Only rejection.
We lay on the bed, and she pressed her head against my chest. “Tell me something sad.”
I exhaled while she ran her hand up and down my shirt as if I wasn’t already struggling to keep my self-control in check. We were different. One conversation, and we were different, and I was done letting things stand in the way of us.
The way we were always supposed to be before life rose up against us.
“I hate Disney Channel.”
She laughed. “How can you hate Disney Channel?”
I shrugged. “When you’re a little boy with no parents, or at least parents who don’t want you, and you’re put in front of Disney Channel as a way of babysitting, you learn to hate it. You hate the love you see between the families. You hate the perfection. You resent the lives you see played out in front of you. It’s like this huge tease. ‘This is what everyone else has, Marlo, but you’ll never have it. Nobody will ever love you enough to give it to you.’”
She sucked in a harsh breath and then leaned up on her elbow, her eyes searching mine. “You don’t still think that, do you?”
I smiled sadly. “Not usually, but sometimes my six-year-old self reminds me of my roots, and I default to a complete asshole who shuts out the world out of fear, fear that one day I’m going to be happy, then someone’s going to pull the rug out from underneath me.”
“You deserve to be happy. You’re good. Plus, you’re only an asshole ninety percent of the time.”
“I pour my heart out to you, and you still call me an asshole?” I asked, smiling hard enough to crack my own face.
She reached for my shirt and tugged it up over my head.
I let her. Because it was a game, wasn’t it? And in the morning, all of our clothes would be back on, our secrets locked back down.
I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them just in time to see her pull off her own shirt. We’d already dealt with socks, shoes, hats… All we had left were our jeans and shirts. She’d already unhooked her bra and dropped it in my lap an hour ago.
And like an idiot, I’d stared at it a bit too long, earning a shove from her as if I was back in high school seeing my first Victoria Secret tag.
“I’m just preparing to answer my next question.” And she was topless. No bra, no shirt, just topless with her platinum hair hanging over her tan shoulders, and she was staring at me.
And I was…
What the hell am I doing? Going into a fucking coma?
I licked my lips and reached for her, gripping her hips between my palms as I asked the next question. “No backing out.”
“‘Kay.” Her voice wavered.
“Will you dance with me?”
Her eyes widened. “You want me to dance? Naked?”
“Right. Don’t freak out… but I want you to dance naked.”
“In front of the chicken?”
I frowned. “It’s not like we fed him KFC. He’ll be fine. Besides, the moonlight looks perfect on you, and I think… I think you may just surprise yourself.”
“And if I don’t?”
“How about you just trust me?”
“Easier said than done.”
I sighed. “I believe in you.”
She gasped as if nobody had ever said those words to her.
And I hated…
I raged…
At anyone and everyone in her life that had been put on this damn earth to love her — and hadn’t.
And I hated myself the most.
Because I’d selfishly thrown that love back in her face to protect myself. That was what monsters did.
Not men.
“Please?” I stood and held out my hand.
She gave me a small nod, one that could have been mistaken for a flinch, and I was off my bed, turning on the first music I could find.
Black Sea.
She twirled in front of me, the cadence a lot of stop go, stop go, which made the song extremely hard to dance to, but if anyone could do it…
She could.
She put her hands over her head and then twirled into my arms, eyes closed, and then she was dipping forward, and I was going with her on the journey of whatever story she wanted to tell me.
She rose onto her tiptoes as I turned her on one foot, grabbing her leg and snaking it backward around me.
She jerked away and turned.
I nearly bit off my tongue when she did a body roll and jumped in the air, just trusting me to catch her, and then she slid down my body, moving her hips against mine in a way that set every part of me on fire, my blood roaring. Moving perfectly with the beat, she bent completely backward, her hands following her as she arched at the most elegant angle and then thrust forward, throwing herself against me.
I repeated the movement, and when she came toward me again, I twisted her in my arms and flipped her over my back in the air, letting her slide behind me. Her palms ran down my face as she used her hands to move my head around with the music, and then she splayed them across my chest.
I gripped her by the wrists, the music completely forgotten as we played off one another. I pulled her to her feet and pushed her boundaries, asked for complete surrender from her body, fucking demanded she dance her truth for me, for us.
Tears streamed down her face, and it felt like more than dancing, as if we were living our love, our hate, and everything in between as we pushed at one another then pulled, only to dance as one and repeat the process.
She turned again. I tugged her against my chest and locked my arms around her waist as we swayed in sync, eyes penetrating, breathing labored.
“I figured it out,” she whispered.
“What did you figure out?” I smiled down at her excited expression, expecting her to say something about finding herself through dancing, through letting go.
“I couldn’t let go…” She was up on her tiptoes, gripping my face as if she had something important to say. “…because I was always meant to dance with you.”
Her mouth opened to say something else.
I devoured her next word with my tongue and swore I would never look back. She wrapped her arms around my neck as I lifted her off the ground and carried her over to the bed.
