Though her knees knocked and her hands quivered, Charity remained rooted in place. God, he looked good enough to eat. Dressed in a tuxedo with his hair combed back, he looked exactly like he had all those years ago. Back when they were best friends. Before she’d screwed it all up by sleeping with him.
His smile faded when their eyes met. There was no mistaking the hurt reflecting back at her when he mounted the two tiny steps. Her throat constricted and her eyes stung with unshed tears. She’d put that look there, and for what? Because she couldn’t handle the truth. She was a fool and, if she had a shred of dignity, she would leave and let him enjoy his triumph.
“I shouldn’t be here,” she said around the lump threatening to choke her. “Congratulations, Scott. You did a fabulous job restoring this place.” She turned, ready to step off the stage, when a strong hand grasped her elbow.
“Wait a minute. Twelve years ago, I kissed you for the first time and you know what? The biggest mistake I ever made was not telling you how much you meant to me.”
Charity closed her eyes, a tear slipping past her lashes and trickling down her cheek. Memories of her childhood and the week she’d spent with him flooded her mind and she winced.
“Don’t. Just let me go.” She lifted her eyes to give him a pleading look. “Please?”
He didn’t let go. Instead, he turned her around to face him and brushed the stray tears from her cheeks with the rough pads of his thumbs. “I’m afraid I can’t accommodate that request.”
“Why?”
“Because, I can’t let you go.” He nodded to the DJ in the corner of the club. As the opening notes of the song they’d danced to at prom began to play, Charity groaned.
“Dance with me, Cherry.” He guided her off the make-shift stage and wrapped his arms around her waist. After she’d slipped her trembling hands onto his shoulders, he leaned toward her ear. “I read your article. It was very good.”
“Thank you. I wasn’t sure if you’d seen it.” Her heartbeat quickened when his arms tightened around her. “Scott—”
“I also heard you on KORK. Why didn’t you say anything? I wasn’t any better than Nick.”
Charity lifted her head and offered him a faint smile. “We really need to work on your insecurity issues. I didn’t call you out because there was no need.”
“I shouldn’t have forced you to talk about Bobby.”
“True, but just because I didn’t want to discuss him with you then, didn’t mean I never would have. Keep in mind, you had just destroyed my living room and beaten the snot out of my latest ex-boyfriend. Discussing a violent ex wasn’t high on my priority list at the moment.”
Scott rubbed the base of her spine with his thumbs and leaned his forehead against hers. “I’m sorry, baby. I never should have said those things to you. They were cruel and I didn’t mean any of them.”
“You could have apologized before now, you know. You didn’t have to make me wait three weeks, you big jackass.” She sniffed through a laugh.
“Didn’t you read my note at the bottom of the invitation? I’m sorry for the wait, but your bar wasn’t ready until this morning. Who would have thought it would be such a hassle to get a fire clearance this close to the water?”
Charity withdrew several inches. “Wait a minute. My bar? What are you talking about?”
Scott licked his lips and nodded. “Everyone needs a safe haven and I wanted to make sure you always have yours. So, I bought the Sand Bar for you. I restored her with you in mind and, every day when I come to work, I’ll be thinking of you.”
“Some might say that’s a bit obsessive.”
Scott laughed. “Good thing I have a friend who’s a psychiatrist.” He cupped her cheek and tilted her head back. “I love you, Charity. I’ve loved you since we were kids, and I want you to be mine for as long as you’ll have me.”
Her heart soared at his declaration. “Longer than three months?”
“Baby, thirty years won’t be long enough. I grew up with you and now I want to grow old with you. I dare you. No, I double dog dare you, Cherry. Are you up to the challenge?”
Charity stole a glance in her brother’s direction and, seeing the approval in his eyes, she wrapped her arms around Scott’s neck in a tight embrace. For the first time in a long time, everything felt right.
She rose onto her tiptoes to press a kiss to his lips. “You’re on.”
