As Timeless as the Sea Read online

  “You’re trying to kill me,” she whispered, pushing up to look down at him, her lips parted and her eyes half-lidded. “You want to orgasm me to death.”

  He tugged on her nipples, thrusting up hard beneath her. “Maybe. Come again for me.”

  “Jace...”

  “You look so fucking sexy, come for me, baby... Say my name, let me watch you...” He slid a hand between them, his thumb finding her clit, and he rubbed it gently.

  This orgasm seemed to start in her toes and the roots of her hair and then travelled toward her core, tightening every single muscle along the way. The more she’d experimented with teaching herself to have multiple orgasms, the more this ‘plateau phase’ had lengthened. Now, it was so long it was almost painful, and so agonizingly pleasurable that she was aware of holding her breath and her mouth forming an O, until she became one hot, tight clench of muscles deep inside.

  Even before she’d finished, Jace moved his arms around her and lifted, and then she was on her back on the rug, her hands pinned above her head, and he was thrusting down into her again, harder this time, his flesh meeting hers with a sharp smack. The orgasm didn’t stop, but just became a rolling ripple of pleasure, and she cried out, almost sobbing with the blissful ecstasy. He was never going to stop, he was going to fuck her forever, and he really was going to kill her with orgasms. He was pounding into her now, his hands tight on hers, and she couldn’t do anything about it, she couldn’t have stopped him even if she’d wanted to, and she did, but she didn’t, because it was so amazing, so incredibly erotic, and the pulses kept coming, oh God, so amazing, just coming and coming as he thrust, they were never going to stop... And then he cried out, pushing forward until she thought he was trying to split her in two. All she could do was lie there and watch his climax take him, the most beautiful sight she thought she’d ever seen, more beautiful than any mountain or natural phenomenon, with his fierce frown, and his deep, shuddering gasps.

  She collapsed back on the rug, completely exhausted. Jace withdrew and then fell beside her, and they lay there, looking up at the ceiling.

  Then she felt his hand on hers, and their fingers interlaced. “You’re a goddess,” he said. “I can’t believe I was lucky enough to have met you.”

  Sandi’s lips curved up, and she closed her eyes and let the fan cool her sizzling skin.

  Chapter Sixteen

  JACE FELT SANDI LIFT his arm that he’d rested across his face and peer at him.

  “Have you gone to sleep?” she asked suspiciously.

  “No. I’m hoping that if I lie here quietly for a while, I won’t have a coronary.” He slid an arm around her before she could move back and pulled her so she fell forward onto his chest. “You have some stamina, woman. If we spend any significant time together, I won’t need to go to the gym anymore. Sex with you is like an aerobic workout.”

  Her eyes danced. “Is that a complaint?”

  His lips curved up, and he pulled her head down for a kiss. “You know it’s not,” he murmured against her lips.

  She gave him a long, luscious kiss, then sighed. “I’m starving.”

  “Jesus. You’re insatiable in every way.”

  She laughed and sat up. “I’m going to raid your kitchen. Is that okay?”

  “Help yourself.” He watched her get up, saw her gaze rake him, and then she walked into the kitchen.

  He’d only been half-joking when he’d said to her, I’m wondering if you’re only after me for one thing. Clearly, she had a high sex drive, and she’d enjoyed their time in bed. He already knew he was going to have trouble getting her to commit to any kind of regular relationship. And yet she’d looked horrified when he’d said that, as if the last thing she wanted was for him to feel used.

  Not that he minded Sandi Cartwright using him for sex. He wanted more than something physical, but regular sex the way they’d just had it would do, for the moment.

  “You have a lovely house,” she called, and he heard her open the fridge.

  “It suits me,” he said back. The living area was open-plan, with a big kitchen separated by a long breakfast bar, kauri wood floors, and a great view over the inlet. It was minimalist, because he didn’t need much and he didn’t spend a lot of time here, but it was quiet and peaceful, with lots of places he could sit or lie and listen to music, read books, and drink whisky. What more could a man need?

