Without Warning (Capparelli & Co. Book 1)

by Dee Lagasse

  Any buzz I had from the reception is long worn off and if I am going to make the first move with Chase, I need some liquid courage. Hearing my cousin moan Tucker’s name followed by a whole bunch of “shhhhhh’s” and laughter wasn’t part of the plan. But that made banging on the door and yelling, “keep it down you damn hooligans,” before running back to my room for the night that much funnier.

  Chase was outside, supervising the caterer and DJ packing up their equipment, something I had been doing with him until he noticed me shiver and sent me inside to warm up. After lighting a fire in the room, I decide to take a bath and wash the day off. Getting dressed up and having a face full of make-up is fun occasionally, but the truth is, I’m much more of a ‘let my freckles show, band tees, and ripped jeans’ kind of girl.

  After a half hour of warming up and relaxing in the Jacuzzi tub, I drain the water and step into the walk-in shower to wash off the bath salts I had been soaking in. The water pressure from the shower is so relaxing that I find myself fighting the urge to close my eyes. When all the salt is rinsed from my body, I turn the water off and wrap myself in one of the oversized fluffy white towels hanging on the wall.

  During the last month that I had spent sleeping at Chase’s house, I never thought to wear anything other than a big t-shirt and flannel pajama pants. He has seen me stumbling to the coffee maker, braless, hair all over the place more mornings than not over the last thirty days. Hoping this weekend would change things for us, I had stopped at the mall after work earlier in the week. Why I felt I needed to spend almost $100 on a black bralette and matching shorts that barely cover my ass is still beyond me. But I did.

  And now they’re sitting next to a plastic storage container of cut-up limes, the salt shaker from the kitchen table, and a bottle of tequila staring back at me from the counter I left them on. I had packed flannel pants and an oversized t-shirt just in case I chickened out. But those aren’t what I took from my suitcase. And now my options are to go back out there wearing the bridesmaid’s dress I had worn all day, go out in this towel, or…suck it up, be brave, and go out in the bralette and booty shorts.

  Stalling, I reach for the pump bottle of lavender lotion off the counter. After lathering my legs, I drop the towel and slide the bottoms over my legs. I never, ever wear underwear to bed, but maybe I should have grabbed something. Hooking the bralette, I stare at myself in the full length mirror hanging behind the door.

  What if he isn’t on the same page as I am? But then, why would he have kissed me? If I wear this out there, it’s going to sends a message…the kind that says, “I want to do more things in that bed than just sleep next to you, Chase Merrimack.” Am I ready for that?

  Opening the container holding the limes first, I brace myself for the burn that’s coming. Turning the top of the salt shaker, I grind sea salt onto a lime wedge and then pull the round cork topper off the bottle of tequila. Tipping the bottle back, I shudder as the burn of the clear liquid slides down my throat, then suck on the salted lime as soon as I’ve put the bottle down. Deciding one wasn’t enough, I take one more shot before putting the top back on the bottle.

  Ready as I’ll ever be, I put the lid back on the remaining limes, leaving them on the counter with the tequila for now. Sucking in a breath, I slowly open the door. Like a magnet, my eyes find Chase. Black, red, and white plaid cotton pajama pants hang just below his waist leaving that stupid V muscle showing like a damn beacon. His hair is wet and tousled, like he had taken a shower. He must have used the guest bathroom down the hall. And of course, somehow, the mess makes him even more attractive.

  “I was just about to check on you,” he says, not taking his eyes off his phone. “The players seem excited about the pizza party. You’re a lifesaver, Hurricane.”

  Instead of answering him, I focus my attention on the TV above the fireplace. Harry Potter. It only takes a few seconds for me to recognize that it’s the first movie. As Hermione fixes Harry’s glasses on the train, I find myself wishing I had a wand and could pull the flannel pants and t-shirt I had packed from my suitcase without drawing attention to myself. Accio Dignity.

  “Whoa,” Chase says, looking up, and locking eyes with me for just a second before I turn away, focusing on the movie again.

