by R. Linda
Warms hands wrapped around my arms and pulled them away from Indie’s. Frowning, I opened my eyes, expecting to see Nate glaring at me, but it was Kenzie. Pulling my eyebrows together in confusion, I asked, “What are you doing?”
“Helping, ’cause you sure as hell will never figure this out otherwise.” She smiled sweetly and placed one of my hands on her shoulder and the other on her waist. I heard Nate’s rumbling laughter from the other side of the room. Looking over Kenzie’s shoulder, I flipped him off, which only made him laugh harder.
I was glad Ryder wasn’t here to see me with my hands on his sister. But with Kenzie leading me from the front, and Indie kicking my feet in the right direction every time I messed up, I managed to complete four full squares. Sure, it took three of us for a two-person dance, but I did it.
“This is like Dirty Dancing.” Indie laughed into my back.
Kenzie snickered. “Only we’re dancing with Linc and not Patrick Swayze, who had the best moves.”
“Never seen it,” I admitted, feeling like a puppet being led around by two women, one of which I would gladly let lead me around by the balls for the rest of my life, if things weren’t so complicated.
“You’ve never seen it?” Kenzie raised an eyebrow in disbelief. I shook my head.
“We’re changing that, soon,” Indie announced.
Whatever. If I watched it with her, I didn’t have a problem. Hell, I’d watch The Notebook if she wanted me to.
“Sure, Princess.”
“Okay, I think you two are good to go on your own now. Wanna give it a go?” Kenzie stepped back, giving Indie room to come around to my front. I rested one hand on her shoulder gently and gripped her hip with the other, pulling her closer to my body than I had Kenzie because, well, it was Indie, and I wanted her close all the time.
“Ready?” She smiled brightly.
“Let’s do it.”
And we did. Perfectly. Kenzie clapped, while Nate cheered us on, jumping around like a baboon. We danced for an hour, eventually figuring out how to move around the dance floor and not in a tiny square. We were far from graceful, but at least we had the steps right. Finally.
But I’d practice all night if it meant dancing with Indie in my arms a little longer.
I was a sucker for punishment.
Chapter Fifteen
Indie
We had dinner on the roof. I didn’t even know there was a rooftop bar and restaurant, but the food was delicious, and the evening was warm. Kenzie didn’t join us for dinner, saying she didn’t want to leave Harper alone with Jack for too long, which was understandable. So, it was just Mum, Dad, Nate, Linc, and me. Just like old times. Only things felt too tense now.
Mum and Dad quizzed me on school and wanted to know more about Jack—they seemed to really like him—making me feel terribly guilty for lying about our relationship, or lack of one. They asked about the house I shared with Bailey and Ryder, and I screwed up by mentioning I lived with Jack as well, not thinking they’d take that the wrong way because they believed we were in a relationship.
Dad choked on his beer. “You’re living with your boyfriend?”
“I thought your other roommate—I can’t remember his name—was gay?” my mother asked.
“You have separate bedrooms, right?” Nate growled.
And Linc was silent. Like always. Fingers clenched around the knife again.
“Yes, I’m living with Jack and in separate rooms,” I reassured them, feeling a little better because at least none of that was a lie. “Bailey and Ryder are there all the time. It’s fine, really.”
After the first shock of that little tidbit wore off, dinner went smoothly. It was nice to catch up and do something as a family like we did growing up. It reminded me so much of our Sunday night dinners. Linc would join us, and we’d spend the night eating and talking. I hadn’t realised how much I had missed my family until now.
After we’d eaten, my parents said goodnight and left. It was getting late. Nate yawned and announced he was heading back to his room as well. I guessed he was still tired after being out all the night before. “What about you guys?”
“I think we might take advantage of the band,” Linc pointed to the two-man band in the corner of the roof, “and practise that dance a little longer. What do you think?” he asked me.
“You need all the help you can get.” I smiled and stood, dropping my bag on the table.
“Don’t leave that there. Someone will steal it.” Linc picked it up and handed it to Nate. “Take this back for her.”
“Okay. Good luck with the moves, man. You’re gonna need it.” He laughed, waving over his shoulder as he walked off.
“Come on.” Linc grabbed my hand and pulled me over to the makeshift dance floor, a square space free of tables and chairs.
We danced the waltz for so long my feet felt like they were on fire and my arms were too heavy to lift.
“Again,” Linc said, gripping my waist and pulling me closer. Thunder rumbled overhead. I looked up at the sky and noticed all the stars had disappeared.
“I think it’s going to rain,” I said.
“One more time. Please, Indie,” he pleaded.
“Okay.”
No sooner had we taken a step than the rain started, hard and fast. But Linc made us finish our loop around the dancefloor before pulling me into the stairwell.
We took the stairs carefully, making sure not to slip because they were all wet from every other person on the roof escaping the rain. Once were reached the top floor, we had to wait for the elevator to come back up and get us.
“Hope it doesn’t rain for the wedding,” Linc said, wiping water from his face. His shirt clung to him, accentuating each and every muscle on his torso. He looked like a god. And I looked like a drowned rat. I frowned at my appearance in the mirror beside the elevator doors. Smoothing my hands over my face and hair didn’t help at all.