  He sat up and twisted around to look at Sandi. She’d taken off her skirt. Stark naked, she was taking things out of his fridge and arranging them on the workbench. He could see the glow of the fridge light on her breasts. Smiling, he tucked himself back into his boxers and zipped up his trousers, got to his feet, and walked over to join her.

  “Sit there,” she instructed, pointing to one of the stools. “I’ll make you some dinner.”

  “Okay.” Happy to be bossed around, he sat and leaned on the breakfast bar, and watched her begin to cook.

  “I love this kitchen,” she told him, smoothing a hand over the tiles above the hob. “What a beautiful color. Aubergine, I’m guessing—what you call eggplant?”

  “It’s purple.”

  “It’s not purple. Purple is a vivid color. This is much darker.”

  “It’s dark purple, then.”

  “It’s not!” She laughed. “It’s more wine-colored.”

  “Then it’s a reddy-purple. I’ll never understand why women have to complicate things.”

  Smiling, she chopped and fried, and they chatted about their day, about the wedding, about all kinds of things, gradually exploring each other now the sexual frenzy had—for the moment—passed. Jace had to admit, though, that having a completely naked woman in his kitchen wasn’t helping his concentration. After a while, he took off his shirt and held it up for her.

  In the middle of stir-frying, she looked at it, then up at him. “Sorry, am I distracting you?”

  “Just a tad.”

  Smiling, she slipped on the shirt and did up one button in the middle, then carried on with the cooking. “I liked being naked,” she said. “I think I’m a naturist at heart.”

  “Is that different to being a nudist?”

  “Technically, no—nudist is used more in America and naturist in Europe and Down Under. But to some people there are differences. Nudists enjoy being liberated from clothes. But for naturists, it’s more of a... I don’t know... environmental thing. It’s about connecting with nature. It’s more a... belief system, I suppose.”

  “I didn’t realize that. Have you been to a nudist resort?”

  “No... I’m not sure how comfortable I’d be going naked in public.” She added a dash of chili to the sauce she was cooking. “I haven’t done it much here—I can’t just go wandering around the B&B starkers!”

  “Starkers?”

  “Sorry. That’s English for naked. In the U.K., I lived in a house that had a garden that wasn’t overlooked. I used to sunbathe there without clothes, although to be honest the English weather isn’t really conducive to that.” She laughed.

  “Well, I don’t know that I agree with cooking naked. Rule number one is never fry bacon without your boxers on.”

  She giggled. “I can see that.”

  He smiled. “I’m guessing you don’t want a glass of wine if you’re driving later.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Sprite Zero?”

  “Sure.”

  He retrieved two cans, tipped ice into two glasses, and poured the soda over the ice. Sandi had finished cooking her pasta, and she drained it and tossed it in the tomato sauce she’d made, scooped it into dishes, and then he led the way out onto the deck, where he had two chairs and a wooden table.

  They sat and ate their pasta, while overhead tuis fluttered in the manuka bushes, and two dragonflies swooped across the deck, hovering in front of them before diving down to the water.

  “So,” Jace said, dipping a piece of bread into the sauce. “Tell me more about when you used to sunbathe naked.”

  She
ate a forkful of penne pasta and raised an eyebrow. “Just had to make sure I didn’t get my nipples sunburned.”

  He stared at his dish, sighed, and ate another mouthful. “Yeah, that backfired on me. Now I’m imagining rubbing lotion all over you.”

  “Serves you right.”

  He gave her a wry smile, then searched amongst the pasta for a piece of bacon. “This is the house you shared with... Brodie, was his name?”

  She met his eyes, her smile fading. Her gaze dropped to her food. “Yeah.”

  “Were you married?”

  “No.”

  “But you were living together.”

  She sighed. “Yes.”

  He watched her push her food around her plate. “I don’t want to pry,” he said softly. “But I’d like to know what went wrong. So I don’t make the same mistake.” His lips twisted.

  She stabbed at a mushroom. “You won’t. Unless you have a secret identity you’re not telling me about.”

