“Olivia?”

He rubbed her back with his free hand, his grip on her chin tightening.

“Olivia? Can you hear—?”

Her eyes snapped open, wide with surprise, and he tensed, waiting for her to shake her head in confusion and pull away from him. But she looked up into his eyes and smiled and said, “Gabriel.”

And then she kissed him.

He would later replay that moment—more times than it needed to be replayed—telling himself he had to revisit it to be sure he hadn’t taken advantage of her confusion. He had not. She kissed him. There was no doubt of that. There was also, he would admit, no doubt that he kissed her back without even a split second of hesitation.

There wasn’t even a thought of hesitation. Nor a thought of whether he should kiss her. It was like seeing her fall from the bridge and leaping after her. She started, and he followed, and there was no other choice, because that kiss …

That kiss …

If there was a part of sex that Gabriel could happily do without, it was kissing. The rest was about satisfying biological urges, much the same as eating or sleeping, and therefore it could be handled in the same way he ate or slept—dispassionately and perfunctorily, getting it out of the way. Kissing was different. It served no purpose other than intimacy and therefore, to him … No. Simply no. Fortunately, he’d discovered that if one picked the right partner, kissing was not required.

That did, however, lead to a problem. One he had never considered until he’d experienced another first for him: wanting to kiss someone. On the beach, with Olivia, too much wine drunk, hearing her laugh, watching her in the moonlight, and thinking, unbidden, that he wanted to kiss her. He hadn’t, of course. That would be a violation of trust, an unwanted trespass. He had thought it, though, and then, upon thinking it, he’d felt a surge of panic, as he’d realized that if it did somehow happen …? Well, the problem with avoiding kissing? He was almost certainly not very good at it.

But now she kissed him, and he kissed her back, and it was like hearing about ice cream and thinking it sounded revolting, and perhaps getting a taste or two of some cheap ice milk and agreeing it was revolting, and then tasting the real thing and realizing this was not what you’d imagined at all, not what you’d tasted before, that even to give it the same name seemed a sacrilege. Because that kiss …

That kiss was a blazing fire in an ice storm. It was a clear running stream in a desert. And yet it wasn’t quite that. It was finding something that you didn’t know you wanted, didn’t know you needed, and then suddenly it was there, and you couldn’t believe you hadn’t been looking for it all along.

Gabriel had spent his life knowing exactly what he wanted. Pursuing his goals with single-minded determination. And then along came Olivia. She’d stopped him in his tracks, and he’d circled tentatively, questioning, unsure, thinking that maybe this was something he wanted but the urge was too foreign to be taken at face value. Perhaps he was wrong, misinterpreting, confusing a need for companionship for a need for more. And then she kissed him, and he knew he wasn’t wrong. He was not wrong at all.

What he wanted to do most at that moment was seize it. Immerse himself in that kiss because that’s what it demanded—no thought, just feeling. And for the first few minutes, he was able to give it exactly that. But then he felt the spark of an emotion never properly developed, never truly part of his admittedly flat emotional landscape until recently. Until Olivia. The emotion he liked, perhaps, least of all.

Guilt.

It was not guilt at kissing another man’s lover. Gabriel could fathom such a response in only the most abstract way. A lover was not property. If Olivia chose to kiss him, that was her business. Perhaps, though, he should feel some guilt at the betrayal of someone who was—yes, admit it—a friend. For now, though, he really didn’t give a damn about Ricky. No, the guilt was for the niggling and growing acknowledgment that Olivia did give a damn about Ricky. That Olivia was not the sort of woman who’d kiss a man when she’d made a commitment to another. That if Olivia had not pulled away by now, then Olivia was not truly present, not truly awake, not truly and mindfully kissing him.

No, that’s not true. She opened her eyes. She looked at me. She said my name. Goddamn it, she said my name. Not Ricky. Not Gwynn. She knows exactly who she is kissing.

Was he sure?

Yes.

Then he shouldn’t mind checking.

Gabriel had witnessed children’s tantrums. In school. In shopping malls. In restaurants. A child howling at the universe because it did not give him what he wanted. Gabriel had never, even as a child, thrown such a tantrum, because he had not lived a life where he could presume the universe was in any way inclined to give him what he wanted. That wasn’t how life worked. But now he felt like those children, stomping his feet and clenching his fists and raging at the unfairness of it all.

She said my name. Mine, mine, mine.

And how would he feel later, if he discovered he’d been mistaken? What if, instead, she’d had too much to drink? If she’d been drugged? If she kissed him then, would he claim she said his name and that was enough?

No. He would not.

He could do many things to many people, but that was one offense he had never been remotely guilty of. However uncomfortable the act of seduction, however much he wished to get what he needed and disappear into the night, he had never even been tempted to walk into a bar and choose someone too inebriated to make a conscious decision to leave with him. If he wouldn’t do that to a stranger, he certainly wouldn’t do it to Olivia.