by Grant, Pippa
That hasn’t happened just by looking at a man in months.
“Yeah,” he says, his voice thick and low. “Yeah, I’m fucking annoyed.”
I rise and shimmy out of my leggings, because this is a bad idea, but every good idea I’ve ever had hasn’t gotten me what I wanted in life, has it?
“Christ, Ellie,” he rasps out.
“You only wish you looked this good,” I tell him, but I can’t keep my voice steady either.
I’d blame the ice cream for the heady tingling in my fingers and toes, but my blood’s not spiked with anything more than sugar.
I let Wyatt take his time looking at me, because I know I look good. I hit the gym for weights four mornings a week. I run marathons. I still have curves. I don’t run without a heavy-duty sports bra and my ass could squash a supermodel, but I won’t apologize for being built like a woman.
I am a woman. A strong, powerful, unique woman who fucking deserves exactly what I’m seeing in the raw desire in Wyatt’s gray eyes.
If he’s never noticed my body before, he’s noticing now.
“You need to put your clothes back on,” he says, but his eyes aren’t in agreement with his words.
His eyes are offering to use my body to make my brain forget what my heart’s suffering.
“Or what?” I ask.
He visibly swallows, but he doesn’t answer.
He doesn’t look away either.
I slip one bra strap down my shoulder, letting it hang in the crook of my elbow, not off, but not on either.
“Ellie,” he warns, his hand going to his pants over his cock, like he can’t decide if he wants to press it down to stop it, or if he wants to jerk himself off while he watches me strip.
“You’re hurting,” I say, slipping my other bra strap halfway down my arm too. I’m still covered by my simple satin demicups, but I reach behind me like I’m going to unhook the band, and we both know he’ll be getting an eyeful of my breasts if I do it. “I’m hurting. I don’t want to hurt. Do you?”
“No,” he rasps out.
“Don’t you want to just say fuck them and feel good for a few minutes?”
“Yes.”
I shut down all the warning signals alarming inside my head, because they’re not all don’t screw your brother’s best friend.
Some of them are you know how long it took to forget him the last time you got a crush on him.
And some he’s unavailable, dumbass, and so are you. You know you can’t do this without feelings getting involved.
Can’t I?
“You’re probably a terrible lay,” I say as I drop my bra.
He rises, and his pants hit the ground.
So do his boxers.
I take in the sight of his cock bobbing and straining, and I have to physically stop myself from reaching for it.
He’s long. Thick. With a blunt head and dark curls framing his balls, so unlike Patrick’s total blondness.
“You probably lay there like a cold limp noodle,” he says.
“Try me.”
He’s suddenly crushing his mouth against mine, and he tastes like cinnamon and beer and summer, and his skin is hot against mine, his tongue unforgiving, his cock hard against my belly while his hands roam up my sides to tease the underside of my breasts.
I moan into his mouth. He groans in response. Our tongues clash, an inevitable extension of the war we’ve always waged since before we were old enough to understand it. I scrape his back with my nails. He squeezes my breasts. I push his shoulders until he’s on his knees, following him all the way down to the ground.
This is insane.
I should stop.
“Condom,” he sputters. “Wallet.”
I grab it off the end table. “Hurry up before I change my mind.”
He stills.
Like he’s changing his mind.
So I grab his cock and pump it in my fist before he can tell me no.
I don’t want to think.
I just want to feel.
And right now, my skin is on fire, my pussy is aching, and my breasts are heavy and desperate for attention.
“Fuck, Ellie,” he groans, his head dropping back while he fumbles for the condom.
As soon as he’s pulled it out of his wallet, I snag it and tear it open. “Touch my breasts,” I order.
“Christ, so soft,” he mutters while he tests the weight of my D-cups and teases my nipples.
Every brush of his thumb over one of my tips sends a shockwave of desire straight to my core. He alternates. One nipple. Then the other. Like my body is an instrument, and he’s teasing new notes of arousal to the surface.
“So hard,” I mutter back while I roll the condom down his steel shaft.
I cup his balls, and the next thing I know, he’s rolled me onto my back, his mouth sealing over mine again. We fumble together to yank my panties off. I part my legs and arch into him, and he pushes into me.
It’s new. And weird.
But not unwelcome.
He fills me, sliding easily into my soaking heat even as he stretches my inner walls, and I tilt my hips to take him as deep as I can.
“You drive me fucking insane,” he rasps as he pumps into me.
I don’t answer, because oh, fuck. “There. Right there.” I buck my hips, the tension building high and tight right in that deepest part of me that he hits every time he thrusts in.
“Don’t close your eyes,” he orders.
Against my will, I open them.
He’s watching my face while he hammers inside, faster and deeper, watching me gasp in pleasure while he fills me to the hilt and pulls back just long enough to make it that much better when he strokes deep inside me with the next thrust.
How long have I hated Wyatt Morgan?
And how long have I possibly just been afraid?
Told you so, my subconscious whispers, but he hits that sweet spot deep inside me again, and I come completely undone. My orgasm roars out of me, squeezing and pulsing and spasming around his hard cock, a silent cry on my lips while he groans and strains, holding himself inside me while he grits his teeth, eyes still penetrating mine, anger simmering, pain simmering, release simmering.
