by Amelia Wilde
If Serena doesn’t come back from China, she’s going to miss Rosie’s first step. My jaw clenches at the thought of it. I’m not going to, damn it. She can miss whatever she wants, but I’m going to be here for every moment.
What is it about, then?
Honor, obviously.
I wander toward the back door of the rented cottage. It’s going to be a shame to leave this place. My grandfather’s house is a lot bigger, but it doesn’t have a view of the lake. It does, however, have a big old oak tree with a swing, and a wide green hill in the backyard.
This isn’t a conversation I want to have via text message, and the reasons are entirely selfish. I want to watch Ellery’s lips move while she talks. I want to be able to lean in and kiss her.
Do we still have a truce? Or is it only on certain days of the week?
Why?
Are you hungry?
You ask a lot of questions.
I smile down at the phone like an idiot. I’ll ask her even more if she comes over because I’m desperate to get under the surface. The surface is where we’re going to fight about coffee shops and whose should be open and whose should close. The surface is where we’re going to compete for customers, and one of us is going to lose out. That’s the only possible ending in a place like Lakewood. Stores come in and out every season.
I go into the little kitchen and open the fridge. I have a package of ground beef from the grocery store yesterday. I have a green pepper. I have an onion.
The cupboard is the final test. I fucking pass it. I have Italian tomato paste and spaghetti noodles. The loaf of bread is icing on the cake.
I’m cooking dinner if you’re hungry...
There’s a long pause. In that pause, I don’t hang around, waiting to see if she’ll answer. Whether she comes or not, I’m making spaghetti. If I end up eating it by myself, so be it.
I dice the green pepper and the onion and tip them both into a pan on the stove. I want Ellie to come over. I want her to come. If one happens, then the other will happen, based on our limited time in the store today. God, she was so hot in my hands. I had to nurse a painful erection all the way to Norma’s house. My list of unsexy things to think about very nearly failed me. It’s failing me again now, and she hasn’t even agreed to visit.
My phone buzzes again while I’m rinsing off my hands.
What’s your address?
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ellery
This is definitely a sex date. Definitely.
My hands tremble on the steering wheel. Dash is renting a place on the lakefront. I’m all for wading in the lake, but I’m a hundred percent certain we won’t be doing any of that once I get there. I can’t quite decide if the dinner invite is real or an excuse to pick up where we left off at his shop.
You can bet I rushed into the shower when I got that invitation, scrubbing my hair extra hard to get rid of the coffee smell. I forced myself to slow down and do it twice, and then I did a quick survey. A shave is all I needed.
It’s the first time Dash is seeing me outside of my Medium Roast uniform, but damn did that make things harder. I didn’t want to seem like I care too much. I’m not showing up in a prom dress or anything, but I did debate for a solid ninety seconds over whether to blow-dry my hair. It always turns out frizzy and weird when I do that, so I went with a classic bun at the nape of my neck, my hair still wet.
My phone beeps to signal that I’m at the right place. I pull into the driveway and take a deep breath. It’s not like I’m going to jump on his D the minute I get into the house. We can take our time.
The property is nice. On either end, there’s a cottage, and a huge lawn in the middle dotted with mature trees.
Ha. Mature trees. It reminds me of Dash. He’s fucking mature. Not old. He’s definitely not old. A few years older than I am, maybe, but we’re roughly the same age.
Oh, God, this is a sex date. This is for sure a sex date, and here I am, turning into a nervous teenage version of myself.
I approach the cottage with caution. The front door is painted a jaunty red that sets off the pine siding nicely. All of it looks well-maintained. Sharp. The opposite of my life, which is bursting at the seams.
Keep it together, Ellie. You were making out with this man in his coffee shop mere hours ago. There’s nothing to freak out about.
I raise my hand to knock on the door with all the confidence I can muster, but before my knuckles hit that red paint, it swings open.
Dash has changed out of his jeans and into a pair of shorts.
That’s the first thing I notice, but it’s not the last one.
Or the smallest.
Midway through checking him out, I realize what I’m doing and look into his eyes with a gasp. He’s waiting, his green eyes sparkling. And, holy shit, he’s actually holding a tray in one oven-mitted hand. Dinner is real.
“Oh, man,” I blurt out. “This isn’t a sex date?”
Once the words are out of my mouth, I stand frozen on the cement slab in front of the door.
Yes, it is true that we had several hot moments back at his shop. But this looks like a real honest-to-God sit-down dinner that he’s planning, and I’ve opened it by making a total ass of myself.
Dash grins down at me. “Come in.”
“Okay,” I say, nodding my head too many times. “Okay.”
He ushers me inside the small entryway, which opens into the kitchen, which becomes the living room after a few steps. In the back is a nice view of the lake.
It smells so good in here.
Dash steps to the side and puts the tray carefully down on a cooling rack propped up next to the stovetop. He takes the oven mitt off and lays it next to that, then picks up a spoon from a tile spoon rest and pokes it into a frying pan. Meat is sizzling in spaghetti sauce. It’s not from a jar, I can tell that much. After a moment he puts the spoon back down and turns back to me.