About the Author
Monica Robinson has been writing novels and short stories since the age of twelve. Having dabbled in poetry, YA, and even horror, she found her calling in romance writing. When she isn’t busy staring at her computer screen, she’s attending her teenage children’s various activities, spending time with her husband, whom she lovingly refers to as “her grown-up child,” or burying her nose in a juicy romance novel.
Visit Monica at
www.monicarobinson.net
To chat with Monica Robinson and other Wild Rose Press authors of erotic romance, join us at www.groups.yahoo.com/group/thewilderroses.
Also Available
All Hands Below
by
Lelani Black
Twice married and twice widowed tends to leave a girl wanting, so Evangeline Spencer decides to look for roses, romance, and a happily ever after. Wild sex with a smoking-hot crewmember of the Sea Sapphire wasn't on Evie's to-do list when she booked a cruise to the Caribbean, but the delicious things Liam Rossi does on a moonlit deck leaves her addicted and needy.
Newly promoted ship captain Liam Rossi is allergic to gorgeous, husband-hunting hotties with bed-me blue eyes. But after one taste of Evie's charms, he must have her in his bed. He'll give her the roses and romance she came aboard for. The happily ever after? Well...
Chapter One
7 Night Western Caribbean Cruise
aboard the Sea Sapphire
Day 1
“Are you sure it’s safe down here?”
Liam Rossi ducked his head out from under a ventilation shaft as the sultry query floated up to his ears. Stuffing his flashlight into the pocket of his coveralls, he scrambled down the vertical ladder and onto a catwalk in the steamy engine room of the Sea Sapphire.
“It’s safe, lovely Evie,” came masculine assurance from down below. “And, perhaps the only place I can have two minutes of peace without interruption.”
Liam rubbed at the kink lodged in his neck and frowned down at the face of his watch. Ah, yes. It was that time again—the twilight hour. The courting hour. He peered at the couple standing in the corridor below.
The woman raised sun-kissed arms and curled them around her companion’s neck. Her long throat arched up from an action-packed body whose Christmas-red gown clung to some pretty dangerous curves. Full-sized breasts tanned to a honeyed sheen pillowed up against her companion’s uniform dress whites.
When she tilted her oval-shaped face to gaze up at her partner, Liam stared, arrested by the wide-set eyes, delicate sloping cheekbones, strawberry wine lips, and a pert nose.
Beneath a flare of smoky topaz lashes, blue eyes simmered with a look so full of desire Liam suffered a fierce stab of envy for the other man.
“We could go back to your cabin,” she offered, her voice lilting hopefully.
“I’m on duty. I should not even be here with you.”
“Then come to my cabin later. When you’re off duty.”
“Not allowed, unless it’s official business. But you’re here, I’m here and…I’m on fire for you, Evie. I want what’s between those legs, sweetheart. Here.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now. We could have our own cruise ship mile-high club.” Her companion nuzzled her neck. “Where is your sense of adventure, hmm?”
It’s not in her pants, genius.
With a sweep of his finger, the other man coaxed one luscious, quivering breast out from behind its velvet slash.
Hot damn! Liam smothered a groan. His taste buds puckered and his mouth watered at the sight.
&nbs
p; “Look…at…you. Mm-mm-mmm!” The other man breathed and cupped that golden, buoyant mound in his hand.
Concealed in the shadows, Liam watched him squeeze her breast until its pink peak jutted into a pout. The man fingered the wanton nipple to pudgy elongation till it looked like a plug of cotton candy. Then he guided that tender morsel and its creamy, weighty flesh inside his mouth, deep as it could go, and began sucking.
“Ahh…” The woman’s gasp shot a sexual charge down Liam’s back, but a frown marred the sweet contour of her lips.
What do you think, sweetheart? Liam mused. Time to move the party somewhere else?
She sighed, cupped the man’s jaw, and slid a finger inside his mouth to break the rigorous seal his lips had on her tit.
“Evie!” The man protested, pawing at her glistening nipple.