The two of us are quite the pair.
And it’s not nearly as terrifying a thought as it should be.
I’m panting, my breath loud in my own ears, when he suddenly freezes.
“Oh, shit,” he whispers. He pushes up to his knees, pulling out so quickly and covering the goods so fast that my vagina almost gets whiplash. “Fuck. Ellie.” He shakes his head, gaze darting in a panic around the room. “We shouldn’t have done that.”
The words take a minute to sink in.
And he takes advantage of my dumbfounded silence to hop back into his clothes. “Fuck. Sorry. I—”
“Shut up.” I lunge for my own clothes. Tears are flooding my sinuses, and they’ll be leaking out my eyeballs in approximately two seconds if I don’t get myself under control. “Just shut up.”
I dive for my clothes too.
“Ellie—”
“Shut. Up.”
That sympathy. That regret. That this was a mistake. It’s all in the two syllables of my name on his lips.
Fuck. Fuck.
He moves toward me, but I shove him in the chest until he backs off.
He’s right, of course.
It’s Wyatt.
He’s always right. If this was a mistake, if I’m a mistake, then yeah, clearly I’m a mistake.
A mistake who thought that screwing her brother’s best friend was the solution to heartbreak.
I don’t look at him while I dash for the door.
“Ellie,” he calls in a hushed whisper, but I ignore him.
I’ve already been someone’s mistake recently.
And as I barrel into the cold winter night and throw myself into the car, I vow to myself that I’ll never be anyone’s mistake ever again.
“Never again,” I whisper as I s
tart my car.
“Never again,” I whisper as I gun it on the way down my parents’ street.
“Never again,” I’m whispering through tears five minutes later on the I-256 loop.
I see the movement flying up the entrance ramp next to me a second too late.
There’s a flash, sparks, a crack, a jolt.
Spinning.
Crunching.
Glass shattering.
Metal buckling.
Pain.
Blinding hot pain.
Never again.
It’s my last thought before everything goes black.
Two
Six months later…
Wyatt Morgan, aka a single dad military man unaware that an unresolved piece of his past is lurking in the bathtub
The house is too quiet.
Probably because Tucker quit talking as soon as he saw the socks and bra hanging on the chandelier in the foyer. I give myself a mental pat on the back.
Way to go, Dad. Introduce him to party central at a young age.
If Beck Ryder wasn’t the closest thing I had to a brother, and if just being here didn’t already bring back the same lingering guilt that’s been with me the last six months, I’d be plotting to put Icy Hot in those briefs he models right about now.
Instead, I give the living room a cursory glance and stifle a sigh while I kick my sandals off on the entry mat and nudge Tucker to do the same. Books, magazines, robot toys, and empty mugs and glasses are scattered over every flat surface of the spacious living space, from the end tables to the wide-plank maple floor. The mess ruins the effect of the tall bay windows overlooking the spruce and oaks sloping down the side of the mountain to the little landlocked town of Shipwreck, Virginia in the valley below.
A subtle scent of wood smoke hangs in the air, and the massive stone fireplace separating the living room from the dining room needs the ashes cleaned out. The kitchen is just as much a disaster, with dirty plates, cups, mixing bowls, and pots and pans scattered all about.
Use my weekend house, Beck said. Somebody should.
Go clean my weekend house, he meant.
He needs to be more careful with who he lets in here when he’s gone.
A family picture on the mantle catches my eye, and I do my best not to wince.
The guilt is still there. The guilt, and the lie.
I pissed her off.
That’s all I told Beck about what happened before Ellie’s accident.
Of course you did, Levi had said, because he’d also been lurking at the hospital when I showed up to check on her as soon as I got Beck’s text the next day. I’d never been so glad to have a buffer, and felt less like I deserved one, and after what I grew up with before my mom finally moved us to Copper Valley, that’s saying something. Levi hadn’t cracked a grin when he’d added, Pissing off Ellie is what you do.
Fuck, man, you got your own problems, Beck had told me. Don’t put this on yourself too.
And just like that, I was forgiven.
By them, anyway.
Not by her though.
And not by me.
It’s gotten easier to get back in the groove of participating in the group texts with all the guys from the neighborhood, but being here, in Beck’s second—third? fourth?—home, surrounded by reminders of his sister, makes me tenser than I’ve been in months.
Coming here was a bad idea.
But I’m not here for me.
Not entirely.
I squeeze Tucker’s shoulder. His gaze has drifted from the chandelier to the life-size cardboard cutout of Beck in his skivvies standing in the corner.
The air-brushing on that thing would be hilarious if my son wasn’t gaping at Beck’s six-pack. I turn the thing around, then nod toward the hallway beyond the kitchen. “C’mon, little dude. Let’s go find the bedrooms.”
He nods back. Sort of. I guide him past the kitchen and down the hallway toward the two bedrooms on this level. His suitcase goes into the guest bedroom, and I’m about to fling my duffel inside the master, but the rumpled sheets on the king-size four-poster bed, the glass of water on the heavy nightstand, the open suitcase next to the stone fireplace stuffed with—parrots?—and the flowery scent tickling my nose give me pause.
