He could feel her confusion and concern about what happened after tomorrow. Knowing she was already on the fence about her future in Los Angeles gave him the edge to push ever so slightly. What didn’t help, though, was the whole ‘Oopsie Condom’ thing.
“Hey! Bud,” a loud, booming voice hollered.
Shit. It was Chuck, Kyle’s caddy, and the laughter in his voice told him that he couldn’t wait to rub Ryan’s nose in a gotcha exchange.
“Little early for formal attire, isn’t it?” he snickered.
Making matters worse was the smiling presence of Chuck’s wife, Theresa. He couldn’t count the number of times over the last few years when he’d socialized with the couple. Nobody was closer to Ky than he was, but Chuck came in a fast second. And that mash-up of facts meant they were each aware of Ryan’s lengthy turn as a celibate monk.
Of course, they found this funny. Why the hell wouldn’t they? It was.
He shook Chuck’s hand and gave Theresa a peck on the cheek.
“Got hammered last man, man. Passed the fuck out on the beach. Can you believe that shit?” he snorted with fake laughter.
Theresa covered her mouth but not before a cackle broke free. Chuck gave him the up and down eyeball smirk and threw down, “Got a shower and a bath kit down on the beach, have they?”
They had him by the short hairs, but he shrugged and acted like nothing at all was strange about any of this. “Something like that,” he said. “Listen. I’m in a hurry. Got shit to do. You two good,” he asked while putting distance between them. “Need anything?”
Chuck laughed. “You’re one hell of a bad actor, Ryan. Run along, man. Oh, and tell Samantha we said hi.”
After that truth bomb, they turned and walked away having a great laugh at his expense. All he could think was thank god Ky and Andi’s phones were off, or some phone relay satellite would work overtime from the speed at which the newly married couple would learn of his and Samantha’s conspicuous behavior.
Another truth bomb. . .did he care? Nope. Not in the least. Let the whole world know as far as he was concerned. The sweet golden girl was his, and that meant she was his number one priority. Ryan did not do halfway. Life was way too damn short for fucking around. Making love with her changed everything. Maybe if their night together had been nothing but a high-octane fuckfest, he’d feel less territorial. But it hadn’t.
Had he kept count? No. It was impossible because as soon as one wave hit, another wave started building in the quiet aftermath. After taking the edge off the feverish hunger, they fed the flames with long, slow, intensely poignant lovemaking. Another first and maybe the most important one.
He had work to do. Running on pure instinct, he crossed his fingers for luck and jumped with both feet into an emotional maelstrom he was sure would transform his life.
Sam made it back to her room just as the maids were leaving. Juggling a bag of pastries and a cardboard tray holding two hot drinks, she shuffled out of their way as they chanted, “Aloha,” and pushed the housekeeping cart to the next room.
A chill hit her out of nowhere, tingling along her spine and up her neck. She looked around, expecting to find an ice ray gun pointed in her direction, but found nothing out of the ordinary. Shivering head-to-toe, she pushed open her door with a foot and hurried to put what she carried onto the table.
The maids had made it so the door only slid shut halfway, so free of her burden, she hurried to close the door only to come up short and stumble awkwardly when Tara Donner’s face appeared in the crack.
“Aloha, Sami,” her nemesis cooed. “Sleep well?”
What the hell was she doing here? Sam realized their rooms were inconveniently next to one another but still they’d managed over the course of more than a week to barely cross paths. Tara showing up at her door did not feel random.
Be careful.
‘Yeah, no shit,’ she scoffed to her inner voice.
“What are you up to this morning, Tara?” Sam did nothing to disguise the irritation she felt at having to speak to the other woman.
Had she just awarded the suspicious woman a million dollars? Because the gleam of delight shining in Tara’s eyes was unnerving.
When she spoke, Sam found out why.
“Oh, so exciting, Sami,” she gushed. That she kept calling her by Andi’s pet name for her sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard to Sam.