  His heart skipped a beat, then gave an extra-hard bang on his ribs. He sipped his soda and then cleared his throat. “What do you mean?”

  She sighed, laid her fork on the dish, and pushed it away. “It’s no state secret or anything. It’s not that I want to hide it from you. It’s just that talking about it reminds me what an idiot I was. What a mug. And I don’t want you to think of me in that way.”

  He frowned. “I wouldn’t.”

  “You can’t say that. I’m going to tell you, and I know that you’ll sympathize, but inside you’ll be thinking Jesus, why on earth didn’t she notice something? How could she have been so dumb?”

  “Sandi, I talk to people all day every day who’ve had broken relationships. People who’ve been cheated on, who’ve been betrayed in the most terrible ways. Women who’ve stayed in abusive relationships. Men whose wives have treated them like shit. Relationships are never black and white. They exist, for years sometimes, in a gray world of suspicion and regret, where each party does their best to make it work, but eventually the resentment and mistrust become too much. I’m the last person to pass judgment on people. In fact, my job relies on me not doing that.”

  She nibbled her bottom lip. “I suppose. The thing is, I feel like a different person out here. In control. And I don’t like how remembering what happened makes me feel uncomfortable and stupid.”

  He ate the last piece of bread, mopping up the remainder of the sauce, pushed his dish away, and stretched out his legs. He didn’t say anything, just sipped his drink, and studied her. He didn’t want her to feel as if he was pushing her to tell him, but equally he did want her to confide in him.

  “Enough with the interrogation,” she said, reaching out to poke him. He smiled, and she sighed. “All right. I met Brodie in—of all places—a supermarket. It sounds so corny, but we reached for the same packet of cereal, and started laughing. We were on our own, and we each had a basket with meals-for-one in it—it was obvious we were both single. We got chatting, and he asked to meet me for a coffee. And that’s where it started.

  “He was just starting work as a technical representative for a paper mill. He travelled a lot—they’d send him to printers that were having trouble with the paper, and he’d have to fix the problems. He went all over the UK and even to Europe. But he came back to the paper mill in Kent, not far from where I lived, every few days. We’d go out on dates, to the cinema, to restaurants, all the usual. We fell in love quickly, and it seemed idyllic. After a few months, he said he wanted us to live together, and I said yes.”

  She sighed. “I was living in a flat with Ginger at the time, and he had quite a nice house, so it made sense to move in with him. We lived together for two years. He still travelled a lot, but I had my friends and my job which kept me busy, and it gave me space—it felt like an ideal arrangement.

  “We hadn’t been together that long, maybe six months? And he started having the issue with premature ejaculation. I did lots of research on it, and I knew there were physical and psychological causes. We talked a lot about the psychological ones—anxiety, depression, fear of not being able to perform. He swore it wasn’t any of those, and I believed him. I’d read about there being an issue with hypersensitivity of the skin on the penis, and he swore this was the cause, so we started investigating that.

  “It was a problem, and it worried me, but other than that I was happy. I loved him, and I wanted to help him. So we saw doctors and tried numbing creams and all sorts, but nothing happened. In fact, it got worse, not better. He started to put off having sex, because he didn’t want the pressure to perform. We argued about it, because I was sure we could fix it, if he kept trying, but he started to get angry if I mentioned it. Over the final six months, our relationship deteriorated, but I still kept trying...”

  She looked away, down the river to the Kerikeri basin in the distance. Jace studied her, puzzled, still not knowing where this was going. Did the guy have an affair? He thought about Tim, and how he had felt a need to prove to himself that he wasn’t the problem. Had Sandi been the problem for Brodie? And if so, why?

  “He continued travelling,” she said, her voice distant. “He’d spend a couple of days at home, then he’d be away for two or three, but I usually knew when to expect him. Then, one day, he just didn’t come home. I waited, rang his mobile phone, but he never answered. So I rang the paper mill, and they told me they’d just found out that the night before, he’d had a heart attack in his hotel room, and he’d died.”

  Jace waited for her to show some emotion, but she just looked tired and dispirited. He guessed she’d grieved so much over the past year or two that she didn’t have any tears left.

