“You remember me touching you like this?”

  “It’s better than I remembered, Remi. It’s better than I dreamed. And I dreamed this moment so many times.”

  His eyes were closed and soft breaths escaped his slightly parted lips.

  “Tell me what you dreamed,” she said, gently rubbing the tip until she felt wetness.

  “What I dreamed?”

  “When I was a teenager, I used to dream about what my first time would be like. I was young and romantic and wanted my first time to be beautiful and special. But then I had a boring first time with a boring guy, because I was nineteen and I couldn’t wait any longer. But you had to wait. And now it’s time. So tell me how you wanted it, how you dreamed of it happening, and maybe we can make your dream come true,” she said.

  “Remi…”

  “Tell me please,” she said. “Let me do this for you.”

  Julien exhaled and opened his eyes.

  “I had a ton of fantasies. They were great distractions from real life. Real life sucked for a long time.”

  “How did you want it to happen?”

  “In my bed,” he said. “No fancy hotels, no castles or anything. When you’re in the hospital, your own bed becomes this symbol—home. Not just home but home-free. When they let you go home for good, it’s because you’re better. So being in my own bed at home would mean I was good, out of the woods. And that was a very sexy thought.”

  “Here we are, in your own bed. Anything else?” she asked as she kissed his neck.

  “I liked the thought of being on my back for the first time. But when you’re seventeen all you want to do is see breasts. Everywhere. All the time.”

  “That can be arranged,” she said. “What else?”

  “I dreamed…” he said and paused. “This is stupid.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “I dreamed that my first time would be with someone who was really happy to be my first time. And second. And third.”

  “It’s a good dream,” she said, running a hand down the center of his back. “I’m thrilled to be your first time and can’t wait for the second and third. So let’s make your dream come true.”

  Remi held her breath as Julien eased her panties down her legs. She was nervous which made no sense. He was the virgin, not her. But that was the reason, the one remaining rational part of her brain told her. She was nervous for Julien. She wanted him to enjoy every second of his first time. After all he’d been through, after what he’d survived, she wanted his first time to be perfect.

  She kicked her underwear off her ankle and opened her legs for him. He slid his hand up her thigh as he looked at her. The only light in the room came from the bedside lamp and the streetlights streaming in through the window. But it was light enough for him to see every part of her.

  “Good? Bad? Weird?” she asked, as he traced the seam of her labia with his fingertip.

  “Amazing,” he breathed. Remi smiled and settled deep into his bed and let him touch her. First he caressed her outer lips with his fingertips. When she whispered a desperate “please, Julien” he pushed one finger inside her. He closed his eyes for a moment as if wanting to focus solely on his sense of touch. “You’re so wet inside. And warm.”

  “I’m turned on. That’s what happens to women when we get turned on.”

  “I know. Doctor Salena gave me the lowdown on your down lows,” he said.

  “My down lows are grateful.”

  “God, you feel so good. I want you turned on like this all the time forever and ever,” he said, opening his eyes again.

  “I don’t think that’ll be a problem if I’m around you.”

  He pushed in a second finger and she sighed with pleasure and need. He went in deep and pulled out again, in and out, as she grew even wetter and hotter on the inside.

  She opened her legs even wider and Julien pushed in a third finger. Remi flinched with pleasure and Julien froze.

  “Don’t stop,” she said. “Everything you’re doing is good.”

  He nodded and pushed his three fingers into her again, in deep. She felt full and open, but not uncomfortably so. She wanted him to experience all of her, inside and out. He explored her with his fingertips, running them up and down the front wall. He hit a spot inside her, and Remi gasped loudly.

  “Good?” he asked.

  “Do it again,” she begged.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, laughing. He massaged her g-spot, grinding into it with gentle spirals that sent Remi’s hips rising off the bed. She grabbed the brass bar of the headboard behind her. So much tension built in Remi that she had to breathe deeply and slowly to keep from coming right then and there on Julien’s hand. It felt so good, she wasn’t ready for it to end yet. She’d had good sex before. Even great sex. But she’d never felt this open before, never been this wet and this aroused, and never wanted someone inside her so much in life.