And then she lobbed a grenade straight into Sam’s lap. A Tara special, complete with barbs and a lingering aftershock.
“I’m meeting Ali for brunch, and then we’re going to tour a garden planted by a Hawaiian Queen. Ali wants to check it out as a setting for a new story. Isn’t that thrilling? She’s a hoot. All the Sommerfields are so much fun.”
She heard the unmistakable challenge in Tara’s little speech. Could smell the putrid stench of her marking some imaginary territory. Sam’s tummy fluttered. She didn’t need this shit.
“Oh,” she continued, “and then we’re meeting Ted and Hannah for an early dinner. They rented a house down the beach. Have you seen it? Really quite nice and what a view!”
Seriously? What bullshit was she going to throw next? The Sommerfield coat of arms?
Pressing her hands on her stomach, Tara made a little face and Sam felt all the blood rush from her head into her feet. “I really need to eat something,” she drawled. “Went for a walk earlier because strange noises during the night kept me awake. But now, I’m feeling a little nauseous.”
Sam’s mouth fell open. She’d heard each and every one of Tara’s nasty insinuations loud and clear. Either she’d heard her and Ryan getting loud last night, or she was a great poker player because that was one hell of a bluff.
A frisson of unease slithered into her belly when she remembered them taking lusty advantage of the private patio for a pre-dawn naked romp on the lounger. She was infuriated that the lack of true privacy could lead to some embarrassing explanations. But what really toasted her bagel was the veiled remark suggesting she was pregnant.
Sam touched her own stomach and very nearly hurled on Tara’s ugly Roman style sandals. Just like that, a complicated situation became a cluster-fuck with tremendous ramifications for an awful lot of people.
Ordinarily, she’d have shut the other woman down in short order, but some line had been crossed, a point breached, and she was over it. Shutting the door in Tara’s shocked face, Sam turned the lock, fully intending for the loud click to be her final word.
Pacing seemed like a good thing to do. The hand-wringing followed shortly after. Shaken by how quickly things escalated, she tried to find a middle lane through the building chaos in her head.
She liked Ryan. A lot. And that was before the sex. They clicked perfectly on so many levels that it was a bit scary. Didn’t stuff like that only happen in movies? Or books?
Tara’s crazy involvement didn’t taint things, but it sure did make things weird and stranger-than-truth. The woman’s troubling attachment to Ryan’s family made her uneasy. What the hell was she up to?
Oh, my god, she thought. And then there was Andi. And Kyle. How she wished at that moment to speak with her oldest friend. Sam understood that the newlyweds were clearly rooting for her and Ryan. But Tara complicated things.
So did the speed with which she and Ryan took their budding relationship into serious territory—helped in no small way by a condom malfunction and their inability to keep their hands off each other.
Dammit. She was forgetting something. In twenty-four hours, she’d be home and confronted with the real possibility of being unemployed.
Shit storm? Hi. My name is Samantha, and boy, is my life a mess.
“Hey,” she growled with food stuffed in her mouth. “Thief!”
Swatting his hand away from the mounded manapua on her plate, she scowled and said, “Keep it up and no shaved ice for you.”
“Aw, come on,” he chided playfully. “Still hungry.”
“You’re always hungry.”
H
e chuckled. She was right. He was the Ron Weasley of the Sommerfield clan, and on Thanksgiving, he made sure to wear his Joey Tribbiani turkey-eating pants.
“My mom says it’s because I was breastfed. Can just never get enough.”
The comment was true. That was what she said. He didn’t realize how funny it sounded till Samantha snickered.
“That’s what you all say.”
“Is that a complaint,” he asked.
She covered her boobs with her hands, finished chewing, and shook her head. “Not a complaint. More of a reminder. The girls chafe easily.”
He waved off her comment. “Eh, relax. I’ll rub ‘em with some lotion later and make ‘em happy again.”
“How about you?” She asked so innocently, he did a double take to see if she was serious. “You’ve got some rather zone-specific delicate skin happening. I’m surprised,” she told him with complete sincerity, “how much, uh, rough handling you can take.”