She grabbed her partner’s hand and gazed, exasperated, into his face. “Slow down there, speedy.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to have some fun with you in a bed, that’s why. The silk sheets I brought on board are the color of Belgian chocolate. They’ve never been used.” She kissed his fingers.
Liam drank in a pensive breath. Heat sparked from the pit of his stomach and lit into his cock with a sharp, hot singe.
While he struggled to hear what she was saying, his gaze remained fixed on her breast, its rosy innocence rubbing against the officer’s dress whites as she pleaded her case.
“Come to me when you’re ready, Robert. I want to be with you, but—” she winced. Overwhelmed by the roar of marine diesel engines, she yelled louder, “Not here.”
Robert? Chief Security Officer Robert Montero?
Oh hell no.
Liam swung out from the shadows and landed on the rubber soles of his boots with a whump in front of two startled bodies.
“What the—”
“Officer Montero, how is your wife and baby son these days?”
“Umm…well…”
“Wife?” The rosy flush in Christmas Beauty’s cheeks deepened to an indignant red. “Robert, you’re fucking married? With a baby?”
“Evangeline, I—”
“Your presence is needed on the bridge, officer.”
“Of course.” The other man tripped over his feet, eager to escape the frosty edge in Liam’s gaze and hotfoot his way to freedom. “Evie, we will talk later.”
“No. We won’t.”
The other man hurried from the engine room, leaving Liam to wade through a taut silence with the other man’s catch of the day. Or night.
“You’re in a restricted area, miss,” Liam said, no stranger to the party’s-over look that crept into her eyes. Her reality ship had just docked, but that usually happened after a cruise. This ship had just set sail.
Two engineers came clattering in. She stiffened at the sound of voices drawing near. When he flicked a pointed glance at her breast hanging out in the open, she looked down at herself in dismay.
“Ohh!” Hastily she restored the hill of flesh behind her gown, but the image of her silky hand tucking her breast behind a swatch of red velvet had already branded his memory cells.
The men strolled by. Liam nodded. They nodded back, then gawked at the woman next to him. As one of them ran into a load-bearing pole, Liam guided her away through a maze of machinery and up a ladder, beyond a door, and out of the engine room.
Once inside the safety of an interior corridor, she sighed. “It seems other things were off limits, too.” She looked up at him as she removed moldable earplugs.
Misty blue lilacs, Liam thought. As he summed up the color of her eyes, muscles deep in his body throbbed with a blistering awareness of this lethally sexy woman.
He took the earplugs from her and stuffed them in one of his pockets, noting with relief how the baggy cut of his coveralls toned down the ramrod salute of his cock.
“Thanks for what you did back there,” she said to him. “You just saved a married man from being naughty, and me from umm…getting…ah…”
“Fucked?”
“Yes. Right. Thanks for sorting that one out for me.”
Liam shrugged. “Do yourself a favor and avoid men in dress whites altogether.”
She studied the blue coveralls he wore. “Why?”
“Ship’s officers meet beautiful women all the time, so you’re out of luck if it’s roses and forever you’re after. Only on a cruise ship do one-night stands last the entire voyage.”
Her mouth quirked up. “Thanks for the warning, but I think I can handle a man in or out of uniform.”
Liam’s gaze narrowed. “Then pick one who isn’t wearing a wedding ring.”
Her long dark lashes flickered. “Robert wasn’t wearing one.”
“Funny things rings,” Liam drawled. “They slide off at the most convenient times.”
“Really? Are you speaking from experience?”
Excitement rioted under Liam’s skin. Even his scalp tingled from the challenge that sparkled in her eyes.
He grazed his fingertips down her arm and drifted closer to her, drawn to the floral notes that misted the air around her.
“Maybe.”
A blend of spring roses and something else, something fragrant like red, oaky wine, ripened his tongue with anticipation. She would taste as good as she smelled. No doubt about that.
Liam’s fingers closed over her hand. He raised it to his mouth and feathered his lips along her silky-soft knuckles. “After all, it does get lonely at sea.”
