“Live a little.”
She rolled her eyes but took the helmet and jammed it on her head. He helped her adjust the straps before pulling on his. Her blue eyes blazed behind the visor with what he hoped was excitement. More likely, she was planning to disembowel him if he didn’t behave himself.
He wheeled the bike out of his garage and straddled it. The engine roared to life and he caught sight of Vee in his mirror, fisting her hands on the lapels of his old leather jacket.
She walked slowly toward him and placed one hand delicately on his shoulder as she swung her leg over the bike and sat. The hand disappeared from his shoulder and her weight shifted slightly backward as she gripped the grab handles instead of holding onto him.
“You have been on the back of a motorbike before?” he asked.
“Once or twice,” she said, but didn’t elaborate.
He couldn’t help but wonder whose bike she’d been on. An old boyfriend? Not that it was any of his business. It didn’t stop unexpected little pinpricks of jealousy from forming in his gut.
“It’s safer if you hang onto me and not the grab handles,” he said. “We’ll be riding along a pretty twisty road, and cornering is much easier if you’re closer to me.”
“Really.” Her voice was full of skepticism.
“Really.” He let the bike idle and rolled slowly toward the road.
She moved fractionally forward, but still kept her distance as he turned into the main road and the bike picked up speed. They drove back toward town, and he was very aware of his tense passenger.
Once they’d passed through the main street of Bounty Bay and coasted past Kauri Whare, where Isaac no doubt was spitting tacks at Sam’s disappearance, they hit the highway north. The suburban speed limit restriction lifted there and he could allow the bike to fly. Wind rushed past him, buffeting his T-shirt. The power throbbing between his thighs as the bike surged forward made him smile. What made him smile more was Vee’s arms sliding past his hips and wrapping firmly around his stomach. Her knees bumped along his thighs as she snuggled closer and he felt the press of her breasts through the leather jacket against his back.
“Too fast?” he asked as they approached a hired campervan with signwriting all over it.
It was prime tourist season and locals had learned by experience that many overseas drivers were a little shaky with New Zealand’s drive-on-the-left rule.
Checking to make sure the road ahead was clear, Sam accelerated and they streaked past the campervan. Vee’s reply was a tightening of her hands fisting his T-shirt and the sound of her laughter being ripped away in their slipstream. She snuggled closer, or at least didn’t move away as they leaned into the road’s curves.
He knew this highway like the back of his hand, but somehow the experience felt entirely new and fresh and exciting, because he’d never brought a woman with him before. This had always been his thing, a way for him to experience an adrenaline rush on land. But now with Vee clinging to him as they rode the wind, moving as one into the set of hairpin corners of a treacherous stretch of highway, he couldn’t think of anyone he’d rather be with.
He shifted down gears and guided the bike off the main highway, taking a slightly slower drive along a narrow side road leading to Cook’s Landing. Paddocks of sheep and grazing cattle lined the road, along with a few farmhouses. Vee lightly punched his stomach and laughed with delight when they passed a high wire fence with a cluster of ostriches watching them with suspicious beady eyes. He grinned to himself, having suspected she’d get a kick out of them.
Cook’s Landing wasn’t really well known or a tourist destination. It was kind of a hidden spot that only a few locals knew about, and was most often used as a beach ramp for launching their fishing and pleasure crafts.
Sam eased back on the throttle as they neared the end of the road where the tarmac stopped and an unpaved gravel road led down to the beach. He parked up the bike and killed the engine. Vee slid off the back and removed her helmet, shaking out her long hair. Her cheeks were flushed a pretty pink color and her eyes sparkled.
“You were right,” she said. “That was exactly what I needed.”
He pulled off his helmet and set it down beside the bike.
She looked around her while she unzipped his leather jacket. It was slightly too big for her, but Vee in his leathers was sexier than a supermodel in a string bikini.
“Cook’s Landing?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“I haven’t been here in years. Isn’t this where kids used to come to make out?” She shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over the bike. She shot him a look, but she appeared to be more amused that he’d brought her here than annoyed.
