Sex on the Beach (Cosmo Red-Hot Reads from Harlequin)

by Delphine Dryden

  And touch, though he knew it would probably wake her up. His hand conformed perfectly to the contour of her ass, her thigh. He explored, not aimlessly but not in any hurry to arrive at his destination. They had time. Not enough of it in the grander scheme of things, but enough for this. Enough for reminding himself of her dimensions by touch until he knew enough to pick her out of a crowd blindfolded.

  He suspected she was awake, but wasn’t sure until he finally brushed his fingertips between her legs and heard her soft, gasping response. She was already wet, and when he slid a finger inside her she arched into the touch.

  “More.”

  “I’m just getting started,” he reassured her, shifting his hand to press his palm against her clit. “Spread your legs for me.”

  She hooked her top leg back over his, opening herself up with the same complete trust he’d spent patient months earning back at the start of their relationship. She’d been gun-shy, thrown off by a bad first experience with her college boyfriend, who had managed to convince her his trouble in bed was due to lack of sufficient natural ability on her part. So confident in most other areas of her life, Amanda had become prickly and anxious when it came to sex, and the first few times they’d slept together had been tense. Jeremey was no sex god, had no special magic other than adoring her and wanting her to enjoy it. So he’d studied—both the topic in the abstract and Amanda in particular. He’d tried things to find what worked best for her. Kept some, refined others, kicked some right out the door. And by a series of baby steps, they had moved from that tense, concern-laden atmosphere in the bedroom to one of having fun and taking joy in each other. And the resulting sex had become nothing short of spectacular.

  Amanda’s confidence now, that simple movement of her leg with no hesitation or embarrassment, felt to Jeremy like an achievement. If nothing else, perhaps he’d had that one good effect on her life.

  Not to mention, it was hot as hell. His dick strained against his boxers, clamoring to replace his fingers in her pussy. But there wasn’t a condom within reach, and he couldn’t bear the idea of stopping to find one. Not when she was making those noises. Not when her slim body felt taut as a bowstring under his arm, every muscle involved in reaching for pleasure. He played her, and finally she sang, shivering against him and sending his sweet agony of denial to an almost unbearable pitch.

  The strip of shiny foil packets was on the nightstand next to Amanda. As if she’d read his mind, she reached for it. Snagging it with a fingertip, she flicked it back toward him before shoving the robe off her shoulders and onto the floor. He yanked his boxers down, rolled the condom on, and was just in time to meet her lying down again in the middle of the bed. She turned her back to him, spooning up the way they had been before, and he slid into her in one easy glide.

  Yesterday had been frantic and messy. Today they were more measured and precise, but it was no less astonishing. Small wonder he hadn’t been able to sleep lately. He’d been missing a piece of himself, one of the best pieces, and now that he had it back he didn’t think he could ever let go. His sex-addled mind, and his absolute certainty that this was right, led him to speak without thinking it through.

  Grazing his lips over the crest of her smooth shoulder, he paused before his next thrust and whispered, “What if I leased some office space in San Jose?”

  He wasn’t sure what answer he expected, but it wasn’t the one he got.

  “Um...why?”

  “Wh—why? Because I love you. I was dumb to move when you didn’t want to, and I want to come back so we can be together.”

  He pushed deeper by instinct, but Amanda’s response was chilling his enthusiasm rapidly.

  Shit shit shit. Rewind. REWIND! Why don’t these stupid human bodies come with a fucking rewind button?

  “This is so hot,” he blurted.

  “It was.”

  He heard the unspoken addendum: Until you went and opened your big fat mouth, you jerk.

  Or possibly he was projecting just a bit. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to screw it up. Can we just ignore the past minute and a half?”

