“I spend almost every waking moment with you. Have you ever considered that’s why I’m in such a foul mood to begin with?”
“Nope,” he says cheerfully.
“Grayson .” I groan. “Seriously, I was looking forward to my nap.”
“Just trust me, okay? This is way better than a nap.”
I scoff. “Not possible. Naps are the greatest thing of all time.”
“This is better.”
I stop trying to tug my hand from his, but my eyes are still narrowed in doubt as we cross a road onto a narrow trail, officially leaving hotel property behind.
“I thought we weren’t supposed to leave the grounds.”
“We’re celebrities, not prisoners.” He grins at me. “And what the security detail doesn’t know won’t hurt them.”
“Shouldn’t we at least tell someone where we’re going?”
“Live a little, Firestone. I thought you were a badass.”
“I am a badass,” I grumble.
“Then buck up and stop resisting.” His eyes twinkle. “I’m taking you on an adventure. And I’m not taking no for an answer.”
“Fine,” I relent with a heavy sigh, as if he’s torturing me.
In reality, there’s a heady excitement building inside me like a fault line overdue to quake. I keep my eyes on the spot between his shoulder blades as he leads me through the thick brush deeper into the forest, the trail incline getting steeper and the plant life growing denser the farther along we travel.
“If you wanted to murder me, we could’ve gone snorkeling,” I note wryly, wiping sweat from my brow. It’s late afternoon, but the Hawaiian sun still beats down like an oven broiler. “The sharks would’ve taken care of the evidence. Much cleaner, as murders go.”
“I’ll keep that in mind for next time.” He smirks.
“You’re really not going to tell me where you’re taking me?”
“Nope.”
I sigh again.
We walk for about twenty minutes. He’s still holding my hand. I repeatedly tell myself to pull away, but I can’t seem to actually do it.
“Just a little farther,” he mutters, helping me over a particularly rough part of terrain. I’m not exactly dressed for a hike — since we arrived on the island, I’ve either been in costume on set or wearing the requisite vacationer uniform: a white string bikini, a sheer lace cover-up, and cheap flip-flops.
We push on, up a final stretch of incline. I hear the telltale sound of rushing water a few moments before it comes into view, and suddenly know exactly where Grayson is leading us. Even knowing what I’m about to see doesn’t prepare me for its beauty. Rounding a bend, we step into a clearing and come up short at the sight before us.
The hidden pool is totally secluded. Mist fills the air around the base of the waterfall, a damp cloud kicked up by the steady stream of water free-falling forty feet over a cliff into the turquoise green grotto. Massive, prehistoric ferns and lush green lichens flank the sides of the clearing, growing vertical along the rocky cliffside. The shallows closest to the shore are so tranquil, you can see straight down to the bottom.
There’s something sacred about this place — something old and untouched. Neither Grayson or I speak as we step over mossy stones to an overhang of rock a few feet above the pool’s surface. I’m hesitant to fracture the silence.
He looks over at me when we reach the edge, a slow smile dawning on his face.
“Better than a nap?”
“Definitely better than a nap.”
“Come on, Firestone.” With a final squeeze, he drops my hand. Reaching for the bottom hem of his t-shirt, he whips it over his head and tosses it to the ground. “We’re going swimming.”
He doesn’t have to twist my arm. I’m warm from the hike, a faint sheen of sweat coating my limbs, and the water looks almost as heavenly as the man jumping into it.
I force myself not to watch too closely as he lets out a shout of delight and makes a running leap into the grotto. He dives in, arms extended, and emerges a moment later, grinning broadly. Shaking his head, he sends water droplets flying in all directions. The sight of his hair standing on end makes me smile.
“Get your ass in here, Kat!”
I reach down and pull my cover-up over my head, feeling his eyes on me the entire time. He’s seen me in a bikini a thousand times over the past week. This shouldn’t be a big deal. My heart shouldn’t be racing like I’m doing a private strip-tease for him. And yet, it feels different. Everything about this day feels different. The very air between us seems to buzz with unspoken words and all manner of things I’d much rather keep pushing under the rug than ever address out loud.
