by Serena Bell
“Trey,” she whispered. “Is it good?”
His eyes met hers.
“How does it feel? Being inside me? Because it feels really fucking good to me. You’re big. You’re stretching me. You’re filling me. But I bet it feels really good to you, too. Am I tight? Can you feel me squeezing you? Can you feel how wet I am?”
She couldn’t take her eyes off his face, the pleasure-fierce-as-pain expression, and she saw the exact moment when he broke, his eyes dropping closed, his jaw locking tight and the tendons straining in his neck and all the way down the length of his fine, beautiful body, as he came, throbbing inside her and groaning her name. God. Her orgasm rolled over her, making her cry out in shock and triumph.
32
“Fuck, Auburn,” he said a few minutes later, when he could talk. “That was—”
But he shouldn’t be surprised. He’d known it would be like this.
“—so fucking good.”
“Mmm,” she murmured, against his shoulder. “It was.”
With effort, he withdrew from the sweet heat of her, clutching the condom carefully, and took it into the bathroom to dispose of it. When he came back she was sprawled out on the sheets, flushed and beautiful. Her curls were spilled all over the pillows, and he realized that he’d imagined them that way the first time he’d seen her. He’d imagined her like this. Full and lush and generous and relaxed and unself-conscious. She hadn’t even made an effort to cover herself up. He ran a hand up her leg from below her knee to where her wetness coated her thigh, and she shivered and smiled at him.
He’d had eight? nine?—yes, nine—sexual encounters since Karina had left a year ago. All impersonal, casual. He ticked them off in his mind—he could name the cities he’d traveled to, the bars where the pickups had taken place. He could name the women, even, he was pleased to note.
He hadn’t wanted any of them a second time. Not even close.
He wanted Auburn again. Now.
Now and later tonight and in the middle of the night, tomorrow morning—
He made himself stop, because there was only tonight. And if they couldn’t save Beachcrest, if they couldn’t save Home Base …
He couldn’t imagine what losing the inn would mean to Auburn or what losing his company would mean to him.
And the scenario in which they both won felt so flimsy and unlikely.
Not to mention that she lived in a permanent vacation on the Oregon coast, and he lived in a workaholic haze in Silicon Valley.
So he wouldn’t let himself think about anything except the present moment. Not when she was stretched out beside him, so curvy and relaxed and beautiful. When she’d just said yes in every possible way to everything he’d asked her for.
He could think of a few more things he wanted her to say yes to. Her moving lazily on top of him. Or clutching the headboard as he took her from behind.
“Are you hard again?”
“No.” He grinned at her and put his hand on his—hardening—cock. “Maybe. Um, yes.”
She lay back down, her eyes on his fist. Then his face. Then his fist.
“You like watching this?” he asked. He sure as fuck liked doing it, although his hand was neither as hot nor as tight as she’d been a few moments ago. But he really liked the look on her face as she watched. Her pupils had crowded out the blue of her irises, and her teeth worried her lower lip.
“Hell yes.”
He stopped, and was gratified by the look of disappointment and hunger that crossed her face. A good deal was always made from a position of power. “I want to watch you first.”
“What, touching myself?”
“Yeah.”
She blushed, and he felt a rush of blood into his cock, like the tides answering the moon. “I don’t usually do it like that.”
“How do you do it?”
Long hesitation, her lip taking a beating. “Toys,” she whispered, finally.
“Oh,” he said. Except it was really more like, ohhhhh. “What kind of toys?”
“I have, um, a dildo. And a vibrator. And—”
Whatever it was, it was causing her particular trouble to say aloud.
“It’s called Hello Clitty.”
“It is not.”
“It is,” she affirmed. “It looks like an ear thermometer, with this little silicone nozzle and you put it right over your clit, and it’s contactless. It uses air to create suction—”
All the blood bottomed out of his brain, leaving him lightheaded. “I think you should go get it.”
She shook her head.
“No, really. I think you should go get it right now.”
It didn’t require much convincing. She was already pulling on her panties and dress, and she ducked out the door only to come back within three minutes with a small tote bag. She pulled out a device that, indeed, looked exactly like an ear thermometer. She touched a button and it began emitting a small buzz.
“Doesn’t sound very powerful.”
“You’d be shocked,” she said. She touched it to one of his nipples, and he jumped. Not because he got much out of having his nipples played with, but because she was right—it packed way more of a punch than he would have guessed. He didn’t have a clitoris, but he could project what it would feel like to have that thing sucking on an incredibly sensitive body part, and—
His most sensitive body part was sympathetically hard as a rock.
“I want to watch you use it.”
She hesitated, but he could see she liked the idea.
“Take off your dress.”
She did, and shed her pretty lace panties, too. He couldn’t help himself; he reached out and cupped the soft, sweet curve of her ass. Her skin felt like silk against his palm, and impulsively, he rubbed the satiny head of his cock against her. She moaned at the sensation.
“Lie down.”
She was warming to the idea; she was quicker to obey this time.
“Show me.”