  “What do you want me to do?” Julien asked, his voice as breathless as hers. “I want you to come.”

  “I’m really close,” she panted.

  “Tell me what you like,” he said. “I’m supposed to ask that.” He looked down at her with his dark eyes shining, his skin flushed, his lips wet and parted. She rose up and kissed him, needing to taste his mouth again.

  She reached between her legs and pulled his hand out of her. With her hand over his hand she guided him to her clitoris.

  “There,” she said. “Kissing here or touching here is how the magic happens.”

  “I want to make the magic happen,” he said, lightly gripping her clitoris between his thumb and forefinger.

  “That…” Remi collapsed onto her back again, “is magical.”

  She could feel her clitoris swelling even more under his touch. Lost as she was in the ecstasy, she barely noticed him sliding down the bed until she felt his tongue on her. He pushed three fingers back into her as he sucked on the tight knot. Remi twined her fingers through his soft hair and held his neck gently as he pumped his fingers into her and licked her simultaneously. No amount of deep breathing could stop her from coming now. Her entire body went stiff and still for what felt like an eternity as Julien lapped at her with the hunger of a starving man.

  With one hoarse cry, Remi came, her inner muscles fluttering hard and deep inside her, the muscles twitching around Julien’s fingers, her clitoris throbbing against his tongue.

  “Stop,” she said and Julien immediately pulled his fingers from her and sat up.

  “You okay?” He sounded almost scared.

  “More than okay. I am incredible.” She slowly opened her eyes.

  “That was the sexiest thing ever,” Julien said, cupping her breast with his wet fingers. Her nipples had grown more sensitive with arousal. The heat from his hand seeped deep into her skin. She never wanted him to stop touching her.

  “It’s not always easy to make a woman orgasm. You should be proud of yourself.”

  “I plan on doing it again as soon as you let me.” Julien pinched her nipple and rolled it between his fingers.

  “Your turn,” she said, laying a hand on the side of his face. “Ready?”

  Julien heaved a breath and she felt a slight tremor pass through his body. Her heart galloped inside her chest at the look of trust and need on his face. She pulled him close and kissed him again. She didn’t have the words to tell him how much it meant to her that he wanted her to be his first, so she tried to tell him with the kiss.

  As they kissed she rolled him onto his back. She pushed her hips into his hips, sliding her wet and open body over his erection. The tip of his penis nudged the entrance of her vagina. Without breaking the kiss she pushed back. As wet as she was the tip slid right in. Julien raised his hips and inch-by-inch he entered her completely.

  Remi placed her hands on either side of Julien’s shoulders and pulled back from this kiss. His eyes were closed, his lips slightly parted. She pushed against him again and his shoulders rolled off the bed.

  “Remi,” he panted. She’d never loved the sound of her name so much as when he said it.

  “Hold my hips,” she whispered, not wanting to break the spell of the moment.

  He took her hips in his large strong hands and held them tight as she moved on him. She kept the pace slow and easy, letting Julien getting used to being inside a woman before taking things further. Looking down, she saw where their bodies united and became one. Julien was looking too.

  She took a deep breath. She would start slow with him, let him feel everything as she moved on him. Remi tried to feel nothing herself as she rode him with each sway of her hips, each undulation. His hands held her thighs and she let him set the pace of her movements at first, the rhythm of their joining.

  Joining…that was it. She couldn’t think of what they did in this bed together as fucking although she knew that’s what the world would call it. She’d fucked him with her eyes the moment she’d seen him again for the first time in four years standing in his doorway. He’d fucked her with his fingers moments ago as she’d lay splayed open for him against his pillows. He’d fucked her with his mouth and now she fucked him for the first time in his short life that could have been so much shorter—a thought that terrified her so much her own terror terrified her. But it didn’t feel like fucking to her even as the room grew warm from their bodies and sweat trickled down her back and his fingers smelled of her arousal and his mouth tasted of her desire. She licked it off his lips.

