by Lily Everett
“Actually, I couldn’t even get him to come to the door. He yelled at me to go away, so I did.” She huffed a short laugh that sounded like it hurt. “Like father, like son, I guess.”
Marcus’s knee-jerk response was to deny that he was anything like his father, but he couldn’t form the words to protest. Quinn wasn’t wrong in this case, and no matter what Marcus felt or wanted, underneath it all was the lingering fear that he was, in fact, exactly like his father.
As they left the grim shell of his childhood home behind them, another house came into view. Farther down the road, almost to the tip of Lantern Point, the Harper house shone like a beacon in the darkness. Golden light spilled over the wraparound porch, inviting and welcoming, beckoning them closer.
Even with the upstairs windows mostly dark—it was going on midnight, after all—the house felt inhabited. Alive.
Marcus pulled into the driveway and cut the engine. Beside him, Quinn blew out a breath.
“Here we go. Are you ready for this?”
He quirked a brow at her. “Are you?”
The quick flash of her irrepressible grin lit the darkness inside the truck cab brighter than the overhead lights. “Heck, yeah. This is going to work, Marcus. It’s all going to be worth it.”
Her blind optimism should’ve been annoying. He ought to want to give her a reality check, make her admit that this ridiculous scheme had zero chance of success. But instead, Marcus felt his own mood lifting to mirror hers.
Not that he could ever, on the best day of his life, match Quinn Harper’s sunny cheer. He wasn’t built for happiness. But when he was with her, he came close enough to get an idea of what it felt like.
Before he could go any further down that soppy path, Marcus shoved out of the truck and grabbed both their bags. He followed as Quinn tripped up the porch steps and flipped over the corner of the welcome mat with the toe of her sneaker to reveal a house key. The ex-Secret Service agent in Marcus cringed at the abysmal security, but it wasn’t his business to assess locations for safety any longer.
And it was a good thing, too, because when a figure loomed out of the darkness at them, Marcus startled so badly that if he’d had a gun in his hand he would’ve taken the shot. Maybe winging Quinn’s father would be a way to get out of this crazy mess she’d landed them in, he thought as his heart rate spiked and adrenaline gushed through him in a useless flood, but Marcus couldn’t imagine it ending well for him.
“Hi, Daddy,” Quinn said softly, throwing her arms around him for one of her no-holds-barred hugs. Marcus told himself he didn’t miss them. And he definitely wasn’t envious.
“We weren’t expecting you until the morning,” Paul said, hugging his daughter back and staring at Marcus over the top of her head as if contemplating how to dispose of the body.
Marcus understood. If he had a daughter, he wouldn’t appreciate coming face-to-face with the idea that she was spending her nights with a man like Marcus, either. But since he couldn’t lay the man’s fears to rest and tell Paul that he didn’t intend to touch Quinn that night or any other night in the future, Marcus made do with an apologetic grimace. “Sorry to show up so late. The bar just closed.”
“It’s fine,” Paul said, lips thinning briefly. Marcus couldn’t help but notice that he looked worn down, the lines on his face deepened to grooves and the line of his shoulders slumped. “I was up anyway. Your mother will be happy to see you at breakfast, Quinn. I think she made up your room already, so come on up. Marcus, you need a hand with those bags?”
“Got them handled, sir.”
Quinn shot him a glare over her shoulder like she thought he was overplaying it or something. But Marcus didn’t see how it could hurt to be respectful. He was a guest in the man’s house, and as far as Paul knew, Marcus was regularly looking at his daughter naked. The least he could do was keep a civil tongue in his head.
The stairs creaked under their quiet tread, and the staircase was gently lit with wall sconces that cast a warm gleam over the rogue’s gallery of framed family photos. Marcus gazed from side to side, seeing Quinn in the pigtails he remembered while riding her bike, Quinn holding a bouquet of roses out to her mother, Quinn graduating from high school in a black robe that made her hair look like a living flame. Interspersed with those pictures was the evidence of Paul and Ingrid’s decades of happy marriage—because if those two were faking it in these shots, Marcus would eat his backpack.
