Almost Paradise (Book 4)

by Christie Ridgway

  Skye quivered at the damp contact and her chin lifted. As they stared into each other’s eyes, an urgency rose in him, a breathless insistence not unlike that he’d felt when he’d been running up the sand. Running to her.

  And now that he had her...

  He lost his head.

  Gage’s mouth came down on hers. His fingers tightened on her upper arms, but instead of fighting him, her body yielded, going boneless. He reassured her anyway. “This is me,” he said against her mouth, then licked the seam of her lips.

  They parted, and she quivered in his hold.

  He didn’t make any quick moves with his tongue. He just toyed with her mouth, painting the soft surfaces, sucking on the plump upper curve, letting her feel the edge of his teeth as he delicately bit the lower one. She was panting, her breath hot against his chin, and when he heard her moan...

  He plunged.

  She made a sound deep in her throat. With one arm around her waist, he gathered her closer and fed on her mouth. It was crazy, this intense need to have her, to know her flavor so intimately, but it had him in its thrall. She seemed equally absorbed, her lips still open to him, his shirt tangled in the grip of her fingers. When he broke to allow them air, she stayed glued against him, her body heat mingling with his.

  Nuzzling her hair, he knew the moment the brief spell broke. A small whimper sounded. Her hands dropped. She stepped out of his arms.

  Without a protest, he let her go.

  “That shouldn’t have happened,” she said.

  When she meant she hadn’t thought it could happen. Skye hadn’t believed that she could—even for a moment—lose herself and her lingering terror in the pleasure of a man’s kiss.

  In Gage’s kiss.

  “That really shouldn’t have happened.” She took another step back, a panicked expression on her face.

  Gage, on the other hand, felt calm and centered for the first time since receiving her call, his next steps clear in his mind. He owed Skye in ways she’d never know, and he’d make payment on the debt by convincing her that the sweet fire had been no aberration.

  Her sexuality still burned, and he would be the one to prove it to her. Not only because it was obvious an attraction ran between them, but because he knew he had her trust.

  He wouldn’t break it. Instead, he’d do everything in his power to reassure her she was still a woman. What else were friends for?

  * * *

  SKYE HAD GOTTEN DRESSED before dawn, determined to get started on an idea she’d come up with weeks before. With a cup of coffee downed, she was caffeinated enough to put her muscles into pushing the living room furniture to the center of the floor. Next, she rolled up the hall runner. Following that, she stacked the kitchen chairs atop the table. Old sheets served as tarps to cover the furniture and then she retrieved the tools from the garage: rollers, pan and brushes. She was lugging in cans of lemon-chiffon-colored paint when she heard someone at her front door.

  Pulse tripping, Skye froze. Every instinct she had told her who stood on the other side. Those same instincts warred with each other in loud demand: Pretend you’re not home! Welcome him in!

  Part of her was relieved he now knew the truth. She wouldn’t have to paper over her odd edginess. He’d understand her jumpy nerves and aversion to being touched.

  Except she’d let him touch her last night.

  Kiss her.

  And she’d managed not to faint in panic.

  Another thump sounded on the door. “I hear your brain whirring in there, Skye,” Gage called through the wood. “Take a deep breath and let me in.”

  Still, she hesitated.

  “I bear fancy coffee.”

  Feeling ridiculous, she set down the cans and made her way toward the door. One comfort kiss from him didn’t mean he anticipated another. She’d probably been a lousy partner in the whole thing, she thought, turning the knob. Had she even responded? She only remembered absorbing—his heat, his strength, his exotic-spice smell.

  A blush crawled up her neck as she pulled open the door. Her heart stuttered as she took in the sight of him, breeze-ruffled dark hair, piercing blue-green eyes, faint smile on his lips. His alert gaze gave her an intense study and she suspected he could see every toss and turn, every sleepless minute, every second thought she’d had since bidding him good-night.

  She shouldn’t have called him from the office.

  She shouldn’t have shared her secret.