No good can come of these things I’ve been feeling.
Kicking off my flip flops, I race for the water. Propelling myself as high as possible from the edge of the outcropping, I curl my limbs in toward my body as I plummet toward the surface, landing close to him in a perfect cannon-ball that sends an arc of water splashing straight into his face. I surface, laughing, and immediately get dunked under again as he retaliates.
What follows can only be described as a splash fight. We swim around the pool like children, dunking and circling, sending waves into each other’s directions, play-wrestling. I catch him full across the face with a particularly good splash and he grabs me in a head lock, growling. I squirm against him, trying to get free, and his hands slip beneath the water to get a better hold on me.
I laugh in his face. He pulls me in closer.
He’s holding the small of my back; my hands are resting on his broad, bare shoulders. The water around us is so warm it feels like a massive bathtub. The sky overhead is streaked with pink as the sun begins its descent into twilight, but I can’t look at it.
His eyes and mouth are so close, they’re all I see.
Quite suddenly, nothing is funny at all. The laughter shrivels up and dies in my mouth like a flower left out in the frost. I’m staring at Grayson and he’s staring back. I see the moment our closeness registers in his eyes, see the second they drop down to laser-in on my lips, and I breathe out something that sounds like, “we can’t ,” but he’s well past the point of listening.
He kisses me — ardently, wholeheartedly.
And I kiss him back, with all the pent-up passion I’ve been harboring for the past week, since he walked me to my door like a gentleman and left me balanced on the razor’s edge of wanting. My hands slide into his hair as my legs wrap around his waist beneath the surface of the water. I pour everything I have into the kiss.
My frustration, my fear, my anger, my adoration.
Worry, desire, need, longing.
With a kiss, I speak the thousand words I’ll never, ever let myself say to him. With my hands, I whisper secrets that will never pass my lips. With my body, I unequivocally declare all the things I want from him that he can’t ever give me.
His lips work over mine with expert precision even as his hands clutch me closer. Our bodies, slippery from the water, move together like a dance — skin on skin, barely anything to separate us. And it makes no sense, this feeling that I’m about to combust, because water can’t catch fire. I know that, logically. Yet, somehow, here in his arms, I’ve never felt more flammable.
There comes a moment when we could stop — a point when, maybe, we could laugh it off as another drunken slip-up and vow to forget it ever happened.
But we aren’t drunk.
And I don’t want to stop.
He pulls back to rest his forehead against mine, breathing hard, and opens his mouth to speak — perhaps to ask me something mundane and considerate like are you sure ? Perhaps to suggest we slow down, swim to the edge of the grotto, step back into our clothes, and return to the resort before things go too far. Perhaps to tell me something I’m scared to hear, like I care about you or this means something to me .
I don’t let him get a word out. I kiss him into silence.
The moment of turning back passes like an afte
rnoon rain shower.
He moves against me and I feel the firm length of his cock through his thin bathing suit. I grind down against it, feeling my bones dissolve into pure, blissful need. I think I make a noise, maybe a moan, but his mouth is still claiming mine in a brutal kiss that I have little doubt will leave my lips bruised and swollen.
I feel his fingers leave my back and begin working at the strings of my bikini top. My legs cling tighter around his waist as he strips the wet tangle of fabric from my body and tosses it blindly in the direction of the shore. When his palms cup my breasts beneath the water, the sensation is so acute, so mind-numbingly intense, I nearly come apart in his hands. My whole body arches back, bent like a sapling in a storm. Eyes to the sky, legs at his waist, I feel his mouth trailing over my collarbones, down between the valley of my breasts, closing over my nipples.
“God, Grayson,” I whisper like a prayer — a benediction from the sinner I’ve become in his arms, praying at his altar as he worships my body into a sublime state of need.