Paul and Ingrid laughing in the backseat of a VW bug, Paul and Ingrid slow dancing at their wedding, with Paul in a wide-lapeled suit and Ingrid in a white macramé dress with a wreath of flowers crowning her flowing blond hair.
Marcus knew better than most that a happy family could turn into an unhappy one, in almost the blink of an eye. But looking at these pictures, Marcus understood for the first time exactly why Quinn was so certain her parents’ marriage could and should be saved.
The Harpers were the real deal. A real family who stuck it out and worked through it and made the best of things together.
The kind of family Marcus always thought he had … until his mother got sick.
He clenched his jaw until it hurt, using the pain to drive away the memories stirred up by seeing this old street again. His old house. The house where his mother died.
Paul led them to the first door on the right of the upstairs landing and held the door open. Quinn trooped in confidently, as if she’d never left home, but Marcus couldn’t help hesitating on the threshold.
Partly because he could see the cozy bower of a room from the doorway and was already calculating how impossible it would be to get a minute’s privacy for the next two weeks while sharing that tiny, pink space with Quinn. And partly, he paused because Paul Harper grabbed him discreetly by the strap of his backpack and held on.
“I’m allowing this because you’re engaged,” Paul said in an undertone so low, it didn’t reach Quinn where she’d wandered into the en suite bathroom to wash her hands. “And because Quinn and her mother have me backed into a corner. No other reason. Please don’t imagine for an instant that this means I accept you sharing a room with my daughter. Please remember that, and be respectful of the fact that you’re staying under my roof.”
Marcus cleared his throat. He wasn’t a man accustomed to embarrassment, but damn if he didn’t feel awkward as hell just then.
“Understood, sir.”
Paul held his gaze for the length of a heartbeat, and Marcus didn’t know exactly what his own face was doing, but whatever Paul saw there made his eyes widen a fraction. Damn it. Marcus was shooting for sincere and upstanding, not lovesick idiot.
Things just got a little too real.
The light clicked off in the bathroom and Quinn came out, drying her hands. She paused when she saw them hovering in the doorway and her eyes slitted in suspicion. “What are you two talking about over there?”
Paul dropped his hand quickly, with a guilty twitch that Marcus covered by stepping smoothly into the room and answering, “Your dad wanted to know if I’m a breakfast eater. I told him not to go to any trouble, but he’s pretty insistent.”
“What can I say? We like breakfast in this house,” Paul said, a little too heartily, but it was enough to make Quinn relax and regard them both with fondness.
“I just hope Mother is over her gluten-free thing soon. In the meantime, maybe omelets, Daddy?”
“You got it, sweetheart.” Paul stepped into the room far enough to scruff a kiss over the crown of Quinn’s head. “Good night, you two. Sleep well.”
The door closed behind him with a gentle click, leaving Marcus and Quinn staring at each other over the narrow queen-sized bed she’d slept in as a little girl. The light pink walls felt as if they were closing in on Marcus, the sloped roof caving down on his head. They were standing too close together. He wanted to back up, get some distance between their bodies, but there was simply nowhere to go.
Every breath he took was filled with Quinn.
The old
house creaked as it settled around them, her father’s footsteps fading and the low murmur of voices from down the hall tapering off into silence. Or as silent as it ever got way out here at the edge of Sanctuary Island.
As Marcus and Quinn stood, caught in each other’s eyes, he could hear the slow, steady crash of the waves against the rocks that tipped Lantern Point. Wind rustled through the maritime pines and the first, brave crickets set up their early summer song.
“People who say it’s too quiet in the country are obviously not listening very closely,” Quinn said, doing that uncanny thing where she almost read Marcus’s mind.
Clearing his throat, Marcus attempted to ignore the curves and lines of Quinn’s firm, athletic body mere inches from his own, much larger form. She was smaller, more slender, but she wasn’t fragile. Quinn could hold her own.
Danger. Redirect.
“Do you have an extra pillow?” He dumped their bags on the floor and kicked them off to the side of the rose-patterned rug. “And maybe a quilt.”
