Jay drew in a shaky breath. “You said you trust me.”
She was afraid to ask. Afraid not to. Instead, she nodded.
He reached behind him and released the chair settings flat. His head and body reclined. He captured her hands and urged her to stand, walk forward. Her thoughts snapped to a photograph, undesired. She glanced around. In darkness, at the right angle, what they had done while sitting could have been anything—an embrace, Jay removing a lash from her eye—but this, this there would be no mistaking.
As if he had read her mind, he said, “The door at the base of the steps is bolted from the inside and the only way this room is visible is via a boat in the bay with a long, long telescoping lens and night vision. Any vessel would require light to navigate. See for yourself, no lights.”
He was infinitely patient, waited for her to scan their surroundings, decide the rocky cliffs on all sides of the decking at their feet would be a slippery death to anyone who dared invade their privacy. He had paid an obscene premium to ensure that privacy. If she was honest, she was far more worried about a breach inside, in her heart, than one from an armada of tabloid reporters in the inlet. She walked her feet up the deck boards until she stood broadly, comfortably at the head of the chair, and slipped out of her panties. Her skirts eclipsed him.
She gathered them at her waist.
He sprinkled adoring, husky words on the wind—gorgeous, fragrant, enticing. Perfect.
The moment he planted kisses along her inner thighs, she believed him. All concern evaporated.
She couldn’t say the same for her moisture. Trapped as it had been beneath her dress, in the heat between her legs, against his clothes, it cooled in a night gale. She wanted to use her hands to splay the hand-laid stone wall before her, to thread his hair, to inquire after his impressive swell. Increasingly, as he used his tongue to swirl a luxurious path from her knees to her damp curls, she grew frustrated at holding her dress like a tutu. She crossed her arms at the waist and lifted the material over her head, leaving the plane of her body in absolute nakedness. Her creation she tossed aside.
A rash of chill bumps consumed her body. No match for the slant of his mouth against her opening—one hot flick of his tongue that found her totally unprepared. Her knees buckled as the force of arousal crested through her. A cry of pleasure lifted from her throat. She reached for two nearby lengths of gossamer curtain, roofline to deck at what was surely the final pane of glass that had been recessed into the cliffside, and steadied herself inside the electrical currents his mouth continued to elicit—slow at first then rhythmed, resourceful, relentless.
She bit her lip to stifle subsequent moans.
“I was right. You taste like edible petals dipped in sugar crystals.”
Freesia flushed, pleased. She didn’t doubt he’d consumed that country-club delicacy. The compliment emboldened her. “Gave it thought, did you?”
“Every minute since the greenhouse.”
She remembered the cupola, the dappled colors, the seedlings planted for her. So much had happened since, at the end of a life when hours had to count for more and time crawled, at the beginning of her creativity she thought she’d lost. Coyly, she asked, “All the way back then?”
By way of answer, his tongue delved into her. He could not have uttered a more supreme note of satisfaction. The swiftness of his pendulum from honesty to wickedness was made all the more insistent by a reaching of his hands—one to turn and ply and pinch her taut right nipple, the other to her innermost flesh to apply friction and pressure in tandem with his tongue.
She fisted the curtain, wrapped it taut, used its leverage to hold steady against the onslaught of unrelenting pleasure. Her breath came hard. The pleasure-pain wrapped her, consumed her until she was sure she would scream from the exquisite torment unless she found a way to share the agony.
Releasing her hold on the fabric, she gathered herself: deluged, shivering, kneeling beside the chair. She lowered the armrest—unfettered access to his body. From the moment he’d sat beside her in Elias’s truck and she’d sized up his proportions, the way his clothes had skimmed his lines, she knew what lay beneath his expensive threads would be pale perfection. The time had come to take a most enticing journey of discovery—perhaps the most satisfying trip of her life.
Freesia stripped him of his shoes, his belt, his shirt and cuff links—everything she could think to prolong his most coveted, most swollen expanse—all while trailing his musky, exposed skin with soft kisses. Questions and expectations and the greater aches of life would return, but here, now, there was only venerating demands and a yet-to-be quenched exchange of desires. With each article of clothing gone, folded, placed neatly on the side table between the lounge chairs, Jay relaxed deeper into the chair’s padding and looked for subversive ways to reach out and pleasure her before she playfully knocked his hand away.
“They don’t teach you to take turns in finishing school?” she asked.
“Fine art and self-control were not on the same curriculum.”
They shared a smile before she divested him of the remainder of his clothes. Slow, leisurely strokes brought him to full length in the moonlight. Fresh waves of desire to please him, to make him forget, to reciprocate the healing he had brought her, swept through her body. The sight of him nude, pleasured, his chest rising and falling with labored breaths, raced her pulse. She pulled him past her lips, tightening and gliding his shaft between her tongue and the roof of her mouth. His attempts to reach and reciprocate were welcomed as playfully as before.
His breath came hard. He neared his breaking point, begged her through his satisfied pleas to slow, to allow him a minute, to give him the chance to pull fresh oxygen and vow not to repeat the mistakes of the shooting range. With the slightest chuckle and a slight stumble, he found his legs beneath him and carried her inside, to the decadent layers of white bedding.