The doors opened, and we took the lift downstairs, only to realise we had to run to our building through the rain. By the time we got upstairs to our rooms, we were saturated. And…
“Dammit!” I banged my head on my door.
“What?” Linc asked with an amused smile.
“Nate has my key and my phone. Again. I can’t believe I did it again.”
“I’ll let you through to your room from mine.”
“Thanks.”
I followed him into his room and over to the door that separated our rooms, but it wouldn’t open.
“What the hell?” Linc said, trying again.
“Use your key,” I suggested helpfully.
Grabbing his key card out of his wallet, he looked at the door handle. “There’s no slot for the card. Dammit, look. It needs an actual key. Did you lock it from your side?”
“No.” I shook my head, confused about how it got locked when I knew I hadn’t done it, not since I unlocked it last night after the club.
“I’ll call Nate.”
“Okay.” I shivered, the rain well and truly seeping into my bones now.
“Shit, sorry, Princess. Go dry yourself off. There are spare towels in the bathroom.”
“Thanks.” I left him to call Nate and went in search of clean, dry towels.
Peeling my wet dress off was a great idea. I felt warmer at once without the cold, wet fabric sticking to my skin. Grabbing a towel from under the sink, I squeezed the excess water from my hair down the drain and then rubbed the towel through the ends.
“He’s not answering, but—” Linc’s voice stopped immediately.
I looked over my shoulder at him, staring wide-eyed. Crap. I didn’t lock the door. Holding the towel in one hand, I was frozen to the spot. Linc was shirtless. In fact, he didn’t have pants on either. Clearly having the same idea as me about getting out of wet clothes, he was standing there in only his boxers.
He didn’t move. He didn’t speak. And neither did I. I didn’t know what to do. Yell at him for walking in on me in only my underwear—th
ankfully, black this time, and not see-through at all? Wrap a towel around me so he couldn’t see anything? But that would be stupid. He’d seen it all when we went swimming yesterday. Instead, I stood there like an idiot and waited for him to leave.
Why wasn’t he leaving?
He pinched his bottom lip between his fingers and stepped farther into the bathroom. And still I didn’t move. His grey eyes were so much darker than before, and his gaze travelled down my body deliberately before coming back up and resting on my face.
Another step closer.
And another.
He was directly in front of me, so close the heat from his body warmed me. His fingers wrapped around the towel and plucked it from my hands. Taking one step behind me, I moved my gaze to the mirror to watch him as he rubbed the towel over my wet skin. Across my shoulder blades, down my arms, dragging painfully slow. Goose bumps erupted on my skin everywhere he touched. I watched his hand travel across my stomach, around my back. My breath stopped when he brought the towel over my chest and down across my hips before pulling my hair over one shoulder and wrapping the white cloth around the end of my locks.
I watched him as he watched me.
I watched the towel fall from his fingers to the floor.
I watched his hands skim over my stomach, tickle my ribs.
I watched him kiss my shoulder, his lips barely grazing the skin and sliding along to where my neck and shoulder met. My breath caught in my throat.
What was he doing?
My eyes drifted closed, and my head fell to the side. This was too much. I couldn’t handle it. I had wanted this for so long, and now I didn’t know what to do. What did it mean? Did it mean anything? Or would he just brush it off as nothing again? If he turned into a jerk again, it’d be the end of me. I’d pack my bags and get on the next plane out of here, wedding or no wedding. I couldn’t keep going back and forth, not when he did things like this.
My legs were like jelly. They could barely support my weight as I struggled to catch my breath. He literally knocked the air out of me, simply by kissing my oversensitive skin. I’d wanted his lips on me again, ever since my eighteenth birthday, but I never imagined it would have me feeling that way—so nervous, excited, scared. All these emotions bubbled inside me, and I was struggling to maintain my calm.
His nose dragged along my skin, up my neck to where he placed a kiss behind my ear and groaned my name. Shivers ran up my spine.
“I’ll get you something to wear,” he said, meeting my gaze in the mirror. If I wasn’t mistaken, he looked like he was in pain, confused, like he didn’t know what to do. He was struggling with whatever this was between us as much as I was. I just wished I knew what he was struggling with. Was it because we shouldn’t be this close? Or was it—hopefully—that he wanted more too and was just as unsure as I was about this? No, he’d never be unsure. He was the one person I knew who always seized the moment and went for whatever it was he wanted. But this time he looked so uncertain. His eyes were guarded, hesitant.
He squeezed my waist and placed one last kiss against my jaw and walked out of the bathroom, leaving me to fall in a heap against the counter.
Hell.
I was done for.
A couple of minutes later, he returned with a white tank for me. That was it. No shorts? Not even a t-shirt? Just one of those tanks with the wide armholes. “Thanks.”
“I’ll give you a minute,” he said quietly and walked back out of the room that felt increasingly smaller with each passing second.
I slide the shirt over my head and ran my fingers through my hair to try to get some of the tangles out, but it was futile.
Returning to the room, I found Linc lying on the bed with the television paused on the beginning scene of Dirty Dancing.
“Thought we could watch this?”