She frowned. “Don’t be ridiculous. There’s plenty of room in the bed.”
Marcus looked at the bed in question. It was less queen-sized and more full-sized. Every tiny motion, every shift of weight, every breath Quinn took … he’d feel it. He deliberately blanked his expression.
“I’ll sleep better on the floor.”
“Oh for the love of … Fine.” Marching over to the foot of the bed, Quinn snatched up the comforter that was folded at the end and flung it around her own shoulders like a superhero’s cape. She snagged a pillow and dropped it on the far side of the bed from the door, where the hardwood floor was mostly covered by the plush wool rug.
And then she plunked herself down by the pillow and stared mulishly up at the ceiling.
“What are you doing?” Marcus leaned over the bed to glare down at her.
“I’m sleeping on the floor,” she replied loftily. “Since you think we can’t be trusted to keep our hands to ourselves for two, tiny little weeks.”
“You’re not sleeping on the floor.” It was a struggle to keep his voice low when frustrated irritation wanted him to yell. “I said I’d sleep down there.”
“Well, now I’m sleeping down here. Get used to it.”
“Quinn. Get in the bed.”
Her eyes flashed dangerously. “Make me.”
Grinding his back teeth, Marcus studiously did not imagine scooping her up and tossing her over his shoulder, caveman style. If he did that, and threw her on the bed the way he wanted to … neither of them would be sleeping on the floor.
Neither of them would be sleeping much at all, in fact.
“I don’t get it,” he finally said.
She eyed him warily. “What?”
“I don’t get why you have to make things so much harder than they have to be.”
The words came out weary, and Quinn had the grace to wince. “Sorry. But I’m the hostess. You’re already doing me a huge favor. I’m absolutely not making you sleep on the floor too, on top of everything else.”
“You know what?” Marcus shrugged and turned away. “Fine. You win. I don’t know why I’m even arguing with you.”
It wasn’t as if Marcus were some stereotypical Southern gentleman or something, determined to lay his coat across a puddle rather than let a lady get her shoes wet. Quinn was a grown woman, not some delicate flower. If she wanted to sleep on the floor, let her.
“There’s not usually much of a point to arguing with me.” Quinn was cheerful again, now that she was getting her way.
He shucked his jeans in silence, shrugging out of the flannel shirt he’d been wearing and leaving him in just his boxer briefs and a T-shirt. Hesitating for a moment, Marcus fingered the hem of the shirt.
Usually, he slept in the buff. A fact that Quinn was all too familiar with. Rolling his eyes at his own belated sense of propriety, Marcus tugged off the T-shirt and slipped between the covers. He’d leave his underwear on as some kind of nod to decency. But Quinn said she wanted him to be comfortable, so he’d take her at her word.
Reaching over to turn the old-fashioned knob on the multicolored stained-glass bedside lamp, Marcus plunged the room into darkness.
The sounds of the spring night swirled up around them again, filling his ears. But in addition to the beat of the surf and the chirrup of the crickets, if Marcus concentrated, he could hear the soft in and out of Quinn’s breath.
It was those near-silent inhalations and exhalations that lulled him to sleep.
*
Quinn rolled onto her side, biting back a whimper as her hip bone banged the floor in the spot where it already felt bruised from the first hour of tossing and turning.
Flopping onto her back, she blew out a breath. She was almost surprised it didn’t fog the air, it was so cold down there on the floor. The blanket she’d pulled from the bed had long ago been wrapped around her like a cocoon, but it didn’t seem to do much to keep her warm.
All it did was make it nearly impossible to sit up, but by inch-worming herself along, she managed it. Quinn popped her head up by the bedside to stare at Marcus.
He slept on his back, exactly the way she remembered, with his face turned away from her and one arm thrown over his head. His sheets had slipped down, revealing the tender underside of his arm with its tuft of silky dark hair, and the broad planes of his chest. From where she knelt, she could just make out the shadow of one dusky nipple.
Her heart picked up speed, blood whooshing through her veins and throbbing in her ears, just from the sight of Marcus Beckett half naked in her childhood bed.
He might’ve been right to worry about her ability to keep her hands to herself.
