Million Dollar Marriage

by Evans, Katy

  It only takes one pull on the string of the skirt and it falls in a puddle at her feet. I lay one hand flat on her belly, feeling her tremble underneath. I lift my head to kiss her navel, then take ahold of the string at her hip with my teeth. “Take this off—now.”

  “What if there are . . . cameras?” she asks, her eyes darting about.

  “There ain’t.”

  “But how do you—”

  “Because I paid off the cameraman to leave us alone for one night.”

  “Oh. Transportation money again?”

  “Yep.”

  She’s still frozen there, so I pull on the other string, letting that swath of fabric fall to the ground, and now her bottom is bare to me. I run my fingers lightly into her slit. So wet. So ready and primed for me, and . . . fuck. So not what I need right now. But the scent of her arousal hits me, and she lets out a little moan, wobbling on her feet.

  Feeling her come, seeing her totally lose control . . . that’s my new addiction.

  “Sit on my face.”

  “What . . . ?”

  “You heard me. I need to taste you, Penny. Sit your pretty little ass on my face and let me taste you.” Let me punish you for being so fucking tempting.

  Her eyes flash with worry, but I can tell she wants it as much as I do. Breathing hard, she climbs onto the lounge, straddling my face with her thighs. She sinks down onto me and gasps when my tongue hits home.

  As I lick her, she’s moaning, grabbing onto the sides of the lounge in desperation. She’s tense and sounds almost like she’s crying when she says, “You can’t keep doing this to me, Luke. Give me your cock. I need your cock. Please.”

  I dig my tongue into her as far as I can, biting and nibbling on her clit, feeling her juices flowing out of her. I pull her down hard onto my face, and she wriggles, sliding her bottom where she wants me to be.

  She comes in a rush, falling forward on me, then slinks off to the side of the lounge and is quiet for such a long time that I have to sit up and look at her.

  There are tears in her eyes.

  “What’s your problem? You fucking came. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  Her eyes turn hard. She sits up and grabs her bikini bottoms. “No. I told you what I want! What are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to be some kind of a martyr?”

  “No. I’m trying to save us both from making a massive mistake.”

  “It’s not!” She jumps off the lounge and stares at me, her chest heaving, her hands fisted on her hips. She’s nearly naked, and in the moonlight she’s a fucking goddess. The urge to take her in my arms and hold her against me is so strong that I’m physically shaking. “Yes, the rings are fake. But why don’t you believe that this is real?”

  Because I know more of how the world works than she does. And it doesn’t work like this. Brilliant doctors with bright futures don’t marry ex-junkies with nothing to offer them.

  I don’t answer. Can’t, because I know she’ll argue with me and try to convince me that this can work. I have to get up and leave her now before I do something we’ll both regret.

  I slip off the lounge and try to storm inside, but she stops me. It’s embarrassing how easily she does. A touch on my arm, and I stop. Time stops. Nothing else exists. I’m hers.

  I turn to her, and she’s already zeroed in on my board shorts. She drags a finger down my abdomen and reaches under the seam, pulling at the tie. She lifts them open, guiding them carefully over my cock, letting it spring free, as hard as it’s ever been for her.

  She sinks to her knees.

  Her fingers close around my cock, like she’s been doing this all her life. I can only watch in complete fucking disbelief as she takes it in, her eyes hungry, hungry for me. My body jolts from her touch. I let out a growl of protest that dies in my throat, becoming a moan of ragged desire. I will my hands to push her off me, but they don’t go anywhere.

  She has me.

  She’s had me since the day I met her.

  And now she’s under me, gazing at me, wanting me like I’m her oasis in the desert.

  I fucking can’t deny her any more than I could deny myself her. This was inevitable.

  And maybe I’m not the man she’ll want forever. But god help me, if this is all I get, it’s good enough. I’ll settle for being the man she wants to be with right now.

  I scan down to see her stroking and teasing my flesh with her palm, curiously, like the tempting little kitten she is. I think of the way she begged for my cock, and my knees nearly give out. I brace myself against the wall as she slips her hands down my hips to my thighs.