She parted her lips with one hand and touched the funny little silicone nozzle to her clit with the other. Her face immediately went slack with pleasure, and his cock jerked its approval. He couldn’t help himself, his hand squeezed the base and he thrust into his fist.
“Yeah,” she moaned.
He wasn’t sure if she was moaning in response to the thrum of suction against her clit or the sight of him, but he didn’t care a whole lot. It was all the same to his cock.
“Do you—” Her voice was breaking up now, her concentration shot. “Do you do it dry like that?”
It felt like she’d reached out a hand and added her soft stroke to his. He groaned. “I lick my hand sometimes.”
“Do it.”
He was in the process of lifting his hand to his own mouth when he thought better of it and lowered it to hers. Her tongue came out, flat, wet, rasping against every fingerprint and groove, sending sensation thrilling up his arm. He brought it back to his cock, the strokes slicker now, more like her—and she knew it; a flush was rising in her face.
She did something and the hum of the device working between her legs edged up a notch.
“Did you just turn it up?”
She nodded, wordless.
“Does it feel good?”
“So good.”
“God, Auburn.”
“Not as good as when you lick me, though,” she said, almost conversationally, and he almost lost it.
“But I can’t watch you like this when I do that,” he said.
“No, you can’t.”
Her nipples were sharp points. He reached out his spare hand and stroked one, then the other.
“If you keep doing that I’m going to come,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I want.”
“You, too,” she said.
“Yeah. Me too.”
He was. He was so close that each stroke felt dangerous in the best possible way.
He stopped stroking himself long enough to reach between her legs. She
was swollen and soaking, and he covered his fingers in it and brought them back to his cock. He was close, his balls drawn up, his cock so big it felt like it was splitting the skin. Her eyes were riveted on the shiny skin over the head, on the drops of pre-cum forming there.
He hit the point of no return suddenly, the orgasm shooting up his spine, the pressure in his balls and tension in his limbs all releasing at once with white-hot pleasure. He came hard, all over her soft belly, and she watched the first thick white strand fall on her skin.
That was enough for her, apparently.
“Oh!” she said breathlessly, and her head thrashed from side to side on the pillow, her body bucking, as she came. She was unbelievably beautiful like that, all pleasure and abandon, his cum all over her stomach.
He cleaned them both up with a warm washcloth and lay down beside her, drawing her close against him. Breathing in lavender and the sea-scent of sex.
“Good little device you’ve got there.”
“I don’t remember it working that fast or making me come that hard the last time I used it.”
He chuckled and kissed her forehead. She snuggled closer.
And that was the last thing he remembered until morning.
33
Trey Xavier was eating pancakes.
And not just eating them, but consuming them with gusto, alternating bites of syrup-drenched hotcake with crispy bacon and fresh local berries. And his phone was nowhere to be seen.
She’d awakened around one a.m. with his arm thrown over her. In sleep, in the moonlight streaming in through the window, he’d looked as vulnerable as a little boy. His lashes trembled against his cheeks and his face was relaxed and guileless. He looked nothing like the man she’d first seen in Bob’s Tavern, and she’d been overwhelmed by tenderness. She’d curled against him and fallen back asleep.
This morning she’d woken with a whole different set of emotions. In the dark room in the pre-dawn, she remembered the claustrophobia of Patrick’s world and the terror of realizing she’d completely lost herself.
Hadn’t she promised herself she wouldn’t do this? Mix money, sex, and power? Let herself catch feelings for someone before she’d established herself—sister, friend, owner of Beachcrest?
She hastily dressed and slunk back to her room to change. A hot shower and her own clothes, the sun beginning to cast gold through the Beachcrest breakfast room windows, restored her somewhat. In the daylight, the memories and sensations of last night were more vivid and compelling than the awfulness of her old mistake.
She wasn’t the woman who’d lost herself.
Trey wasn’t Patrick.
As if in answer to this thought, Trey looked up from his giant stack of pancakes and beamed in her direction. He raised an eyebrow in a way that made her body instantly recall the touch of his mouth and crave it again. She bit her lip, and his smile vanished and his eyes went dark.
Maybe they should go on a beach hike today to that secret cove—the one no one was ever at—and take a picnic and a blanket—?
For a moment, she let herself imagine that this might be her life. Trying to decide what delight of the Oregon coast to show Trey next.
But there was no point in thinking about that, was there? About a time when Beachcrest was hers and his company had been saved, and maybe he would occasionally make a jaunt up to Tierney Bay to see Carl and Brynn and the boys?
Because what if it didn’t play out that way?
What if she weren’t running Beachcrest and he didn’t have his company in San Francisco?
Both those things were still real possibilities.
And she couldn’t imagine this—whatever it was between them—outlasting either of those defeats.
It was Friday, not a bank holiday, and in all probability she would hear back from Diane Cooper today. She’d checked the Bootstrapper this morning, and while James’s strategies had clearly kicked up the action a few notches—and all four of the romance writers and her siblings had made generous donations—at their current rate it would take them far past Monday to raise even half the money she needed.
