by Taryn Belle
Laina dropped her chin. His story was as good as any film tearjerker, but it was real. She couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for him, losing his only parent when he’d just entered adulthood. And the image of him as a little boy, trying to make his mother’s dream come true—it was heartbreaking.
But she wasn’t going to be sucked in. “I’m really sorry,” she said finally.
“It’s no excuse,” James replied with a shake of his head. His eyes met hers, and he looked like he was going to say something more when he suddenly glanced over her shoulder and groaned. She followed his gaze and saw several wedding guests heading their way, including Ward and his insipid date.
“Quick, ground, swallow us up,” James joked, looking down at his feet.
Laina laughed. And then, before she could think too much about what she was doing, she gestured toward the palm trees. “Come with me.”
* * *
James stared at the small stretch of beach. “You’re telling me no one knows about this?” he asked incredulously.
Laina shrugged. “I’m sure some of the locals do. But it’s hard to get to, so no one ever comes here.”
“Then how did you discover it?”
“I was a curious kid, and I loved nature. While my family was picnicking on caviar, I used to go exploring. One day I discovered this cave and went inside, but it was actually a tunnel. Who knew this would be at the other end?” She lifted her arms to the scene before them: a perfect expanse of white sand surrounded by rocky cliffs. Waves lapped at the shore while a tortoise made its way across the sand. In the quiet, they could hear the music from Pablo’s mingled with the calling of gulls.
“You really know this island, don’t you?” James said.
They dropped onto the sand. James kept his body parallel to Laina’s, gazing out at the ocean to keep his eyes off her. Her near-nakedness had nearly undone him when he’d first seen her, resulting in an embarrassing response that he’d had to hide behind his iPad. It was torturous. Though Laina had put on her cover-up for the short walk here, its mesh fabric was useless at hiding what was beneath it. But if he stood a chance at winning her back, he needed to do this right. No touching. No sex. Just straight-up honesty that was about to lay him bare, which he had zero experience with.
He was terrified.
“So, what was your question for me?” Laina asked, letting a handful of sand sift through her fingers.
“That day at the old house. You never told me what your broken dreams were.”
Laina gave him a sideways glance. “That’s it? Nothing more interesting than that?”
“No,” he answered firmly, and it was true. At around 2:00 a.m. last night, after waking from yet another agonizing dream of her, he’d made his decision: he would not involve her in his development. He would find another way to get what he needed. He had no idea how, and it could quite possibly mean the death of the project. But he’d felt oddly at peace with that this morning, and then his decision had been confirmed by the conversation they’d had on the beach: she would never help him with something like this. He still had to break the news to Jennifer, who would surely make his life a living hell over it, but he could deal with that. In fact, he felt like he could deal with anything as long as he had Laina by his side.
But first he had to win her back.
Laina resumed sifting sand. “My broken dreams. Hmm.” She shrugged. “Nothing important, really.”
“I keep hearing that from you.” When she didn’t respond, James went on. “Laina, do you not see how incredible you are? Why do you dismiss yourself like that?”
The last of the sand drained from her fingers, and she stared out at the ocean. “Rich kids aren’t allowed to have broken dreams—I learned that early on. Money is supposed to be able to buy us anything we could possibly want, so we better not expect any sympathy from the world if it doesn’t. The problem is that my dreams didn’t have anything to do with things.” She sighed. “What I wanted most of all was a close family. We were once—at least I think we were—but it all changed. I don’t even exactly know when. All I know is that one day when I was about fifteen, I realized that I was spending more time at that broken-down house than at my own. I was different from my parents and brothers. It’s a strange kind of loneliness, to have this family that looks so perfect to everyone else but feels so distant from me.”
“You’re speaking in the present tense.”
“Yes. It hasn’t changed much. When I was twenty, I did something—something they didn’t agree with. At the same time, I stopped coming to our home here. The two events drove a wedge between us, and it’s never been the same since.”
“Have you tried to make things better with them?”
“Not really. It’s not that I don’t love them or know how lucky I was to grow up the way I did. And it’s not like we don’t have a relationship—we do, on the surface. It’s just that to me, embracing them means going back to everything they have and represent.” She grinned. “Do you know what I did when I was sixteen? Got a summer job at Wendy’s. It paid less than half of the allowance that landed in my account each month for doing exactly nothing. That was the first year I refused to spend the summer in Moretta. I told them to go without me, that I was old enough to look after myself. At that point my mother tried to make a deal with me—that if I got a ‘more respectable’ job at their golf club, she’d let me stay home for the summer. We got into a huge fight—I told her that if I didn’t do it on my own, it didn’t count. She used to get so exasperated with me.”
James chuckled. “It sounds to me like you were just fiercely independent. I love that in a woman.”
To his shock, Laina gave him a scathing look. “Do you? Well, then, it’s a good thing there are a lot of us out there.” She jumped up, ripped off her cover-up and headed for the water. With his mouth gaping, James watched her dive in, and then he went after her. The water closed over his body, warm as a tepid bathtub.