“Don’t know if they still do,” he said. “But you can’t tell me you and Tui never came out here when you were teenagers.”
“No comment,” she said sassily. “Because I seem to recall you and Isaac threatening to beat the crap out of any guy who got too friendly with your little sister. So I’m not going to be the one to disillusion you about what good girls Tui and I were in high school.”
He huffed out a laugh, angling his chin toward a path through the waving seagrass that grew over the sand dunes. “Does your good-girl reputation prevent you from taking a walk with me?”
“I’ll chance it. Perhaps I’ve been a good girl for too long. Live a little, you said.” And the smile she shot at him over her shoulder as she walked toward the sand dunes had him thinking all sorts of bad-boy thoughts.
The day was the kind Sam lived for. Cloudless blue skies and an offshore wind that sent perfectly formed breakers surging ashore. A perfect day for ditching work and walking with a beautiful woman along the beach. Blame it on the sun, sand, and surf, but he couldn’t stop himself from linking his hands with Vee as they reached the apex of the dunes.
They stood, strands of seagrass tickling their legs, looking down at the waves forming in straight even rows. She didn’t pull away from him either, but leaned into his side. She inhaled deeply and when he slanted a glance down at her, she had her eyes shut, her face tilted up into the sun.
He could no more resist kissing than he could resist the call of the ocean in his blood. He slipped his hand from hers and half turned toward her. Her eyes fluttered open and met his. In them he saw anticipation and desire.
“This time,” he said, “there’s no one to see.”
He traced his thumb over the silky skin of her throat, feeling blood thrumming at the pulse point at the base. He slid his hands around to gently cup her skull and drew her mouth to his. She made a soft little moan at the back of her throat as their lips met, brushed together with the lightest of touches, and then clung.
He took his time exploring her mouth because he’d waited so long to do so. As he deepened the kiss, tasting the sweetness he’d already become intoxicated with, he realized it had, in fact, been years. He’d wanted to kiss Vanessa Mae Sullivan for years.
There. He’d admitted it.
He’d wanted to kiss her and now that he had, he wanted…
The tentative touch of her tongue against his ripped a raw moan from his chest.
God, he wanted her. So damn bad. And the kiss went from exploratory to explosive.
Vee’s nails raked up and down his back, catching on his T-shirt until she bunched it up and slid her hands beneath it. The feel of her fingertips skimming over his bare skin was a lit match to kerosene. Heedless of the sea breeze and the hiss of the waves below him, he drank her in, his hands buried in her silky hair. She tasted of sunshine and a whisper of salt, of lazy summer days and the nostalgia of a first kiss shared on a beach blanket beside a bonfire. She made him ache for all the things that could’ve been between them but had never been realized.
Vee’s hands slipped from under his shirt and he ground a protest into her mouth until she hooked her fingers into the waistband of his jeans and pulled his hips into hers. He was hard—painfully so—and her murmur of approval as she arched hersel
f into him made his eyes cross.
His hands left her hair and skimmed down her back. Clasping a sweetly rounded ass cheek in each hand, he pressed her more firmly against him. She squirmed her hips in a luxuriously slow circle, twined her arms around his neck, and then boosted herself into his arms. Her legs hooked around his hips and directed an intensely savage jolt of pleasure to his cock.
Fuck, he felt like a fifteen-year-old kid who’d got his first opportunity to bump his hard-on against a girl’s belly. Only it was Vee’s belly pressed so intimately to his groin. And that nearly drove him out of his ever-loving mind.
“Mate, get a room.” A gruff male voice laced with amusement came from close by.
Vee reacted quicker than he, jerking out of their kiss with a sharp inhale, and dropping her legs from around his hips so quickly that Sam nearly overbalanced. He whipped his head around to see two men with fishing rods on their shoulders and tackle boxes in their hands below them on the sandy path.
She thunked her forehead on his shoulder and left it there, uttering an embarrassed groan. He kept his arms wrapped tight around her and grinned back at the two men. They chuckled and ambled past him and Vee, one of them giving him an encouraging thumbs-up.