  “I went to pieces,” she said. “Completely fell apart. Ginger and Fred were absolute rocks. They spoke to his boss at the paper mill, who said he’d been in contact with his family, and they were organizing the funeral, so I didn’t have to worry about anything. I realize now that I was in shock, because I didn’t think to question what he meant by his family. You see, Brodie had told me he was an only child, and his parents were dead.”

  “So... who were the family?”

  “I discovered that a few days later. I went to the funeral with Ginger and Fred. We arrived at the crematorium, and even as we walked in, I knew something was wrong because his boss came rushing up to us, and he looked upset. He started gabbling, saying I should leave, that I shouldn’t be there... Ginger and Fred got angry and demanded to know what was going on... And then I saw them...”

  “Who?”

  “His wife and children,” she said simply. “She was standing at the front, staring at me, and she had a boy of about five and a girl of about three standing by her. I heard her ask Clive—Brodie’s boss—who I was...”

  She looked down at her hands then. “Anyway. Suffice to say it didn’t end well.”

  Jace was staring at her, conscious his jaw had dropped. “Brodie had been married all that time?”

  “Yes. He’d lied to her as well as me, which should have been some consolation, I suppose, but it didn’t feel like it. It all unraveled over the next few weeks—the police were involved, and they questioned Clive and his work colleagues. Brodie had been very clever. He’d managed to keep his two lives very separate. I don’t know how. To this day, I don’t remember him making sneaky phone calls or doing anything suspicious. Apparently, he had two mobile phones, and turned off one when he was with the other person, saying it was because he was working. I never thought to question it. His wife and kids lived in Bristol, straight down the M5, and he’d call in and see them if he had a job nearby. And he’d stay with me when he was working at the mill. He never told the people at the mill that he was married, so they only knew me.”

  “Jesus. It must have taken some doing to maintain that deception for that long,” he said, before he could think better of it.

  She gave him a sharp look. “Yes. It must have taken a special degree of skill to lie to two women so completely.”

  He could have kicked
himself. “I didn’t mean—”

  But her expression softened. “I know. The thing is, I think he did love me. And I think he did feel guilty. That’s why he had the issue he did in the bedroom. It was all guilt—lying to her, to his children, and lying to me. In the beginning, I told myself he must have been laughing behind my back, thinking how clever he was to pull the wool over my eyes, but as time has gone by, I’ve come to think—or hope, at least—that he didn’t mean to be cruel. I don’t know what he expected to happen, how long he thought he could maintain the deception—to be honest, I doubt he thought about it at all. I think he saw me and wanted me, and that started a trail of lies that he couldn’t get out of. One of the worst things was that the house was in his name, and it went automatically to his wife. She threw me out, and I got nothing.”

  “Jesus.”

  She held out her hand to him. “I wanted to tell you, because...” She took a deep breath. “I do like you, and I do want to see more of you. But if this does develop into something, I need you to understand how important it is to me that we’re honest with each other. I’m sure you can understand why. It nearly killed me, and it’s taken me so long to even think about going near a man again. So if you don’t feel that’s something you can do, I need you to tell me now.”

  Jace stared at her, his heart sinking into his boots.

  Fuck.

  Chapter Seventeen

  SANDI LOOKED INTO JACE’S eyes for a long moment.

  His expression was carefully blank, his eyes cautious. Her stomach gave a little flip. She’d expected him to say something along the lines of “Sweetheart, of course I understand, and absolutely I agree to be completely honest with you.” But he didn’t.

  For a moment, she felt a wave of complete and utter panic. Then, gradually, her stomach settled. She was in control here. She didn’t have to do anything she wasn’t comfortable with. And she was determined not to catastrophize every single moment in her life—Fred was right, Brodie was not going to have that power over her. Just because Jace was taking his time to reply didn’t mean he was married with six kids somewhere at the other end of New Zealand. Not everyone was comfortable with sharing every detail of their lives, and it was his prerogative to take a moment to think about what she’d asked and consider how far he was willing to go.