Gansett Island Boxed Set Books 1-16 (Gansett Island Series)

by Marie Force

  Maddie’s lips slid over his shaft as she withdrew, leaving him with a look of sincere regret. The sight of her silk-covered ass as she left the room did nothing to ease the ache.

  “Fuck,” he muttered to an empty room.

  This had been, Erin decided, the nicest Christmas she’d had in years. Other than the emotional blip at Jenny’s house, she’d gotten through a day that had been difficult for her in other years. Much of the day’s success was due to the man who was now driving her home.

  He’d been quiet since they left the McCarthys’, and Erin wanted to know what he was thinking. But she didn’t ask. She wanted to thank him again for being such a rock for her when she was spinning earlier. She wanted to tell him how, in the past, an episode like that could’ve ruined her for days, but because of him, that wouldn’t happen this time.

  There were so many things she’d like to tell him, but she wasn’t sure he was ready to hear them. They were in the odd position of having been close friends for months but romantic partners for only a few days. It would be easy—too easy—to press the accelerator on the new romantic portion of their relationship in light of the many hours they’d already spent together, talking, laughing, flirting, sharing confidences.

  When the silence became weighty, she decided to ask what he was thinking about.

  “Naked boy-naked girl,” he said with a sly grin.

  “How funny was that?”

  “Funniest thing I’ve ever seen, but I wasn’t thinking about the kids. I was thinking about you. And me.”

  Was it warm in here, or was it her? “How many McCarthy men do you suppose are using that line on their women tonight?”

  “I suspect all of them. It’s an instant classic. Have I mentioned how incredibly hot you look in that skirt?”

  “Um, no, I don’t think you have.” It was definitely getting warmer in the small cab of his truck.

  “Major oversight on my part. All day today, I’ve been wondering what you’ve got on under there.”

  “Will you be disappointed to find plain old white cotton?”

  “Absolutely not. Nothing about you has disappointed me.”

  Would he be disappointed to learn that she would never want to fly with him? That thought threatened to ruin the nice warm buzz she had building thanks to his shameless flirting, so she pushed it aside for another time.

  He reached over to run his hand up her leg, under her skirt, stopping at the top of her thigh, which he gave a gentle squeeze that ignited her desire. That he could make her feel so much by barely touching her was remarkable and unprecedented. For a long time after she and Mitch broke up, she’d wondered if she’d made a terrible mistake by letting that relationship go. In just a few days, Slim had shown her what’d been missing with Mitch.

  By the time he pulled into the driveway at the lighthouse, he had her on the verge of explosion, and he still hadn’t done anything more than touch her leg. When he got out to deal with the gate, she shivered from the cold as much as the loss of his warm palm on her thigh.

  He drove the truck through the gate and then got out again to close and lock it.

  She was practically vibrating in her seat as they pulled up to the door. He cut the engine and the lights, casting them into inky darkness that would last until the motion-sensitive lights came on.

  “Stay put,” he said gruffly.

  Erin’s heart beat so fast with anticipation and excitement that she couldn’t seem to draw air into her lungs. The door opened, and he reached across her to unbuckle the seat belt she’d been too flummoxed to do herself. His arm brushed against her nipple, and she gasped.

  She expected him to back away and let her out of the truck, but instead, he lifted her right into his arms. Her legs encircled his waist and her arms wrapped around his neck as his lips found hers in a hungry, desperate kiss. While she was lost in the hottest kiss of her life, he somehow got them inside. He kicked the door closed and pressed her against the mudroom wall, his cock rigid against her core as the kiss went from desperate to wild.

  Erin buried her fingers in his hair, keeping him anchored to her. Then he surprised her by softening the kiss before breaking it to turn his attention to her neck. His hands were everywhere, under her coat, cupping and squeezing her breasts, then under her skirt, his fingers finding her clit.

  She cried out from the pleasure that shot through her system like a shock wave. “Upstairs,” she somehow managed to say.

  “Here. Right here.” He put her down only long enough to toss both their coats to the floor, pull her tights and underwear down her legs and free himself from his pants and roll on a condom. “Now.” His desperation seemed to match hers as he lifted her again, bringing her down slowly onto his rigid length. “Yes,” he whispered fiercely.

  As her body stretched to accommodate him, she held on tight, half afraid he would drop her but knowing in her heart of hearts that he never would. She was safe with him. That much she knew for certain.

  “God,” he said, his lips close to her ear. “You’re so hot and tight. You make me crazy.”

  She wanted to tell him he made her just as crazy, but the words were lost in a deep thrust that triggered her orgasm.

  His fingers dug into the dense flesh of her ass as he hammered into her, riding the wave of her climax into his own.

  “Christ,” he uttered between deep breaths. His forehead dropped to lean against hers, the heat of his skin warming her from the inside. “What just happened?”

  Erin laughed at his befuddled tone. “I think we had mudroom sex.”

  “Hottest mudroom sex I’ve ever had.”

  “Me, too.” She stroked the sweaty hair off his forehead. “How about we take this somewhere more comfortable?”

  “Mmm, as soon as I’m sure my legs still work, we’ll do that.”