Away from the constant curl of ocean waves in her ears, his and her breath, both racing, became more defined, more acute. Apart from the relentless moon, shadows sculpted Jay’s physique, more measured and perfect than any man’s dress form. He walked to a nearby bag, shoulders proud, unapologetic in his confidence. From a side pocket, he pulled out an accordion of square foil packets.
He respected her enough to not tempt the same mistake she had been for her mother and Elias. For that, she quite possibly fell. Beyond lust, into love.
She was grateful for the wicking glow from the hurricane lamps. If she ugly cried because he was the first man to cherish her, to make her feel worthy, to know her history and respect its limitations, she didn’t want him to see it.
Jay coaxed her back to whimpered pants, revisiting the body’s haunts that had delighted them both. By equal turns, they were gentle and insistent, inquisitive and gracious, spirited and focused, nothing between them but what was real, honest.
And when she ignored her conviction that this would never happen again between them, ignored that an encounter with a man such as Jay—classy, open, damaged—had the capacity to sway her into a frightening place of mutual healing, ignored her belief that he, too, would leave her, Freesia allowed the greatest release of herself.
In the darkness, afterward, his exhales even and soft against her neck, her body sated, her spirit more joyful than any time she could remember, she tallied her lies.
She was becoming Camille.
Tears squeezed her throat. This time, she let them fall.
Freesia awoke to an empty bed and a note: Went to find us breakfast. J.
She tumbled inside the covers, cocooning deeper until his scent captured in the sheets brought the night’s encounters racing back and tempted her into alertness. At this fairytale elevation, the moon had been powerful. The sun was equally blinding. After a bathroom visit, where she brushed her teeth and washed her face of the dryness of shed tears, she wrapped herself in a robe and descended the stairs.
Poolside, Jay had his laptop open on a video call. A familiar female vo
ice sounded in paradise.
Kitty Scott.
“I don’t like choking down photographs like these over breakfast.”
“Don’t be so dramatic, Mother. You’ll give yourself a migraine.”
“Your brother would have been more discreet.”
“My brother would have screwed half the island.”
“I don’t understand you, of late. First Peyton, now this.”
“I’ve done everything asked of me.”
Freesia stopped short. She wasn’t one to interrupt—or eavesdrop—but there were at least forty steps back upstairs and the infinity pool looked amazing. Not that she would get anywhere close. She searched for a place to go so that Jay could see her but she could still offer him privacy.
“Is this because of how she looks?” Jay asked.
His words froze her intent. She. She was respectful until the topic treaded dangerously close to unacceptable. She waited behind an enormous column, slowed her breathing.
“It’s the situation, Jameson. You know as well as I that we don’t have the luxury of trusting people, willy-nilly. We know next to nothing about her except that she’s traipsed all over the world doing God knows what to support herself, has no assets and nothing in her bank account, has no father listed on her birth certificate—he might be an imprisoned felon for all we know—and that she sews women’s clothes.”
“You had her investigated?”
Jay’s blade-edge tone was everything Freesia felt inside. Cut. Scored. Fileted. She braced herself against the column, tried to remember how to draw air.
“Your father has all his business contacts checked out,” said Kitty. “Quite routine.”
“She isn’t a business contact.”
“Then what, exactly, is she?”
Jay hesitated. He was at a loss, same as Freesia.
“She’s a friend.”
“A friend who sees your assets as a lottery win, no doubt.” Kitty emphasized friend as if she already had closed-circuit television evidence that Jay was lying.
Freesia felt sick.
Jay’s voice emerged, brisk, blunt. “You’re out of line, Mother.”
“That’s quite a reaction for someone who’s a mere…dalliance. Get her out of your system before your return.”
A sharp snap. A severed conversation. No doubt, he’d slammed his laptop shut.
Freesia scraped herself from the pillar, discovered that she could straighten with some effort. She located her diaphragm, used it for a fortifying breath. Shoulders back, chin even with the stone floor. Stoic.
Out in the open.
The storm’s eye, seen.
Jay glanced up, made eye contact. His eyelids drifted closed, pained. He exhaled an enormous breath. “How much did you hear?”
“Enough.”
“I’m sorry. She was…” He stood. His eyes darted around the patio, a clear attempt to pin down a choice word, finally deciding on one: “Wretched.”
Freesia took a few steps forward, couldn’t go anymore. “She was right. Well, everything but the lottery part. I see your assets as a sexy-win.”
For once, he didn’t laugh. “That’s not funny.”
“All I got.” Freesia splayed her hands in mock surrender. “She’s your mother. It’s her job to protect you. Least you got one who cares what happens to you.”
“I’ll stand up to my family when it comes to you.” Jay slung his hands low on his hips.
A regular superhero. She had no doubt he meant it. She also had no doubt that what had happened between them was a mistake. He operated on love; she thrived in love’s absence.
“The same way you stood up to them about living your life?” said Freesia. “Let me know how that works out for you.”
“Freesia, I—”
“Take me home,” she said, her voice even, resigned, with a strength she didn’t feel.
Jay swallowed, hard. Eventually, he came around to nodding, surrendering.
