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We drive for a while, not seeing a single horse, so Savannah makes a left hand turn through a break in the sand dunes. We lurch over some more loose sand before she hits a hard-packed dirt road that winds in and out of a small neighborhood of beach homes.
As we turn a corner, we see some of the horses… just a pair of them as they graze on the short grass yard of a red-stained house that sits on stilts.
Savannah puts the Jeep in park, and we watch them for a bit. They’re really small, and they look like they’d buckle underneath me if I tried to ride one. Not that I’d want to. I’m not overly fond of horses, having been nipped by one when I was little. They’re dark brown with long, shaggy hair and kind of cute.
“It’s against the law to approach or touch the horses, and you can’t feed them either. ”
“Why’s that?” I ask as we watch another horse come from around the side of the house and join the other two.
“They’re diet is very specific. If you were to feed something to them that they weren’t used to, it could make them really sick. Plus, they can be dangerous. You don’t want one to take a bite out of you. ”
Fuck yeah, I don’t want that.
After a few moments, Savannah puts the Jeep in drive, and we meander through the dirt streets of Corolla. Pushing further away from the ocean, there are fewer houses and the dirt roads wind among a thicket of trees that Savannah tells me consist of wild persimmon, yaupon, myrtle, and red cedar. The trees are shaped and molded by the ocean winds, creating thick canopies and heavy shade as we drive along. We see several more horses and spend a good hour just driving around and watching.
Finally, Savannah heads us back to the beach, which is the only way to make our way back to Highway 12. Unless you know how to drive a vehicle on the beach, you don’t come to Corolla.
When we make our way back over the dunes and onto the harder sand, the ocean is revealed before us and my breath catches in my throat. Right before us stand five horses on the edge of the water, the incoming waves lapping around their lower legs. Savannah immediate stops the Jeep and puts it in park.
“Come on,” she says as she jumps out of the vehicle. As I exit, I watch as she reaches in the back seat, grabbing her camera bag that she had tucked in there earlier.
We walk around to the front of the Jeep and I lean back against the front grill, watching as she pulls her camera out. She removes the lens cover with deft fingers, flips a button, and makes a few adjustments to the settings. Savannah then walks a few feet forward, still a good thirty yards from the horses, and drops to her knees in the cold sand.
Camera to her face, she silently shoots picture after picture, her form still and gentle. The horses meander north, wading in a bit further until the cold water rolls in just under their fat little stomachs that Savannah told me earlier were often swollen because they will sometimes drink the saltwater.
Every few minutes, Savannah stands, walks a few feet down the beach—away from me—and continues to take photos. I sit back against the front of the Jeep, still warm from the engine, and listen to it making ticking sounds.
She’s so f**king beautiful right now. Solely focused, enraptured with the beauty of the ponies walking through the frigid surf. The wind blows, lifting her dark hair all around, causing her to reach a delicate hand up to push at it time and again. I could watch her forever, I realize, and that thought causes my stomach to tighten in almost disbelief. Savannah is a pretty package, in some regards, like many of the other women I’ve used and then forgotten.
But she’s also more, and the more is something that pulls me to her. It’s her ever-changing seasons of personality, her bold moves and shy smiles. I want her desperately but, For how long? I ask myself.
Savannah finally rises from her last kneeling position, stretching the kinks from her back from holding said position for a long time. Turning to face me, she starts walking back. She has a well-satisfied smile on her face, and her eyes are sparkling as she gets closer.
With her camera in one hand, she walks straight up to me, never pausing in her stride, and my legs open up when she’s a foot away. She walks right in between them, lays her small hands on my chest, and stands on her tiptoes to kiss me.
Pulling away laughing, she asks, “Wasn’t that incredible?”
“Incredible,” I agree as I stare down at her, wanting more than anything to see that look on her face over and over again, from here to eternity.
Savannah lays asleep in my arms. Glancing at the clock beside my bed, I see it’s just short of ten o’clock at night. After our outing on the beach, I took Savannah out to lunch in Duck and then back to her little beach house, where I ordered her inside and told her to get a bag with few days of clothing.
She cocked her eyebrow at me in question.
“I have plans for you,” I told her simply.
“Like what?” she asked with a grin.
“They involve a bed, a couch, a bathroom counter, the back deck of my house, and probably the driver’s seat of my car. You’ll be occupied for a while. ”
“Don’t you have work to do?”
“Yes, but I could use a break,” I told her, even as my mind calculated the hours I’d have to buckle down once I got my fill of her so I could get back to my writing.
“Well, I have work,” she said primly and didn’t move from the seat of the Jeep.
“Of course you do,” I said sarcastically. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t sleep at my house, right?”
“Oh, so we’ll sleep on the bed, the couch, the bathroom counter, the back deck of your house, and in the front seat of your Maserati?” she asked playfully.
“No,” I had told her. “We most definitely won’t be sleeping on any of those surfaces… except perhaps the bed. ”
Savannah had scrambled out of the Jeep and within fifteen minutes, was back and crawling in my Maserati so we could go get started on my checklist of places I wanted to f**k her.
