“How’s your mom?” Ciro asks while we’re on his balcony, overlooking the Valley with all the lights flickering and dying as people and businesses go to sleep.

“She’s okay. Hasn’t had another bright idea since that last time.”

“I’m sorry about all of my shit when you should be concentrating on her.”

“So why are you stalking me?” I float a look at him and take the glass he hands over, the one with a refill of rosé.

“Because I’m selfish.” His chin does a small, boyish lurch upward I don’t think he realizes that he does. It draws my eyes down to the miniscule indentation in his chin. Golden stubble. Not much, never much. Just enough to make me shut my eyes for a second, blocking him out.

“I need you in my life more than I’ve needed anyone.”

I open my eyes. “More than Silk?”

“Oh yes, more than Silk.”

I lean back in my chair. Send a stray gaze out over the Valley because I’m trying so hard to remain unaffected. “Since you have me—”

“I have you?” His elbows go on the table, a drizzle of silken hair covering the lower half of his arms and begging for my cheek to brush over it. I’ve done that before. I’d love to do that again.

I close my eyes against his hopeful expression. Why did he light those candles? I wish he hadn’t. We’re exes with broken hearts. Circumstances don’t want us together. Suck it up. I’m like Silk now.

I meet his eyes as soon as I’m in control of myself. “No, I mean, since I’m here now, tell me more about Silk.”

“I thought you were here to learn about tomorrow?”

“First things first.”

His fingers, his hand, his bicep. Every contour of his arm as he raises it. I know I’m crumbling his privacy with a single sentence, first things first. Someone with an arm like that shouldn’t have to breach out of his comfort zone to appease me, someone he doesn’t even have anymore.

It makes me feel small like I’m on some sky bridge, extended above a valley, an ocean, the world, but he’s pushing himself, and I know why.

“You want to hear about Silk?”

“Yeah.” I’m cruel. I’m Maleficent. There are goosebumps on his arms, and those golden hairs raise from them. “You want to go inside?”

“We could turn on the heating lamps.”

“I’m good with inside. I’m not afraid of you.” I wink at him. Strange that.

I saw him struggle. Now I see him relieved. Ciro is a mind reader of me. If I pledged a religion, I’d choose one that believed in reincarnation, because how else do I read him as well as he reads me?

The living room isn’t as cozy as the sunroom. The sunroom is where we first—

The sunroom has memories.

Princess whines. It’s late, and she wants to retreat to his bedroom.

“Kitchen?” he says, and I wish he didn’t say it in a hoarse voice. It’s so sexy to me. As he turns to shush Princess, I get a view of his profile, his Greek god profile. It doesn’t matter. I’d date a troll if he treated me the way Ciro does.

“Shit!” It ricochets out of me, and Ciro doesn’t ask why. He just watches me with a hand on Princess’ head.

“Sorry,” I say. “I... My head is going amok with you.” It’s the sincerest I’ve been in ages. “You drive me crazy. You know that?”

He opens his mouth, but I shut him up with a hand in the air. “I’m not happy. You’re not happy. At least let’s make Princess happy. It doesn’t have to mean anything. Your bed is giant. She can fall asleep on it and be content, and you and I can talk.”

He nods slowly, gaze trailing over my features like it always does, assessing my mood every minute we’re together. Fuck. Again. How can someone be this perfect and not perfect at all?

My Ciro is not imperfectly perfect. He’s simply perfect and absolutely wrong at the same time. What normal girl in this universe can accept the way he shares himself?

God, his desire-colored sheets are inviting. He pulls out a drawer beneath his bed and throws four, five, six new pillows at me in quick succession. It’s comedic relief. It makes me breathless. And when his eyes glitter from my amusement, my throat clogs.

He places me against the wall of pillows as if he thinks I’m made of paper. He’s seen me crumpled lately. Maybe that’s why. I’m not a paper doll, but I still let him. His eyes look like he’s never seen me before, like I was Eve and he hasn’t seen me since then.

I didn’t know breaths could do hiccups. I’ve seen so little. I’ve been with so few. Heck, he might not be that special. Maybe this is exactly how grown men are when they’re in love with a woman? My brain screams to get real, to try someone else, to prove my body wrong and find something easy and good and nice.

“Comfy?” When the corners of his mouth raise a fraction, his lips create a mauve protrusion at its center. Tonight, in this candlelight, they are arresting.

“You don’t have to treat me like I’m breakable.”

He settles in next to me. “I treat you like you deserve, and it’s not because you’re fragile.”

