She spun away, leaving him with a view of her shoulders. She had dressed relatively conservatively, showing little skin until tonight. He wondered if she realized what a temptation even her shoulders were. She was made of muscle and elegance, and when she lifted a hand to touch the list of his competitors, she created a divot at the cap of her shoulder. “How much work do you put into these rankings?”
He shrugged, then reminded himself that she couldn’t see that. “Some. Most of the process is automated. Downloading information from the Internet.”
“You’re a competitor, Sean Westin. Not a playboy.” Her head tilted, and dark hair shifted across the tops of her bare shoulders. She was cream and chocolate, blending her personality’s sharp edges. Her hair was thin, but it looked butter soft. Touching it would be like touching spider’s silk.
“Can’t I be both?”
For some reason, that made her turn around. The gentle oval of her face was tempered with that silken hair. Her eyes were widely spaced, her cheeks soft. “Don’t you eventually have to decide what you are? Isn’t that part of growing up?”
He knew better, but he put a hand on the wall by her head, right between his analysis of Rowdy McMillan’s second heat at the Hurley Pro and the overall standings of the last Billabong event. Leaning in was so damn stupid that he tried to stop himself, but he couldn’t. She didn’t move. Didn’t flinch. Kept staring at him with those eyes that he wanted to drown in and that mouth that he wanted to taste.
He tested the tight limitations of his right arm to let the ends of her hair skim like feathers over his fingertips. She was worth the pinch of pain. “Growing up is bullshit. That’s why everyone wants to be done with it as soon as possible.”
Her head tilted. “I don’t think that’s true. There are lots of people who hold on to their high school years with an iron grip.”
“The star football players. The homecoming queens. The ones for whom everything worked.” The words spilled out with a hefty dose of bitter ashes.
“You weren’t one of those, were you, Sean?”
When his shoulder pulled with fatigue, he put his hand on her waist, framing her in. She shied away from his touch as if she wasn’t the one in charge. He’d seen that when he tried to take her hand at the party. Even in the middle of a crisis, she’d held safe within herself. But crowding her meant that maybe she’d stop asking stupid questions about his background. He wasn’t ready to answer, because the answers blew. There was nothing lovely about being trapped in a house with a crazy woman. “No. I wasn’t.”
“You’re certainly making up for lost time lately then, aren’t you?” She lifted her face toward him, defiantly raising her chin. She wasn’t completely unaffected, though. Her hands flattened against the wall at her hips. The pulse at the side of her throat fluttered like a butterfly’s wings. “Putting on the playboy act. I don’t think that’s real. I don’t think that’s who you really are. Maybe a hard-drinking, bar-fighting surfer would take drugs to try to catch up. But you’re this Sean Westin, the one who devotes hours to research. Who knows your competitors inside and out. Who’s made himself an industry. You wouldn’t risk any of it by doping. Steroids would defeat the purpose.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” he growled. Fuck, he needed to shut his own mouth up, because what was he arguing for? She was saying good things about him. But at the same time, it felt like she was going too far beneath his surface. Crawling under his skin. He didn’t know what to do with that. How to respond. She assumed his biggest concern was doping rumors. How cute.
She smiled serenely. “Sure I don’t, Sean,” she agreed, except she laced her words with doubt, teasing him. “But I also know you’re about two seconds away from kissing me.”
The hand he had braced against the wall clenched into a fist. He dropped to his elbow, crowding her even more. He had to pull back his bad arm, which made the nerves across the back of his skull crawl with frustration. She smelled like pure skin and soap and the faintest hint of flowers. No perfume for her. She didn’t put that type of work into herself. “Shouldn’t you run, then?”
Her head fell back against the wall. Her breasts pushed out with the move, her hips bending away. “Do I seem like the running type?”
He hated when other people were right about him. He’d made it his mission to defy expectations in so many ways. Otherwise he’d have a house piled to the rafters with trash, if he’d even had a house at all. He might have been homeless. It came close to being a viable option more than once when he was young. He broke stereotypes about surfers being laid back and lazy. He was neither of those.
But Annie was right about him. He was transparent as glass, because he couldn’t think about anything but kissing her, not anymore. Part of him wanted to blame it on her because she’d planted the idea in his head, but he knew it wasn’t true.
He’d been fixated on her mouth for hours, ever since she’d shown up at his front door in her demure dress with the gold straps. She was a demon meant to torture him.
So he kissed her.
If he’d thought she’d melt, he had another thing coming. She made a welcoming sound, a gasping moan in the back of her mouth, and rose on her toes so that she pushed up against his mouth. Her breasts brushed his chest, but he didn’t touch. He didn’t move his hands from their fisted position at the wall.
Kissing her was like kissing a whirling dervish cloud. She was energy and fire, but if he tried to grab on, he thought she might flit away. Disappear like so much mist. She trembled under him. Her bones were made of wire and held together with lace. But the lace was made of steel as well.
He tasted vodka on her and regretted it. He wanted only her pure taste. She was wet velvet against his tongue. Every move of his lips across hers was temptation. Keeping his hands still became harder and harder with the pounding echo of his blood in his ears.