  She shouldn’t have let him kiss her.

  “Stop thinking so much,” he advised, stepping over the threshold. He placed a cardboard cup in her hand.

  “Thank you,” she said, sniffing at the rich scent of fresh grounds. “How far did you have to go for this?”

  “Captain Crow’s.”

  Her eyes rounded. “They don’t open until eleven.”

  “Unless you’re me, and you strike up a conversation with the prep cook who starts work at seven.”

  “Ah.”

  “Get your mind out of the gutter,” he said, uncurling his forefinger from around his own cup to point it at her. “His name is George and he has a wife and three kids.”

  “My mind’s not in the gutter!” Well, not since she woke from a twenty-minute midnight doze during which she’d imagined herself stretched out on her bed, Gage standing at its foot, slowly stripping off his clothes.

  He grinned at her, then reached into his front pocket to pull free a slim camera. Still juggling his coffee, he managed to bring the viewfinder to his eye and snap a shot. “I’ll call it ‘Guilty as Charged.’”

  “That’s an invasion of privacy,” she said, frowning at him.

  “I think that blush indicates that you’ve been mentally invading mine.”

  “Gage!”

  He laughed. “Relax. Nobody will see the photo but the two of us.”

  “I don’t want you looking at me,” she grumbled.

  Ignoring her, he took a slow perusal of the living room. “What’s going on?”

  She swallowed a mouthful of coffee. “I’ve been planning on repainting some rooms, rearranging the furniture in others. Sort of...”

  “Reclaiming your territory?”

  “Yes,” she said, grateful that no more explanation was necessary. He understood her so well. “Yes, exactly.”

  “You should have written to me when it happened,” he said, his voice low. “I would have done something, anything—”

  “Gage, you were thousands of miles away.”

  “I know, but—” He blew out a frustrated breath. “But I can do something now. Let me help. Let me help you paint. I’m the best furniture mover you’ll ever meet.”

  She sent him a skeptical glance. “Don’t you have better things to do?”

  “Actually, no. You’d be doing me a favor. I get tired of my own company pretty quickly these days.”

  It was her turn to study him. “That’s a surprise. As you’ve pointed out before, your job means you spend a lot of time alone.”

  He lifted a shoulder. “Too much time, it seems. Give me a paint roller, Skye, I’m begging you.”

  What could she do when her pen pal put it like that?

  And the fact was, his assistance helped her in more ways than one. Not only was he tall, skilled with tools and willing to do whatever asked, but being around him leached the awkwardness she’d been feeling over the kiss, even though they started work in separate rooms. She took the kitchen and he the living room.

  They expected to meet in the hallway.

  But before that, she caught him taking more pictures. “What are you doing?” she said, craning to look at him from her place on a stepladder.

  “Just practicing. I haven’t held a camera in weeks.”

  Weird. Because she remembered him never being without one since he was nine or ten. “Why not?”

  He shrugged, and snapped again. She thought he’d focused on the back of her hand, speckled with pale yellow paint freckles. “That can’t be pretty,” she said. />
  “In the eye of the beholder,” he commented as he wandered off.

  Half an hour later, she brought him a cold glass of iced tea. He’d opened the front door so that the breeze cleared out some of the paint fumes. Her gaze was drawn to it, and she tried to quell her instant quake of worry. Usually it was double-locked and dead-bolted. At night she hung a cowbell from the knob.

  “I’m between you and your nightmares,” he murmured, taking the glass she proffered.

  As she glanced away from the concerned look in his eyes, her gaze snagged on the camera he’d left on top of the sheet-draped sofa. She cleared her throat. “I never asked—how did professional photography come about?”

  He pursed his lips, appearing to think. “I suspect it all begins with Rex Monroe.”

  “Rex?” He was ninety-something years old, and a longtime resident of the cove. A Pulitzer Prize–winning war correspondent, he’d complained about the Lowell twins every year they’d summered at Beach House No. 9.

