ISBN 978-1-408-91455-7

      Version: 2020-08-17

      MILLS & BOON

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      Chapter 1

      The dream comes, as it has for as long as she cares to remember, rolling over her like a tsunami. It comes despite everything she’s tried to stop it. Meditation, medication, fornication.

      Nothing works.

      Since the night he came into her life, the night he changed everything and then disappeared, the dream has haunted her.

      Her body weeps for him, damp and hot with the aftermath of the dream. She never comes in the dream, but her body aches for release, her nipples pebbling with desire for his lips.

      She wakes each time on the edge, her back arched, her arms reaching, screaming for it, for him, for the orgasm she’s done without for almost three years.

      Waking up hurts.

      She’s tried sex—well, of course she has. She’s tried deep-down dirty sex, sex with strangers, sex with friends, sex with toys, sex with almost anyone or anything. But like the dream, she gets so far and no further.

      She can hang on the edge for what seems like forever, her body dripping and reaching for more. Please, please, more, she hears herself sobbing, feeling more than a little like Oliver Twist and wishing—even with all the hell she’ll have to go through to get to it—for his happy ending.

      On the edge, her legs shake, her teeth score her lips until they bleed. She looks down at her body, at her rose-red painfully hard nipples, her blush-pink skin, her legs sprawled as far open as she can get them, and more often than not, a head she doesn’t recognize between them.

      No matter how talented the tongue—and she’s become an connoisseur since him—she can’t come.

      Now she understands the agony represented by the term “blue balls”—three fucking years’ worth of it.

      “No medical reason for it,” more than a dozen doctors have told her. GPs, gynecologists, psychiatrists—they do the tests, they hem and haw, and then they say, “Sorry, nothing we can do.”

      Except, of course, for the psychiatrists, who would love more than anything to put her through the therapy wringer until she bleeds her childhood, her extremely active and sometimes dangerous sex life, her dreams and desires.

      But Miri will not submit herself to that invasion. She’s full to the brim with self-knowledge.

      Yes, her childhood was shit—wasn’t everyone’s? Yes, it made her the woman she is today. No surprise there.

      Yes, she’s had a varied, mostly entertaining, occasionally frightening sex life for almost thirty years. And she wouldn’t trade it for anything. There were a few encounters—if she had it to do over—she might decide not to indulge in again. She might tamp down her darker side just a little bit, but having lived through them, she is more than content to keep the memories.

      As for dreams and desires? Only one of each.

      Not enough, she tells herself, for a psychiatrist to enjoy though she’s fooling herself. They’d love them.

      The dream and the desire to get off the fucking edge, to fall—as she used to on a more-than-regular basis—deep into the full body pleasure of orgasm.

      God, she misses it with the intensity of an addict. She’s jonesing for it, for the way her entire body heats up as she climbs toward the peak, the way she can never stop herself—if he, whoever he is, hasn’t already taken care of it—from reaching for her straining nipples with dampened fingertips.

      She loves the first touch of her fingers on them: a gentle stroking of the aerole, though that gentleness never lasts long. She rolls her lengthening nipples in her fingers, then pinches, softly at first, one and then the other—a sharp squeeze—hard enough to sting, to send a quiver of heat right through her.

      The slide of tongue in her mouth, on her belly, her thighs. She’s open for it, for him, wet and hot and fragrant. She’s panting, but forces herself to take deep breaths when she can—the scent of her own arousal, the strongest aphrodisiac she knows.

      She’s shaking, writhing with an ecstasy that’s almost pain. So close, so ready. She needs him inside her, needs that final thrust, but she’s almost there. Miri knows if she reaches down with a saliva-moistened fingertip, she can push herself over. But she doesn’t do it. She waits for him, for that added sensation of fullness.

      She remembers so clearly the rush of blood to her clitoris, the buzzing at her pulse points as her heart beats harder, the anticipation of the delicious soreness she’ll feel in a few hours, a reminder of her body’s disregard for posture when in this place.

      She sighs as she remembers the sweet arch of her back, the strain as she tries to prolong the moment.

      Because before him, before the dream, she wanted the edge, craved the thrill of it—knowing the longer she held out, the better the orgasms would be, the longer they’d last—until the pleasure overwhelmed it.

      Now all she craves is the fall.