“You thought this was a sex date?”
I nod, speechless still from my embarrassment.
“What gave you that impression?” He steps closer. The air between us heats up. I want to fan myself with my hand. “I said I was cooking, didn’t I?”
I swallow hard. “Yeah, but you—” I cut my glance down at the front of his shorts. “The store—”
He looks down at his tented shorts and nods. “It’s a dead giveaway, isn’t it? My fault, in a way. I saw you pull in and watched you get out of the car.”
“You watched me step out onto the driveway and that—”
“That’s what happened,” he says, moving closer still.
We stand that way for several heartbeats. His breath is in my ears. Is that his heartbeat, or mine?
“I liked it earlier,” I whisper, putting my hands up on his chest as if I’d never taken them away in the first place.
“Are you sure?” he murmurs, bending down to speak directly into my ear. “We’re always going to be working against each other, you know. I’m going to open my shop.” There’s a breath of a pause. “Even if you beg.”
The word beg is hot between my legs, a jolt of pure desire. “I’ll never beg you for anything,” I say, brushing my lips across the side of his neck. He smells like safety, like cooking and a recent trip to the shower, like he’d never have a reason to run away, even if something truly fucked up happens. That kind of thing has happened to me before. It could happen again. That’s why I’m working in Lakewood. But I can’t think of that now.
The coffee shops drop away into the corner of my mind that I usually reserve for shit I don’t care about, like actually drinking coffee and horror movies. I press my lips into his skin a little harder as his hands slide around my waist, tugging me into him that last inch.
His hand comes up to my chin, tilting my face up until our lips are almost touching. I forget that I spoke until he answers me, his words melting the rest of my thoughts away.
“We’ll see about that.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Dash
Ellie is mine again from the moment I kiss her. She presses the length of her body against mine, taking special care to wriggle her hips a little, brushing against my cock.
The spaghetti can wait.
I don’t break the kiss when I reach around and flip the switch on the front of the stove to turn the burner off. And I definitely don’t look back at the garlic bread on the tray. What’s a little garlic bread gone cold when there’s an Ellie here, her hips swinging against me, her pretty lips opening to let my tongue in?
Filthy. Filthy thoughts. I haven’t had thoughts like these since before Serena. When she left, I thought I might never have them again. Staying out of the kitchen, and all that.
I’m literally in the kitchen with Ellie right now, and it could light on fire before I’d leave. It’d have to be a pretty terrible fire, too.
Ellie braces against the countertop, leaning back. She’s switched into a black tank top for the occasion, and I flex my hands against the fabric.
“That doesn’t have to stay on,” she says, tilting her head back to give me access to her neck. I linger there for a moment, teasing, before I say anything.
“If you were hot, you could have said so.” I flick my tongue against her earlobe and strip the shirt off in one quick motion. It drops to the kitchen floor next to our feet. “Damn, Ellie.”
“What?” she says innocently.
Her bra is unbelievable. No—it’s not the bra. It’s her breasts. They’re perky and full and gorgeous, and the black lace number she’s got on is doing them all kinds of favors.
“You’re gorgeous.”
“You’re not being fair.” She leans back onto her elbows and bites her lip.
“How am I—” I get it a heartbeat later and whip my shirt off over my head. “Is this fair?”
Ellie takes me in, and her breasts rise and fall with her breath. “We’re almost even.”
I move back in, sliding my palms over the smooth skin of her waist. “Almost?”
“I feel like...” I lower my head to her neck and kiss downward toward her shoulder. “I feel like you might owe me...”
“What could I possibly owe you for?”
“Well,” she shrugs her shoulder so it presses back against my lips. “You won’t close your coffee shop and let mine survive.”
I pull back to look into her eyes. “I’m not opening a shop to run you out of business.”
She snakes one hand around the back of my neck and toys with my hair. “Yes, you are.”
“I’m really not. I’m opening it because of my grandmother.”
“I don’t think now’s the time to talk about your grandmother,” she whispers.
“Why are you whispering?”
“To keep the inappropriate topics from getting out.”
“My grandmother was not inappropriate,” I say with a laugh. This conversation is going off the rails, but somehow I care not at all. “But you’re right. I don’t want to talk about her right now.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“I don’t want to talk.”
Ellie smiles.
“You challenged me before,” I say, hooking my thumbs into her shorts.
“I did?”
“You said you’d never beg me for anything.”
Her body tenses under my hands. “I did say that.”
I tug the shorts down an inch, then another. “Are you sure you meant it?”
Ellie leans her head back, her hips jutting forward, making it easy to slide the shorts down below her ass. She’s wearing matching panties. “I’m sure,” she says, and then she leans forward to look down. “Do you like them?”
“Your panties?”
“Yeah.”
“I’d like them better if they were off.”
“Can I tell you a secret?”
“You can tell me anything,” I say and slide the shorts over her knees, over her shins, down to her feet. It takes kneeling down in front of her to get them all the way off.
“I’d like them better if they were off, too.”