Interesting observation on her part. “Don’t be fooled by the soft skin. That’s the result of organic wack-off lotion. My dick can take a beating, I assure you.”
She nearly choked to death at the table when laughter shot from her mouth in the middle of taking a bite of the doughy Hawaiian delicacy.
He smiled as she struggled to get it together. “Pile enough dirty innuendo in that statement for you?”
Samantha wiped her mouth and dropped the napkin to her lap. “I can see the headline now. Shy innocent chokes on local meat pie over the mention of cruelty-free wack-off sludge.”
“Well, I didn’t say anything about cruelty-free. Hell, babe. Sometimes? The chicken wants to be choked but good. And Sam?”
She blinked. The use of her shortened name was an erotic road sign that she stepped on the brakes to observe.
“You left shy and innocent in a bag on the patio last night. I gotta get one of those loungers for home. Talk about the perfect fucking equipment!”
Boom! All playfulness and silly laughter disappeared in a heartbeat, and he jerked from the whiplash effect of her sudden change in demeanor.
“What did I say?”
She didn’t meet his eyes for the longest time. A trickle of nervous sweat ran behind his ear to his shoulder.
He didn’t like the sudden silence. It felt troubling. “Samantha?” he urged when she remained mute.
At some point during their daylong island adventure, she’d gathered her hair into a long thick braid when the heat and humidity got to her. She reached for the curling ends of the braid and fiddled with them for a few seconds before sighing deeply and sitting back in her chair. She looked straight at him, crossed her legs, and calmly lay her hands in her lap.
He didn’t know what was coming, but he admired her lack of artifice. She didn’t need to be sly or cunning because Samantha knew who she was. He wasn’t sure if she even realized it, but the way she handled herself as an adult showed him over and over what a great person she was at heart.
“Did you know Tara’s room is next to mine?”
Not expecting to hear the name, he went on high alert at the guarded tone Samantha used. No way was this good, he thought.
“Didn’t know. Don’t care.”
He covered all the bases with those four words, right? Should he say something else? Shit! He didn’t know. And fuck if he wasn’t fuming at the suggestion Tara was casting a shadow over their happiness.
“I ran into her this morning. Before you came back.”
The idea of anyone, let alone Tara, doing or saying anything to cause Samantha harm or pain was the new deal breaker for Ryan.
Impatiently, he snarled a response. “And?”
“How do you know there’s an ‘and’?”
“Because I know Tara and with her brand of crazy, there’s always an ‘and.’”
Perhaps, that wasn’t the right thing to say because she looked uncomfortable with his answer. He was troubled by her quick mood change.
“I think she overheard us this morning.”
“What exactly does that mean?”
She answered in a rush of words that landed with a thud in his gut.
“I went out to get coffee and croissants, and when I came back, Tara more or less jumped me at the door to my room. After she finished rhapsodizing about hanging out with Ali and your parents’ at their vacation rental—oh, sorry,” she murmured. “I meant Ted and Hannah.”
His eyebrows almost shot off his face hearing her divulge that Tara thought it was okay to call his parents by their first names.
“She went on to taunt me with mention of noises coming from the patio and how it kept her from sleeping.”
Why that bitch.
“Yeah,” she murmured. “And, well. . .never mind.”
Ohhhh, hell to the no! “We don’t do that, Samantha. Understand? If you have something to say, say it.”
He gave her a silent round of applause for having the balls when she spoke right up.
“I don’t care if this makes me sound crazy or paranoid, but she kept touching her stomach. I work in Hollywood. Body language is a whole thing there. You get what I’m saying, right?”
“There is zero possibility of my involvement in any of that woman’s body functions. I’m dead serious here, Samantha. Please tell me you understand that despite whatever appearances she’s working overtime to manipulate, I have nothing whatsoever to do with—not now, not ever—Tara Donner.”
