“Are you all right?”

Darius’s voice pierces the bubble of my thoughts. Well, really more like a cloud of them. A storm cloud gathered around my head, buzzing with warnings. Someone’s going to find out. Your parents are going to be furious. The media is going to have a field day with this.

You’re betraying everything you’ve worked for.

I cough to clear my throat and drag myself out of that mire. I glance around at the fields we’re walking through. After our steamy hot, extremely dirty shower, I wound up needing another shower. Darius and I shared one, in fact, taking turns soaping one another up and rinsing down. But after we stepped out of that shower, it felt like I woke up from a spell. Or maybe I just broke through the lust that had been clouding my decision-making capabilities all day.

I finished dressing at record speed, and hurried out the door of the little field shower house, which luckily for both of us was still abandoned and empty at that time of day—no lingering witnesses around to overhear us fucking so loudly in a public bathroom.

What the hell is wrong with me?

Now we’re halfway back to the hotel, me walking so fast that Darius practically has to sprint to catch up, and here he is catching my arm and spinning me to face him, gazing at me with dark eyes that pierce right through to my soul.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Of course. What do you mean?” I blurt in response, lifting one eyebrow. Falling back on sarcasm, my usual and favorite defense.

“Well, you’ve been quiet for several minutes straight,” he points out. “That might be a new record for you.”

I groan and punch his shoulder lightly. “You are such a jerk.”

“I might be a jerk, but I’m a jerk who just made you come three times in a row,” he says.

My cheeks flush, remembering the last time. Halfway through our soapy shower cool-off, he pressed me up against the back wall of the shower and fingered me until I came again, screaming his name that time, completely fucking shameless. “Yeah, well, you seemed to be enjoying yourself just about as much,” I reply.

“Believe me, I was.” He grins. “Which is why I don’t intend to let this finish yet. You can hate my guts all you want, Holly Spring, but you and I? We have unfinished business. And I’m nowhere near done with you.”

I shake his arm off of my shoulder and turn back toward the hotel. “This isn’t happening again, Darius. It was a one-time thing. A fluke.”

“Trust me, Holly, nothing about what has happened between us was a one-time thing.”

“France was a one-time deal,” I answer without thinking. Then I wince, as for a moment I see genuine hurt cloud his face.

But it vanishes almost before I can register it’s even there. “How do you figure?” he asks, one eyebrow raised.

“We never kissed again after that,” I point out.

“Really. So what was it we just did in that bathroom, hold hands?” He smirks.

I narrow my eyes. “Okay, so we didn’t kiss again for years after that first kiss. By my estimate, that means you and I might hook up again in another, oh, decade.”

“I have a feeling you’re going to be hungry for me again long before a decade is up, Holly.”

I ball my fists, wanting nothing more than to wipe that self-satisfied, over-confident smirk off his face. But part of me quells, because deep down, I worry he might be right. “We’re not doing this, Darius. Hell, there isn’t even a we. This was just a hookup. It was fun, but it’s nothing more than that. A little bit of fun in between the business we both came here to do.”

“We’ll see about that,” is all he replies. “See you soon, Holly.” With that, and a knowing twinkle in his eyes, he turns and strides up toward the hotel now, leaving me standing alone in the middle of the grassy field, wind blowing my hair into my eyes so strongly that I can’t even properly glower at him.

He doesn’t know anything, I tell myself, long after he’s vanished from sight inside the distant, dark hotel building. Only after he’s safely tucked away inside do I allow myself to approach. And even then, my stomach feels like it’s hovering somewhere around my throat, both tight with the mingled fear and anticipation of seeing him again.

Part of me wants to. Part of me wants to tell him to go fuck himself. To say he doesn’t know anything; that I know better than he does. We aren’t going to have sex again. We aren’t going to do anything again, except maybe fight like we used to.

But another part of me knows better. Another part of me knows that if I see him, I’m going to start feeling all those same things again, just the way I did before we fucked in the showers earlier today. I’m going to start to fantasize about him. I’ll start picturing that rock-hard chest of his, his chiseled abs and perfect pecs.