  Smiling, Erin stroked his hair while he continued to breathe like he’d just run a marathon. A feeling of profound contentment and peace came over her, making her wish for things she’d thought weren’t going to happen for her. Now she wasn’t so sure. She wasn’t sure of anything other than how he cut through the numbness that had been so much a part of her and made her feel.

  He took a deep breath and released it before withdrawing from her and setting her gently on her feet, holding her until she got her bearings. Tugging her tights and underwear over her knees, she followed him up two flights of stairs to her bedroom. Only then did he drop his hold on her hand so she could sit on the bed to remove her boots.

  Her body continued to quake and tingle with aftershocks from the hottest sex of her life.

  After ducking into the bathroom to deal with the condom and removing his sweater, Slim sat next to her on the bed, putting his arm around her. “I was rough with you. Are you okay?”

  “You really have to ask?”

  “Yeah, I do. I don’t know what came over me—”

  She rested her finger on his lips. “Please don’t apologize. It was incredible. I’ve never done anything even remotely like that, and if you apologize, you’ll ruin it.”

  His lips curved into a smile, and he nibbled on her finger. “We can’t have that, now can we?”

  Erin shook her head and withdrew her finger, her eyes closing as he kissed her so softly, so tenderly that her body trembled anew. That he gave her both wild passion and abiding tenderness within the scope of ten minutes was almost too much to process. Laying her hand flat against his cheek, she pulled back from the kiss. “Give me one minute.”

  “Take all the time you need.”

  Her legs were wobbly when she walked into the bathroom, closing the door behind her and leaning against it to catch her breath. Images from the mudroom played through her mind like an erotic movie. She already knew that no matter what happened next, she’d never forget it.

  Erin cleaned up and changed into one of the sexy nightgowns he’d bought her at Tiffany’s. She brushed her hair and teeth, examining her reflection in the mirror, noting the razor burn on her neck and j

aw that were stark reminders of what they’d done. Erin’s shiver had nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with him.

  Emerging from the bathroom, she found him wearing only his boxers, sitting on the edge of the bed, checking his phone. He looked up at her, his gaze heating at the sight of her in the nightgown. Standing, he tossed the phone on the bed and came to her, his hands warm upon her shoulders, his expression hungry despite the intense sex they’d already had.

  “I’ll be quick,” he said, stepping around her to go into the bathroom.

  Erin released a deep breath and got into bed, turning to look at the picture of her brother on the bedside table and trying to remember the last time she’d felt as elated as she did now.

  A memory came to her, sharp and vivid, as if it had happened yesterday rather than almost fifteen years ago. She recalled a warm summer weekend at the beach in East Hampton about a month before Toby died. She and Mitch and Toby and Jenny had pooled their resources to rent a small two-bedroom house for a weekend that had been full of love and laughter and promises of a happily ever after that hadn’t materialized for either couple.

  They’d been so excited for Jenny and Toby’s wedding in two short months, and even though it had ended with a disagreement between her and her brother, that weekend was the last time she remembered feeling the way she did right now—happy and hopeful, with every possibility still open to her. Everything had changed a few weeks later, and her life had never been the same. She’d been spinning, as if caught up in a riptide that she’d been fighting ever since. Only recently had the spinning stopped, and Slim was the reason.

  He came out of the bathroom looking sexier than any man had a right to at nearly forty. His chest and abs were ripped with muscles and covered in a light dusting of dark hair, his jaw chiseled with just the right amount of scruff and his eyes… He looked at her with such affection and desire. A man who looked at a woman that way could convince her to change her life for him.

  After he got in bed, the heat of his body drew her to him, and he wrapped her up in his arms.

  “Thank you for an amazing Christmas,” he said. “And for the painting of the lighthouse. I’ll find a very special place for that in my Florida house.”

  “I thought you might like a memento of your stay here.”

  “I’ll never forget staying here or being with you this Christmas.”

  “I love my new necklace, too.” She touched the sterling silver sand dollar to make sure it was still there.

  “Glad you like it. Looks as good on you as does that nightgown.”

  She looked up at his handsome face. “Tell me something about you that I don’t know.”

  Chapter 16

  Erin wasn’t sure where the inquiry had come from. All she knew was that she wanted more of him—and not just sex, although more of that would be fine with her, too.

  “Like a deep, dark secret?”

  “Do you have a deep, dark secret?”

  After a long pause, he said, “There is one thing that no one knows, not even my family.”

  “You don’t have to tell me if it’s too personal.”

  “It’s very personal, and I’ve honestly never told anyone. But I want to tell you.”

  Intrigued and insanely curious, she propped her chin on his chest so she could see his face.

  “My high school girlfriend got pregnant.”

  His grim expression made Erin sorry she’d asked.

  “We were juniors. She was my first, and I was hers. We were crazy about each other until she realized she was pregnant. It all went to shit after that, to put it mildly.”

  “Did she blame you?”

  “She never actually said that, but I blamed myself enough for both of us. We did it once without protection, and I thought I’d pulled out in time… I’ve never had unprotected sex again.” He sighed. “It’s hard to talk about even all these years later.”