  Joining was the word that echoed in her blood. For four years their two families had pushed apart from each other—a foolish drunken quarrel that forced everyone to pick a side and go to war. But here on these pale gold sheets where Julien Brite’s body disappeared inside Remi Montgomery, the fight they’d accidentally began one foolish night ended inside her.

  Remi pressed her palms onto Julien’s chest and drove her pelvis into his with concentrated effort, clenching her inner muscles tightly around him. She wanted him to feel everything as she rode him. His back bowed underneath her, his length deep in her, hot and hard. She ground into him, against him, on him with a renewed frenzy while beneath her Julien gasped and breathed and gasped again. He’d lost control of himself too and nothing could stop him from lifting his hips in short hard pulses as if seeking to tunnel as far into Remi as possible.

  Their bodies were slick with sweat. She could hear the wetness that sealed him to her with each movement. The heat grew almost unbearable. She felt lightheaded even as a heaviness settled into her lower body. Julien latched onto her right breast and sucked her nipple with desperate hunger. They had promised tonight last names would be banished. She was Just-Remi and he Just-Julien. But in that moment when he was inside her vagina and she inside his mouth, they couldn’t possibly be more joined to each other. Even their first names disappeared and they became nothing but a man and a woman driving their need into each other, taking their pleasure from each other, and surrendering their lives to each other.

  Julien’s head fell back onto his pillow, his lower back arching off the bed as he came inside her, filling her up with his semen that shot into her, coating the walls that clasped him. As he came, Remi rode him into the bed with wild movements that brought her to the edge and left her hanging there. Julien emerged from his haze long enough to press two fingers into her clitoris so deep they almost slid inside her. The touch, rough but necessary, sent her falling over the edge. She collapsed onto his chest as her second climax shook her to the core.

  Haltingly and carefully, they disentangled from each other. A pure pervasive exhaustion suffused her entire being. She could do nothing but roll onto her back and let the night air cool her burning skin. Julien’s wetness poured out of her, glazing her thighs and staining the sheets. She did the math and realized it was nearly six in the morning back in Kentucky. She wanted to stay up all night with Julien but her body wouldn’t let her. Tomorrow they would do this again and again and again.

  Remi waited for Julien to speak, to laugh or sigh or to congratulate himself in some way for divesting himself of his virginity, and with an older woman too. It was what she’d expect from any young man who’d fought long and hard to live long enough to experience a night like tonight. But he wasn’t just any young man.

  “We’re going to get in huge trouble for this, aren’t we?” Julien asked.

  She smiled at the ceiling. In this torrid hour when he should have been thinking of sex and passion and conquest and everything that had happened and would no doubt happen again between them, instead he thought of her, of them, of what the future held, and what price they’d be asked to pay for what they’d done. Their families were very likely making a lot of money for stoking a very ugly rivalry in the press, and with one act, Remi and Julien had just merged the two families.

  “With who?” she asked.

  “Our-” he began and stopped. She heard his laugh, felt the bed move with it, then felt the bed move again as he lay on his side and rested his hand on her still quivering stomach.

  “No one,” he said. “No one at all.”

  Just-Remi fell asleep minutes later, her back tucked against Just-Julien’s chest. Far too soon she would be a Montgomery of Arden Farms again. Far too soon he would be a Brite of Capital Hills again. But tonight in this bed that bore the last remnants of his virginity, she took on another identity—the only one that mattered.

  His.

  A Fool's Paradise

  Remi awoke with the first light and found Julien already awake and sitting by the window. He had something in his hands—a book or magazine. She couldn’t tell. She looked at him sitting in the sunlight. In the glint of the morning she could see every inch of the long pink scar on his chest. Nothing scared Remi—not spiders, not snakes, not jumping horses, not anything. But the idea that she’d almost lost Julien before she’d found him again—that terrified her. She said a silent prayer of thanks he’d survived his battle with cancer, which made this morning and every other morning she planned to wake up with him possible.

