When Daniel put his arms around her.
She’d started sobbing immediately and breathlessly pleaded in his ear, “Don’t let them see this.” He’d hugged her harder and ducked his head, holding her as tight as he could without breaking her bones, but he couldn’t keep the press from noticing, everyone from noticing.
THE ICE MAIDEN CRACKS IN THE ARMS OF THE PRINCE!
How that story made headlines. Soon after, the press tried to pair them as a young couple—Daniel was twenty-four, Monica twenty. Monica bought a place on her own and asked him to stay away from her to let the speculation calm down.
Daniel knew the paparazzi weren’t to blame for this request.
The night before she left, Daniel hadn’t been able to merely hold her in his arms anymore. He’d kissed her cheek. Her jaw. Her temple. Her forehead. Told her how pretty she was … how much he wanted her.… And when he moved to fit his mouth to hers in the way he’d been dreaming of constantly, morning and night, she leaped out of bed and across the room, looking so genuinely startled Daniel had instantly backed off with an apology.
She began dating older men, and Daniel—wound up from two months of sleeping with Monica in his arms, warm and vulnerable and yet completely physically immune to him—forewent the dating and went straight to fucking, basically. Anything that he could. He tried kink, he tried variety, he tried screwing everything and anything that could help him forget those nights, that kiss-that-never-happened, that one girl.
Even with his more lasting involvements of a couple of weeks, Daniel was never again interested in knowing a woman like he knew Monica. Hell, those first few years, he could hardly talk to her, his frustrations flaring every time he saw her cool smile and guarded gaze, every one of their encounters causing him to react like a wounded beast who would go bury his pain between another woman’s legs.
He’d cursed himself for making a move on her for years, for it had taken that long to gain Monica’s trust back.
But all that calmed down with time. Now those evenings were in the past, and they’d gotten back to the point where they could be together comfortably for hours. They laughed, talked, sometimes didn’t have to say anything at all when they sporadically asked each other out to lunch. Daniel was a member of the board of Davenport’s, and he saw Monica every Thursday morning at the board meeting. Sometimes he was early, or stayed late … when he couldn’t quite quell the urge to see her.
Some of these times, he could tell she was eager to see him, as her eyes would flare warm as a summer sky.
Other times, their stares would keep searching the other’s across the boardroom table, and they’d both smile at each other when they clashed.
He could have her, he’d told himself for years. Yeah. He could have her if he wanted to. Maybe he just didn’t want to risk losing her friendship. Maybe he would rather settle for a little piece of her than nothing at all.…
Luke’s voice brought Daniel back to the present.
“I was your friend when all the shit went down between the two of you, Danny,” Luke said. “I read the papers. And when you were drunk, she was the only thing you’d talk about. I’m just saying if you’ve always wanted her, why not go for it?”
“Why the hell are you here so early anyway?” he demanded of Luke. “Can’t Mars men sleep?”
“Got to run off the alcohol in my system,” he said, with a shrug. “Before a family lunch with Peyton’s gang. But dude, last night when that woman came into the room, I had to step back so your boner wouldn’t strike me. So just go tell this bullcrap to some dimwit who wouldn’t know you from shit, dude.”
“I have a better idea. Stop minding everyone’s business and mind your own.”
“I’m not Chicago’s darling, baby. You are. Everyone wants to know what Danny Lexington is up to.”
“Whatever. Go run yourself to a stroke, why don’t you.”
Luke laughed and slapped his friend’s back, and Daniel cranked his neck and stalked outside to plunge into the Olympic-sized pool. He submerged all the way until touching bottom, then he came up for air and slicked his hair back. He heard a whistle as his trainer, Rico Manrico, snapped off some instructions, already thirsting for Daniel’s blood.
“Right,” he murmured, then swam to the side of the pool to start warming up, but his mind was swarmed with nothing but her, his body still primed, still aching for her, his brain replaying over and over the way she’d asked, as casually as only Monica Davenport could, “Will you have sex with me, Daniel?”
Jesus. And not only had she asked for sex, but she’d stripped for him, her figure ripe and tantalizingly provocative as she came the hell apart for him.
Last night he’d had his fingers in her pussy, and she’d been so seductively wet Daniel leaked into his pants all the goddamned time he held her on his lap, her buttocks scraping against his sex as she pushed her hips onto his fingers.
A fierce new erection tented his swim trunks as a fresh wave of heat overtook him. He’d tried to be controlled, friendly even, while every pore and fiber in his being had screamed with the need to feel every inch of her naked flesh against his. He’d wanted to taste her sweet mouth, to cup the soft, full mounds of her buttocks in his hands and squeeze them as he pumped every last drop of need inside her.
Of course she could not find pleasure in the men she dated.
They were companions to her, not lovers. They’d been shields to keep Daniel away, and it had worked. Daniel had been watching her with them for years, all the while telling himself that she would always be the Ice Maiden to them.
They didn’t understand her like Daniel did. She needed to be challenged, but not completely dominated. She needed to feel both trustful and protected, but not vulnerable. She sought weaker men to feel safe, but she didn’t realize she needed one that was stronger. She was used to pushing people away, and if you got too close, too fast, you were done for.
Daniel was nobody’s fuck buddy.
His buddies were men, all of them except Monica.
But last night he’d have done anything to get in bed with her and finish what he’d started so many years before, in a small twin bed in his parents’ guest bedroom.
He’d agreed to two weeks with her. Two weeks, where the line of physical distance she’d drawn for him a decade ago would be erased, where she would settle on his lap and pump her hips into his fingers and ask to take his shirt off, his pants off. God.