Page 23 of Tides Of Your Love (Riviera Shores #3)

Owen

YOU DIDN’T FOOL ME , Rio. You wanted it just as much. And keeping each other at arm’s length? That was never going to last.

I went to bed with her that night, anyway.

She wasn’t there in body, but she was in my mind, in my blood—maturely beautiful as she was now, dissolving against me like she had back then.

Every touch. Every gasp, moan, and sigh.

Every taste of her lips, every revelation beneath her clothes of the Rio I hadn’t known before that night.

My hands and lips had mapped her, learning every inch of skin—the soft roundness of her breasts, the hardness of her nipples, the yielding curve of her neck, the smooth skin of her stomach, the tender strength of her thighs, and the taste of the wet, pulsating heat between them.

If I wasn’t too busy chasing her ghost with my own hand alone in my bed tonight, I might have been surprised by how much I remembered.

Sixteen years, and yet that night lived in my bones.

And now—now fresh memories from just two hours ago layered over the old ones, turning my resolve to stay away from Rio into nothing but ashes.

And I knew, with unrelenting certainty, that I would set everything in flames if she let me.

Win. Lose. I didn’t care. I had to have her.