If she couldn’t get the money, then one of them would lose the thing that mattered most to them.
Trey was sandwiched between the fishermen and the romance writers, entertaining them all with a story about the time, back when he’d been flipping houses and working as a contractor, when he’d accidentally built a front porch on the wrong house.
“And the owner—the husband—comes home from work and I’m almost done, and he comes storming up, yelling, ‘What are you doing?” and in my head, I’m like, what? I did exactly what we agreed on. And finally, it becomes clear what’s happened, and—so, obviously, I agree to not charge them for the work I’ve done, or the materials. I mean, they’re going to get this front porch for free. And if I do say so myself, it’s a beautiful front porch. Big and broad, with plenty of room for furniture, and perfectly situated in a nice spacious front yard—probably going to add fifteen-K in curb appeal to the value of this cute little suburban house—and he says, ‘Take it down.’”
“No!” gasps Aria. “Oh, my God, I would kill for a front porch. I would sell my soul for one. If I were him, I would have thought I won the lottery.”
There was a murmur of yes from the romance writers and even Dewann was nodding his agreement.
“Well, not him. And no matter what I did, I couldn’t convince him that he should keep it. I hoped that when his wife got home, she’d talk some sense into him, but no, she was even more pissed than he was about the whole thing. By the end they were both talking about suing me for disrupting the integrity of the house, or something like that, making me promise that I’d restore everything to exactly how it had been, putty up any holes I’d made, all that. So I spent the whole next day unbuilding it. Two days lost work. But it taught me a really good lesson. After that, I was like a surgeon: ‘Mark yourself with permanent marker before I cut.’ ‘You’re sure you want a porch. Right here? On the front of your house? Here’s a sharpie, make an X where you want it. And then sign in blood, please.’”
Auburn watched him, watched him demolish her pancakes and bacon and fruit, watched him make the guests smile, watched him smile, and wondered until she couldn’t wonder any more.
As the other diners started to drift away, she sat down next to him.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
His eyes moved over her face, soft and admiring. It made her warm.
“Trey?”
“What?”
She wanted to ask him what would happen if she couldn’t get the money. She knew how it would affect Beachcrest and Home Base, but she wanted to know what it would mean for them. But he dug his fork back into his pancakes and crammed a mouthful in and followed it with a slice of bacon and a swig of orange juice. When he’d finished chewing, he grinned at her. “There isn’t any more bacon is there? Worked up an appetite yesterday. Must have been the three-legged race.”
And she couldn’t make herself ask. Sometimes you didn’t want to know the answer. Instead she said, “There’s this secret beach.”
“Is there?” he asked mildly, but his eyes darkened.
“It’s usually deserted.”
“Is it?”
“Unless you have work to do?”
He leaned close, his breath a whisper against her ear.
“The only work I have to do today,” he murmured, “is the kind it takes to get you to scream my name.”
34
It was technically a woods hike, not a beach hike. They walked several miles, mostly along the ridge of a cliff that rode the edge of the Pacific, the world falling away to one side of them into the vastness of gray water and sky. It wasn’t sunny, but Auburn said that was for the best, because then they wouldn’t get sunburned on the beach. She said it suggestively, and he thought about the prettiest, pinkest parts of her, exposed to the air and the breeze, which would tease over her nipples and ruffle her curls and—
<
br /> He was walking behind her and she was wearing a sporty sundress, made of some stretchy material that clung to every curve and flared out into a skirt that didn’t even make it to midthigh.
“It’s hard to walk with an erection,” he said grumpily.
She stopped abruptly and he crashed into her. She turned around.
“I can help with that.”
The breath went out of him at the same time the blood plummeted south. “It wasn’t meant to be a hint—”
But he didn’t even get the whole sentence out before she grabbed his hand and tugged him a short distance off the path and into a secluded grove. Then she was on her knees, grappling with the button and zipper of his cargo shorts, releasing him from his boxers so he sprang up, long and thick. It was a relief to feel the cool air on his hot, tight flesh.
He got to watch her face when she first saw him, too. Eyes big and pupils already blown black, nearly blocking out the last ring of blue. She licked her lips, and not for show, he didn’t think. Just because she liked the slickness all over his plump head. Then she was licking him, popping him past the rim of her lips, sucking generously and loudly, which—holy fuck, he would never have predicted how much that would turn him on, the sound of her wet mouth. The feel of her tongue, licking stripes up the length of him and swirls around the head.
Some women hated giving blowjobs and some women liked it. Some were decent at it, some weren’t. She was so good and so enthusiastic that he was losing his mind. She was finding spots on his cock he hadn’t known were there, drawing lines and connecting dots and his balls pulled up so fast, the heat shooting down his spine so he barely had time to warn her, “Jesus, Auburn, I’m going to—”
But she knew. She’d grabbed his ass the moment he’d swelled in her mouth, and she wasn’t going to let him go. He came just the way she’d wanted, against the hot, wet back of her throat, so much pleasure he didn’t mind losing control.
