by Toby Neal
I bang the door shut with my heel.
“You think I care? I hope you aren’t too attached to this.” I grab the front of her prim blouse, tug it out of her pants, and rip it open. Buttons fly in all directions to the music of ripping cloth. She gives a cry of surprise—and arousal. Her small, perfect breasts bounce into my hands in their demure white lace cups. Their nipples are peach promises just begging for my mouth. Her eyes meet mine in a fierce blaze of hungry green.
I make them mine, sucking and biting through the fabric, but I hardly have time to really get to know them before she grabs my designer silk shirt in both hands and tears it off too, a dramatic rending that makes me laugh.
“I’ve dreamed about this chest.” She puts her mouth on my nipple, a feeling both electric and hot.
I groan and my erection pulses. “I need to be in you. Please.”
“And I need you in me.” She grabs my belt buckle, and I hers, and we strip each other, falling onto the humble air mattress on the floor together.
I barely get the condom on and then I’m driving deep into her. She bucks beneath me with a cry, coming apart almost instantly as I sink fully into her. My hands dug into her hips, her shoulders, trying to bring her even closer as I wait out her climax, relishing the feeling of the waves of her clenching around me, her flushed face beautiful before me. Her cries are music, and everywhere smells of vanilla and sex...
Finally, Jade calms, and opens her eyes to gaze into mine.
She tips her hips up and wraps her legs tighter. “More.”
The feeling that I have, as I give her that more, as I find a rhythm, is of coming home.
Jade
He’s going so fast and so hard now that I’m hanging on for dear life: my hands are clenched in the chiseled muscles of Brandon’s buttocks, and he’s pistoning into me. The air mattress slides with each thrust across the floor and fetches up against the wall, something I might have found funny another day—and still he’s not done, his eyes fierce on mine, his hands everywhere, his possession total.
I couldn’t love this more: his intensity, the leashed violence of it, the pounding pressure, as if to break me open—but instead it just winds me tighter, takes me higher.
I feel another gathering, a tightening coil low in my belly, the storm of passion building, building, building… about to shatter both of us. It crests inside me, a dizzying fullness, a depth of exquisite, intense sensation, and it pushes me across an invisible threshold.
I ride the edge for just a few seconds more so I can see him climax. His eyes close as his back arches high over me and his face darkens as a hoarse sound is wrenched from his throat—and then I let go.
The hot spiral of feeling explodes through me, cascading lights blinding me as ecstasy ripples through my body, and I match his cry with my own.
Brandon collapses over me, crushing me close. I’ve never felt anything as good as his heavy, muscular body squashing me deep into the air mattress. I sigh, and settle my face into the curve between his neck and shoulder. I stroke the supple, firm muscles of his back.
“We need a real bed next time,” he says into my neck.
“Yeah. You moved this thing halfway across the room.”
Brandon turns his head to see where we’ve fetched up. He grins as he lifts himself onto an elbow and strokes my face. “I wasn’t too rough?”
“I loved every minute of it. Let’s do it again.”
He kisses me. “I love you.” He looks down at me, the question plain in his honey-colored eyes.
“I love you, too.” I reach up and pull Brandon’s head down to mine, kissing him with all the passion that he alone ignites in me—and always will.
Epilogue
Jade
“Has it really been two years since we got married?” I ask Brandon as he pulls the Beemer up to the curb in front of a strip mall in Santa Monica. The sun is setting, and as we get out of the car, I feel a breeze, cool and kelpy with the unique smell of the California ocean, swirl my dress around my legs. “This seems like a goofy spot for our anniversary dinner.”
Brandon grins. “I think you’re going to like this.” I laugh at the phrase we found a way to say a lot that first year we were together, and then the following year after we got married, and even more as time has gone on. He walks around the shiny silver car. “Do you trust me?”
“You know I do.” I learned my lesson after that bumpy start—no one could love me more than he does.