The roar was almost enough to drown common sense. He wanted to tell himself to move on, to take more, to cup her breast in one hand. Or at the very fucking least, her tight, slim waist.
But he didn’t move. Only poured his every thought into their mouths, into their kiss. They were something incendiary.
And she was someone who’d been bruised at the edges. He’d suspected it before, but the way she moved and sighed at his kiss confirmed it. Her hands fluttered at her waist, as if she wanted more but didn’t know how to take it. That didn’t sound like Annie in usual circumstances. The way she stood boldly and challenged the world to come at her was one of the things he dug about her.
Sean was used to women touching him, used to them immediately twining their arms around his neck and pressing lithe bodies against him. Hell, sometimes they wrapped their leg around his hip before he’d even gotten to the point of opening his lips.
Not Annie. She was waiting. She was hesitant.
And he was the worst shithead in the world for liking that.
Chapter 10
Annie didn’t flee. She wasn’t the fleeing type. Instead, she made a strategic exit as quickly as she could. It might be a matter of semantics, but they were words that mattered to her. Fleeing sounded weak, and she didn’t want to ever feel weak again. She’d left that feeling long behind. Considering how delicious Sean’s mouth was . . . maybe that exit wasn’t done as quickly as it ought to have been.
She insisted on a cab, despite Sean’s protests. There was no way she was getting back in a car with that man when her whole body wanted nothing more than to climb him like a spider monkey. And how strange was that? She couldn’t remember the last time she was more than vaguely turned on, and that had been intentionally created as part of therapy, by trolling Tumblr for the very best in smutty-men pictures.
But there weren’t pictures of Sean Westin on Tumblr. Or rather, there probably were, under the #surfing hashtag, and in every one he’d be wearing board shorts at the least or a wet suit at the most. On a bo
ard. On top of the world.
Not obviously worrying over the vagaries of his career. Except even that was an understatement. This was a crisis that could destroy his entire career and with it his name. He didn’t need her experimenting all over him.
But God, she could use an orgasm that wasn’t self-directed.
Except not from him. Not from him. Maybe if she repeated it to herself a hundred times more, she’d believe it.
The man could kiss like a god. Not rape-minded marauding Zeus, but one of the gods invested in making their human targets seduce themselves. He’d teased responses from her, his lips on hers promising all sorts of things.
Hence, cab.
She was a professional. She wasn’t supposed to be messing with him.
But when she stood at the start of the walkway to her back door, all she wanted was Sean. She didn’t want to walk into her house. There was no quiet there. No privacy. She looked longingly at her ramp and pool.
Skateboarding could fix her. Could get her out of her head and into her body. She bit the edge of her thumb where the cuticle met her nail.
“If you want to skate, you’ll at least have to come inside and change your clothes,” said a voice from behind her. “If you wreck that dress, I’ll be so annoyed. Do you know how hard it was to find an actual dress that you were willing to wear?”
Annie’s shoulders released from their anxious climb up toward her ears. “I know, Mom.”
“Twelve. Twelve dresses. That’s how many I had to take back to the store. Because it’s not like you could be bothered to go shopping, even when you’re the one with the fancy schmancy event.”
“I know, Mom.” Her tension was slipping away. This was a conversation they’d had a hundred times. A million. “What are you doing here, anyway? Your town house is two miles away.”
“Two point six. You might as well call it three miles.”
“You say three miles like it’s some giant hardship.” Annie finally turned around. Her mom was leaning a shoulder against the open doorway. She had on skinny jeans, awesome boots with buckles that went up to the knees, and a cowl-necked sweater. Annie’s mom had style, which was why it was kind of pointless for Annie to go shopping. Denise had it covered.
“You know there are people who live thousands of miles away from their families,” Annie continued. “They leave for college and never come back.”
Denise waved a hand, her nose curling. “Those parents obviously did something wrong, to make their kids run away.”
Annie rolled her eyes. “You don’t believe that.”
“I don’t.” Denise flashed a grin. “But I like having you living nearby.”
“Easier to spy on me?”
“You know it.” She stepped back in the doorway, letting Annie move past her to the stairs, and they both climbed.
Annie loved her bedroom. It was on the east side of the house, which meant it got gorgeous sunlight in the mornings. The bed was huge for her. There was no reason why someone who was only five foot one needed a king-sized bed with a half-canopy headboard. She’d piled it with all sorts of blankets, from a fuzzy fleece to a black-and-gold afghan that her grandmother had made. The pillows teetered haphazardly.
She was at least a little bit self-aware. She’d made her bed into a nest, a safe place where she could hide from the world. Nothing was wrong with that as long as she didn’t hide forever.
Ducking into her closet, she pulled the stupid dress in question off over her head. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
“I can’t hear you, darling. Stop talking with your mouth full.”
Annie stuck her head out the door and shot her mother a look. “We’re not at the dinner table.”
“Fine, don’t talk with a face full of fabric.”
“Does Dad know you’re here?”
Denise wasn’t easily shaken. She was an inch shorter than Annie, but she’d always been able to wrap Annie’s dad around her little finger. Andy adored Denise, and he had since they’d met in college. She rolled her eyes and said with droll emphasis, “No, he thinks I’m working the corner.”