  “You don’t have to. I’m sorry. I never meant—”

  He cupped her cheek and stroked her face with his thumb. “It’s okay, Erin. I wouldn’t have told you if I didn’t want to.”

  “What did you do about the baby?”

  “I left it completely up to her. I told her I’d support any decision she made, including keeping the baby. After a torturous month, she decided to end the pregnancy.”

  “How did you feel about that?”

  “If I’m being totally honest, I was relieved. We were so young, and the thought of a baby was… It was the most overwhelming thing I could imagine at that time. I gave her the money I’d saved from cutting grass the summer before, and I went with her to the clinic. It was horrible and heartbreaking. I thought she was never going to stop crying.”

  Erin’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m so sorry you went through such a traumatic thing when you were so young. Your parents really didn’t know?”

  He shook his head. “We went to tremendous lengths to make sure no one would ever know. I didn’t want her to be the talk of our school, so I insisted we tell no one. Somehow we managed to get through it without anyone knowing. Afterward, we tried to get back to normal, but our normal had been permanently altered. We broke up a couple of months later, which was a second round of heartbreak.” Even as he stroked her hair, he seemed a million miles away. “I think about the baby and who he or she might’ve been. It’s hard to believe he or she would be twenty-four now, a fully grown adult, maybe a college graduate.”

  Hoping to hide her emotional response to his heartfelt words, she closed her eyes and kissed his chest.

  “You know what’s funny? When you’re sixteen, you think you’ll grow up and get married and have kids and everything will unfold in a certain expected order. But then life happens and nothing goes as planned, and you wake up at nearly forty and realize you never again came close to being a father.”

  “It’s not too late, especially for guys. Look at Tony Randall, who became a dad at seventy something.”

  Slim grunted out a laugh. “Yeah, no thanks on that.”

  “Still, it could happen.”

  Smiling, he let her hair slide through his fingers. “I told you mine,” he said with a teasing glint in his eye that let her know he was okay after sharing his secret pain with her. “Now tell me yours.”

  Erin knew she was under no obligation to tell him her deepest secret, but after what he’d told her, she didn’t feel right giving him anything less. “Mine is also something that no one else knows.”

  He tilted his head, giving her his undivided attention.

  “After Toby died, I… There’s just no way I can adequately describe the despair. And the worst part? We had to share our agony with three thousand other families and an entire nation that was changed forever by what happened that day. But for us, for me, it was so intensely personal.”

  “I didn’t know anyone who died that day, but as a pilot and an American, it was one of the most gut-wrenching things I’ve ever lived through. I can’t even begin to know what it was like for people who lost loved ones.”

  “It was a very dark time. A couple of months later, after the initial shock wore off and the insanity settled somewhat, I began to wonder how I’d ever find my way out of the darkness. Part of me didn’t think I had the right to feel that way because look at what my parents had lost and Jenny and all of Toby’s friends who saw him far more often the last few years than I did. But as his sister, his twin, his only sibling, I simply didn’t know how to live without him. I’d never had to.”

  “Baby,” he said softly, wiping away her tears with his thumb.

  “I began to make plans to stop the pain.”

  “Erin… God.”

  The distress she heard in his voice made her feel safe to continue. “I wasn’t thinking clearly. I know that now. But at the time, I couldn’t see any other way out. I wanted it to stop. I wrote letters to my parents and Jenny and even one to Toby in which I told him that I couldn’t wait to be with him again. I even set the date. For the first time since it happened, I had something to look forward to.”

  “Come up here.” He tugged gently on her arms and arranged her so she was on top of him, his arms wrapped tightly around her. “What stopped you?”

  “My parents did, and they don’t even know it. They stopped by on their way to brunch, which was something they did every Sunday before. It was their first time going back to the place they always went, and they wanted me to come. They said it would make it easier for them if I went, too. I think they came over rather than calling me the way they normally would so I wouldn’t be able to refuse. I found out later they were worried about how withdrawn I’d become. They didn’t know that I was dealing with the onset of what became severe obsessive compulsive disorder. I was plagued by worries about my safety and theirs. I would get up thirty or forty times in the course of a night to check to make sure the locks were on, that the windows were closed, that the nightlights were on. I was exhausted from the need to perform these rituals over and over and over again, like a hamster on a wheel. I was afraid not to do them, that something else awful would happen if I didn’t. It took years of therapy to get me to the point where I only do some of the weird stuff you’ve probably noticed.

  “On that day, only because they asked me to, I took a shower, did my hair, put on some makeup for the first time since the funeral, and I went with them. We saw a lot of people we knew, people who cared so much about us and how we were doing. I remember thinking if my parents could endure this unbearable tragedy, maybe I could, too. And seeing them and the courageous way they were facing their loss made it impossible for me to compound it. By the time I got home, my plan had lost its allure. I’ve had a lot of really low moments over the years, and I continue to struggle with the OCD at times, but I’ve never again been that low.”

  To his credit, he didn’t say anything. He only held her and rubbed her back in tiny circles and made her feel loved and protected. Maybe he didn’t love her, but his quiet support made her wonder if he did. Listening to the strong beat of his heart comforted her and made her feel less alone with the grief that had never gone away, even if it had become more manageable.

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