by Serena Bell
He got to his feet, the boys still trying to drag him back down. He shook himself off, running a hand through his hair to dislodge the rest of the sand. He was wearing a new pair of board shorts. Did that mean that at some point he’d gone into town by himself and bought more beach clothes?
“Auburn,” Chiara said.
“God,” Auburn said aloud. “This was not supposed to happen.”
“What?” Hannah asked. “What wasn’t supposed to happen?”
“I wasn’t supposed to like him.”
“No,” Chiara said thoughtfully. “You weren’t. It’s … inconvenient, isn’t it? It’s always so fucking inconvenient.”
30
Hannah handed Jake and Auburn their gift certificates for free O’Hearn’s Ice Cream cones, and Tyler pouted at the sight.
“It’s okay,” Hannah said. “You can enter the three-legged race with your brother.”
“But then he’ll have two ice cream cones!”
“Well. But you’ll have one, too.”
“Mom,” Ty called. Brynn had just stepped out onto the beach. “Help me ’n’ Jake get ready for the three-legged race.”
“Jake and me,” Brynn corrected, as Hannah handed her a length of rope.
He watched her bend to tie her boys’ legs together.
“What do you say?”
It was Auburn, at his shoulder, one eyebrow cocked in now-familiar challenge toward the three-legged starting line. God, she was pretty, her hair pulled back for the moment into some kind of ponytail puff, her cheeks pink, her eyes sparkling. “You know you want to!”
“You’re kidding,” he said. “I haven’t run a three-legged race since I was five.”
“You just ran a wheelbarrow race. This is no different.”
“Except for the part where we’re tied together. We’re not the same height.”
“Come on! You seriously need to redeem yourself after that last display.”
The thought of Auburn joined to any part of his body, more than anything else, propelled him to the start line.
“You’re going to run it in—that?” He took advantage of the moment to survey all the territory not covered by her dress—and to imagine how she would look without it.
“That’s my problem, isn’t it?”
With a sigh, he gave in—which pretty much described everything that had happened this last week, not that he really minded—and followed her to the starting line, enjoying how the dress swayed over her hips and revealed delicious thighs and strong calves.
They lined up beside Jake and Tyler and Hannah knelt and bound their legs together. He watched the loop of rope close around their ankles, but his mind was on the press of her body along the length of his. She was warm. She’d been so hot against his hand last night—
If he didn’t quit this line of thinking, there would be another limb in this race. He didn’t want to put the other teams at a disadvantage or anything.
Hannah yelled “3 … 2 … 1 … go!”—startling him out of his thoughts—and he and Auburn took off.
They were a hot mess, laughing too hard to do anything other than yank each other along. Ten feet from the finish line, he tripped and fell, dragging Auburn down on top of him in a heap. She was all silky dress and soft curves and bare thighs and arms entangled with his.
“Oh,” she whispered.
He couldn’t even find enough breath for that short syllable. Not the way she felt. Not with how much he wanted to slide his hand up her leg, push away that pesky dress, and feel more of her bare skin.
“You should—probably get off me. Before I do something that would not be family friendly.”
“You’re already—not very family friendly,” she whispered. “God, Trey,” she said, moving her hip just slightly against him and making him ten thousand kinds of crazy.
“I thought you said you didn’t want—”
“Yeah,” she said. “I did say that. But I changed my mind.”
It took every ounce of self-control he possessed to help her off him and get them both back to standing. Luckily he was so tangled in the layers of his clothes that he was still more or less presentable.
“Like, changed your mind changed your mind?”
Pink and breathless—which he wanted to think was as much from the full-body contact as the three-legged race—she nodded.
“Is there anywhere around here we could be alone for a few minutes?” he murmured.
“Meet me behind the bike shed.”
The rope had tightened around their legs and was hard to untie. She looked down at it, then up at him. “Never really thought about three-legged races as kinky before,” she whispered, and he hooted a laugh.
Working together, they unbound themselves. She managed to slip away, and he went to join her.
She was leaning against the back of the bike shed. When he rounded the corner, she put her arms out, and he stepped into them. Bent his head and kissed her, a sweet, slow sweep. He groaned at the feel of her—so soft, so wet—and the taste, already familiar. He hemmed her against the wall, their bodies not touching but so close he felt every hair rise on his skin.
“I want you so fucking much,” he breathed.
She was panting, and time seemed to slow. Her head tipped back against the wall and her lips parted. Her eyes were huge. “Me too,” she whispered. “I want you, too.”
His mouth crashed down on hers. Not gentle, but she didn’t seem to care. She clutched his head, yanked his hair. Her mouth opened without hesitation, and her tongue found his, slick and eager. He went from hard to aching. He bore down on her mouth and split her with his tongue, and all he could think about was how her flesh would part between her legs just like that when he took her.
He groaned into her mouth. She moaned and pressed back, his cock trapped between their bodies.
“Fuck, Auburn,” he murmured.
“That’s what I was thinking,” she murmured back.
“Don’t say anything you don’t mean.”
“I don’t, as a rule.” She reached for his belt.