She fisted the front of my jeans with her hand while I pressed into her, my erection straining against her. She trembled and arched toward me for more.
I kissed down her tear-stained cheeks.
It had never been infatuation with her.
Never.
It had been a lot of things.
Hate. Love.
Love will always win out, won’t it? Despite the hate I had thrown her way… love had always won.
I stopped kissing her tan skin. The smell of sunscreen brought on a smile. She was a Ray of sunshine and didn’t even know it.
“No revenge,” I murmured tenderly.
Her smile was dazzling as she looked up at me. “No revenge.”
I leaned over and kissed her forehead then reached for her jeans and unbuttoned them slowly, savoring every movement as if it was my last. I unzipped and tugged.
She wiggled out of them, and I tossed them to the floor and braced my hands on either side of her hips. And then I hooked my fingers into her lacy underwear and slid them down her thighs, fascinated with the violet color of them against her skin, obsessed with the way her hips lifted like she was giving me permission to love her.
The ethereal look of her hair spread across my pillow, on my bed, was something I knew I would never forget, the way she reached for me once she was naked, as if she couldn’t wait one more minute to touch me again, to kiss me.
Our mouths fused. She tasted like my sunshine, like light. She tasted like she was finally free. My head swam with possibilities while my heart pounded against my chest.
Finally.
Fucking… finally.
I pinned her hands above her head and pressed a teasing kiss on her neck — one, two kisses, three, four. My tongue met the sweetest skin, and I inhaled deeply, w
anting it to last forever.
“My turn.” She hooked her feet around me. I let her press me onto my back as she took over. I was one-part insecurity and helplessness and one-part completely turned on that she was taking the lead, that the spoiled princess who I’d wanted to both kiss and make cry, was straddling me as if I was hers.
Dear God, please let me have her forever.
“You’re smiling?” I cupped her breasts because I could and because the view from flat on my back was the best I’d ever seen. Mouthwatering, forbidden, shameless.
“Well…” She rocked her hips against me, against my straining cock and jeans. The friction was almost painful. “…I was thinking…” She was officially Wonder Woman in another life as my jeans all but disappeared along with my briefs, leaving me vulnerable and naked in front of the only woman capable of breaking me.
She could ridicule.
She could run away.
She could tell me this was all in my head.
She had the power to reach inside and laugh the foster kid out of the room.
I didn’t realize how much my insecurity was still there until I let out a relieved breath as she crawled back up the bed and lay against me, skin on skin, and pressed her cheek against my chest.
I played with her hair. “So, now we’re sleeping?”
She yawned.
I pinched her ass.
Dying.
I was dying.
“I just wanted to feel you, Marlo.”
“You are feeling me.”
“I wanted to hear your heart too.”
“Why?”
“So, I could remember the way it raced when I told you… I love you.”
I exhaled a shaky breath.
“There it is.” She sighed happily. “So…” She gazed up at me with a drugged look on her face, her eyes shining with unshed tears, with happiness I’d like to think I had put there. “…that’s what love sounds like?”
I nodded, afraid to trust my voice, then pulled her down so I could kiss her and whispered against her lips. “Now let me show you what it feels like.”
HE WAS HARD heat.
He was perfect.
He was staring up at me as if I was the most important part of his life, as if he wasn’t sure he could take another breath without doing it in sync with me, and I wanted more.
I was drugged by each kiss.
Needy for more of his touch.
I pressed my palms against his chest and slid them down, letting them slowly graze each part of an eight-pack I would most definitely dream about later.
We linked fingers, and then he shifted beneath me and lifted me into the air. I wrapped my legs around his hips and sank down onto him, slowly, inch by inch, feeling each pulse from his body, clenching each one between my thighs as he filled me not quite to the hilt, never once taking his mouth from mine. His tongue slid against my lips while I clung to him for dear life, while he moved in and out creating the most aching tension between our bodies. A thrill shot through me when he pulled away his eyes and locked on mine as we moved together.
He kissed down my breasts. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t focus on sucking air between my lips as he found new places to kiss, new places to explore that made my body shudder with the need for a release so intense I wasn’t sure I would survive it. My breath hitched when he groaned, his head between my breasts, his body trembling as if he was trying to hold back, when all I wanted him to do was let go.
He hissed when I pulled him deeper, farther inside me, when I took him all the way and held him there, when our bodies pulsed on the brink of free-falling from a cliff. I squeezed my pelvic muscles, clenching around him.
An explosive sigh blasted from his lips, and a sense of power rocketed through me.
“So fucking greedy for more of you, all of you, now.” His lips moved against my skin. “I want this moment forever.”
“Me too.” I tugged his hair and leaned down to press a kiss to his mouth.
He surged forward then. I gasped against his lips as he thrust faster, so deep I couldn’t stop the moans coming from my mouth, the desperate gasps.
“Marlo, I’m so close I can’t—”
“You will,” he said with authority. “You’re beautiful when you let go, so let go.”
