Barely able to contain his intense need, he pushed her back into the blanket and she opened her eyes, glassy and dazed with passion, giving him a lazy smile. “I love it when you lick me,” she said, and he nearly exploded at her sexy words.

“I love to lick you too,” he said, running his tongue over the light sheen of sweat between her br**sts, so tantalizingly displayed in the moonlight.

“I’m giving you permission,” she said as he suckled her, his shaft settling at the base of her slick passage.

He lifted his lips from her br**sts just long enough to say, “Permission to do what?”

Looking into his eyes with a wicked gleam, she said, “To bite me.”

Jason groaned and gently sank his teeth into the swell of her br**sts, willing himself not to explode as he slid into her cunt and the hot, silky passage enveloped him in a flood of wetness. She threw her head back with an expression of ecstasy as he pumped harder and harder into her, as she took him all the way to her core. Lifting his hips until only the very tip of his shaft remained inside her wet heat, he tried to stave off his orgasm. But when she arched her back so that her ni**les teased his lips, silently begging him to suck them, he couldn’t take it any more. Tasting first one breast and then the other, he put his hands on her hips and drove into her.

Their pelvises rocked frantically and her br**sts swelled between his lips as she neared her second powerful explosion. She milked him as she came, but even as he detonated within her Jason felt torn in two by his need for Emma. Just as he always had.

Fourteen

The song of the birds woke her, and as usual, Jason wasn’t in bed beside her. What she wouldn’t give to wake up in his arms. Their lovemaking at the winery had made her feel closer to him than she had since they’d last been truly close in college. Still, she felt that leaving her to wake up in an empty bed was his way of holding something back.

When she looked back at the picture of their lovemaking these past days, their sexual encounters had been far more exhibitionist than intimate. She wanted more than that. So much more.

Her muscles slightly sore from the aerobics of their lovemaking, she slid from beneath the duvet and stretched her arms above her head. She heard the squeaking of a chair on concrete and tiptoed over to the French doors, peering out into the garden.

A beautiful sight awaited her. Jason was sprawled across a chaise lounge, manuscript pages for what must have been a new cookbook balanced on his knees, and she longed to brush away the thick, dark locks that nearly covered his eyes.

He seemed so private, so untouchable, and she contented herself with this chance to observe the man she loved. And to think things over.

Last night she’d had her chance to ask him some questions. Namely, “Why areyou here with me?” just as he’d asked her. But she hadn’t wanted to go there, to delve too deep for one simple reason.

His answer had the power to hurt her more deeply than anything else.

Emma had escaped into the excitement and passion of Jason’s arms because her current life was crap.

She’d had nothing that was truly worth holding on to. Not until now. But she was well aware that it was a far different story for Jason.

He’d already had the perfect life, job, house, the perfect everything before she’d waltzed back in. Frankly, she wasn’t convinced that she wasn’t just making things worse for him. She knew she was distracting him from his work. He was a very busy, in demand man, and the fact that he was willing to give so much of his precious time to her meant a great deal.

Her cell phone rang, knocking her out of her musings. She reached into her purse, on the top of his dresser, and flipped open the top to see who was calling.

Her parents. Again. She didn’t want to answer it. Didn’t want to speak to them, but the way Jason had called her on her obvious avoidance of them, on the way she was hiding from their disapproval rankled.

Because it was so damn true.

She was determined to try and face her demons, one a time. Especially if it meant gaining Jason’s respect.

Taking a deep breath she said, “Hello.”

“Emma. Where are you?” Her mother didn’t wait for an answer, not when accusations and guilt were so much more fun. “We’ve been trying to reach you for nearly a week. Do you have any idea how worried sick we’ve been about you?”

“Mother,” Emma began, her brain whirring to come up with a way to explain the situation.

“That friend of yours, Katherine—”

“Kate.”

“As I was saying, Emma, we finally called that girl and she refused to tell us where you were. Refused!

Just wait until she’s a mother and her daughter runs off in the middle of a meal without a word to her parents about where she is going.”

Emma hated to hear her best friend be so mistreated. “She was only trying to protect me.”

Jane sniffed. “At least she told us you hadn’t been in a car crash. Your father nearly had a coronary over it all.”

Emma sorely doubted that. Her father was in better shape than most thirty-year-olds. But it was better to humor her mother than to give in to the snort of disbelief gurgling around in her throat.

“Tell Daddy I’m sorry.”

“You can tell him yourself tonight at dinner.”

“No!”

She couldn’t go back there. To her parents’ house, to her house, to her life. Not yet.

“Don’t raise your voice to me young lady.”

Letting herself lash out at her mother for the first time in, well, ever, Emma said, “If you haven’t noticed, I’m thirty-two, Mother. I’m not a little girl anymore who needs to tell you where I am every moment. I have my own life to live. And I’m living it!”

“I never thought I’d hear my own daughter speak to me like this. We raised you better than that.”

Emma tried to fight back the guilt at telling her mother off, but it was no use. She couldn’t change thirty-two years of behavior overnight. Even if she desperately wanted to.

“I’m in Napa. With Jason.”

Silence met her declaration. “Jason? You don’t know any Jason. Is he a new client?”

Emma hated to dash her mother’s hopes that this was only about business, but for the first time she wanted to come clean, no matter the repercussions. And she knew there would be consequences.

But if she denied being with Jason now to her parents, wasn’t it the same as turning her back on him in college?

“Jason Roberts. My friend from Stanford. He’s a chef now. A world-famous, incredibly talented chef.”