Quinn had taken the floor for exactly the reasons she’d said, in addition to the knowledge that however little she liked to think it mattered, Marcus was ten years older than she was. And he was a secret stress case who carried all his tension in his back and shoulders. She should know, since she’d nearly sprained her thumbs trying to dig the knots out during a massage that had started out sexy and turned into a to-the-death battle between Quinn and the long muscles lining Marcus’s spine.
Marcus didn’t need to screw up his back by lying on the floor for eight hours, was her point. Not that she would ever say that to him. She didn’t have a death wish.
But as it turned out, the floor was more uncomfortable than Quinn had anticipated. And as the hours wore down, so did her resistance to the temptation of the warm, soft bed mere inches from her stiff, aching body.
She stared at Marcus’s sleeping form and wondered if she dared.
Then she wondered what the hell was the matter with her. It was a bed. They were adults. Sleeping next to each other didn’t mean they were automatically going to cross some invisible, arbitrary line. She wasn’t going to roll over in her sleep and accidentally impale herself on his penis. They’d be fine.
This is fine, she told herself, getting up off her shaky knees and creeping around to the other side of the bed. The way her knees popped when she stood up was a deciding factor. Quinn carefully peeled back the covers and slid into the bed beside Marcus.
Quinn held her breath, but he didn’t move. His broad chest rose and fell with his deep, even breaths. He threw off heat like a roaring bonfire; Quinn went from chilled to toasty in seconds.
Letting her body relax into the softness of the mattress, she drifted peacefully into sleep.
Quinn’s dreams were chaotic, flashes of memories mixed with totally random people from her past and present. She was aware they were dreams, in that vague way that happens sometimes, even when the dreamer is deeply asleep.
In the dream, she and Marcus were walking through the woods behind her parents’ house, holding hands. Even Dream Quinn couldn’t suspend disbelief quite enough for that. Marcus wasn’t a hand-holding kind of guy. So she knew it was a dream, even as he led her deeper into the pine copse, their footfalls muffled by layers and layers of dried pine needles that released their
evergreen scent as they were crushed.
Come here, said Dream Marcus, giving Quinn the smile she’d only glimpsed once or twice—the small, private, completely unguarded smile that made Marcus look like the carefree boy Quinn had first fallen for.
She could never resist that particular smile. Not that she wanted to resist. This was only a dream. She could have whatever she wanted, with no consequences.
Emboldened by her freedom, Quinn followed Marcus down to lie on a bed of springy green moss. He lay back, arms crossed behind his head and more relaxed than she’d ever seen him in real life. Sunlight dappled his handsome face, patterns of light and shadow that shivered over his cheekbones when wind fluttered through the branches overhead.
Her heart swelled with all the feelings she’d been stuffing down and denying since the day Marcus unceremoniously ended their relationship. It wasn’t smart to care about him. She knew that, and Quinn wanted to be smart, she really did.
The trouble was that she’d never learned how to stop caring about someone. Her poor, bruised heart was as optimistic and stubborn as her hungry body was when it came to Marcus Beckett.
Despair teased at Quinn’s mind, but she pushed it away. This is a dream, she said aloud to remind them both. Only a dream.
Beneath her, Marcus smiled again, the smile that promised things like love and forever and the kind of pleasure she could live on. Thighs tensing with need where she was suddenly straddling his hips, Quinn felt the low-down clench of her body around the emptiness only Marcus could fill.
A shudder racked her, sweeping up her frame in a rush that tightened the peaks of her breasts and forced her mouth open on a gasp.
Yes, like that, Marcus murmured, his eyes going hot and feral the way she remembered from their first nights of passion. The grip of his hands at her hips excited Quinn. She squirmed a little, wanting to feel it, hoping it bruised so she could look in the mirror later and see the evidence of Marcus’s desire for her.
With a smooth twist of his massive torso, he flipped them so that Quinn’s back was arching off the cool moss and Marcus was covering her with his body. Her legs fell open, wanton and wanting, and she relished the stretch of her thighs as he fit himself into the cradle of her hips.