“Good.” He ties a kerchief over my eyes and takes my hand. “Right this way.”
I cling to Brandon’s arm as he leads me up the sidewalk to some sort of door. I hear him fumbling around with a key, a muttered curse—then he gets it open. “Wait here just a second.”
I stand in the doorway, blindfolded, feeling vulnerable. I wrap my arms around myself as I feel another draft of air, this time from within—and it smells a little musty. Not like a restaurant. I hear some sounds from inside, a clunk. Crinkling.
We’ve been looking for a house to buy since we’ve been talking about starting a family now that I’m moving out of music videos into helping him with Forbes Talent. Surely this isn’t our house? I didn’t even see a scrap of yard anywhere nearby. My hands go damp. I wish I could wash them, and it makes me realize how much better I am. I hardly ever have that obsession any more.
“Okay.” Brandon sweeps me up into his arms, making me gasp and giggle as he steps over the threshold. “You can take the blindfold off.”
I lift the kerchief up off my eyes and look around from the haven of his arms. The lights are on in a carpeted waiting area, directly in front of the entrance we just came into. The waiting area is separated by a low seating ledge from a shining wooden floor that ends at a mirrored wall fronted with a barre.
Hanging from the barre is a long silver banner proclaiming, HAPPY ANNIVERSARY. A huge bouquet of peach-colored roses rests on the floor beneath the banner beside a bottle of champagne and two flutes.
“It’s a dance studio,” I say.
“Your dance studio,” Brandon says. “Happy anniversary, honey.”
I slide down out of his arms. “I can’t believe this.”
My lips feel numb. He’s done some wonderful, amazing things in the time we’ve been together, but this… my own studio, to dance, to teach, to share with others.
“You like it?” Brandon’s getting nervous at my lack of response.
I can’t express my feelings in words. Instead, I take his hand and lead him out onto the floor, placing his hand at my waist, mine on his shoulder. “I love you so much.” We’ve been taking ballroom lessons together, and his waltz is already at least as good as mine. “Let’s dance.”
And as we move around the shining floor in perfect sync, I glance over at the vase of roses through a blur of tears. There will be thirteen of them.
I’m the lucky one, now.
Acknowledgments
May 2016
Dear Readers,
I’m so happy you danced along with me for Jade’s story! I danced in my younger years, and have been a huge fan of the So You Think You Can Dance reality show. Every interest I have eventually finds itself into my writing, so I enjoyed revisiting the intense drama of the best competitive dancing to hit TV, and inventing a show. By making this story a “retro” romance, I could include some of the artists and songs that defined the late 1980s and early 1990s, and to remember things like Walkmans and pagers and how easy it was for misunderstandings to happen in the age before cell phones.
The world has changed a lot since then, but finding love, in all its beautiful complexity, has not. As I was coming to the end of this book, I realized how much I care about these sisters and of the loving family they are building, and I wanted to write more—but how? I’d used up the family whose stories I wanted to tell!
Suddenly I realized that little Peter would be around twenty-eight in current times—and Pearl and Magnus’s little one would be grown too! So we’ll be fast-forwarding to the future, and
you’ll be meeting the next generation at a vineyard in a story called Somewhere in Napa. The Michaels family will go on! I hope you’ll join me for their next adventure.
Much aloha from Maui, Toby Neal
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About the Author
Kirkus Reviews calls Neal's writing, "persistently riveting. Masterly."
Award-winning, USA Today bestselling social worker turned author Toby Neal grew up on the island of Kaua`i in Hawaii. Neal is a mental health therapist, a career that has informed the depth and complexity of the characters in her stories. Neal's police procedurals, starring multicultural detective Lei Texeira, explore the crimes and issues of Hawaii from the bottom of the ocean to the top of volcanoes, and are so popular that they've spawned a licensed fan fiction world on Amazon. Fans call her stories, "Immersive, addicting, and the next best thing to being there."
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