“Not here,” he said. “I want to do it right. I want to lay you down on your bed and slide into you so slowly that you beg me to finish it.”
She whimpered.
He slid a hand under her dress and glided it up the skin of her belly, cupping her breast and finding a nipple with his thumb. It was drawn tight. She arched and squeaked. Then he let her go. Stepped back.
“Trey—” Her chest rose and fell rapidly, her nipples visible through the thin fabric of her dress and the lace of her bra.
“Later. I promise.”
She grabbed his hand and tried to tug him back to her, but he grinned and resisted. “You don’t want to miss your party.”
“I want—”
“Your hair’s a little mussed,” he said, patting it down in the back where it had been rubbed into frizz by the shed wall.
“You’re a bastard.”
That made him smile.
“Yeah, well. You knew that long before you let me kiss you.”
31
They lay on a blanket on the beach and watched the sky explode with fireworks overhead. They were very close, shoulders touching, her hand in his. It was not much contact at all, really, but she felt like if she rolled toward him, even a little, they might both spontaneously combust. She didn’t, because there were families all around them on the beach, and she didn’t trust herself to stop if he touched her for real.
“So this is how Tierney Bay does the 4th,” he said. “All of this? The street dance, the beach fire, the parade, the barbecue, the fireworks?”
She smiled into the dark. “Yeah. Didn’t you ever come to visit Carl on the 4th of July weekend?”
She felt, rather than saw, him shake his head beside her.
“You’ve been doing this every year since you grew up, huh?” he asked.
“Every year except the year my parents died. None of us wanted to celebrate that year. So we didn’t. And in
some ways I think that was what I grieved the most. That year, it felt like everything had ended. My parents were gone. My childhood was over. And I’d lost the part of the year that had always felt like rebirth—because in Tierney Bay the world comes back to life July 4th weekend. But not that year.”
His hand tightened on hers.
“And meanwhile Levi was busy trying to run Cape House, provide for all of us, keep Mason from self-destructing. Chiara—she got her heart broken on top of everything else, and she was Hannah’s security blanket. Mason was just a blank wall. You might have seen—that’s him. He’s—not an easy guy to know.”
She took a breath. “Beachcrest and Carl were the only things in my life that kept making sense.”
“Auburn.”
Her name in his voice was a touchpoint. An anchor. It made her know he was listening and really hearing her. It made her think about how few people did that, really listened and heard.
“Oh!” she said suddenly, because the sky had lit up with a brilliant ball of gold flecks. “I love those. They’re my favorites. The ones that are just showers of sparks.”
She turned her head. He’d turned to look at her. His face was splintered into shadows and the play of light from the fireworks above.
He got to his knees, suddenly.
“What—oh!”
He’d scooped her up and lurched to his feet, and now was carrying her across the sand, leaving the blanket behind. She didn’t care. It was one of the oldest ones, a castoff from the Beachcrest beds that had gotten too worn to be good for guests. He carried her up the path, all the way to his room. He set her down, fumbled with the door key, got the door open, and followed her inside.
When he kissed her, the world stopped. He did not kiss like the man she’d met in Carl’s hospital room. He kissed like the man who’d secretly adored her biscuits and chocolate chip cookies, who’d tumbled laughing into the sand on their bike ride and wrestled his nephews like they were puppies. He kissed like sunshine and salty breezes and beach magic.
He stopped kissing her and stood just looking at her, which should have been unnerving but was so lovely, the way his gaze took her in and made all of her beautiful. Her wild hair and the sunburn under the straps of her dress, the curves she sometimes loved and sometimes hated. His hands settled on her shoulders and brushed the straps away like strands of spider web.
“This okay?”
“Hell yes.”
He tugged the top of her dress down and ran a finger along the top edge of her bra, tracing the contour of the lace, making her breathless. Slowly, like they had all the time in the world, he eased the cup of her bra down, baring one breast. The hunger in his eyes made it perfect.
“Oh, God,” he said, bending and licking. “I’ve wanted this since the first time I saw you.”
That made her mouth so dry and her whole body go soft. Or maybe it was the sensation of his tongue, circling toward her nipple, spiraling, teasing. As if he sensed the weakening of her knees, he slipped a hand behind her and drew her toward him, his tongue finally finding the sensitive tip.
She cried out.
He groaned like she’d hurt him and seemed to lose control then. He ducked his head and took her nipple, and the suckling sensation dove all the way to her core.
“There’s a zipper—”
He found the zipper at the back of her dress and the silky fabric dropped to the floor around her ankles. He stepped back and looked at her. “Jesus, Auburn, you’re so beautiful.”
Then he picked her up again and deposited her on the edge of the bed. He knelt on the floor, reached for her hips, and tugged her close.
“These are pretty,” he said, teasing a finger over the pale green lace of her panties. He bent and kissed her where he’d just touched her, breathing her deeply. “Mmm,” he said. “You smell so fucking good.”