“You’re killing me.” I mean it.

“I don’t want to kill you. I want to be the one who makes you happy. I’m yours, heart and soul.”

“Stop it.” I push his hand away before it reaches my face. I feel exposed. I feel too covered up. Damn you, body, enemy of sane, steady presents.

“Your reality is so twisted. You want to be exclusive with me?” God, I scream it. “Do you want to be exclusive with me?”

The room rings with silence, the antithesis of my head. My pants puff, cooking blood in my veins and making me lightheaded. At the foot of the bed, Princess cocks her head with kind eyes the color of her owner’s.

He knows better than to reach for me, my beautiful man who cheats for a living and got himself tossed out of my life.

“I am exclusive with you.”

Lies, all lies, and not depending on the eye that sees. These are lies according to every set of moral standards I know. My breath moves in and out too fast, and he looks at my mouth, alarmed. Ciro doesn’t ask me to stop hyperventilating today. Doesn’t cover my mouth with his hand. I work to slow down on my own.

“I’ve always been exclusive with you. My heart, my mind, my thoughts. They’re all with you even when my body works for a living.”

“Quit talking like that.”

“Can I hold you?”

“No!”

He leans back against our shared cushions, but his hand squeezes his other hand instead of me. The space between us makes my stomach contract painfully.

Eyes on Princess’ confused face, I move closer. First an inch. Then another. Ciro doesn’t speak while I keep sliding, sliding, surely into place. Pride can be overridden.

The heat of him bleeds into my body, and his arm bows over my shoulder and tightens me against him. He wards off the world outside—just, the world wasn’t what made me cold. It was him.

He holds me. The feeling is pink cotton warmed in a towel dryer, bliss for a broken heart.

“This means nothing.” Sluggishly, I lift my head and turn my face. And then I’m nostrils deep in the soft aroma of the skin beneath his ear.

“Don’t get any ideas,” I sigh and feel him barely shake his head.

He twists enough to kiss the top of my head. “No ideas. You’re okay.”

“So Silk.” My energy is depleted, but the words still come out loud enough. “Let’s just say what you told me about her and your relationship comes off a little different to me now.”

“It does?”

“Duh. She wasn’t just an insecure, jealous wife.”

Just his breath in my hair. No attempt at a defense.

“I can fill in the blanks of your Mad Lib now. You weren’t just stars. You were porn stars. Both doing well in the business. When you worked on different films, it rattled her hard when you didn’t come home at night.”

“I couldn’t come home at night because I was in a different city for work.”

“Same difference, don’t you think?” My voice has a soft, detached sound.

“Same and different, like our pasts. I was the lonely, rich kid with too much testosterone and overbearing parents. But Silk’s past was so beyond comparison it made me seem lucky.”

“What do you mean?”

“Silk was trafficked to the U.S.”

“What? As in…?’”

“As in human trafficking, Savannah.”

“You’re joking.”

“I wish. She got out thanks to her last buyer. She was sixteen when they kidnapped her. Eighteen when her last owner had her tracker removed and set her free. She and I weren’t big on rehashing our pasts, but there was no hiding that she was deeply scarred from what she’d been through.”

“How?”

“She had night terrors. What seemed like irrational fear of everyday objects and tools. Things like that.” His arm hooks me closer, and I don’t flinch away when he kisses the corner of my mouth.

“Her owners, did they sexually exploit her?”

“Yes.”

“Wow. I can’t even fathom. I’m so sorry.”

“She found the adult film industry quickly after she was let go. I starred in her fifth film, and when we worked, there was instant chemistry. We took on common projects as much as our film companies allowed, and she found peace in me for a while there. It was good. Then, we shacked up in this weekly motel for a bit. She wanted me around all the time, but that wasn’t possible due to our work schedules. Silk was brought in to Lucid more than I was, while I had my full-length films to tend to.”

“And that’s when it slid out?”

“In the beginning, we were fine. We had these talks about trusting each other and how our jobs were just our jobs. We agreed we were in the same position. I guess it was easier for her to mean that while we were in each other’s arms.” His lashes lower in a slow blink.

“I proposed to Silk to make her understand that she was my only girl, and she was so happy. That lasted for the first few months after we got married. But later… it got a little sick in the end. Nothing I said helped, and she finally started showing up on my sets. I knew I couldn’t do it anymore when Silk flung a beer bottle at one of my colleagues and the girl needed stitches afterward.”

“Wow. She lost it.”