“Ryan,” she drawled. “Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not asking if you’re her baby daddy. After your explanation and Andi’s story on the same subject, I got what Tara was doing.” The smile she bestowed calmed his nerves. “She’s messing with the wrong, crazy bitches here, though. Andi’s ready to either smack her or fire her. I know it’s not you, but Tara is playing by Tara’s cray-cray rules. Not being involved and not getting dragged into someone else’s drama are two very different things. She’s dangerous. And she didn’t hesitate to try to make me feel like the outsider.”
He snorted. “She’s the outsider.”
“Actually, she’s not. On the mainland, all of you live within sixty miles of each other. You. Andi and Kyle. Your parents. Even Ali.”
“Doesn’t mean anything,” he grumbled.
“It does to someone three thousand miles away.”
Ryan felt trapped. By Tara’s delusions. By knowing Samantha was looking for an out on her life in California. By the normal constraints of being a good guy.
He couldn’t destroy Tara. She was too pathetic for that, and besides, karma would get her someday soon.
And though he wanted to, Ryan couldn’t use what he knew to force Samantha’s hand or push her into a decision using an unfair advantage. She’d hate him for it later on. She made her own decisions—a lot like him. She wouldn’t appreciate him interfering under any circumstance.
In a very real way, they were sitting on a time bomb. Pretending tomorrow wasn’t looming or that walking away from each other wasn’t about the most confusing and upsetting thing a new relationship could handle was dumb. This didn’t seem like the time to choose subtlety over candor.
“Scoot over here,” he told her before moving a bag of souvenirs from the bench between them.
“Why?”
This itty-bitty shade of defiance she engaged in from time to time would keep them on their toes in the years ahead. Like a lightning bolt of clarity, he saw the trait in his parents’ marriage and with Uncle Burt and Aunt Mel too. Now, he understood why his dad told him the Sommerfield men needed strong women to keep them in line. Many things were starting to make sense.
He looked at Samantha through new eyes. As much as he needed her to keep him grounded, she needed him to keep up the challenge. He snickered. It was their personal form of relationship yin and yang.
“’Cause I said so, you cheeky wench. Move that ass, lady.”
The twitching pursed lips as she fought a laugh reset the equilibrium and helped draw a distinct warning line around the seriousnes
s of the discussion.
“Since you asked so nicely. . .” she muttered with a snark-laden smirk as she made a huge production of scooting, an inch at a time, across the bench until her knees hit his legs. “There. Happy now?”
Oh, yeah. Now, he got it! The spanking thing. She was almost begging for a turn over his knee.
Ryan turned toward her, shifting his body until he rested an elbow on the table—which effectively caged her in—and lightly stroked his fingers up and down the bare skin of her arm.
“Very happy. Your fire excites me, Samantha.”
Her eyes flashed dangerously. He grinned and kept on.
“So please, honey, keep it up.”
He saw the second she thought of a comeback and inclined his head to encourage her mouth to have at it.
“Careful. You might get burnt.”
“I like the fire,” he assured her. “Without it, you can’t really appreciate the peaceful times.”
She looked pleased with his observation, so he decided to tease her a little bit. Put some of that pretty blush he enjoyed so much onto her cheeks.
Using small, unhurried movements, he fingered the strap of her sundress and caressed the soft skin on her shoulder. Didn’t take long for Samantha to draw her bottom lip between her teeth as a slight tremor rippled beneath his sensitive hands.
“And then there’s that other reason when your smart mouth will come in handy.”
He liked the guileless confusion on her face. It spurred him on.
“Oh? Why’s that?”
His face split into a wide grin. “You’ve got homework.”
“What?”
“Homework. I want you to research what I’m told is the fine art of ass spanking. There’s a lot of material out there. Maybe you could use some of your movie consultants for information. Those BDSM guys with the knots and rope.”
Ryan almost fell off the bench laughing when her brows bumped together furiously, and she gaped at him, open-mouthed. “Are you serious?”
The Wedding Affair (The Affair Series Book 2) Page 18