  “You’re so big. So . . . alive here,” she murmurs to me, awestruck, my little dirty vixen who’s got me on a string. “Luke . . . do you, um, want my . . . Oh god, you’re so beautiful. I really want to . . .”

  And then she trails off and starts to lick the shaft, her tongue flicking, experimental. Unsure. My head falls back, but not because I want it to. I want to see this, want to see every little thing this girl’s tongue can do. But the feeling of her lapping at me, tasting me, teasing my cock is beyond even my hottest wet dreams. Mindlessly, I clutch at the back of her head, tangling my fingers in her hair, completely at the mercy of this woman.

  “Am I . . . ,” she suddenly says, her voice as sweet as music. “Is this okay?”

  Jesus. Is it okay? If there has ever been a better feeling on earth, I don’t know what it is. I think of that asshole ex of hers and how she’s got the last laugh because this is fucking glorious and he doesn’t know what he’s missing. “Yeah, baby. You have a sweet mouth. Give me more.”

  Emboldened, she pulls my body closer and then takes the head into her mouth, tonguing my skin in soft, slow circles. She sucks me in deeper and my mind spirals out, and I’m not even sure what fucking planet I’m on. She starts to bob her head on my cock, finding a rhythm, making me fuck her pretty mouth, and now her hands are on my ass, gripping me into her mouth. And I’m twitching, getting close. Getting so close that she seems to know it.

  She releases me, only to deliver soft, teasing kisses to my length. Fucking temptress. Fucking beautiful temptress, kneeling before me, worshipping my cock. When she gets to the base, she dips her head and slowly sucks one of my balls into her mouth.

  My body seizes. I tense, letting out a groan that people on the other side of the island can probably hear. “Holy fuck,” I groan. “You said you’ve never done this before?”

  She stops lapping at my balls and nods as our gazes lock and hold, and then she takes my whole length into her mouth again. I’m beyond sane thought right now. I thought I’d be teaching her, but she’s been schooling me from the very beginning. Her tongue flicks over the ridges of my length, and she holds there, her lips firm around the base of my cock as my breath catches.

  “Penny,” I warn her in desperation, because I’m close, and I know that after the sheer torture she’s put me through, when I start coming, I ain’t gonna stop. I nudge her away, but she doesn’t let up. She takes me deeper, sucking me in as I let out a moan and start to spurt my hot come into the back of her throat. I can’t help it. Can’t stop it. Coming harder when she moans softly. She’s so into this that she doesn’t even flinch when I go. She fixes her mouth on me, swallowing eagerly, lapping up every last drop, and she doesn’t let go until I’m done, sagging against her, gasping for breath.

  I lift her up into my arms, my beautiful goddess, and I hold her on the lounge in my shaking arms, cradling her as much as she’s cradling me. I can’t find the words. Can’t find a single thought.

  All I know is she’s fucking done it.

  She’s gone and made me fall in love.

  BEYOND THE SEVEN SACRED POOLS

  Nell

  Yes, I’m nervous. Nervous about things ending. Nervous about the upcoming challenges. We’re so close. But I’m just trying to live in the moment and appreciate every moment we have in the game. This really is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I doubt I’ll ever exp
erience anything like this again.

  —Nell’s Confessional, Day 14

  We need to report to check-in at six in the morning. This time, we don’t oversleep.

  Before we leave the cabana, Luke kisses me breathless, cupping my face possessively and awakening desire straight down to my toes. “You ready?”

  I nod. Even if I’m not, we’re doing this. It’s hot and sticky, even this early in the morning, so I’m wearing the bikini—just because Luke gave it to me—and the one pair of shorts I brought. He’s just wearing his board shorts. For a moment, I wonder if it’s possible to just stay here and seal out the outside world and hibernate together.

  But we’ve got a race to win. We’re determined now.

  The sun is just rising as we report to the platform and see Will Wang and the other couples. “Welcome back, remaining couples! We’re now going to bring you Marriage Test Number Four! In this challenge, we’ll be finding out how well the two of you have become aligned over the past two weeks. We’re going to have couples standing back-to-back, women on one side, men on the other, wearing earphones to drown out any sound. At the count of three, we’ll begin showing you sets of two words. Your job, simply, is to shout out one or the other. These words are going to come lightning fast, so you’ll need to be quick. The couple who has the most matches at the end of the round will receive a fifteen-minute boost on their starting time. Contestants, take your places.”