My hands lace into his hair as my heels push at the hem of his bathing suit. He understands what I want without words.
In the space of a second, he’s rid me of my string bottoms and kicked out of his own. I force myself to focus on his eyes as I reach down between us, searching for his length. Wanting to see the way the constellations rearrange themselves inside his irises when my fingers close around him.
My hand moves over rock-hard ridges, stroking rhythmically, and satisfaction sluices through me as I watch his pupils dilate in pure desire.
“Grayson,” I whisper, my hand moving faster.
“Kat,” he echoes, sounding half tortured, half triumphant.
“Fuck me,” I beg.
He doesn’t need to be told twice.
His hands find my hips as he lifts me slightly in the water, then pulls me down hard, impaling me on his shaft. I clench around him, feeling full in the best possible way — as though my body was missing a vital piece and I didn’t even realize it. As though I was walking around without the ability to see color and didn’t even know how sad my grayscale world was until he pushed inside me and unlocked something I didn’t know existed.
I cling to him soundlessly as he fucks me beneath the waterfall, my soft cries swallowed by his kisses, my fingertips digging into his shoulders so hard I worry I’ll break the skin. He moves faster and faster, sending me reeling like a meteor across the sky, and with each powerful thrust I lose another piece of myself in him.
When I can take no more, when the orgasm crashes through my system with so much force it makes my head fall back to the sky and my legs convulse around him, I cry out loud enough to send a flock of birds bursting from their roost in a nearby tree. Dazed and half-drunk on sensation as pleasure spirals through me, I watch them disappear over the horizon, into the pink-streaked sky. I hear Grayson shout as he finds his own release, his head falling into the crook of my neck as my arms wind tighter around him and aftershocks pump through me.
The birds disappear from sight as we stand there wrapped around each other, waist-deep in the warm water, neither wanting to move just yet. And I think, more than almost anything in the world, I’d like to be one of those birds — to fly away with this man in my arms, out over the water, into infinity, where no one can catch us.
Grayson and me.
Free from real life, from obligation, from reality.
Just two wild creatures chasing wind currents under the stars, pushing each other faster, further, until we’re so far from land there’s no turning back.
If I could only build us wings.
Thirteen
“ Y ou never said we were exclusive.”
- A guy with multiple side-chicks.
W e sneak back onto hotel property like kids caught out after curfew, hands held fast in the darkness. He doesn’t try to be a gentleman this time — he pulls me straight into his villa, shuts the door firmly behind us, and backs me up against it.
“Shower?” he murmurs.
I nod, my half-hooded eyes locked on his mouth. We’re soaked to the skin. After a day of filming, a hike to the waterfall and back, plus our off-script activities in the grotto, I’m covered in salt and sand and god knows what else. In silence, he strips me naked and carries me into the massive walk-in shower.
There’s a satisfied ache between my legs, the kind you get after a thorough fucking, and it only intensifies when Grayson bends me over and takes me from behind with the water running over us from the massive shower head. Not quite a Hawaiian waterfall, but close enough.
“We’re supposed to be getting clean,” I gasp, hand thrown out to the tile wall so I don’t fall over.
“First…” His voice sounds rough with need as he pounds into me, words forced out in time with his thrusts. “I need… to make you… a little… dirtier.”
I’m too far gone to protest.
Later, when the hot water has run cold and we’re finally clean, we don the fluffy white robes hanging in the bathroom closet and order room service. We’re both starving, so we raid the mini-fridge while we’re waiting for our cheeseburgers to arrive. I lie on the bed, eating maraschino cherries from a tiny glass jar, while he mixes us both a Manhattan.
“You’re doing it wrong,” I call, smirking.
“You can’t make a Manhattan wrong,” he counters, turning to glare at me. “It’s impossible.”
“I’m a bartender. I know these things.” I roll off the bed, cross to him, and pull the bottle of whiskey from his hands. “Let me do it.”
