Illicit ✔

eight 🔥

It was like stepping into a fifties gentleman's club, minus the cigar scent and the ladies in mini-skirts distributing beverages.

Most of the clientele seemed to be of an age with her, either settled around tables imbibing in colorful cocktails, or chilling at the bar, spinning in their chairs, waving at her—

Oh.

Someone was waving at her, but it wasn't some ordinary patron. It was a handsome man with light brown skin, holding a clear drink in one hand, his other beckoning her forward.

He outshined other customers by a long shot. He didn't blend in, and didn't seem to care. His gaze was fixed on Coralie as she took a few more steps inside.

He was a blur, a mirage in a powder blue suit with a crisp white shirt unbuttoned at the top. Even if she hadn't recognized him at once, he would have intrigued her with his gentlemanly airs and his upright posture and his torso puffed out as he watched her.

His eyebrows arched and a smile spread over his lips as Coralie came close, close, closer. But as his features sharpened, as she deciphered the dots of green and hazel in his ocean eyes, as she identified the subtle creases in his forehead and noticed the different shades of brown and black and auburn in his beard, her heart stopped.

All manners of the usual love-at-first-sight style clichés raced through her brain. The time-stopping, transporting to another planet, everyone around her disappearing sensations all happened so fast they knotted her intestines and forced her to quit walking, to clutch at her gut, to picture herself rewinding, restarting. She almost wanted to turn tail and run out before he stopped her.

In his pictures throughout the years, she'd found him charming, well-built, a good-looking guy that she'd always adored. In the recent video-chats he'd revealed himself as even more good-looking, grown-up and confident as he'd never been in their teenage days. He made her laugh, always saying the right things to please her.

But this man before her, watching her try to stabilize herself as the ground seemed to break beneath her, was no man—he was a god. He had to be; a radiant glow glimmered around his outline and every inch of his exposed skin prompted her to want to touch it, kiss it, worship it until he responded to her every desire. Every muscle in her core screamed at her to jump into his big arms and beg him to take her away, to shove her against a wall and lift her dress and—

"Cora," he said, his minty mojito breath washing over her face, waking her from her lustful dream. "You okay? Come here!" He'd gotten up to come get her, and his hand wrapped around hers, worsening the haze his presence had stuffed her in. She suffocated on the inescapable sensuality that dripped from his every move.

"Ry... RyRy." As he tugged her closer, she felt gravity pulling her down. Her knees shook and her extremities tingled. She wanted to pinch herself—no way was she awake and experiencing this for real. It was like every single one of her fantasies about him had mashed together and exploded into brilliant, blinding fireworks.

Ryan fucking Bennett. The one she'd had questions about, the one she had unfinished business with, the one she'd never expected to resurface in her life so fast and with such intensity. The one she'd yearned to be with for twelve years, and who reanimated her frosted heart and woke lust and love and hunger in her abdomen.

He tilted her chin up, and when his fingers grazed her flushed face, when their gazes connected, every sensation that had already flipped her world upside-down intensified.

A fire burned in her rib-cage and she wasn't sure she could stand straight for much longer.

I can't believe this is happening.