Leaning over her as she sleeps, I can make out the planes of her face in the moonlight coming through the windows of my bedroom. She’s na**d with the sheet and comforter pulled up to her chin, her mouth slightly parted as she silently breathes. I bend down and rub my lips against hers. She sighs into my mouth, so I kiss her.
By the time my tongue slips inside, her arms are around my neck and she gives a sleepy moan. My hand goes between her legs, and I know she’s fully awake by the time my first finger is joined by another.
“Gavin,” she pants against my mouth.
It’s all the invitation I need. I pull the bed covers back, sliding my body down hers. Pushing her legs apart, I bring my mouth to her pu**y, laving at her like a starved man and she’s the only food that will sustain. After she comes beautifully, I crawl back up her pliantly soft body and enter her with a single thrust, f**king loving the way she calls out my name when I hit her deep.
Then I f**k her slowly, twining my fingers among hers and finally groaning from the bottom of my chest when I come deeply inside of her.
I find Savannah downstairs the next morning, standing at the counter, watching the coffee as it brews. She hears me, turning to give me that shy smile over her shoulder, and says, “Good morning. ”
“Would have been better if you were in my bed when I had woken up,” I tell her as I come to stand beside her. Her cheeks fire red over my compliment, so I reward her by threading my fingers through her hair, to the back of her head, and pull her upward for a kiss.
When I release her, she gives a tiny sigh of contentment and pulls away to grab two coffee cups. After she pours for both of us, doctoring hers up with milk and sugar, I take her hand and lead her into the living room. I sit on one end of the couch, and she curls her legs up underneath her on the other end.
She’s so f**king sexy, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and pale blue panties that I can see sticking out from under the hem.
“I have a proposition fo
r you,” I tell her after I take my first sip of coffee.
“If it involves us na**d and with you giving me a big, fat orgasm, then I accept,” she says with a grin.
Laughing… laughing, and it feels so good. Foreign, but good.
“Funny girl. I think I can manage that… but later. I want to talk business with you. ”
Her eyes go serious, and she takes another sip of coffee. “What’s up?”
“I want to hire you to be my assistant,” I tell her and wait for her reaction.
I have no clue what it will be, but this is an idea I started harboring yesterday as I watched her take photos of the wild horses in the ocean. I thought about it some more, once while I was plunged deep inside of her, and again as I watched her in the moonlight last night. I came to the realization that I wanted more of her, and seeing her a few times a week after she cleaned my house wasn’t enough. It wasn’t going to be enough, even if she stayed over with me every night.
No, I wanted her in my house… while I worked, knowing she was nothing but a flight of stairs away from me, so I could have her whenever I wanted.
Simply put… she had become an obsession for me, and while I wondered about the lunacy of my thoughts, I really decided that I didn’t give a flying f**k if I was going crazy. In the short time I’d known her, I had become addicted to her brand of sweet.
“Your assistant?” she asked in confusion. “What do you need an assistant for?”
Indeed… what do I need one for?
“Lots of things,” I blurt out, my mind racing to come up with ideas. “Errands… I have errands to run. I have fan mail to go through, correspondence to answer. I have a schedule I need to maintain. I have a book signing in Chicago week after next, and I need help with research and proofreading. I have phone calls to return, dry cleaning to pick up, Facebook and Twitter posts to respond to, and a blog to maintain. I need to buckle down on this manuscript, and I don’t have time for all of that. ”
“Why do I feel like there’s more to it than that?” she asks skeptically, holding the rim of her coffee cup just below her nose so she can breathe in the fragrance.
“You caught me,” I say with a grin. “I just want you around twenty-four-seven, so I can f**k you whenever I want. ”
That’s so much closer to the truth than she’ll ever know, but I’m not about to admit that to her. That, all of a sudden, she’s become my weakness.
Luckily, Savannah takes it as a joke and snorts at me before taking another sip of coffee.
“So, what do you think?” I ask her. “I’ll pay you twenty dollars an hour and you can give up breaking your back cleaning houses and having weird photographers grope at you. You can also take the time to find another photography job… one that will be perfect for you when I’m done here and ready to leave. ”
“And when might you be ready to leave?” she asks quietly.
Shrugging my shoulders, I hedge. “A few months probably. ”
I know I promised my manuscript would be done in two weeks, but no way is that happening. I’m going to drag it out just a bit further, so there is no real need for me to leave the islands just yet.
No need to leave Savannah just yet.
“Let me think about it,” she says thoughtfully.
18
It took me all of eighteen hours to think about it, then I accepted Gavin’s offer. I gladly called Eric and gave him my notice… effective immediately. I also called the two women whose houses I cleaned in addition to Gavin’s and told them I had to quit because I was accepting a full-time job. They were sad to see me go, but mollified when I recommended a good cleaning service that Casey had told me about.
When I wake up for my first day on the job as his assistant, Gavin’s breath is hot on the back of my neck and his hand is working between my legs, two fingers deep.
“About time you woke up, love,” he murmurs, and then kisses me on the side of my neck. “I thought we’d start our first workday together right. ”
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