But it’s the soft light flickering in the bathroom doorway that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
I put a hand out to stop Tucker from coming closer. “Stay here,” I murmur, my pulse suddenly hammering.
Since Christmas, it’s been just me. Alone. Except the one weekend a month I’ve flown to Copper Valley to visit my son.
Checking out an intruder? Twenty-eight days a month, I can handle that.
But on the first day I get Tucker for the summer? When it’s not just my neck on the line?
This is not how our week of vacation is supposed to go.
I slide my phone out of my pocket and creep softly to the bathroom door, one hand held back to remind Tucker to stay and be quiet.
He’s seven.
This isn’t going to end well.
But just as I decide getting the hell out of here and calling a sheriff is probably a better idea, I see what’s lurking in the bathroom.
A woman.
Alone.
In the corner tub.
Her dark hair is piled in a short ponytail on top of her head. The faint sound of country music drifts out of her earbuds. Candles line the tub shelf and the platform it sits on, causing the flickering glow. The bath bubbles are so high I can’t see her face.
My heart gives a squeeze and shoots out guilt, but I tell it to knock it off.
Beck lets anybody who asks use this house.
It’s not Ellie.
Her hair’s too short and too dark. Ellie always has blond streaks in her hair.
I step onto the cool tile floor, and I’m about to clear my throat to get her attention when Tucker exclaims, “A bubble bath!”
The woman shrieks, straightens, and spins, wide blue eyes connecting with mine for a split second before she disappears.
One second, she’s gape-mouthed and goggling like she’s just as shocked to see us as we are to see her, and the next, there’s a splash that sets my heart spiraling into a panic, because fuck me, that’s Ellie.
A flurry of foamy bubbles shoots into the air as she goes under the water. Her arm flaps up, then the other, waving wildly like she’s trying to find purchase to pull herself up. I dash across the slick tile to grab for her in the deep tub. My hand connects with soft wet flesh, and suddenly I’m getting a fist to the chest as she breaks through the water. “Back up, asshole. I’ll fucking cut you!”
Fuck, that voice.
It’s coming out of a face covered with bubbles from the top of her head to the foam sticking to her eyelashes all the way down to the droopy bubble beard, but I know that voice, and it has my pounding heart suddenly beating from somewhere around my voice box.
“Ellie. Are you—”
The bubble eyes blink. “Wyatt?”
The shriek is amplified by the hard surfaces in the bathroom, bouncing off the glass window over the tub, the mirror, the hard floor.
She gasps, looks down and flings her arms over her bubble-covered chest, and ducks back down, but then she shrieks and disappears under the water again, arms flailing again, and what the fuck is she soaking in that’s making the tub so slippery?
I bend at the waist to reach into the tub and grab onto her arm and pull, but no sooner does she surface than her eyes narrow. “Let. Go,” she sputters around the bubbles cascading down her face.
“So you can drown?” Christ, she nearly died the last time I saw her. I’m not letting her drown.
No matter how much she irritates the fuck out of me.
Or how—
Nope.
Not thinking about Ellie in any other way than the annoying and alive ways.
Still, we’re so close, I can count the specks of midnight in her blue irises and the new list of reasons sh
e has to hate me.
And I know she’s naked under those bubbles.
Fuck fuck fuck. Think about my kid. Remember Beck. Think about Beck in his underwear…
Her eyelids snap up and down, more heat—anger, not interest—surging out of them. “I’m not going to—fu—”
Her words are cut off as she slips and flails again. She doesn’t go under, because she grabs a handful of my shirt.
And pulls.
Hard.
The floor slips beneath me, and suddenly I’m falling face-first into the bubbles.
Wet heat crashes over my face and soaks into my T-shirt. I choke on a lungful of soapy water and come up sputtering.
I probably deserve that.
And more.
“What the fu—he—heck was that for?” I spit out around a cough while I shove away from the tub though, because while I can admit to myself that I deserved that, I’m not ready to admit it to her.
I’m still pissed at her for ignoring me so effectively for the past six months.
She huddles in a corner, firmly gripping the faucet. “Get out.”
“Dad, you got bubbles on your head,” Tucker laughs. “Can I have bubbles? Can I take your picture?”
The force of Ellie’s glare is so hot I’m surprised the bubbles don’t melt. “Get. Out,” she repeats.
I swipe water off my face and ignore the stinging in my eyes. “Gladly. You’re welcome for trying to help.”
She flips me the bird.
Not the first time.
Won’t be the last.
Ellie Ryder and me?
We mix as well as water and lava.
And I don’t want to talk about how fucking good it feels to finally confirm for myself that she’s still in one piece.
That she’s still breathing.
And that she still hates me.
More so, if that was possible.
I hate that she hates me, but I also need her to hate me.
Fuck, we’re complicated.
“Can I take a bubble bath?” Tucker wants to know while I pull him back out of the bedroom, grabbing my duffel and then his suitcase from the guest bedroom too. Water sloshes off my shirt and drips onto the runner while we head for the stairs.
Fucking Beck.
He knew.
He knew she’d be here.