Family was a formidable barrier to love. It had been so for Elias, who had a wife and two young girls waiting for him at home. It had been so for Alex, who had yet to see past the ideal family she thought she had to define a new, imperfect kind of family. Charlotte had armored herself with family so that love would not destroy what she had built. Kitty valued family over love, and Camille had always sought love elsewhere to the detriment of Freesia, her only family.
Time and again, family had proven itself an overly complex, overly selfish, overly burdensome institution. Freesia preferred choice. The decision to love without ties to history and expectations was the greater freedom.
21
Stella Irene
Millie,
Try as I might, I cannot seem to post these letters. I fear that if you read these words, my world will crash down and all I have known since you and me and Elias will come true. Elias is an honorable man, but the pull of the sun and the earth is powerful.
With each child, first Alexandra then Charlotte, I believed the bonds of our marriage would grow stronger, impervious to your memory. At times, everything seemed to fall into place. But I kept you alive between us, maybe more than Elias. I failed, Stellie. In all ways a woman can fail. I traded my love for you and received a love in return that came from only part of a man.
You are the sigh between us when words go unspoken, the wind through the magnolias on nights Elias won’t come in from the garage, the smooth whiskey at the bottom of his glass. Sometimes, it’s all I can do to step away from your ghost, to stop chasing things that never were, to feel as if I am someone’s gravitational pull. I have been tempted.
He loves me, but he loves you, too. Not even another pregnancy will change that. I am due come the fall. Maybe things will be different then.
I hope things are well for you. Your aunt in Savannah gave me the address of your friend up the beach. I hide it in a place Elias will never look. What would he do if he found you? What would I do? Love can so easily unravel a life.
I want to find a time to get away, to visit and see if things could be as they once were between us, but that cannot be so long as Elias is alive, between us.
Your friend,
Stellie
22
Charlotte
Charlotte trudged into the barn and collapsed on a trailer blanketed in hay.
Nash stopped his night mucking, propped his gloved hands across the top of the rake handle.
“Stick a fork in me. I’m done.” She thought better, amended her statement in light of present sexy company. “Better yet, if you told me you emptied the dishwasher and take a shower—you can have your way with more than a fork.”
“Used to be that you’d take me without a shower,” he joked.
“Yeah, well, I used to wear cork-wedge heels to make my butt stick out more too, but then I got all the brain cells working together for the common good.”
Nash’s laugh was low, throaty. Made her sit up and reconsider her shower clause.
“Not even half a rum cake could get Earl to confess he had an affair with Mama. Boy, how that man can eat, though.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Nash. “About not getting a confession. Men want to be able to take things to the grave. Besides, I can’t see your Audrey Hepburn mother going for a man who picks his teeth with a Swiss army knife and names his bowel movements.”
Charlotte made a face. “He does that?”
“Brings them up for discussion at the barber shop.”
“Why haven’t you told me this before?”
Nash shrugged. “Not sure when Earl’s dumps would’ve come up in discussion.”
“Ew. No, the part about men taking secrets to the grave.”
He hesitated, tipped the rake against a stall, then came to sit beside her. “Look at your dad. Took one of the biggest secrets of all.”
Nash smelled like outside air and hard work. She hugged his arm and tipped her head against his shoulder.
“What will your secret be?”
“That I never loved another woman the way I love you.”
She gave him a nudge. “Hardly a secret if you say it all the time.”
Nash worked his callused hands together, whittling away at specs of dirt like he did when he was working up something to say that might upset her. Given the topic of secrets, her heartbeat slipped out of rhythm. Charlotte hugged his arm closer.
“Earl the last one on your list?”
“Every time we get a lead, another name pops up.”
“You know how small towns are. Ninety-nine percent speculation. One percent truth.” His voice might have been jaded. It wasn’t. For Nash, gossip was part and parcel of small-town life. A small price to pay for the privilege of receiving the shirt off a neighbor’s back in hard times.
“It’s the one percent that scares me.”
The warmth of the barn, the familiar way Nash draped his hand along her inner thigh to keep her close, his tired, silky voice and the way his exhales rearranged the hair at her part conspired her close to sleep. Her eyes drifted closed.
“Ever think about what you’ll do if you find a man who’ll own up to an affair with Stella Irene?” said Nash.
“What do you mean?”
“You find the guy. What then? Doesn’t change what happened, but it will change your relationship with your Mama. Imprint over good memories with details of what he looked like, questions on the logistics, a black hole of whys that can never be fully answered. Sounds like a punishment you give yourself by snooping.”
She had never thought of it that way. Still, she clung to Alex’s argument: the only way out of hurt was through it.
“It’ll be the truth.”
Nash shook his head. “Truth is overrated. Seems to me the goal here should be peace. Her peace. Yours.”
There it was—all that working up to something that might upset her. He wanted her to stop investigating, he just didn’t want to come out and say it. Not again. On so many other recent issues—really listening, making the choice to turn toward each other instead of outside the relationship when things got rough, acknowledging things the other valued—they had moved forward. About this—unlocking the past—they were a wind turbine on perpetual spin.
The Family Wish (Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book 3) Page 16