She could feel the wetness gathering for him, and she wanted to tell him, but she was breathless and wordless. He breathed her again, then buried his nose right up against her and blew warm air onto her damp flesh. Then he licked her right through her panties, and she thought she was going to scream. She wriggled, trying to get herself closer to the heat of his breath and the caress of his tongue, but he pinned her hips and she couldn’t move. He held her there, his face just a few inches from her. Then he pulled back to look at her face.
“I know I came off like an asshole,” he said. “That first night. I should have just told you the truth. That I saw you kneel and help that waitress and I thought, That’s a good person.”
He was going to take her apart. Seam by seam, molecule by molecule. He was going to make it impossible for her to hang onto herself. And she was going to let him.
“You thought that?” How would things had been different if she had known, that first night, that he had seen her that way?
His mind must have been chasing along similar pathways, because he asked, “What if I hadn’t fought you? What if I’d just agreed to sell you Beachcrest when you first asked?”
“You wouldn’t have. You couldn’t. I didn’t have the money, and you have to save your company. And at that moment, you couldn’t see any other way.”
“I was a stubborn asshole and I wanted to fight you because you weren’t letting me have my way.”
She smiled at that. “I’ll grant you that, but … If you’d just said, ‘You want to buy Beachcrest? Sure. Okay,’ then—well, I don’t know what would have happened, but it wouldn’t be this.”
And it seemed unimaginable and insupportable that they would not be here. That they would not have spent the last few days coaxing each other into the open like soft-bodied sea creatures from shells, cultivating the taut wanting that ran all the way down the length of her body, that strained towards him.
As if he felt it too, he bent and kissed her, all along where lace met her skin. He tugged her panties to one side and stroked a finger down the length of her seam, practically making her jump off the bed. “You like that?”
“So much. Do it again.”
It was his turn to groan. Then he did exactly what she’d asked. He stroked his finger down the length again, then up, bringing her wetness up to her clit and circling it, so lightly, but enough that she bucked. Then he bent and repeated the motion with his tongue, and … “Ohhhh,” she moaned.
“Is it good?” He bent and did it again, a long lick and then a tight circle. A few more circles until her clit was swollen and eager. He wiggled it with the tip of his tongue until she couldn’t stop the tilt of her hips. And then he buried his face in her and kissed her relentlessly while the pressure mounted and her muscles clenched helplessly.
She was going to come—but just as she could feel the point of no return looming, he drew away, stripped his shorts and t-shirt off, and crawled up over her, dragging his erection over her now-slick pussy. She groaned and tried to rub against him, but he kept himself just out of reach. The hard muscle of his abs, his hip bone, his erection through his boxer briefs, his thigh—he wouldn’t let her have anything she could get purchase on.
“Bastard,” she whispered.
“You know it.” He laughed wickedly and bent his head to tease a nipple with his lips. His tongue. He sucked it into his mouth, tortured it between his teeth, flicked it until she could feel the trail of electric messages drawing tight between her breast and her core. If he kept it up, she would come—
So, of course, he stopped.
He kissed her mouth, long, hot, slick kisses, so deep and sweet it felt like she was suckling his mouth, and each of those kisses felt like a crank tightening in her low belly. And then he took that away, too, and just braced himself over her. Let her look at his pecs, tight with the effort of suspending himself, his broad shoulders striped with muscle, his bulging biceps and curved triceps, and the lean, mean sinewy gorgeousness of his forearms, furred with golden half-curls. He held himself off her body so she could feel the breeze of his cock moving between her legs but not the thick contact itself, and …
“Trey.”
“What?”
“Please. Please, please, please, please, please.”
He smiled. “Please what?”
“Please put your cock inside me.”
He stood up, a slow and leisurely stretch. Eased his boxer briefs down over the swollen head of his cock like he had all the time in the world, while she panted on the bed. She would probably kill him later, but right now she was too beside herself to organize a murder. She just wanted him to satisfy her craving, fill the emptiness that had bloomed and swelled in her pussy and belly.
Also, she really liked looking at him now that he was naked. The taut swells of his pecs, the ridges of his abs, the V shape of the muscles that framed his cock. His cock itself, a darker shade than the rest of his skin, thick and ruddy and long enough to kiss his navel. It made her mouth water, especially when he dug in the drawer of his nightstand and liberated a condom, then rolled it down over himself slowly—and with supreme confidence.
“I want to watch you jerk off sometime,” she surprised herself by saying. “But not now. Right now I just want you to get that thing over here.”
He laughed. And did, setting a hand to each side of her head in a distinctly predatory way. He settled himself between her thighs, lowering his hips to hers, easing his length along her seam so the slickness there spread all over her and coated him. She moaned. He found her clit with his cock head and rubbed lightly, in circles. She was so primed that he had her gasping again in seconds, and as soon as he did, he slid himself home, slowly but forcefully, filling her with one stroke.
“Now you can come,” he said. All at once, she was overwhelmed: his words; the intense sense of fullness; the bright, silvery stretch; the roll of his hips, which brought pressure down hard on her swollen clit; and the expression on his face—God! the expression on his face. Like the way he looked when he’d tasted the biscuit. Or the cookie. But times a thousand. Like he didn’t know what to do with all that pleasure, like it was too much for him. And she wanted to take him with her.