  “He was annoyed with me and Griffin one fog-shrouded afternoon. We were wrestling and yelling at each other in his yard. If I remember correctly, he yanked us into his house by the scruff of our necks and told us we needed to better ourselves instead of batter our brother.”

  Skye laughed. “He has a way with words.”

  “In his study, he had an old manual typewriter and sitting next to it, a Kodak Brownie camera. It was a classic even then, something he’d had since the 1950s, but he...he let me touch it. Showed me how to use it. Griff was engrossed with putting letters onto paper, but that Brownie...the world looked different to me through its lens.”

  “Different how?”

  “I controlled it.” He finished off his tea and set the empty glass on the windowsill. “I could cut away the parts that didn’t fit my vision. I could focus on the subjects I thought needed to be seen. The appeal of that never left me.”

  “So in college...”

  “I studied political science, not photography. But one spring break I went with a philanthropic group to Mexico with the intention of building a school by day and drinking tequila by night. We were there when the region was shaken by a magnitude-7.9 earthquake. The photos I took were the first that made it out...and they were the beginning of making my reputation.”

  “And you continued globe-trotting and taking photographs,” Skye said. She didn’t know why the words made her melancholy. Gage had found his place in the world, just as her place was here at the cove. Or had been at the cove.

  Okay, melancholy explained.

  A crease dug between his eyebrows. “What’s wrong, honey?”

  She didn’t want to say the words. This all ends here. We’ll never again be at this place together.

  Once summer’s over, we’ll never again be together anywhere.

  Still frowning, he approached her slowly. She didn’t move; her feet felt weighted to the floor, made as heavy as her heart by the notion that this was the aching end of everything. “Skye,” he whispered, and his fingers were just as gentle as his voice when he pushed a wisp of hair off her forehead.

  “Don’t,” she whispered back, feeling as if she were teetering on the edge of the tall bluff at the south end of the cove, with only cold water and jagged rocks to welcome her at the bottom. Don’t push me. I’ll never survive the fall.

  Instead of obeying her unspoken words, Gage stepped closer.

  She jerked back, her pulse rocketing.

  He only smiled. “Sweet Skye. Don’t worry, I’m not going to kiss you again.” Then he leaned around her to grab a rag draped on the sheet-shrouded wing chair behind her.

  “I didn’t... I don’t—”

  His second smile held more mischief. “Unless you ask me to, that is.”

  Pulse still racing, Skye stared after him as he returned to work, unsure of her reaction to his provocative statement. Was it relief...or disappointment?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  TEAGUE WHITE WAS ZONED OUT, staring into his beer, when a voice found its way into his consciousness. “Hey, you okay?”

  He looked up, coming back to the present. August evening. Captain Crow’s deck. Tables pushed together and a big gathering of friends drinking, laughing, talking, as part of the ongoing dual celebration of Gage Lowell’s vacation and his twin Griffin’s impending nuptials.

  His gaze slid to the questioner. It was the bride-to-be, Jane Pearson, who was seated near him along with her fiancé. Skye, Polly and Gage were gathered at his table, as well. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m a little out of it. Didn’t get much sleep last night.” There’d been no down time during his last twenty-four-hour shift.

  Polly studied his face. “Work was tough?”

  He grunted, then took up his beer for a swallow.

  “I don’t know how you do it, Teague,” Jane said. “You go from ‘tough’ hours on the job and slide right into party time.”

  Griffin leaned back in his chair. “I once did a story on Doctors Without Borders,” he said. “The men and women engaged in that kind of work are experts at leaving the dark stuff on a high shelf.”

  “I suppose you have to separate yourself in some way,” Jane murmured.

  Teague was saved from examining his psyche by the sound of female laughter at the other end of the conjoined tables. They all looked over to see Tess Quincy pulling her recalcitrant husband up by the elbow. His grumbles only made her laugh harder.

  God, she was beautiful, Teague thought.