Sam stroked soothing circles on Vee’s back and she melted into him. Something inside him melted in response as she continued to snuggle into him, as if she, too, didn’t want to break their physical connection. He’d never held her like this, never touched her in a way that could’ve been misinterpreted as anything other than brotherly. The simple act of trust, of her allowing her body to relax in his embrace, was making it damn difficult to avoid misinterpreting his own emotions.
But the emotion leading the pack was more physical need than curious tenderness. There was nothing brotherly about the sweet way her hips ground against him now that the two strangers had moved out of sight and they were once again alone on the dunes.
She arched back in his arms, turning her face up to his. A Mona-Lisa mysterious smile turned up the corner of her mouth, her lips pink and a little pouty from where his stubble had grazed her tender skin.
“Maybe we should head back to your place before we end up with sand in all the wrong places?”
His heartbeat skyrocketed. “Race you to the bike,” he said and, grabbing her hand, tugged her laughing down the dune in huge bounds.
Vee showed restraint that should’ve earned her a gold medal as they rode back into Bounty Bay. She’d kept her fingers firmly interlaced where they rested on Sam’s midriff, when they really wanted to explore his hard stomach, his hard thighs, his hard…
Her core muscles contracted at the needy ache between her legs, and her nipples rubbed against her bra cups trying to bore through layers of clothing to reach his bare skin. Being this close to him was making her crazy. Crazy enough that she constantly reminded herself that they were on two wheels and distracting him was a stupendously insane idea. But she wanted to feel that sun-warmed sleek skin under her fingertips again, so badly she jittered like a deprived caffeine addict.
Once, as the bike slowed to cruise through town—overflowing with tourists and fishing competition entrants alike—Sam took his left hand from the clutch and placed it over her laced fingers. She’d no idea what that touch meant to him, but to Vee it was confirmation.
Right or wrong. Good idea or dumb as a sackful of hammers, she and Sam were on the same page. At least so far as wanting to tear each other’s clothes off. And there was no need, she thought as he turned the bike into his driveway, to think any more than that. To feel was what she wanted. To feel was her only need.
Sam hit the garage door remote and it rumbled up. He idled the big bike inside and killed the engine. Vee slid off and removed her helmet, returning it to the metal shelving unit against one wall. By the time she’d shucked off Sam’s leather jacket, he’d removed his own helmet.
He caught her gaze from across the garage crowded with stacks of junk and boxes from his spare room and a partially finished wooden surfboard on trestles. He grimaced, raking his fingers through his flattened hair.
“Helmet hair,” he said.
For a moment—just a blink of an eye, really—the cocky, invincible Sam Ngata vanished. The man before her wasn’t so self-assured, wasn’t so certain of what his next move should be. While the cocky and invincible fired her blood, excited her, and caused her to ache in the most pleasurable of ways, it was the hint of vulnerability that drew her across the garage.
She eased around the surfboard, letting her fingers trail over the wood, smooth and hard and cool to the touch since the sunlight streaming in from the open garage door hadn’t reached it.
Smooth and hard and cool. Her gaze traced the defined lines of Sam’s upper body, his T-shirt clinging to his muscular chest.
“Take off your shirt,” she said.
Sam’s eyebrows arched but he didn’t question her demand. He hooked the back of the shirt by the neckline and dragged it over his head.
Definitely smooth and hard. Her fingers itched to trace where her gaze devoured. By God, he was savagely beautiful.
She took a step toward him, her hands still skimming over the honey-colored wood, buying time until they could touch. His gaze shot to her fingers, then lifted to lock with hers. Desire darkened his pupils, and she knew she had only seconds before he reached for her and every imagined sliver of her control would fly out into the summer sky.
“Hands where I can see them,” she ordered.
A smile that almost melted her clothes right off curved his mouth. He tossed his T-shirt aside and raised his hands in a stick ’em up position. Then he lowered them slowly to brace hip distance apart on the surfboard.