  “I’m going to change,” I stumble over my words, trying to find the ones that don’t make me sound as pathetic as I feel. “I brought other pajamas, should have grabbed the other ones. I’m sorry.”

  Oh. My. God. What the fuck was I thinking?

  Just as I bend down to reach for the suitcase, Chase’s hands are on mine, pulling them back, the rest of me along with them. I didn’t even see him get off the bed or hear him walk across the room, stopping behind me. Stealthy mother fucker.

  “Hey, wait.” His voice is low as he brushes the hair that has fallen in front of my face. It’s the shortest and the darkest it’s been in a long time. When Ellis convinced me to chop my hair off last night, she also convinced me to cover all the blonde highlights with a deep, dark brown. Right now, it’s as close as it’s been in years to my natural hair color.

  “This was dumb,” I manage to stutter out, refusing to look at him. “I feel so dumb. I don’t do shit like this.”

  As he pulls me back to being upright, I feel more exposed than I’ve ever been in my whole life. I’m no prude, I wouldn’t say I’m as experienced as most of the girls Chase has been with, but fuck.

  This is just different, on every level. Aware of everything happening right now, I’m pulled in so many different directions. The crackling of the fire as it snaps, the movie playing on the TV. The smell of open air and the mountain. The fresh air is permeating my lungs and despite being up here for a day, it’s making it harder for me to breathe. The same lie I weakly attempted to use to convince Kinley yesterday. I should probably just accept that it’s Chase.

  As his arms slide around my waist, finding their spot in the small of my back, he leans down and answers my tangent by shutting me up with a long kiss. When he pulls back, he takes my bottom lip into his, sucking the lingering taste of the salted lime off me.

  “That’s lime and tequila,” he nods with certainty as he slides his tongue across his lip, tasting the transfer from our kiss. “You plan on getting wild tonight, Hol?”

  A girl enters one white t-shirt contest on Cinco de Mayo after taking a few shots of tequila and she never hears the end of it. Nobody ever mentions that it was for charity, ever. Of course not.

  “Shut up. It was just one shot,” I defend myself while holding up one finger. “Okay, two. I’m kind of terrified over here.”

  “So, talk to me.” The sweet, gentle patience in his voice reminds me of the hundreds of phone calls in high school where I called him freaking out about whatever melodramatic teenage catastrophe I was facing at the time.

  “I feel like I did when we were younger,” I say before I can stop myself, the words pouring out. “Except you know, with less clothes on. You’re my best friend, Chase, and I’m nervous to be around you. Nervous. You finally notice me as not just your nerdy best friend and I’m a complete mess…again. I’m tripping over my words, I’m worried about saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing. I don’t do this girlie, having butterflies, catching feelings shit, Chase. I don’t like it.”

  “You think I didn’t notice you?” he scoffs as if the thought absolutely baffles him. “I wasn’t in a good place when we first moved back, Hol. I was pissed off at the world. I didn’t want to be here. My life was back in Washington. I didn’t give a shit about the girls I fucked with back then. You deserved more than that. You were, and still are, the coolest chick I’ve ever met.”

  “That didn’t stop you from kissing me on my sixteenth birthday,” I remind him. Letting go of me, he walks back to the side of the bed he was lying on, reaching down to grab something I can’t see. When he comes back to me, he places his snapback on my head, backwards just like he wears it. His hands linger on the brim of the hat before sliding down my
back, this time taking a firm handful of my ass with each hand.

  “I’m still not even sure how we pulled that off,” he chuckles, referring to how we convinced my dad and his mom to let me spend the entire weekend at his house without Davis. “I remember the first night was easy. I had football the next morning and you fell asleep on the couch. But the next morning, after football, I walk in the door to see you in little fucking shorts and my hat on backwards, just like this, baking and singing in the kitchen with my mom. I went to shower and came down and you were playing video games with Tuck.”