  She shifted on her hip, pressing into him at a different angle, her foot once again scaling his legs to settle behind his knee. When she pulled his hand down, nudged his fingers toward her clit, Jeremy groaned and surged into her, fully ready again. With strokes as gentle as he could make them, he brought her to another climax, one she rode out with greedy, noisy, shameless enthusiasm. His own followed soon after, a less-than-ideal blast of pleasure that peaked before he was quite expecting it to, and dwindled far too quickly.

  They lay in silence for a few breaths, then Amanda patted his arm. “It turned out to be very hot, after all. Good job.”

  Resting his head against her nape, he tried to calm his racing heart. Its rhythm had less to do with the sex, he suspected, and more to do with the feeling that despite Amanda’s casual tone, he’d somehow managed to screw everything back up.

  “I think I’m going to text Julie,” she said, “and see if she wants to have dinner with me. Just the girls.”

  It was the death knell. He knew it. “Yeah, that sounds nice.”

  She pulled away, sitting up and reaching for her phone. Once she’d tapped out the text, she stayed on the edge of the bed, legs dangling off the side. He could feel her drumming her heels against the side of the frame. When she finally spoke, it was almost a relief.

  “So, meaningless vacation sex. You’re doing it wrong.”

  “I kinda figured that out. The office thing just...slipped out. I didn’t mean it to.” He couldn’t apologize again. Saying sorry again wouldn’t make him any more sorry, and it wouldn’t make her any more likely to forgive him.

  “I know it’s awful when people ask things like this, but you know what your problem is?”

  He scanned her shoulder blades, her spine, the array of toned muscles spanning her back and shoulders. Committing it all to memory one last time. “I think I have a pretty good idea, but go ahead and give me your thoughts.”

  A humorless chuckle, a shake of her mussed blond head. “Your problem is you think too much. I know, I know, pot calling the kettle black. But you do. You think too much and you do too much. And what makes it too much is that you do it without feeling first. You’re the authority on an awful lot of things, legitimately. You’ve worked hard for that and earned it and I don’t begrudge you that when it comes to the things you’ve achieved. But you’re not the authority on me. Only I can be the authority on me. And you’re also not the authority on us. And the part you don’t get is...neither am I. That isn’t how it works.” She turned to face him, and the sadness—the resignation—on her face just about killed him.

  “I never said I was the authority on us. Or you.”

  “Didn’t you? Last year, which came first? Proposing to me, or looking at commercial real estate in Seattle?”

  He squirmed, uncomfortable with both her line of questioning and the rubber still hanging, sad and floppy, off the end of his softening penis. “The real estate. I’d been thinking about it for a long time. Looking off and on for months. I’d always wanted to move to Seattle.”

  “Right. But you hadn’t really acted on it yet, so you didn’t think about telling me. Not until it was a done deal.”

  “What would’ve been the point? There wasn’t anything to tell yet.”

  She grimaced, nodding as if he’d just made her point for her. What point, though? “And you proposed, I accepted, we planned the wedding, looked at bigger apartments...and then two months before the big day you tell me about the deposit you just paid on a lease for office space in Seattle. You were so excited, like moving was going to be this big new thing. Like it would finally make things great. I admit part of my shock was that I’d thought things were already pretty great, so I was taken aback that you apparently hadn’t felt that way.”


  “But I did feel that way,” he protested. She shushed him.

  “The bigger part was that you’d done this big, life-altering thing without even—hell, not only did you not consult me. You didn’t even tell me. You didn’t see the point. Just made the plan without me, and then took this immovable position and defended it when I said, quite understandably, I think, that I was happy in San Jose and would prefer not to move.”

  He wanted to get it. He could tell there was more to it than this, some fundamental emotional thing he wasn’t grasping. But he could also tell Amanda’s patience for attempting to explain it was running out. This could be the last try, and he was blowing it. “I don’t get it. I just said I’d look for space in San Jose. I could move back. If you need me to...hell, I don’t know. If I have to, I’ll move my whole company back there. Is that what you need me to say? Is that enough? I would do that for you, Amanda, and I don’t know what more I can do to prove to you how much you mean to me.”

