couldn’t, that whatever this was—whoever he was when he changed this way—he wasn’t the easy, lazy, comfortably relaxed friend she knew so well.

“Are you sure?” he asked, and there was that intensity in the way he asked it. And the way he looked at her. And the way he held himself while he did it. “You want me to show you how to fuck?”

Lexi felt her body shift. A shudder turned into a thrill, and wound its way through her as if connected to that same dark intent she could see all over him. She was aware of her skin, and the way the cool sea air danced over it, soft like a touch. There was some kind of emotion making her eyes feel full, and her breasts scraped against the material of her shirt, tucked beneath her long jumper. Her nipples were so hard she ought to have been freezing cold, but she wasn’t. She was too hot, if anything. A new kind of furnace fanned out from between her legs, where her pussy was a great ache of need and hunger, and all of this would have shocked her if she’d had a moment to process it.

She’d thought she’d been turned on before. She really had quite liked the sex she’d experienced so far. But you knew, something in her whispered. You always knew you were missing something. And there was no point lying to herself about that any longer. Because she’d come all the way here, hadn’t she? For this. For the way he looked at her now that made her heart stutter. And everything else seem to stutter, too.

Because the Tyler she knew was beautiful, yes, but he wasn’t so… powerful. Not like this. Not as if the Olkfield skyline behind him might wink out at any moment, or fade into insignificance, so bright and hot did he burn, just by standing there.

Her breath kept tangling in her throat, there was a kind of weight on her chest and the thing she most wanted to avoid thinking seemed to sneak into her anyway. Maybe this was the real him. Maybe this was the real Tyler. She couldn’t ask herself what that meant. If that was true, what that told her about the two of them. About their friendship. About everything.

“Because you don’t seem sure,” he said, and even his voice was different.

There was a certainty there. A ferocity. And suddenly, it was all too easy to imagine him as the CEO, owner and creator of a billion-dollar company he’d started on the strength of a couple of credit cards and his charm. She’d found it so funny before, imagining her Tyler in charge of all that. Not now.

“You look a bit like you’ve seen a ghost, if I’m honest.”

And there was something drumming in her blood. Lexi still couldn’t name it, but she recognized it. It was what had brought her here, and the more she stared at this version of her best friend wearing the mask of some kind of sex warrior, the louder it got.

“I don’t think you’re a ghost,” she managed to say. “Though between you and me, I haven’t seen a lot of ghosts. I wouldn’t know how to tell.”

There was no trace of that smile of his. So friendly, so engaging. No hint of that bright laugh that put everyone at ease.

So she made it worse.

Lexi reached out across the inches between them that seemed, then, as vast as the harbor she’d spent so much of the day exploring, stretching this way and that, inland and then out to sea. She reached across the distance between them, found the opening of his coat, and slid her hand along his soft T-shirt into the hollow between his pectoral muscles.

She could feel the heat of him, as if she’d slapped her hand down on a stovetop.

And it occurred to her as she stood there, her palm spread against his hard, dense muscles, that she didn’t touch him much. They hugged each other hello and goodbye, but that was usually it. There was very little jostling of shoulders. No offhanded, friendly little touches, here and there.