“Okay.” I shuffled on my feet and twisted the hem of his tank between my fingers. My nerves were shot. We’d never done anything like that before. And everything I’d thought was intense and meaningful up until tonight paled in comparison to that moment in the bathroom. And what was even harder to wrap my head around was that Linc was acting normal. He wasn’t brushing it aside as if it were nothing. He was simply behaving like he towel-dried me and kissed my neck all the time.
“Indie?” He patted the bed beside him.
I walked over slowly and paused at the edge of the bed, unsure about how I felt lying next to him now. Would he expect something else? Would I expect something else?
I didn’t get to dwell on it for too long, though, because he reached for my hand and pulled me down beside him, wrapping an arm around my back until my head was settled comfortably against his chest.
“You know, as hot as you look in your lace underwear, I think I prefer you in my clothes,” he said softly, pressing play on the movie and tracing soft circles on the bare skin of my hip, because obviously his tank had ridden up the moment I lay down.
Chapter Sixteen
Linc
I woke in the morning wrapped around Indie, legs tangled together, my head on her chest, and one hand on her breast. I knew I should move, that I shouldn’t have been holding her like that, but I didn’t want to. I was going to enjoy every moment of it until she moved or woke up.
I’d lost my mind last night when I saw her standing in the bathroom in her underwear. It wasn’t any different than when we went swimming at the waterfall, but last night something in me snapped. I didn’t care that what I was doing broke all sorts of codes and friendship rules. I didn’t care about anything but getting closer to Indie. I thought I realised, or had at least finally made up my mind, that she was worth risking everything for. I just had to be sure she felt the same way.
But it was hard to figure out because she had a boyfriend. Who never slept in her room, here or at home. She’d spent every night with me so far instead of him. Something didn’t add up. Why was she sleeping with me if she had a boyfriend? Why didn’t he care that she was spending more time with me than with him? All these questions and I didn’t know how to answer them.
Indie woke up a little while later. I could always tell when she woke but pretended to be asleep. She used to do it all the time, hugging me closer—I let myself believe it was because she didn’t want me to leave, that she didn’t want to let me go. I was motionless, hand still comfortably on her breast, and waited for her to move, to shift in some way that caused me to drop my hand, but she didn’t. She didn’t move at all. I didn’t know what that meant. There were so many possibilities. Maybe she didn’t want to risk waking me if she thought I was asleep, or maybe she liked that I was holding her like this.
Her fingers danced along my back up and up into my hair, twisting and twirling a dreadlock, yet she still didn’t move or push my hand away. I was going to enjoy every second until it came to an end—
My phone rang from the other side of the room and ruined the moment. Faking a yawn and a stretch, Indie pretended to wake up, shifting under me so I had to roll away.
“Morning, Princess. How’d you sleep?”
“Mmmm, great. You?”
“Better than ever.” I stretched out beside her.
“You gonna get that?”
“No.”
“It could be important. Could be Nate wanting to bring my key up.”
“You don’t need your key. You’re here.”
“I can’t stay in my underwear and your top all day, Lincoln.” She was cute when she tried to scold me.
“You won’t hear any complaints from me.” I laughed, rolling off the bed when my phone rang again. “Yeah,” I answered gruffly, disappointed that I had to get up.
“Hey.” Dammit. It was Nate. “I just saw your call and realised I had Indie’s room key all night, didn’t I?”
“Yeah.” I ran a hand over my face and tried to wake myself up a little better.
“Where is she?”
“Here.”
“With you?” he asked, a challenging tone to his voice.
“No, I let her sleep in the hallway. Of course, she’s here with me.”
“Okay, I’m on my way up,” he said and hung up.
“Nate’s coming.” I threw the phone down on the bed and grabbed a pair of shorts and t-shirt for Indie to wear instead. “As much as I like the view, you should put on something a little more modest so Nate doesn’t freak out.”
“Thanks.” She smiled and climbed out of the bed to do the one thing I didn’t expect her to do. She pulled the tank off, right in front of me. My mouth went dry instantly.
“Dammit, Indie.” I stepped around the bed until I was face to face with her.
“What?” She raised her eyebrows innocently.
“You’re walking a very fine line right now,” I ground out through a clenched jaw. We were chest to chest.
“It’s not like you haven’t seen it a thousand times already this week. What’s the point of hiding in the bathroom?” Her breath was rapid.
Valid.
“Because I’m barely controlling myself right now,” I whispered against her cheek. Pulling back, I reached one hand up and touched the base of her throat, spreading my fingers out over her collarbone. I felt the beat of her heart beneath my palm, getting faster and faster with every second.
I dragged my hand tenderly down her chest, over the swell of her breasts, and across her flat stomach until I gripped her hips, and I pulled her even closer to me. “Better be careful, Princess, or I might do something that’ll get us both in all sorts of trouble,” I said, thinking that would be the end of this torturous game she was playing. But I couldn’t have been more wrong.
“Well…” She licked her lips. When did she get to be so seductive? She was always seductive to me, but when did she get so good at it? “Maybe I want you too.”
And with that, she stepped back and went into the bathroom to get changed.
I groaned and fell onto the bed. What the hell was she doing? What did that mean?