He relents, spanking me lightly on the butt as he walks over to the fridge and pulls out a bag of trail mix. Tossing a handful in his mouth, he cocks his head at me.
“You were a bartender.”
“What?”
“You said you are a bartender. Present tense.”
“Oh. Yeah, I guess,” I murmur, eyes on the chilled glasses in front of me. I stir in the sweet vermouth, add a dash of bitters, and garnish the glasses with a cherry. It would be better with an orange peel, of course, but it’ll do. “Here you go.”
His eyes are still narrowed on my face as he takes the glass from my hand. “You know this movie is going to be a success, right?”
I sip my drink, skirt around him, and settle on the edge of the bed. “Of course.”
“Kat.”
“What?”
“Look at me,” he says softly.
When I meet his eyes and see the knowing look in their depths, I feel the sudden urge to gulp down my drink. He approaches hesitantly, crouches down between my legs, and drapes his arms over my thighs. I can’t avoid his stare — not when he’s this close. Those green irises are like a tractor beam, pulling me in.
“You’ve got to start believing things are going to be okay.” His voice is steady, unshakable. “You’ve got to let yourself enjoy this.”
“I am enjoying it.”
“Then why do you act like, at any given moment, things are a hairsbreadth from falling apart on you?”
“Because they usually do,” I say quietly. “We didn’t all land our first six-figure deal at age fourteen, Grayson. We didn’t all have the world handed to us before we’d ever known struggle. You don’t know what it’s like to worry about money, about making rent payments, about spending every day going to a job you hate in a car that’s more likely to catch fire than deliver you safely in time for your shift, just so you have enough dollars in your paycheck to keep your bank account out of the negatives.”
“That may be true. But, Kat, you must realize… those things you just said? You’ll never have to worry about them again. You’ve made it. You just have to let yourself believe it.”
I close my eyes, shutting out the view of his face. I try to focus on his words, but all I hear is Cynthia’s cold condescension, ringing in the back of my mind like an incurable cancer.
If you’d just lose ten pounds, you’d be much more likely to land some younger roles…
If you’d j
ust cut your hair in that pixie style that’s so popular right now…
If you’d just practice your pirouettes a few more hours every day…
If you’d just work harder…
Just push…
Just…
“Kat.” Grayson’s voice grounds me.
I open my eyes and look at him, trying not to tear up. “You don’t understand.”
“Then explain it to me.”
“When you’ve spent your whole life not being good enough, it takes time to let yourself believe that you finally are. Self-worth isn’t a switch that flips inside you. It’s a daily struggle not to sabotage your own success. Not to cave into the voices inside your head that whisper you’re not good enough, or you’ll fuck things up, or that someone else could do things better than you.” I can’t believe I’m saying these things out loud. I hear my voice crack precariously and I know, if I keep this up much longer, I’m going to cry. “I’m working on it. That’s all I can tell you. Every day, every moment… I’m trying to make myself believe. But it’s hard. It’s so fucking hard to replace insecurity and inferiority with confidence and composure.”
“Kat.” His voice is as warm as his hands when he removes the drink from my grip, sets it on the bedside table, and pulls me up into his arms. Lacing our fingers together, he looks down into my eyes. “You think you’re the only one who feels that way? I’ve made a lot of movies in the past few years. I’ve got more money than I know what to do with. I live a life that is, by any standards, full of privilege. And I still feel those things you’re talking about. In the past, you’ve called me cocky and condescending… Maybe I am, but I still feel doubt and worry. We all do. It’s human to second-guess yourself. That doesn’t go away just because you win a film award or make your first million.” His hands squeeze mine tighter. “You’re amazing. Everyone sees it — Wyatt saw it, when he spotted you at that audition. Sloan saw it, that day you came to his house and read lines. Harper saw it, long before you’d ever made it . And I see it. I’ve seen it since you were nine years old. I still see it.” He leans closer. “The only one who can’t seem to see it is you.”
The Monday Girl (The Girl Duet #1) Page 21