  I look over at Luke, and he winks at me, as if that fifteen minutes doesn’t matter in the least. It does matter, though. We’re dead last. If we want to win, we need all the help we can get.

  I take my place on the wooden platform and affix the earphones to my ears. I venture a look over at Luke, who’s doing the same thing behind me. Taking a breath, I stand with my back to him, almost but not quite touching.

  Until I feel his hand graze my hip, touch my elbow, and slip down my wrist, finding my own hand. He entwines his fingers with mine and squeezes.

  I melt.

  “Ready?” Will Wang says, raising a hand. “Set! And go!”

  They weren’t kidding when they said the words were going to come fast. I barely have time to think before the screen flashes with a new one. ROMANCE/SEX, LIGHT/DARK, SWEET/SEXY, FAST/SLOW, ROUGH/SMOOTH. I shout out my answers in a jumble until my mouth goes numb. Then, suddenly, the screen goes blank, and Will Wang’s voice is piped through our ears. “Contestants, please remove your headphones and see how you and your spouse did!”

  I drop his hand only to pull off the headset. When I turn around, I see the giant scoreboard. Ace and Marta matched only twelve times. Natalie and Brad, sixteen. Ivy and Cody, twenty-seven.

  Luke and I? We matched fifty-six times. Out of sixty.

  My eyes widen as I take it in, but he’s already hugging me. Hugging me and lifting me up off the ground, pressing me up to his bare chest in a way that makes me wish we could go back to that cabana. He buries his face in my neck and says, “That’s my girl.”

  “How did we do that?” I ask, shell-shocked, as the other teams start lining up for the next leg of the race. “Are we psychic?”

  He shrugs. Ace and Marta get to start out first, and then the other teams, but now we’re not so desperately far behind as we were when we left Julian. We have a good chance. As Will says, right now it’s anyone’s game.

  A few minutes after Brad and Natalie leave, it’s our turn. We step onto the platform, holding hands, and get our clue from Will, who winks at us. “Are you two glued together?” he says, pointing at our joined hands.

  At this point, we’ve both gotten good at ignoring his cute comments. I tear open the clue and read it.

  “We have to get to the highest point on the island,” I say.

  He scans the lush green foliage around us. There are a lot of hills. “Fuck. Where’s that?”

  “Haleakala,” I say, happy I took a minute to read the brochure in the cabana. “The dormant volcano.”

  He gives me an appreciative thumbs-up, and we pile our stuff into the rented Jeep Wrangler, then take off, following the signs for the volcano. We climb high into the clouds, passing pastures with grazing cows. When we finally get to the parking lot, we see a Jeep with Ivy and Cody just leaving. I hope that means we’re catching up.

  When we climb out, we rush into the welcome center. Someone at the welcome center tells us that we need to proceed down a route into the crater. We rush into the barren, moonlike landscape, and up ahead we see the outpost, which makes us run faster.

  I’m feeling good. Almost athletic. Like we can do this. I keep up with Luke now, or maybe he’s just falling in with my pace. But we make a good team.

  We get to the outpost and see Brad and Natalie there. I get a thrill of excitement, thinking yes, we really are catching up, when I hear Brad let out a torrent of curses. He starts to kick and pummel at the wooden post in front of him.

  As we near it, I see it. Four posts, one for each team. There is a little glass-faced cabinet with the clue visible inside, but it’s locked with a padlock. I come up close to it and lift it. It’s a combination padlock, looking for five numbers.

  “What do you think this is?” I ask Luke.

  “Hell if I know,” he says. “Did we get a combination?”

  “No!” Brad growls, punching his palm. “We’ve been here an hour, trying every fucking combination we can think of.”

  I look around, then at the clue. It hits me right away.

  I put in one, zero, zero, two, three, then yank the lock.

  It opens.

