Second Time Around by Portia Da Costa Read Free Book Online Page A

our teachers, the cute but quirky Mr. Laurence, who seems to have been in the wars, poor man, and now walks with a stick. He had us all laughing with a surprisingly funny math joke, and even though James seemed to be laughing along, when I glanced at him, he was smiling at me. Only at me. His eyes were steady, steel in the blue, and the way they speared into me made me tremble in my smart pumps, and a fresh rush of blood made my face and ears and chest turn rosy pink.
    I’m sweating now, when I look at him, and I can’t think straight. I thought I was over him that way. We grew apart. I can’t still want him, now we’ve split…or can I?
    And yet like a hunter, he’s watching me, sizing me up. As the chat goes on, I try glaring at him, to make him stop, but he only gives me that smile, that goddamn smile!
    “Drink, madam?”
    The server, superefficient, is at my elbow with more drinks. I have to hand it to my old classmate Caitlyn, her catering firm’s really organized this shindig to perfection. As I reach for more Chardonnay, I make a note to seek her out and congratulate her on a job well done. At least her future’s turned out well, she’s met her goals.
    But just as my fingers almost make contact with a glass, a hand catches me by the wrist, gentle but unyielding. I know that touch, even after three years of not feeling it, and I forget about my former classmates, I forget about wine, I forget about everything. There’s nothing in the world but the heat in those strong fingers, and a contact that’s intimately familiar, yet totally new.
    “Don’t have another,” James says very quietly, making me face him. His words don’t carry beyond the air between him and me, and I realize our companions have drifted away, as if sensing our tension. “We need to get out of here,” he goes on, “I think it’s time we talked.”
    I feel like a whirlwind inside. How dare he? He doesn’t have the right to order me around anymore. Not that he ever did. To my shame, it was me who always did the ordering, and far too damn much of it. I realize that now, but it doesn’t stop old, hard dying instincts from making me flare at him.
    “I don’t think we have anything to say, James,” I say airily, while the whirlwind picks up speed inside me, emotions spinning round and round, fueled by the mad, unexpected hormones pumping and sluicing through me.
    I want sex all of a sudden. Sex with my ex. It doesn’t make sense, but that doesn’t make the ache between my thighs less keen, the state of my nipples less peaked where they fight against the lace of my bra, suddenly too tight. The reunion party slips out of phase slightly and I see James naked again, in our shared bed, his thick cock risen and rampant.
    The sex was good, I can never deny that. Always satisfying. Plenty of orgasms. Even though James forever avoided confrontation with me, and that in turn made me confused, annoyed, desperate to goad him, he was nothing if not strong, and enduring, between the sheets.
    “Please, Willa, come on.”
    The words are old James, steady and nonconfrontational.
    But the tone is new James, all unyielding, dark and deliciously threatening. My world shifts around me and I allow myself to be led.
    Old classmates watch us as we cross the room.
    And why not? New James doesn’t look like old James either.
    Gone is the conservative suit, the understated shirt and tie, and the floppy banker’s hair. Now he’s in black jeans and a leather jacket, with a black silk shirt beneath, stark, uncompromising and macho. His hair is short, a bit spiky in the front, and his face is bronzed and healthy looking, rugged. He looks every inch the outdoorsman he’s become in the last three years, rather than the rather pale, harassed junior executive he was before we parted. Keeping track of him, I know his garden-design business is thriving. He’s doing far, far better for himself now than in the kinds of jobs I pushed him into to further our status as a