****
Evangeline Spencer gulped as dribbles of want soaked through her panties.
Pleasure raced down her thighs and her fingers trembled against the caress of the sexy mouth belonging to this dark-haired stranger. A man who’d stepped in before she and Robert took things too far.
He’d known Robert was married. Yet he risked the wrath of his superior by reminding the other man of his wife and baby waiting at home. This man’s actions showed a depth of character that intrigued her. What it meant beyond the next five minutes, who knew?
Evie, proceed with caution! So he has a sex-god face, and a voice that turns your legs to stacked marshmallows, but a heart under the pretty red bow is priority number one.
His mouth glided along her skin, and when her eyes met his, dark and cool like mountain moss, she didn’t mistake the glint of humor that flashed in them.
Taking that as a warning flag, she jerked her hand away. It would be a damn shame if he expected some sort of reward for doing the right thing!
“I see.” He straightened and arched a sleek brow. “So, you want an officer and a gentleman, hmm? You know the two aren’t always one and the same?”
“I don’t see an officer or a gentleman anywhere, so I wouldn’t know.”
He looked down at his coveralls and shot her a wicked smile. “I guess you haven’t heard the latest word on engineers. We’ll keep your motor running—all night long.”
“Hmm, I missed that news flash in my Portland paper. Well, it’s been fun but I have to go enjoy the rest of my cruise. Bye-bye.”
She turned to leave, but long fingers closing on her upper arm pre-empted her dash to freedom. The touch of his hand on her skin, the hint of cedar in his aftershave mingling with the scent of leather and diesel fuel, made her hot all over!
Her perky nipples must have poked his chest when he drew her against him, too. But by the time he’d employed his stealth-bomber moves on her, it was too late to run. Curling an arm around her waist, he hooked her chin with one lean finger.
“How about a little souvenir to take with you…” he murmured just before his minty mouth covered hers.
I cannot believe this! Evangeline’s thoughts raced, but she did nothing to shrug off the wild tingle of his mouth exploring hers. It felt…amazing!
Heated fingers swept over the ridge of her spine, rising naked above her gown’s bare-back design. It was meant to invite a touch such as this—a caress so teasing yet so potent, her pussy creamed with the hot thrill
of it. Sensation melted her will. His soft, skilled lips dove over hers and melted her down.
Coiling her hair around his fingers, he tilted her head to give him better access to her mouth.
As his fingers massaged her scalp, he cradled her head to keep her mouth still, while he fed her the steady pulse of his tongue.
My word, does he know how to wield that muscle.
Suddenly she wanted that tongue everywhere! She burned to feel it lick her nipples, flick at her clitoris, and slide into her silken heat.
Step away from the engineer, Evangeline, was her last thought before she curled into him like a dazed little lamb.
She didn’t resist when he grasped one of her hands and glided the tips of her fingers down along the burgeoning ridge of his shaft.
“Hoo,” Evangeline exhaled, impressed.
Trouser bulge rising, his cock was shaping up with impressive girth. And length. Quite the humdinger. Oh, yes, indeed!
Shame on me for taking measurements, she scolded herself, then spanned his mighty length with her hand.
Good grief! The man wasn’t getting any shorter. His brazen words and velvet tongue mimicking the thrusts of a capable cock rubbing inside the grip of her palm let her know he was up for a sexy-hot romp, too.
“Mm-hmm,” he murmured and, licking her lower lip, his hands spooned over her ass as he fit her lower body into his like a long-lost puzzle piece.
She plunged her fingers through his rumple of dark hair and imagined his thickness rooted between her thighs. He tugged on the combs that swept her hair up from the sides of her face and dropped them to the floor.
She knew what he’d see; honey-brown hair spilling below her shoulder blades with strands that cooled to golden blonde highlights.
“Take me on, Evie,” he invited in a husky voice. “Let me give you what you want.”
Heartbreaker Page 24