“What did I say?” he asked as he caught up to her with powerful strokes.
She swam away from him, shouting over her shoulder, “Don’t worry, it’s my bad. I was about to get sucked in again.”
“I am not trying to suck you in—”
“Of course you are!” she sputtered furiously, standing up in the waist-deep water. “Someone like you doesn’t change his ways overnight! Why not try your luck for one more roll in the hay before we go home? Don’t shower me with false flattery—it won’t work!”
He shook his head, walking toward her slowly. How had this gone so wrong so quickly? “False flattery? That is not what this is about! Jesus, I hardly slept last night—”
“Then you’re obviously not thinking straight!”
“Laina—” He reached for her arm.
She yanked it out of his grip and turned on him, wet hair whipping across her face. “You need to stay away from me! Do you know how long it took me to get here after Ward? He just threw me away, and you know what? I thought I deserved it! My life has been easy, so I thought he was my payback! And now I almost did it again—let myself fall for someone who only has a limited time use for me! So just leave me the hell alone!”
“But I can’t leave you alone!” James slapped his hands on the water in frustration, making it splash up between them. “You’ve changed everything for me! I started thinking about my life last night, and all I could think of was how it’ll never be the same now that I’ve been with you. And I—I don’t want to go back to being the person I was before you!” He stopped, searching his brain for the right words to continue. Laina was looking at him with an unreadable expression, water from her hair dripping down her face. She looked more beautiful than he’d ever seen her, raw and perfect. “Look, I admit it. This was not in my plans—meeting you, reexamining my life. And I don’t just mean the way I was handling my personal life—I mean everything. I feel like...like I�
�ve been in this numb place. Work, make money, sleep with whoever I want, and don’t feel a thing. Don’t question the ethics of what I do because I might not like the answer, and that would mean I need to change things. My whole childhood was about change—new apartment, new school, my mother’s new jobs. And then she went away, the only constant in my life. And ever since, I just keep doing what’s working because it’s safe.” He shook his head. How was it that he’d psychoanalyzed his entire life in just one minute? Because he was finally seeing things clearly—thanks to this woman he was indescribably crazy about. “My mother died seventeen years ago,” he continued, his voice cracking with emotion. “That’s seventeen years of being numb. And then—and then you come along, a woman with the face of an angel and the body of a thousand wet dreams. And I’m only just getting to know what’s in your mind and heart, but I want all of it, Laina. I want all of it, because you make me feel so alive. I may not have experience with relationships, but I want to try. And the only person on earth I want to try with is you.”
James was breathing hard by the time he finished, and Laina was still staring at him. He inhaled deeply and closed his eyes, unwilling to watch the rejection come over her face. I tried. I did my best, he thought.
“I want you too, James,” he heard her say. Warmth bloomed in his belly. He opened his eyes to see her closing the gap between them. She looked up into his face. “I keep telling myself how dangerous you are, but it doesn’t make any difference. It’s like—it’s like the only thing in the world I want is to belong to you. The way you make me feel, I couldn’t even imagine it a week ago. It’s like I was dead inside before you. The way we are together... I don’t know how to live without it now. And it’s not just the sex, it’s all of you. You’re like a dream come true.”
James felt his chest expand almost painfully. Laina’s eyes were shiny with emotion as he brought his hands up to push her wet hair back from her face. “I’m not a dream, Laina. I’m realer than real, and I want you so much.”
Her hands slid around his waist. James looked into her face, absorbing every beautiful detail, and then his lips found hers. She opened her mouth immediately, and he lost himself in the sweet slide of her tongue against his. It was better than their first kiss, because it held the secrets of everything they already felt for each other. Connection. Need. Endless possibility and impossibly hot longing. He bit her lips, sucked them, kissed them some more.
Laina pulled him tighter to her, hard enough to make James’s lungs squeeze. It wasn’t nearly close enough. He wanted to pull her into him, hold her inside him, keep her safe, make her his and his alone. Make her feel the same yearning that was driving him forward like a derailed freight train.
Between their bodies, his cock was already hard. “Feel that,” he whispered into her mouth, grabbing her hand and wrapping it around him. “It’s all yours. And this pussy is mine.” He found her with one hand, clamping it over her bikini bottom. She rolled her hips forward, bucking into the heel of his hand. He pulled the tie at the back of her top and yanked it over her head. Then he attacked her erect nipple with a guttural sound, catching her around the waist as she threw herself backward. His cock was straining painfully at the netting inside his trunks, so he ripped them down to free himself, watching Laina’s ravenous eyes take him in.
“James,” she breathed, grinding her pelvis into his erection. “Oh, God, James—touch me. Please.”
He moved her bottoms aside and found her wetness, sinking his fingers in as far they would go. Pressing them forward, he watched her face collapse with lust as he hit that sweet spot inside her.
“More,” she panted. “Don’t stop.”