  He could hear the desperation and frustration in his own voice, an echo of the whiny teenager he’d once been. But your best friend is going to the prom with my best friend. It’s only logical for us all to drive together. Why should it matter whether I wear a tux or not? You can still wear whatever you want. What is it you want, anyway? He hadn’t gotten laid until college, and frankly he didn’t blame any of those girls one bit. If he’d been going out with him back in those days, he wouldn’t have slept with him, either. But he thought he’d changed, grown.

  Apparently not as much as he needed to. And damn, he really couldn’t move his company on a whim. All the key staff he’d spent months wooing, all the corporate structure he’d worked so hard to build. Moving would be a major proposition. He would do it if he had to, he realized that now. Amanda was that important. But it would be painful, and more so for his employees than for him. He didn’t want it to come to that.

  She put a hand on his cheek. Fond, but not passionate. As if she hurt for him, as much as for herself. “If you really thought that was going to fix everything, why didn’t you just offer to do it a year ago? Or show up on my doorstep and tell me? Or mention it when we first saw each other here? I think you knew, deep down, that it wasn’t going to fly. The location of the office isn’t the problem, Jeremy. Even the issue of moving is not the problem. I thought it was, a year ago, but since then I’ve realized that it’s not.”

  “Then what is?” Tell me. Tell me so I can understand. I’ll do anything to fix it if I can only figure out how. Please don’t go. But words had only gotten him into trouble this afternoon. He held most of them back, afraid to do more damage inadvertently.

  “Look. Moving back to San Jose, what does that solve in your mind?”

  Trick question. “Well...the part where I moved to another state before, and we broke up?”

  “Right. So you make a moving plan without me once, then try to fix it by...”

  “Um. Making...a moving plan. Without you. Again. Offering to, at least. But it would be undoing the first one. Making it right.”

  She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. So that’s one disagreement solved. Took a year and uprooting several employees to do it, but okay. I assume you would work that out with them. It would suck for them, but okay. Here’s the thing. What happens the next time we have a disagreement?”

  He shrugged. For a moment he thought he’d started to catch on, that the problem was he’d made decisions unilaterally. But now he was baffled again. “We figure out whose solution makes the best sense, and do that, I guess?”

  “That. That right there.” She slid off the bed, standing with her hands on her hips as though they’d reached a conclusion.

  “What right where?”

  “To you, this is a binary. Either your solution is the correct, sensible one, or mine is. One or the other.” She held her hands out, weighing invisible options. “What about secret option C?”

  Where would the scale pan for that go? Oh God, there are a plethora of options. No, no, you have to take her nudity out of the equation, dumbass. “There are only two of us. Aren’t there? That’s A and B.”

  “There are two of us,” she agreed, shaking her head in resigned contradiction. “But there is always a secret option C, Jeremy. If there isn’t, it’s not a relationship. At least not one I can be in.”

  Chapter Eight

  Sex on the Beach during a beautiful sunset made everything better. Amanda figured that out after her second one. Mai tais seemed to be having a similar effect on Julie, who was on her third drink and clearly tipsy.

  “I don’t get it,” her friend said, slurring only a small amount. “One—he groveled. Two—still in love with you. Three—awesome reunion sex.”

  Amanda nodded, willing to stretch the description to cover the recent incident. “Unbelievably awesome.”

  “Three—he—”

  It might be about time to cut Julie off. “Four.”

  “Four—he flew all the way to Hawaii to do this groveling.”

  “He did do that.” It was sort of groveling, at least. Not very debasing, but there had been apologies and pleading. “I’m not so sure it’s a point in his favor though. Don’t you think it’s maybe a little too much? I mean, he comes here and it makes a big impression, sure. But it’s a one-shot deal. I have no idea if he’s actually willing to change his plans in the long run. Or the way he makes plans, which is the more important thing.”

  “He cared enough to take a risk, at least. Financially, obviously, but it was an emotional risk, too.”