“Yeah. It wasn’t good for her to go onset when I was working without her.”

“Do people ever bring their significant others to... um, work?”

“I know of a couple of husbands who visit sometimes but none who stay for the shoot unless they’re a part of it.”

I shake my head, all these associations running through my brain. “What about you? Did you ever have to share her onset?”

“No.”

“Oh. So always just the two of you on film.”

“No, we’d work with others too sometimes, but her love was for me and no one else. I never had to worry about that.”

“So even if you were with her and another guy in the scene, for instance—”

“—or several. Or with other girls. Yeah.”

I can’t relax in his arms anymore. Unconsciously, I’m putting myself in that situation, the girlfriend having to trust that he loved me and not the girls he has sex with in front of the camera. Red jealousy stirs in my chest, and it’s darkening by the second.

I sit up in an attempt to shake it off and focus on Princess, who crawls upward surreptitiously like she knows she’ll be scooted off the bed if her master notices. She’s so obvious, my comedic relief. When Ciro doesn’t object, she rolls to her back, showing the pink of her belly and wanting a rub. I smile and give it to her.

“So you filed for divorce?”

“I did, and she hated it. I moved out. We had a few confrontations over the first weeks that made it difficult for me to earn a living. Thankfully, the owner of one of the companies I worked for, a former star herself, was understanding. She helped me with a place to sleep the first weeks and basically put the studio on lockdown whenever I worked so Silk couldn’t come in.

“Oh geez. Silk was stalking you?”

“Naw, I wouldn’t call it that.” His gaze moves over my face and rests on my eyes. “She was just my ex-wife who took a while getting over things. She’s fine now.”

“No incidents onset in London?”

“London was cool. We were in a single scene together, and her only job was to verbally abuse me and slap my face.” He chuckles. “I think she liked it.”

“I’d do well in that role,” I say.

“I can think of a few roles you’d be even better in with me.”

I gasp and glare at him, and Ciro lets out a laugh. “You look so hot right now. Your eyes are Betty-Boop-sized.”

“You’re so rude!”

“And for that I apologize.” He bobs his head with fake sincerity. “It doesn’t change the fact that you’d be damn amazing under me in a film. I think we’d be the new knockout sensation, making the entire world of porn aficionados serial-orgasm on the spot.”

“Shut up!” I throw my hands in the air in search of a better comeback. It doesn’t come to me, so I flounder aimlessly. He watches until he can’t take it anymore and bursts into laughter.

“Come here.” He hauls me in. I struggle and slap his hands in quick succession—slap, slap, slap, slap—the sound flat and insignificant. It makes even me snicker for a second.

He’s got me on my back, pulled up between his legs and with my face open for attack. He leans down and kisses me. Slowly at first, absorbing my puffed anger, then deeper. My breathing quiets as I taste him back. Just one more kiss. Nothing changes with that.

My pulse thickens, claiming more air as his hands move down along my ribs. He caresses, draws gentle fingers up and down through our kiss. My body knows what he’s doing, and it’s already prepared.

“You like this,” he hums, hands drawing a pattern over my stomach until it finds my navel. I arch in response. “My belly-button girl.”

I don’t know why it’s so erotic to me—I didn’t know until Ciro discovered it.

I let out a sigh. It’s the kind that means I give up. That too, he learned first. All those hours with sexual communication, of the verbal type that made me blush and wish we could simply get down to business. Oh it’s paying off now. At my sigh, that one big freeing one, his hesitation is gone, and so is my shirt.

My bra is too tight, and I need it off. I don’t have to tell him. Gently he helps me, and I shudder out my relief when he cups my breasts and kneads them with a groan of appreciation. Strong arms flip me, hold me out above him, while he delves in and laps a searing trail down my throat to my boobs. He suckles, elongating nipples that are already stiff with desire.

“You’re delicious,” he groans. “I can’t get enough of you. I fucking love you.” He bends off the mattress, his member bruising me and sending a rush of pre-orgasmic bliss through me. Firm hands press me against him, a zig-zagged band that leaves no air between us.

My butt juts upward automatically when the same hands roll my skirt down together with my underwear and find that secret fissure leading to my holiest.

“Good. Oh yes, you’re warm and ready,” he hisses at my ear. The sensation of slickness being spread through my folds is enough for me to moan out a plea for mercy.

He doesn’t tease me. Just finds a condom with one hand and only lets go for seconds to put it on before he eases in deeply and his grip moves to my face. “So. Fucking. Sweet.”