“But—”
He kissed away the next words I had.
I was consumed by the feel of him inside me, by the feel of us together. The rightness of it all.
He tore down my walls, peeled back my defenses.
“Marlo…” I couldn’t hold on any longer. “…I’m yours…”
Shock waves of pleasure exploded between us as I let go. Skin sliding against skin, I absorbed every hard inch of him as I felt his release, his taut muscles, the way his chest heaved against mine.
“You think,” he asked, out of breath, “we could just… stay like this for a few years?”
“Wouldn’t be weird.” I laughed as he kissed me again. “Totally normal for campers to see their director naked with the choreographer, just wrapped around each other like really horny pretzels.”
He laughed against my mouth then indulged in more kissing.
I wanted him again, and again, as many times as he would let me, as many hours as were in the night.
“You’re not sleeping tonight.” He said it like a threat.
The best kind. So, I smiled and replied, “Neither are you.”
“HELL, YOU TWO look rough.” Brax stood next to the coffee bar and eyed us both up and down — well, inspected was more like it. “If that’s what titillating conversation looks like, I want some.”
I narrowed my eyes and gave him the finger. “Shouldn’t say titillating if you can’t even spell it, dumbass.”
Ray swayed a bit on her feet. And then stumbled toward the breakfast table, walking a bit gingerly the entire way.
Brax’s eyebrows shot up to his hairline as he watched her carefully sit, and then he eyed me with such wide eyes I thought they were going to pop out of his head. He slapped me on the chest. “It was the politics talk, am I right? She got all horny when you said, ‘I’ll be your Mr. President,’ then pulled your dick out?”
I gave him a sidelong stare. “And it’s suddenly so apparent why you don’t have a girlfriend and are going to die alone.”
He smirked and handed me a cup of coffee then made another. “Well, clearly you know you did it right if she’s walking funny.”
I grabbed him by the back of the shirt. “Notice her walk again, and I’m going to run you over with the camp truck. Got it?”
He spread his arms wide and chuckled. “Uh-huh, must have been a titillating night.”
“You need a new word.”
“I find this one very tit—”
“Seriously, Brax, I’m not against punching you, and I got less than one hour of sleep last night. Try me.”
“Oh, boo-hoo, go complain to someone who isn’t having all the sex. Oh wait…” He rolled his eyes. “I’ll just go hang out with my right hand.”
“You’re left-handed.”
“Stop noticing weird shit.” He shook his head. “I’ll use my right if I damn well please.”
I laughed and shook my head and started making a coffee for Ray. “Do me a favor? Go grab cook’s meal plan for today so you can write it on the board.”
“Is this my punishment?”
“No, it’s your job,” I said slowly. “But if it feels like punishment, then we all win, don’t we?”
“I see how it is. You have a naked girl screaming in your arms, and you’re still an asshole. Good to know!”
I saluted him with my middle finger then picked up Ray’s coffee and took it over to her.
“Yes-s-s.” She lifted it to her lips then blew across it.
I cleared my throat just as Jackson sat down. Dark circles rimmed his eyes. Jen sat next to him, though not close. “If I steal your coffee, can we still be friends?”
He directed the question at Ray. I opened my
mouth to tell him to get his own coffee when Ray handed her cup over to him then dropped her hands into her lap.
“Really, Jackson? You can’t get your own cof— Fuck!” My hips jerked against her hand as she palmed me over my jeans, my tight jeans.
My very tight jeans.
Jackson shot me an odd look, his features twisted in confusion. “Coffuck? What the hell is that? Is it some new kinky shit where you bring coffee in on everything and then, I don’t know… like throw it between your bodies while you slide your hand in their—”
“Yes.” I swore under my breath. “I mean, no.” Air. Get air. Focus. “Can we not talk about this right now?” I braced my hands against the table while a perfectly innocent Ray sat next to me.
I was going to murder her later.
After more sex.
And after I got her naked.
And had my mouth between her thighs.
Twice.
Twice sounded good, because, damn, I loved her taste.
Jackson narrowed his eyes at me, and then a stupid grin crossed his lips. “You guys put your differences behind you or something?”
“Nah…” Giving an exaggerated wink, Ray was the first to answer. “…I still hate him.”
And my smile was back. Yeah, she hated me all right, all night long, at least five times, and each time had been better than the last.
“Must be nice to be hated,” Jen piped up.
Jackson let out a sigh and stared down at his hands as if he didn’t know what to say, and the entire table went from comical and witty to tense and awkward.
“Oh, Camp Director?” Brax made his way back over to us. “Got the menus, and rumor has it a few campers stole some fireworks last night. Should you take care of this, or should I?”
Ray jerked her hand away.
And I suddenly wanted to kill every single camper I saw.
I adjusted myself as best I good, jumped to my feet and stomped after him, making my way past the kitchen and out of the mess hall.
Summer Seduction Page 10