  “Morning already?” she asked, pulling the covers over her breasts and sitting up.

  “Unfortunately,” he said. In nothing but his pale blue boxer shorts, he walked over to the bed and leaned in for a kiss. “Good morning.”

  “Morning breath,” she said.

  “Don’t care,” he said and kissed her hard and deep before pulling back and smiling at her. “I woke up without my stupid virginity hanging over my head. You think a little morning breath is going to bother me?”

  “Your virginity was hanging over your head?” Remi asked. “And I thought hymens were weird.”

  Julien laughed and pulled her into his arms. Remi sighed, deeply contented despite the lingering worry in the back of her mind. She couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Julien, and yet she could only stay in Paris so long before everyone back home got dangerously suspicious.

  “Thank you for last night,” he said, kissing her neck and her shoulders.

  “I should thank you. That was amazing,” she said. “It might have been your first time, but it was my best time.”

  “Best time? Are we talking sex or races?”

  She laughed again. “Sorry. Hard to get my head out of the business.”

  “You really run things at Arden, don’t you?” Julien stretched out next to her in bed. He slid his hand under the sheets and rubbed her hips and thighs.

  “I do. At least I thought I did before all this mess. Mom and Dad have been running the show behind my back. I’m more than a little pissed off about that.”

  “I don’t blame you,” he said. “I’m pretty pissed too. I don’t know how bad this could get, but I know when there’s gambling and race-fixing and professional sports involved, it can be…”

  “A disaster,” she completed for him. “Pete Rose banned from baseball. Lance Armstrong stripped of his medals and jerseys. Reggie Bush giving back the Heisman.”

  “You know so much more about sports than I do.”

  “You’re not a typical guy, are you, Julien?” Remi asked.

  “In the hospital, the nurses would hang out in my room with me longer if I had soap operas on. And my sisters would visit and that’s what they wanted to watch. That and Grey’s Anatomy. I put my foot down over that one. I had enough hospital drama in my own life.”

  Remi almost smiled, but she saw Julien wasn’t joking.

  “That must have been lonely,” she said. “Being in the hospital all the time.”

  “Mom and Dad worked their asses off with the farm. My sisters were in school. I don’t blame them. They loved me and visited me every chance they got. But still I was alone a lot. My brain was my best company.”

  Remi wrapped her legs around him.

  “If I had known you were in the hospital by yourself, I would have visited you every day,” she said and meant it. “I would have hung out with you and watched sports with you and made sure you never ever had to watch General Hospital. I don’t care what my parents would have said about it, I would have been there for you.”

  “You were there for me. Sort of,” he said, and Remi noticed a faint blush on his cheeks.

  He got out of bed and walked to the window seat. When he came back to the bed he held a magazine in his hand.

  “That’s a Horse & Hound magazine, Julien,” she said. “You are doing porn the wrong way. Let me get you a Playboy subscription, please. Or introduce you to the Internet.”

  Julien grinned and flipped through the worn and wrinkled pages.

  “Mom brought me her old magazines to read in the hospital. Remember this issue?”

  Remi glanced at the cover. It did look familiar to her.

  “Yeah, I did dressage for years. I won a medal when I was twenty-two.”

  “And you and your team got a photo spread in Horse & Hound,” Julien said. “Look at that.”

  He flipped to a page near the center of a magazine.

  “Who is that smoking hot chick in the riding clothes?” he asked, pointing at a smiling blonde girl in buckskin jodhpurs, a white shirt with a gold pin through her stock tie, a chocolate-colored coat, buff leather riding gloves and black riding boots. The young woman had her hair plaited in an elegant French braid and wore no make-up but tasteful pale pink lip-gloss.