“Gonna frisk me?” His voice contained a ragged note that told her he was hoping for exactly that.
Oh yeah, she was gonna frisk him good.
She started around behind him, stopping in her tracks as his head twisted to the side to follow her movements. “Eyes forward. Don’t move from that spot.”
He chuckled, a low, dirty rasp that caused her panties to dampen in a hot rush. This was going to be fun—and fun was what she needed. She lifted her fingers from the surfboard and trailed them along a vein rising from his sinewy forearm. She continued on to his bunched biceps, circling the dark ink there, then running upward to the solid bulk of muscle spanning his shoulders. He followed orders by not moving, but his warm skin seemed to buzz with an invisible layer of electricity which lifted the tiny hairs on her nape. She walked behind him to where the bike’s engine ticked as it cooled, and hit the remote so the roller doors rumbled down.
For what she had in mind, they didn’t want an audience.
She turned back to him, letting her gaze slide over his bare back. Anatomy and science had never been her thing. The thigh bone connecting to the hip bone didn’t hold her interest. But then there was Sam. Beautiful, perfectly proportioned, divinely sculptured from some magical matter that couldn’t possibly be anything as ordinary as flesh over bone.
Vee shivered at the power of the man in front of her, leashed—but barely—because she’d asked him to stay still. Her feet propelled her to stand directly behind him, hands trembling with the effort of not touching everything at once. She wanted to savor this moment, but God, she was greedy. Starving for him.
Her palms drifted down and settled on either side of his backbone as he bent over the surfboard. So, so smooth and hot was his skin. His chest rose and fell, each inhale and exhale becoming deeper, faster as she continued to explore the shape of him.
She stopped to wriggle out of her top, watching a shiver snake down his spine as the snap of her bra unhooking disturbed the garage’s silence. Tossing aside both items of clothing, she bumped her hips against his deliciously tight ass then ground herself against him. He reached around with one hand and got a handful of her butt cheek. She smacked his fingers and peeled them off her ass.
“Not good at following directions, are you?”
He chuckled
again, but obediently replaced his hand on the surfboard.
She finger-walked around to the front waistband of his jeans, seated low on his hips. She popped the button and his inward breath was a sudden ragged hiss.
“Vee.” Warning and lust deepened his voice.
“Shush,” she ordered and, locating the zipper tag, eased it down.
That required some fancy finger work because, oh my, there was something thick, long, and very, very hard in the way. She managed to get the zipper down without damaging the payload inside—lucky him and lucky her—and worked the snug denim down far enough that she could rub the heel of her palm down his length. Obviously the thin fabric of his boxer briefs didn’t dull his enjoyment as the groan ripped from his chest seemed to indicate.
Her fingertips reached the taut mound of his balls and she lightly scraped her nails over them while stroking her thumb up and down his cock. What she could reach of it. Day-um. She wanted to reach, and touch, all of him. She slipped her hand under his boxers and encircled him, his skin suede-soft and stretched tight. Dampness grazed her skin and her womb clenched in sudden pleasure at the knowledge that she was responsible for his arousal.
“Payback’ll be a bitch,” he ground out. “You know that, right?”
She was counting on it, so she stroked him. Once, twice, three times until his spine arched and he groaned again. She loosened her fingers and once more rubbed her thumb lightly over him—apparently the trigger that pushed him over the edge. He grabbed her wrist to still her movements, then straightened, spun around, lifted her bodily off her feet, and reversed their positions.
“Hey!” Her palms smacked onto the surfboard. “No fair. I haven’t fin—”
She couldn’t continue because her brain short-circuited. Sam grabbed her hips and hauled them backward. Her butt cheeks pressed into his erection sent a flood of heat between her thighs. One big hand closed over her right breast and her knees began to tremble. He kneaded her soft flesh, scissoring his fingers over the stiff point of her nipple. Laser shots of pleasure, so bright they were almost painful, blasted down her body. Her knees buckled and he was forced to wrap an arm around her waist to keep her upright.
Break Your Heart_A Small Town Romance Page 15