  “I woke up to blueberry pancakes with birthday candles on them that morning,” I smile as the memories of that weekend come back to me. “Your mom made me feel so damn special that weekend.”

  As I talk, Chase slowly backs up to the bed. There’s no way to cover up the loud gasp that escapes when he picks me up and guides me down so I’m now straddling him on the bed. The thin fabric of our pajamas leave very little left to the imagination.

  “It was kind of like this,” he laughs, his fingers trail my back, causing more goose bumps with every motion. “Except, if I remember correctly, your crazy ass jump tackled me.”

  “You called me a wee leprechaun!” I practically shout, defending the actions of my younger self.

  “Yeah, that does sound like something I would say,” he laughs. “I grabbed you from falling off the bed, you froze and got the same look you still get in your eyes when you want me to kiss you…”

  As his voice trails, so do his fingers. Shivers run up and down my body when he traces the inside edge of my shorts. For the first time, his fingers slide up underneath.

  “No one else knows how many times since then I’ve wanted to see that look again. My hat on your head. Short little shorts on my lap,” he groans after starting our back and forth game, realizing there’s nothing but me underneath the shorts.

  “No one else knows that’s the best, and my favorite, kiss I’ve ever had,” I admit, trying my damnedest not to lose my composure right now. “And then, you proceeded to avoid me like the plague for weeks.”

  “Says the girl that chased me out of her house and would only answer her phone just to hang up on me after we kissed again in her room, a few months later,” he scoffs. “And wait, hold that thought. Best kiss you’ve ever had? Like, out of all the kisses? Every single one of them?”

  “So, who’s going to be the awkward one after this weekend?” I wonder out loud, choosing not to feed his ego with telling him our first kiss was the kiss I compared every single kiss after to.

  “What if I just keep kissing you after this weekend?” he suggests as he places a slow, long kiss on my collarbone. Another one follows on my neck, my jawline, right next to my lips…

  “I guess, I’d just have to keep kissing you back,” I shrug, before pursing my lips in a dramatic kissy face.

  Taking my cue, without hesitation, his lips are on mine. Short and sweet pecks, every one of them lasting a bit longer than that last. If this was someone else and they were telling me about how they were feeling right in this moment, I would have some solid “Get your shit together, be in the moment. It’s just a guy,” advice for them.

  But it’s not just any guy. It’s Chase. Am I building it up to being more than it is? Probably. I’ve never been the girl to put a dude on a pedestal—even Noah. The love was there, especially in the beginning, but there were never internal fireworks, room spinning, world stopping moments like there is with Chase.

  HOLY. SHIT. Focus, Hollis. Hyperventilating is not attractive, girlfrand.

  His lips linger on mine before he pulls back. When I realize he isn’t coming back for another kiss, my eyes flutter open. As I look at him, with that stupid, cocky grin spread across his face, I can’t help but hope it’s not completely obvious I was just losing my damn mind.

  “Spill it, Hol” he laughs. “I can see the smoke coming from your head.”

  Mind reading bastard.

  After a few seconds of contemplating pushing it off, I know Chase would see through it if I try to bullshit him.

  Instead, I manage to whisper, “I just told you, I’m scared.”

  “Of me?” he asks, concern replaces the cockiness on his face instantly. “Oh, Hollis. At any point, you tell me you need to stop, and it stops, you hear me? We’re not doing anything you don’t want to.”

  “Of change. If we do this, whatever this is, I’ll be done for,” the raw honesty, spills from me once again. “And there will be no going back, Chase. I spent years pushing any feelings I had for you away. Years of pretending we were just friends and eventually I was cool with it. But, if we do this, I don’t know if I’ll be able to push it back again. I don’t think I could do this casually or just go back to being besties if this is going where I think it might be. Are you sure you want to deal with all that?”

  “Abso-fucking-lutely.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chase

  “No one else knows I’ve wanted this since the day you walked into gym class.”

  As soon as she had the reassurance I was ready for this, the shy, vulnerable woman that had appeared out of nowhere disappeared and she, once again, became the calm, collected, one-step-ahead-of-the-rest, Hollis Capparelli I’ve known half my life.