His huge fucking cock.

I stop in front of the big double doors into the hotel and glance at myself in the mirrored reflection of the doors. Then I wipe a bead of sweat from my brow. I look good. Flushed, bright-eyed, hot. Freshly fucked. Why is it that sex always makes me more confident in myself; makes me look into a mirror and say fuck yeah afterward?

And I’ve never had sex as scorching hot as I did just now. Darius might be an asshole know-it-all and a jerk, but he knows his way around a woman. The way his tongue felt between my thighs… The way he held me up easily, as if I weighed nothing at all, pinning me against that shower door to fuck me until I screamed…

God, at this rate, I’m going to need another shower again before I even make it to my room, I think as I yank open the door to the hotel almost angrily.

Then I hesitate on the threshold, struck by another thought. My room. Which is right next to Darius’s room. Fucking hell. I’m going to be sweating all goddamn weekend, thinking about him on the other side of that door. Wondering if he’s fantasizing about me, stroking himself as he thinks about me. Wrapping a fist around that thick, hard cock of his and gripping hard, stroking until he comes hard, the same way he came inside me earlier, filled me up so much that when we stepped apart his cum spilled down my thighs in a steady trickle, so hot it nearly burned the sensitive skin of my inner thighs, but it felt so fucking good.

Stop it, Holly. Like I told Darius, that’s never happening again. It was a one-time deal.

I storm into the hotel lobby and nearly collide headfirst with someone.

“Whoa,” says a familiar voice, even as I dance backward a couple of steps to avoid them and dust my hair back from my forehead, apologizing profusely. “Hey, it’s okay.”

I look up again to find Tony Chambers grinning at me. “Sorry,” I mumble yet again.

“You must be in a hurry,” he says, an amused look dancing in his expression.

I’m immediately gripped by paranoia. Shit. Did he see me? Did he see Darius? What does he know? But he’s only waiting, expectant, for my response. “Just on my way back from the grape-crushing thing,” I mumble, ears bright red. I hope he doesn’t check a clock, and realize how much time has passed since that event this morning.

Actually. How much time has passed? Am I late for something? My panic level surges.

“You going to the ball tonight?” Tony asks, and my panic subsides. Right. After the grape-stomping event, there were just a couple of seminars and lectures—some that I’d wanted to attend, planned to really. But nothing that’s a must-do. Nothing it will kill me to have missed.

The other big event of the day, the networking event that will be a key opportunity this weekend, doesn’t happen until tonight. Tonight is the Vintners’ Ball, the social event not just of this weekend but of the whole of wine country’s year. Everyone who’s anyone in the wine industry will be there tonight, decked out and trying desperately to impress.

I packed at least half of my suitcase just for this one event in particular. My dress, my shoes, everything was planned down to the last detail in advance. Everything, that is, except for how I wound up spending the morning right before this event. Distracting myself from everything I should have been focused on all along. “Of course I’ll be there,” I say, plastering a bright, cheery smile on my face in the hopes that Tony won’t notice how flustered I feel.

“Great.” He smiles right back at me, and I’m inwardly grateful for all the years my father spent teaching me how to play poker. “Then I’ll see you there. Oh, and bring your thinking cap.” He flashes me a wink. “I have a few ideas I want to run past you. Ways we can work to each other’s strengths to wow our future best friend Alexander Microff.”

My smile melts into a genuine one. “Looking forward to it, Tony.” We shake hands in parting, and I hurry past him toward the elevator. There’s only one more afternoon talk session left anyway, and it’s one about post-fermentation processing techniques. Not exactly high on my list of things I’d be looking forward to spending an hour in a darkened conference room listening to someone talk about. It might be important, yes, but my family perfected our technique years ago. And besides, I have bigger fish to fry right now.

Namely, I need to put Darius Bantham as far from my mind as possible, while I prepare to wow the rest of the winery world tonight.