  “Holy fuck,” Luke breathes. “What did you just do?”

  I grab the clue and rip it open as Brad and Natalie stare at us. “The height of the mountain,” I tell them. “The highest point on Maui.”

  “Oh!” Natalie says and starts to press in the number. I grab Luke’s hand, and we rush back to the parking lot.

  I pull the clue out of the envelope and read. “We have to take the Road to Hana. When we get to the end of the road, beyond the Seven Sacred Pools, we’ll get our next clue.”

  “The Seven Sacred Pools? Shit.”

  We jump into the open-topped Jeep and take off. Road sounds a lot tamer than what this actually is. It turns out that the road is a narrow, twisty one-lane dirt path, with traffic going in both directions . . . on the side of a high cliff over the ocean. If you take any one of the hairpin curves too fast, you might find yourself careening straight into a tour bus coming the opposite way. Swerving to miss it means hitting a cliff wall or plummeting a hundred feet into the rocks below. So the speed limit is only five miles per hour.

  Luke drives forty, his hands gripping the wheel, his body tense, like he’s got something to prove.

  “Do you see that?” I say, pointing across the inlet. “I think that might be Ivy and Cody.”

  Luke presses on the accelerator, swerving narrowly to miss a stray cow on the road. “Hell yeah. We’re coming in right behind them.”

  I grip the handle on the door, hoping we do and don’t somehow end up falling to our deaths, because that would be a really great way to finish this season.

  We end up driving past the very crowded and touristy Seven Sacred Pools, but the road continues on, and we manage to catch up to Ivy and Cody, ending up right on their tails. We climb out and see the marker telling us which trail to take. It’s simply a bunch of arrows on the path that we need to follow.

  Once again, our two teams are neck and neck on the trail, which is mostly uphill and rocky. Luke gives me a hand during the really steep parts, and we don’t lag behind.

  We all stop and look up in wonder at an ice-blue pool with three narrow, beautiful waterfalls cascading into it. Cody points to the arrow.

  Which is pointing straight up the waterfall.

  Fear tightens my chest.

  “How do we do that?” I ask Luke. “There’s got to be an easier way. I’m not Spider-Man.”

  He rakes his hands through his scrubby buzz cut and frowns. “Nah. I bet it’
s easier than it looks. Come on.”

  We wade into the pool of warm water. It grows deeper and deeper, almost hitting my chin before we get to the waterfall. There we notice a cord hanging down the waterfall. Cody grabs it first, hoisting himself up and almost straddling the narrow falls as he looks to find a foothold. Ivy goes next.

  Luke places a protective hand on the small of my back under the water. “Go first. I won’t let you fall.”

  I cast him a worried glance but nod, rubbing my hands together as I take hold of the cord. I try to remember where Ivy’s setting her feet as I pull myself up.

  The first few feet aren’t a problem. It’s only when we get up higher and the pool starts to shrink beneath me that my fear of heights kicks in. The footholds are wet, and my sneakers keep slipping. More than once I have to rely on the cord—and Luke—to keep me from falling. And he does just as he promised, always keeping one hand hovering nearby to catch me.

  At one point, we climb to one side of the falls, then have to cross over sideways to the other side of the surging water. I stop and watch Ivy make the difficult jump, gaining her foothold. She reaches up for Cody’s hand but suddenly slips. She reaches for the rope, but it falls through her fingers, and down she goes. Luke reaches out for her, but her hand slips from his grip.

  We all stare open-mouthed as she falls at least thirty feet, shrieking, splashing into the water below.

  “Holy shit!” Cody calls out. “Ivy?”

  She surfaces a minute later, waving. “Shit, that hurt! I’m coming.”

  “She’s okay,” Luke says, letting out a sigh of relief as we continue the rest of the way up.

  When we get there, the path abruptly ends at a cliff. We see a sign that says WELCOME, TRAVELERS. TAKE THE LEAP OF FAITH! with a giant arrow pointing off the cliff.

  Oh hell no.

  Luke goes to the edge of the cliff. “It’s about sixty feet. You can’t really see what’s down there because of the tree cover. But it’s got to be okay.”