  Using my own game against me, Hollis whispers confessions against my skin with each kiss she leaves. With each new secret, I feel my willpower slowly strip away, piece by piece. Letting her guide what happens gives me the reassurance that this is something she wants, but when she tells me that “no one else knows she got herself off in the shower thinking about me” this fucking morning, I’m done. Any resolve I had to let her take control of the situation is long gone. I flip us over, so I’m now hovering over her.

  “My turn,” I whisper into her ear, before placing my lips on her jawline, letting them linger before I start giving her my own confessions. “No one else knows I still hate Luke Whats-His-Face from college because he got a piece of you I’ll never have.”

  Leaving a trail of long, slow kisses from her neck down to her collarbone, I purposely pause at the hemline of the black bra she’s wearing.

  “No one else knows I wanted to kiss you on your birthday, but knew you weren’t ready for it.”

  As if this night couldn’t get any better, I notice the clasp for her bra is in the front, between the cups. With a muttered confession of no importance, I unsnap the two little clasps holding her bra together.

  “We’ve spent the last ten years dancing around this, Chase,” she says against my mouth. “I don’t want to wait anymore. We have all the time in the world to come back and do everything else and right now, I want you, I need you.”

  I hadn’t considered we would do anything in bed besides sleep, so I’m completely unprepared for this. Remembering that I don’t have any kind of protection with me, I feel my heart sinking. Fuck. I didn’t plan on having sex with anyone from the wedding, this weekend had been about soaking up every second I could with Hollis. So grabbing the condoms sitting in my top drawer in my bedroom hadn’t even crossed my mind.

  “I didn’t think we would be, and yeah, I didn’t bring any…”

  “I’ve been on birth control since before college, Chase,” she cuts me off. “I’m okay with it, if you are.”

  Needing no more convincing, I answer her by taking her lips in mine. Our tongues dance together, each kiss becoming more feverish with anticipation. Positioning myself between her legs, I slowly slide inside her. Every intention of going slow and savoring every second of being with her went out the window the second she moaned my name and arched her back, gripping at the sheets below us with one hand, digging her nails and leaving her mark all over my back with her other.

  “I appreciate what you’re trying to do here, Chase,” her breath is heavy, as she chews at her bottom lip, her eyes begging me for more. “But I need you to stop trying to be romantic about this.”

  “Then tell me,” I whisper in her ear, as I purpo
sely slide out of her slowly, drawing it out. “Tell me what you want.”

  Slamming into her, over and over, any chance of keeping this “romantic” is gone.

  “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Je-” she mutters over and over, as her eyes roll back in her head and she covers her mouth, stifling what I imagine would be the sexiest fucking moan.

  “Jesus Christ has nothing to do with this, sweetheart,” I chuckle, as I pull her legs up, hold them up for a second, before taking the hand she’s gripping the sheets with and place it right above where my dick is inside of her. “Two fingers, move them back and forth like this while I fuck you, and keep your eyes right here or I stop.”

  “You’re so mean,” she pouts, as she begins to rub her fingers across her pussy.

  Taking my cue, I slide up as deep as I can go, and just like I knew it would, it only takes a few seconds to feel her tighten up around me, her body shaking as she lets go and reaches for something, anything, I think. My own release coming right after Hollis getting her own.

  Falling onto each other, both of us are emotionally and physically spent. Tonight wasn’t like anything I’ve felt before. After laying in the torn apart bed for a few minutes, I lean over, kissing her on the forehead, getting the sweetest little sleepy smile as her eyes flutter.

  “I would do anything to be the reason you smile like that again,” I admit. “But before you fall asleep, baby, let’s get you in the shower. I’m sure you don’t want to sleep all sweaty and the sheets need to be fixed…”

  “Say that again,” she sleepily asks, as she reaches for me.

  “Before you fall asleep, let’s get you in the shower?” I repeat, gently pulling her up and off the bed.