  At thirty-three, she was no longer the long-legged girl he’d admired from afar when they were both kids summering at the cove. And she wasn’t the gorgeous nineteen-year-old star of TV commercials who’d become the unexpected darling of the country. He’d had her poster hanging in his bedroom. Her image had been the screen saver on his very first laptop.

  When he’d run into her on the sand in front of No. 9 in June, he’d almost thought it was the beach house’s purported magic that had conjured her there. For him. He’d fallen fast.

  Now, as he watched her husband, David, follow her onto the dance floor, he didn’t wish that the two of them hadn’t reconciled. Clearly, the man doted on her. Tess radiated happiness. But he couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for himself.

  “Hey, honey pie,” Griffin said to his almost-bride. “It’s your song.”

  “As covered by Teague’s first love,” Skye put in.

  “What?” Curiosity sparked in Polly’s big blue eyes. “Do tell.”

  Teague shifted in his chair and cursed the DJ who’d decided to play The Jewels’ cover of Cowboy Junkie’s cover of Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane.” “Can we talk about something else?”

  “Not while I’m alive,” Polly said, flashing him one of her brilliant smiles. Then she turned to Skye, whom he’d known all his life—which was clearly much too long. “Spill.”

  “Now that I consider it,” Skye said, tapping her chin with a finger, “it’s his second big love. The first was the exchange student from Belgium who attended our high school junior year. He moped for months after she returned home to the land of waffles and chocolate. Then—”

  “I had other girlfriends,” he declared over her, annoyed.

  “But no one you really flipped for until Amethyst Lake came into your life.”

  Polly hooted. “Amethyst Lake? That sounds like an anime character.”

  “Her real name was Amy Lake,” Teague said stiffly. “Amethyst is her stage name. She’s the singer for The Jewels.”

  His best-friend-who-was-a-girl continued to snicker. “When was this?”

  “It was...five years ago?” Skye posited. “Right before you two met, Amethyst and her group left on tour, never to return.”

  “Wow,” Gage said admiringly. “It’s the stuff of fantasy, dating the hot lead of an all-girl rock band.”

  “Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?” Polly demanded of Skye, then turned to Teague. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  The back of his neck was burning. “Let’s talk a
bout someone else. Surely I’m not the only person with a romance he or she would rather forget.”

  Gage raised his eyebrows in the direction of his sister-in-law-to-be. “I heard that Jane dated the famous author Ian Stone.”

  Griffin leaned forward, sending his brother a hard look. “We don’t speak of Ian Stone.”

  “Jeez, okay,” he said, hands up. His gaze roamed the table. “Polly, you look like a girl with a torrid history.”

  Teague nearly snorted. She looked like a girl who won the Girl Scout cookie prize and celebrated by sharing an ice-cream soda with the boy voted most likely to become a Jesuit priest. “Polly’s closemouthed about her past, but you gotta assume it’s so clean it squeaks.”

  Skye elbowed her friend. Teague glanced over at the movement, caught her whisper. “Wait, doesn’t he know about—”

  “Girl dance!” Polly called, her gaze avoiding Teague as she yanked Skye from the table by the hand. The beat of The Weather Girls’ “It’s Raining Men” was rocking through the speakers. “Jane, you come, too.”

  And so, before he could completely assimilate the “doesn’t he know about,” the women were gone, deserting the men for the small parquet floor, where they shook their asses and shimmied their shoulders in ways you only saw in movies like Dirty Dancing or when females were partnered with each other. Teague stared. He didn’t know Polly had those moves in her.

  “I used to think watching that was hot in junior high,” Gage commented. “It only gets better as I age.”

  “Or as you get hornier,” his brother said. “Making any progress on the Gorge?”

  Gage scowled at his twin. “Like Ian Stone, we won’t speak of it.”

  “Oh, hell,” Griffin said, groaning. “That’s a bad sign. And I promised Jane I’d warn you again about getting involved with Skye. As in, don’t. Is that what’s going on?”

  Skye? She was his friend, too. Teague looked between the twins.

  “It’s none of your business,” Gage said.