The Billionaires Collection. Оливия Гейтс

woman who was still, astonishingly, his wife.

      His wife. That was the part that mattered. That was the only part that mattered.

      “Anais,” he began, his voice serious, because this was long overdue.

      But she surprised him. She turned toward him and she shook her head, and when he didn’t continue speaking she stepped closer and slid her hands up over the planes of his bare chest. Heat against heat.

      And everything inside him burst into flame.

      “I don’t want to talk,” she said, and there was something about her voice. Or maybe it was the way she looked at him, with that gleam of something he couldn’t quite read in her eyes. “I want to say a thousand things to you, Dario, but I don’t want to talk.”

      And she was so close, after everything that had happened. And he wasn’t playing any games this time, the way he’d tried so hard to pretend when he was on Maui. Her hands were on his bare skin and she gleamed pale and smooth in the light from the city around them, and he was only a man.

      “I think we can figure out a better way to communicate,” she whispered.

      And Dario didn’t have it in him to refuse her.

      He didn’t have it in him to try.

      He swept her closer and she was against him then, all those sweet, lean curves pressed tight to him as he bent down and took her mouth the way he’d wanted to for days and days. A lifetime or two, by his reckoning. Every time she laughed, or was still. Every time she frowned at him, or simply breathed the same air.

      He wanted this. He wanted her. He wanted all of her.

      The kiss was a lick of pure fire, of blinding need. And it wasn’t nearly enough.

      He let the wild thing inside him loose, claiming her and marking her, tasting her deep. And as he kissed her he backed her across the smooth stone deck toward the glass doors that led inside his suite, pulling his mouth from hers only to tug the tank top up and over her head.

      Her laugh as she lifted her arms to help him was better than the city’s bright gleam, and it moved inside him like the same restless song.

      By the time they made it to the side of the wide bed he’d never imagined he’d share with anyone, they were both breathing much too heavily, their clothes strewn behind them in a trail.

      “You’re perfect,” he told her, his voice a guttural rasp against the dark. “You’re so damned perfect.”

      “That sounds like talking,” she teased him, nipping at his chin.

      And he worshipped her, this woman he’d never recovered from and never gotten past. This woman he’d never divorced, across all these years.

      Some part of him must have known it was never over between them. It was never finished, no matter how it seemed. The hunger went on and on and on.

      He knelt before her by the side of his bed and he relearned every inch of her gorgeous body, the way he had the night she’d trusted him with her innocence. From her marvelous collarbone to the exquisite arch of her narrow feet, he memorized her. He studied her and he adored her.

      With his hands and his mouth and his gaze, he made her his and he made her come. Once. Again.

      And the third time he threw her over that edge, this time with two fingers deep in her soft heat and his mouth a small torment against one perfect breast, she cried out so hard and so long he thought she might shatter his windows.

      He almost wished she had.

      “Enough,” she managed to say, spread out across his bed like a feast. “You’ll kill me.”

      “You say that as if you’d mind.”

      Her mouth curved dangerously and she rolled over, coming up on her knees beside him. “My turn,” she murmured.

      And she took her time.

      She tortured him, with an electric intensity that might have concerned him, had she not been making him feel quite so good. She marked him with her teeth and she indulged herself in him with her mouth, her tongue, the sensual slide of her palms against his skin. She lavished her attention on every part of him, each ridge of his abdomen, the flat disc of each nipple, the line of his neck and all along his jaw, before heading back down the length of his body.

      She smiled up at him as she knelt between his legs, something particularly raw in her dark eyes. But before he could question her, she leaned forward and took him deep in her mouth.

      He thought he might die. He swore he had. He forgot everything in the world but this. Her. Anais.

      Her mouth was hot and wet, a benediction and a prayer, and he lost himself in the slide and the suck, the small humming noises she made, the way she rocked herself as she moved over him as if she was as carried away by the sensation as he was.

      It was heaven. It was too good. It was so good he thought he might lose his head completely.

      He pulled her off him, his jaw clenched tight as he fought to bring himself back under control. He dealt with the condom swiftly and then he was rolling them both over and bringing her beneath him to thrust himself home at last.

      She cried out at his slick possession, and then, at last, he began to move.

      And there was no skill in this tonight, no mastery. It was raw and intense, wild and hot. A stripped-down taking. A claiming, elemental and fierce. She wrapped herself around him and dug her nails into his skin, and he pounded into her with all the fury of this thing between them in each and every deep, perfect stroke. He lost himself in the fit of her, so gloriously right beneath him and around him, as if they’d always been meant for this.

      And for a while, there was nothing but this.

      But then Dario could take no more. He reached down between their bodies and pressed against the center of her need, making her throw back her head and cry out his name. Then she bucked against him, writhing out her pleasure, and he hurled her straight over the side of the world.

      And he followed right behind her, her name on his lips all the while, as if those long six years had never happened.

      * * *

      Dario knew Anais wasn’t in the bed when he woke up the next morning.

      He knew it in the same instant he opened his eyes and blinked in the morning sunlight, long before he turned his head to see the wide mattress as empty as it always was. As if her presence here last night, her body tucked against his as they’d finally drifted off to sleep together, had been nothing but a dream.

      If it was a dream, he’d have stayed in it awhile longer. He’d have made it last, made it count.

      But he knew he hadn’t dreamed a single second of it.

      He swung out of the bed, pulling on the nearest pair of trousers he could find and leaving them low on his hips. He pushed his way out of the master suite to find the penthouse oddly, strangely, quiet all around him. The door to Anais’s bedroom was wide open, showing him it was empty, so he jogged down the wide steel stairs that brought him to the second level. It took him a moment to realize that he couldn’t hear Damian. Normally there’d be the usual clamor and howl of a young boy in the house, but not today. That was why it was so quiet.

      The nanny must have taken him out, he thought absently, poking his head into one of the small reception rooms on the second level, the one Anais had claimed as her office while she’d been here. It, too, was empty. Not even her laptop open on the small, elegant desk in the corner.

      Dario made his way down to the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee, then took it into his home office. The penthouse was still oppressively silent all around him, and there was a certain agitated sort of sensation brewing beneath his ribs. He couldn’t quite identify it. He rounded his desk and sat down, frowning at the large brown file folder that hadn’t been there last night, he was certain.

      He picked