Take Me

Italy. With Travis. It was incredible how every one of her dreams was coming true.

Travis drove to his loft in a blaze of frustration. He hadn’t felt this out of control since he was a kid, and he didn’t like it. Not one bit.

He let himself into his sparsely decorated living quarters and went into the kitchen to pour himself a drink.

Lord knew he badly needed one. But for some reason he was drawn to the framed pictures resting atop the grand piano. He picked up his favorite and blew off a patch of dust that the housekeeper had missed during her weekly cleaning.

In it, he and his brother were standing in the shade of a large oak tree with their mother, who was kneeling to hold on-to both of them. They were in their Little League outfits, streaked with dirt from a game. His mother was wearing a billowy dress, as she usually did, and she looked just like a mother should: round and comforting. He could still remember their conversation that day by the tree.

“Mom, did you see my home run?”

“Oh, honey,” she rubbed his back, “you were wonderful out there.”

Luke butted in, “Did you see me get the guy out on first?”

“Sure did. I was the proudest mom in the whole world up there in the stands.”

Travis rubbed his eyes and put the picture down. His father must have snapped the picture right before they ran off to celebrate with the other kids. They didn’t know it then, but the cancer was already growing inside of her. Travis wished, for the millionth time, that he had known how little time they had left with her. He would have curled up with her warm, soft body more often, instead of spending hour upon hour playing video games with his friends.

She had been gone a long time, nearly twenty years, and he didn’t know why he was being so maudlin out of the blue.

She would have loved Lily.

The voice in his head shocked him. So what if it was true? What did it matter what his mother would have thought about the grown-up Lily? It was his life. And she wasn’t his type at all.

He was glad she had clarified what they were to each other. Purely professional was exactly what he wanted. He must have been crazy to even consider touching Lily again. But now that he’d given in to his idiotic impulse, he was going to be stuck with her for five days in Italy. He consoled himself with the thought of ditching her as soon as they landed. He’d find plenty of lusty Italian women to take to bed.

A knock sounded at the door. He yelled, “It’s open,” and Luke came strolling in with a six-pack. “What are you doing here?”

“Twin ESP. Thought you could use a drink,” Luke said as he plopped the beer on the kitchen island and handed a cold one over. Travis scowled at Luke, but tilted his head back and drank.

“So, I hear you’re taking Lily to Italy tomorrow,” Luke said as he plopped his large frame onto Travis’s black leather sofa.

Travis nodded and just as negligently unfurled onto a facing chair. “That’s right.”

“She said you gave her a big decorating job.” “Also right,” Travis said. “What’s your point, little brother?”

In a heartbeat, Luke was on Travis, and his shirt was bunched up in Luke’s hands. “If you do one single thing to hurt Lily, I will personally see to it that you pay.” He let go of Travis and stood up. “Well, I gotta go. Have a nice trip,” Luke said, then walked out of the loft, closing the door behind him with a click.

Chapter Six

Lily buckled her seat belt and accepted the glass of champagne from the pretty, reed-slim flight attendant.

“Thank you so much,” she said as the attendant moved on to serve a well-to-do couple behind her. Lily surveyed her first-class surroundings with wonderment. I could get used to this kind of life, she thought with a smile. From now on, it’s first-class or nothing.

Lily laughed out loud at such a ridiculous thought. She still couldn’t believe that she was sitting in the lap of luxury on a Virgin Atlantic flight. They were going to change planes in London, then it was straight to Rome. There was even a neon-striped bar in the compartment back behind the seats. It was so decadent. So lavish. So stimulating. Just like Travis’s hands had been on her br**sts. Just like his mouth had been between her legs. Just like his c**k had been…

Stop it, she ordered herself sternly. With a shake of her head, Lily forced herself to concentrate on the various goodies that had been waiting for her at her seat. She was rubbing a free sample of tea tree oil on her hands when Travis walked into the aisle.

Her smile went. He was so big he seemed to suck all of the oxygen from the cabin. She had to resist a crazy urge to pull her emergency oxygen mask from above her seat. But God forbid she give Travis the satisfaction of knowing how badly he affected her. In the aftermath of their sex-in-the-pool play, she had greatly enjoyed having the upper hand with Travis.

His bright green eyes sizzled for a brief moment, going clear so quickly Lily was sure she must have imagined the heat. Closing her eyes, figuring that she’d been about as brave as she could be, she replayed her talk with Luke.

“I can’t do this,” she had said, giving in and calling her best friend at midnight even though she knew she should be packing her pathetic, dumpy clothes for Italy.

“You’re doing great,” he had replied, a virtual thumbs-up across the wireless lines.

“No, you don’t understand.” Feeling like a bigger idiot than ever before, she had whispered, “He’s flying me to Tuscany, and I told him that I want our relationship to be strictly platonic.”

Luke whooped and Lily had held the phone back from her ear. “That’s perfect, Lily. A stroke of genius.”

“But what if it’s not genius?” Lily blushed fiercely, thankful that Luke couldn’t see her face. “What if he’s happy about it and never wants to, well, you know… ever again?”

Luke had laughed. “Travis hasn’t done anything this spontaneous since we were kids. I have a feeling that you are getting to him, and good.” Oblivious to Lily’s inner shame at lusting helplessly after Travis, Luke added, “All the better that you’re making him beg for it. Just stay strong and keep up the good work.”

Lily had hung up and given up on her clothes—they all were so ugly she really should burn them. Instead, she had settled in to spend the rest of the night worrying instead of sleeping. What if she didn’t let him touch her again, and he left her untouched for good and was glad? What if she let him touch her, and he got bored? What if she let him touch her, and he didn’t want to out of disgust? What if he did want to touch her, for whatever strange reason that she still couldn’t figure out, and she wasn’t strong enough to resist him, then he left her high and dry and even more pathetic and needy than before? What if he could feel the heat between her legs that he always caused simply by breathing and knew without a shadow of a doubt that she wasn’t strong enough to resist him? Hour after hour passed in an endless wheel of doubts and self-recriminations.