“Come on, Mom.” Annie shuddered as she pulled on a pair of cotton pajama bottoms and a camisole. “Don’t be icky.”
“Don’t ask stupid questions,” Denise said with a laugh.
“Did you just call your only daughter stupid?”
Denise sat on the love seat that Annie had strategically placed in front of the fireplace. She only managed to use the fireplace about twice a year, since temperatures in Southern California seldom dipped low enough. But it sure looked pretty in the meantime. Annie dropped onto the love seat next to her and leaned her head on her mother’s shoulder.
She was tired. But more than that, she was a twisting mass of contradictions and nerves. Her fingertips tingled with anxiety, but her lips were tingling as well—for an entirely different reason. “Why are you here?”
Denise passed a hand over Annie’s hair. It had been a long time since her mom had petted her head, and it said a lot about the place each was in. “The last time you went to a surfing industry party, you came home pretty upset,” Denise said quietly.
Annie chuffed a laugh at the understatement, but it wasn’t actually a funny subject. That night had left Annie a mess, and it was the reason she’d had to work through so much. Her entire life shifted that night. “I proved I could protect myself, at least.” It was the one bright side to what had happened—the bright side she’d sometimes clung to desperately.
“You did.” Her mom squeezed her shoulders. “My brave and amazing baby.”
“I was eighteen.”
“Exactly.”
Despite her age, she’d thought she could conquer the world. She’d been on the Prime circuit for women’s surfing for two years already, and a sponsor had come calling. Terry had been the rep for Leslie Sunglasses, and he’d told Annie how much they liked her look and her skills. Then he’d told Annie how much he’d liked her. On a personal level.
“Sean isn’t Terry. He was a perfect gentleman.” Even when he’d kissed the hell out of her. That had been all about being devoured by his mouth. Nothing else. He hadn’t touched her. Even though he’d sheltered her against the wall, she could have ducked away anytime. It was nothing like what Terry had done.
Denise’s fingers dug into Annie’s shoulder with remembered upset. Annie patted her hand. “I still say I shoulda killed that man. Your daddy has a very big hammer. If I’d come up on him from behind . . .”
“Murderous doesn’t look good on you. And that was a long time in the past.”
“Is it?” Denise’s eyes were lighter brown than Annie’s, since Annie took after her dad in that regard. But when they filled with concern, they darkened and turned luminous. Annie knew love from the way it was filtered through those eyes. Pure and undiluted. “I still worry about the effects. You’ve never had a long-term boyfriend since that dick.”
“He and I dated for three months. I’m not sure it counted as long-term.”
Denise pulled a frown. “It was the summer after you graduated high school. Anything more than three days is long-term when you’re that young. But he was a smarmy, too-old-for-you, good-for-nothing.”
“He was twenty-three.” Just out of college, he barely knew what he was doing himself. But he’d known enough to trade in expectations and disgusting favors. Annie had thought he made her feel special. Instead, he’d been trying to artificially build her up, the better for tearing her down when the time came.
“I know exactly how old he was. I still regret letting you even talk to him.” Denise squeezed Annie. “I’m sorry for that, Annie. I should have kept you safer.”
Annie jerked back far enough that she could look her mother in the eyes again. Her jaw dropped open. “You are an amazing mother. You have nothing to apologize for.”
“I
thank God that ass didn’t win at turning your head toward a pro career. You didn’t give up your slot at San Diego.”
Annie was thankful for the same thing. She’d had to surf long enough to keep her scholarship, but after that she’d been able to walk away from the entire riddled, corrupted system.
She bit her lip hard enough that a wash of pain ran through her. “Sean’s in trouble. He found out some bad news tonight.”
Denise’s eyebrows flew up. “Something happened while you were with him?”
Annie found herself recounting the entire story, including the way that she’d almost lost her shit to a panic attack, since her mother knew every bit of her history and treatment. But when she moved on to the part where her positive conversation with Frank Wakowski had turned sour for Sean, Denise sat up straight.
“Annie . . .” Her voice was laden with warning as she shook her head. “This isn’t something you need to get involved with.”
She sighed, dropping back against the arm of the love seat. “I know, Mom. And really, there’s nothing I can do. But Sean’s in a world of hurt.”
She knew she’d be in the same world if she didn’t back away. Kissing him had been foolish. So ridiculous that it felt like a farce. If she had even a modicum of sense, she’d walk away from him immediately. But how would that look? She didn’t want to be the kind of person who left when the shit hit the fan.
He seemed to have so few people on his side. His first call in times of trouble had been to his manager, and he had definitely not followed it up with any sort of family call. Maybe he’d saved that for after she left, but she doubted it. There’d been nothing in magazines or articles over the years about his family. He didn’t talk about them. It was as if he’d sprung fully formed into the surfing world at eighteen, kicking ass through the Prime.
If she abandoned him, he’d be alone. Part of her warred with that idea, arguing that it wasn’t as if they were real friends anyhow. She was hired. Practically an employee.
Ahead in the Heat Page 7