  “Yeah, as a big one-time gesture.” She realized that was the point she’d been trying to make to Jeremy earlier, and failing. “But what happens the next time we have a big decision to make? Or even a small decision, the day-to-day stuff? That’s the part that matters. I don’t want to marry somebody if I feel like it’s a power struggle every time we try to figure out what restaurant to eat at. That’s not a relationship, it’s a series of concessions. One person always taking away from the other person, instead of building something together.” Why hadn’t the words come this easily before?

  “You guys always eat at Tito’s...”

  Oh, sure, go throwing facts into the mix. Wow, pasta sounds amazing right about now, how can I still be hungry? “Yes, but it’s the principle of the thing. And I don’t think he’d eat there now, he’s turned anticarb.” The potatoes had been the catalyst for some confession about just how appallingly health-conscious Jeremy had gotten. The why of it all still escaped her. He’d never been a fitness junkie before.

  Julie sipped her drink but leveled a surprisingly sober look at her. “Is it possible that this—the way you’re worrying about it—is it possible that it isn’t really about Jeremy? I don’t mean I disagree with you, just—”

  Amanda knew only too well what she meant. “You think I’m projecting because of daddy issues.”

  “Okay, yeah. That.”

  That. She wasn’t really sure how much Julie knew about her parents’ divorce, the animosity there. No real reason she should know much; a lot of people’s parents were divorced. Of course, Jules had been around when the shit went down, but she had been a happy, clueless eight-year-old. Amanda had counted on that happy cluelessness, the sense it gave her that there were still good families in the world, still happy homes where kids didn’t have to deal with the fallout of their parents’ crap. So she had never told, and Julie had never asked. But some things you just figured out from context.

  She wasn’t going to get into it now, though. It was more of a late-night non-vacation conversation, that one. She threw Julie a bone but kept the meat to herself. “I know Jeremy isn’t like my dad. Our situation is completely different than my parents’. But the parallels...I admit, it’s a trigger for me. There are all these—these extra emotions going on, clouding things up. I have no idea how I actually feel about him by hims
elf, without all the added junk.” And she didn’t mention just how much added junk was involved, or how relevant the parallels truly were.

  Julie seemed satisfied with that. “Also sex hormones.”

  “Yes, they do bring the stupid, don’t they? Crap. What am I gonna do, Jules? Seeing him again, it’s like I grew back an arm I didn’t realize I was missing. It feels so natural I can’t believe I went without it for a year.” Okay, maybe she didn’t need another drink to reach full-disclosure mode. “But then I think maybe it’s because I’m lonely and it’s so nice to be part of a couple again. I don’t want to make a mistake.”

  It echoed in her mind—I don’t want to make a mistake...a mistake...a mistake—and she nearly missed the importance of Julie’s response.

  “God, I know. That’s so similar to where I am with Alan right now.”

  Huh? Wait...what?

  “Alan? What do you—No way! Wait, seriously? Why didn’t you tell me you were—?” Her brain grasped for the usual baseline assumption that Julie and Alan were destined to end up together, but for once it was simply failing to compute. “Oh my God, I was hanging all over him yesterday, I had no idea.”

  “We weren’t, then. This is recent.”

  “That was last night. How much more recent can you get?”

  “Um, later last night. We danced, and I started talking to some guy, but he turned out to be a total sleazebag, and then he kissed me. Alan, not the sleazebag. Then he told me about the time he got crabs in college from wearing his roommate’s jeans. Which is a sucky way to get crabs.”

  Oh, for God’s sake. Seriously? What idiot college boy with an STD doesn’t try to palm off that lame story on a girl? Why didn’t he just tell her he caught it from a toilet seat? And wow, good thing I didn’t end up sleeping with him, after all...I guess. “And you believed that?”

  “Well, yeah. Actually, yeah, I did. I do. It was a good story. And after that...you know.”