It’s an easy fix.
I stay kneeling and breathe her in. She is immaculate.
Ellie looks down at me. Her lips are slightly open, and there’s a high pink in her cheeks. “I don’t normally do this,” she says.
“I know,” I tell her, cupping her ass with my hands. “It can take some getting used to when you’re not in the habit of begging.”
I reach around from behind and tug her legs apart. She doesn’t resist me, not at all, and spreads her legs open a few inches.
“You’re going to need to open more than that,” I chide her.
“For what?” she says, her voice breathy and trembling.
“For this.”
I spread her open with my hands and dive in.
Her knees tremble on the first stroke of my tongue. Holy fuck, she is sweet. It takes exactly no time at all for her shyness to dissolve into my mouth. Her feet inch outward and she lets go of the countertop with one hand to bury it in my hair.
I don’t let go of her. I keep her firmly in my grip, pressing her hips forward, and devouring her for everything I’m worth, lapping up her juices, going back for more.
I lick until her knees are shaking, until her grasp isn’t steady on the countertop, and then I slide one hand around to her front and find her clit with the pad of my thumb.
A hint of pressure. Just enough so that she knows I’m there. Ellie writhes under my touch, hips dancing. Jesus, if this is how hot she is in the kitchen, I can’t wait to get her into bed.
I don’t move my thumb.
I know she wants me to.
I don’t do it.
That’s the game we’re playing.
She makes a plaintive sound.
“What was that?”
“Please,” she whispers.
“Ellie, I can’t hear you,” I say, flicking my tongue along her folds.
“Please,” she shouts, and I let her have it.
I circle her clit with my thumb and press my tongue in deep, my free hand sinking into her ass. She can’t get away. The gush of juices into my mouth tells me she doesn’t want to.
Ellie comes with a cry, her hand flying up to her lips. She bites down on her own knuckle. Three waves and she’s gasping for breath, twisting away from me, oversensitive and spent.
Not me.
I get to my feet and she faces the counter, leaning heavily on it, breathing hard.
I put my arms around her and she leans back into me. Her head falls back against my chest. I swear, I can feel her smiling.
There’s one more thing to say to her, whispered into her ear as she recovers. “I win.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ellery
Oh.
My.
God.
He was right. He was so right. I don’t know where Dash got those skills—frankly, I don’t want to know—but I’m hooked. How am I ever going to survive without that in my life?
I lean against him in the kitchen, trying to put the scattered pieces of my brain back together. One thought pulses through, drowning everything else out: More. I want more of that. I want more of that right now.
“You won,” I whisper back. I’m not going to admit defeat when it comes to Medium Roast. How could I? After that magic with Dash’s tongue, I feel like I can do anything. “This time.”
“What does that mean?” he says, his voice a low rumble in his chest.
I turn in his arms and run my fingertips down over the outlines of his muscles. “I really don’t think we’re finished here.” We’re definitely not finished here. When my hand meets the waistband of his shorts, he growls, bending to press his lips against my neck again. “I mean, look at this.” I pull the shorts away from his body, tugging away the elastic of his boxers, and reach down to take his cock in my hand.
Whoa.
He’s as hard as iron and thick. I don’t need to see it with my eyes to know that
nothing about Dash is going to be a disappointment. Nothing at all.
I sink down to my knees in front of him, a slow throb of pleasure building between my legs. He gave me that, and now I’m going to give him even more. He’s never going to feel like he’s working harder than I am. No way.
His belt comes away easily in my hands, and the shorts fall to the floor the moment I’ve unzipped them. Without that cloth to keep him contained, he springs out through the opening in his boxers.
I stifle a gasp.
Dash Huxley has the world’s most perfect cock.
“You should have told me,” I murmur.
“You wouldn’t have believed it,” he says with a low laugh.
I wrap my hands around the shaft and size it up. It should fit in my mouth, but it’s going to be a near thing. I don’t care. All of me is humming with anticipation. I want to make his muscles tense with pleasure. I want to suck him dry. It’s unbelievably filthy how much I want his cock in my mouth, down my throat, but it’s only making me wetter. If this keeps up, we’re going to have to clean the floor.
I lean forward and swirl my tongue around the head. Dash lets out a low groan, leaning forward over me to brace his hands against the counter. He’s huge. Jesus. What am I going to—
The pounding on the front door shakes the entire cottage. It’s loud as fuck and aggressive, and I jerk backward, hitting the counter full force. Dash reaches for me and stumbles over his shorts, which throw him off balance. My next move is to scoop my clothes into my arms like a shield. His next move is to overcompensate and he tips backward, arms swinging to catch himself, and catches the frying pan heavy with sauce instead.
“No!” I yelp.
It’s too late.
He pulls the handle toward him and then tries to shove it back onto the stove. Half the sauce goes toward the back of the stove, but he has such a tight grip on the handle that the shorts finally complete their mission of ruining all of this and trip him a second time.
I fling myself out of the way of the falling pan as the second knock comes, along with a muffled shout. The voice sounds familiar.