James had no intention of stopping. He kept his thumb circling her clit while he moved his fingers, massaging the inside of her until she turned liquid in his arms. The water lapped around her waist, dancing with her movements. She was gasping for breath now, letting words out in a nonsensical string. Listening to them was looking into a window to her deepest desires. Harder. Faster. Need. Want. Never stop. Pleasepleaseplease—
He watched her, fully consumed by the intensely pleasurable world he was creating for her. Head thrown back, slender neck exposed, wet strands of hair across lips that were still swollen from their passionate kisses. At his mercy. It was the hottest, sexiest, most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
She came on his hand with a cry he was sure could be heard on the next island. An endless breath whooshing out of her, every muscle in her entire body straining toward her pleasure, her pussy contracting on his fingers over and over again. His arousal was at a fever pitch, that place he’d only ever been to with her where he felt like he would kill for release. His cock at maximum erectness, his balls so tight they were crawling back into his body, visible drops of his desire already glistening at his tip. Aching to be lost in her slippery heat. “I have to get inside you,” he groaned.
“Yes, you do. Right now,” Laina said. With her orgasm behind her she looked flushed, practically delirious, but ready for so much more.
The twenty steps it would take to lie her down on the sand was like a trek across the desert, so James lifted her onto his hips instead. “Hang on to me,” he said. Laina’s arms went around his neck as he shoved her bottoms aside again. He got his cock into position and was about to enter her with a gratifying thrust when he stopped. “Noooo!” he roared.
Laina drew back to look at him in shock, still breathing hard. “What?”
“No condom.”
Laina groaned as if she were in physical pain. “Oh my God. I completely forgot.”
“Me too. And that right there is what you do to me,” he said, letting her slide back down to the ground. Reality invaded the perfect erotic bubble that had contained them, assailing James’s senses with bright sunlight, crashing waves and circling gulls.
“This is literally the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” Laina said. “We have to get to your room.”
“In this state?” He looked down at himself. “There’s no way in hell.”
“It’s not all bad,” she crooned, stroking him slowly. “Just think how good it’ll feel when you finally come. In fact, the thought of that is making me even wetter right now.”
He groaned painfully. “You’re not helping matters.”
“How about if I suck you off?”
His cock surged upward. Those dirty words coming from that sweet mouth—he couldn’t get enough of it. “That’ll do in a pinch,” he joked. “But, Laina...” He pushed into her hand, desperately seeking pressure. Sure, he was brain-meltingly horny from interrupted desire, but it was more than that, something James couldn’t even fully describe. His intense need to be inside her, to be one with her, to meld his body with the only woman he wanted to join with in that sacred way, was driving him as much as anything. “I’ve been dying for you for two days now, and I am going to fuck you if it’s the last thing I do.” He grinned. “Come on. You can block me while we make a run for my hotel room.”
She licked her lips. “We could. Or...”
“Or?”
“Or we could not.”
He shook his head. “I don’t follow.”
“I mean I’m clean. How about you?”
A fresh wave of lust fired through his body. What she was suggesting... “Totally. I’ve never not used a condom in my life.”
She tilted her head at him. “Wow,” she said slowly. “So you mean you’ve never actually felt...”
He shook his head. “Never.”
“Holy shit.”
“I know. Poor me, right?”
Still stroking him, Laina looked into his eyes and cupped his jaw with her other hand. “Then I’m going to be your first,” she said softly. “Right now.”
James’s cock jerked in her hand. It was too amazing to believe. This was a missing aspect of sex he’d resigned himself to long ago, a trade-off th
at came with choosing hookups over relationships. But that was before Laina. Before the woman who’d completely turned his life upside down inside a week. And now he was going to know what she really felt like, an experience that would bond him to her in a way he’d never expected to be bonded to anyone. And he was so ready for it. “I’m in your hands,” he said. “Show me.”
* * *
Propping herself up on her elbows, Laina slowly spread her legs in the sand. James, who was kneeling between them with his cock in his hand, looked like he was going to combust. Her breasts were already heaving as she imagined the ecstasy that was about to wash over both of them. The idea that she was going to introduce him to something new, his first time with no barrier, feeling how much she wanted him for real...she was so wet with anticipation she wanted to rub against him like a horny teenager. She loved this feeling, so close to the edge and filled with hot promise. And after the way he’d already undone her in the water... God.
No matter what James said, he was a dream come true. That she could have gone through her whole life never knowing what this felt like...it was unbearable. The words he’d said to her had seared into her soul, made her see the vulnerability beneath his strength, and she wanted to take that part of him and lock it away for safekeeping in her heart.
But right now, she needed to blow his mind.
She batted his hand away from his erection. It stood straight up, too hard to fall forward even an inch. “You are not allowed to touch yourself,” she said. “This is all about feeling me.” She spread her legs wider, watching his eyes on her. Seeing his pupils dilate with heated need. She leaned back. “I thought you might want to see how wet I am first.”
