“No, really it’s true. I’ve spent all my life trying to get into my father’s good graces.” I pull him in like we’re a couple, and his cologne rolls over me, warm and spiced, subtler than it was earlier. “The core even looks like my father, blonde hair, blue eyes. The rest of us are literally from the dark-side—raven-haired beauties.” I give a little wink and feel cheesy about it. I don’t think a major seduction is needed on my part but I’m anxious to move the show along, to have his mouth sinking over mine, his body deep inside me.
My face floods with heat, and I force myself to look at the ocean with its furious whitecaps slapping against each other ten feet offshore.
“Chestnut.” He leans in and takes a sniff. “You have chestnut hair, deep red highlights that reflect the sky.” His features dim like he’s telling the truth, but he doesn’t want to. “And I definitely agree, you are a beauty.”
“Yeah, well, I couldn’t look any less related to my father if I tried.” I never could take a compliment. “He’s as greedy with his Nordic genes as he is with his money.”
He laughs again, and my hip bumps against his leg as we walk.
“You said the rest, how many more are there?”
“My twin sister, Claire.” And there she is. I knew it wouldn’t take long. “But she’s gone now.”
He pauses for a second, inadvertently pulling me back. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“So am I.” My eyes widen as I glance down at the sand with its impossible divots every few inches. It’s thick and cool and far more uncomfortable to walk through than I remember. “Anyway.” I shoot a quick glance to the ocean and omit the fact I’m planning a reunion. “Tonight’s my birthday.” I shake my head at how pathetic it came out—how unbelievable it sounded.
“No kidding?” He pauses again, and this time I stop, too.
“No shit.”
Our eyes lock as the wind steals the neatness from my hair, making it dance like flames toward the dragon-red sky.
“Happy birthday, Stevie.” His lips twist with a wry smile, and, for a minute, I think he’s going to kiss me. “Name anything. I’ll make sure it happens.” He takes up both my hands and swings them between us. There’s something comfortable about him, familiar. He’s gorgeous, and kind, and perhaps a serial killer, but, sadly, I’m okay with anything he has to offer.
A shadow catches my eye from over his shoulder. A tall, dappled horse plods its way down the beach in the opposite direction.
“I want that.” God, I haven’t ridden since that day, since Claire died. My heart detonates at the prospect. “I want to ride. Right here, tonight.”
“Done.” He speeds us over three houses down and walks straight into a makeshift barn. He saddles up two gorgeous steeds and helps me onto the black one that gives off a blue cast in the dim light of the stable.
We ride out onto the sand as the poor beast’s hooves sink, leaving me gyrating unnaturally. My body rotates in rhythm to the saddle, up and down, grinding my hips in rotation, steady like a gear.
“So did we just horse-jack these babies?” I’m only half kidding. “I’ll admit when you said you’d give me anything, my adrenaline spiked. And now here we are, horse-knapping. I always did get a rise in taking something that wasn’t mine to begin with.” Usually that consists of borrowing my roommate’s sweaters. I’ve yet to add a mammal-related felony to the list.
“I promise we’re allowed. The owners rent the stables in hopes the locals will take them out for a ride and give them a workout. Works like a charm.” He holds up the reins.
“Wow. I wonder if I leave my running shoes on the porch if someone will wear out the soles for me?” That was dumb. “I always did hate working out.” Hand to God. “But I bet you’ll make it enjoyable.” I bat my lashes quick as a butterfly trying to escape a jar. “That’s what tonight is about, right?” I run my gaze down his body slow as tar and just as scalding.
His cheeks pull back with a quick grin. “I thought tonight was about wishes and horses. But, hey, you’re the birthday girl, and I did say anything. I think my brother has a weight room in the back. I can help you with some curls and pushups if you want.”
“Ha ha. I forgot to laugh. Are you always this funny, or is this something you have to rehearse in the mirror before crawling into bed at night?”
“Oh, sweetie”—his head tilts to the side—“there’s not a darn thing I have to rehearse before crawling into anyone’s bed, least of all mine.”
“Is that where the magic happens?”
“That’s where the miracles happen. But if you want a magic show, you got it.”
We plod toward the damp shore where the ride becomes smoother, and I can feel the horse relax beneath me.
“I think it’s time to test out your magician skills, cowboy—see if you’ve got a miracle or two left in you for the night.” I nod over at a defunct pier in the distance. “Last one in has to stare at the ceiling.”
“The ceiling?” He cocks his head before his eyes widen with the epiphany. “The ceiling.”
But I’m already gone, racing down the waterline, the wild wind screaming through my hair, shouting at me to turn around and ride all the way back to Rigby and pretend this day never happened—avoid this night like the STD plague it might turn out to be. Maybe buy a cupcake on the way home and stab it in the heart with a candle.
“Stevie!” Ford’s voice cuts through the wind with a warbling roar. It sounds lonely and distal like the cry of a desperate lover who lived a thousand years ago and found a way to rip open time, making his way back to me. I can picture it, our unstoppable, incurable love—the angst of it all. A part of me has always yearned for that, belly-burning, chest-squeezing infliction. To become so inexplicably dependent on someone else’s heart, their smile, that it literally drives you insane. I guess I expected it on some level, after all, that’s the story of my mother’s life in a nutshell. She always said love was a dangerous plague once it found you—with no cure and certain death in the end. But I romanticized her black and white notion. A part of me chose to believe love had the ability to walk right over death like a stone in its path and endure for the expanse of all eternity.
“Stevie!” His voice booms over my shoulder, dark and menacing like a tornado twisting up alongside me.
Ten bucks says he thinks the horse got away from me—that I’m some damsel in distress in need of rescue. I laugh at the idea. I’m the furthest thing from it. I’m no damsel. I’m a miserable bitch through and through. My heart turned to cinder the day I tossed my sister into the wind. I’ve been hell-bent on revenge ever since, and had I not decided to execute myself this fine dragon’s blood evening, I would have exacted that revenge by pulling the rug out from under my father’s most prized company. I’ve dreamed of ways I could impart just a thread of the misery he’s imparted on me and my long-dead sister. That constant ache of wanting to belong, to be claimed as one of his own has been a never-ending loop. My mother, although just as much to blame in my eyes, would be tougher to nail to a wall. She blew through the earnings she received from the bestseller she wrote, rented out the home my sister and I grew up in, and currently lives in a Yurt with her new boyfriend. Her, I do my best to ignore.
But tonight Claire is out there, up there in the blood-red sky, waiting. The pier fast approaches as the waves crash over the shore—white monsters, roaring out their defenses before falling helpless to the sand. That’s all we were as people, hollow monsters, shouting to be heard only to fall helplessly into the mouth of the earth in the end. Death is the only true common denominator. Birth is simply the first step toward your shared destiny.
The pier comes up quick in jags. The horse tenses as if it knows it’s time to slow down, to relent from this game of slicing through the wind. I pull hard on the reins, steering us toward the angry ocean. Ford shouts something garbled, something faraway and frantic as I beat my legs against this restless steed. A wave pounces over us, and the horse bucks, nearly landing me backward
into the water. She falls back on her hind legs and flops forward just as a strong arm swipes me off the saddle.
In a swift, herculean move, Ford pulls me over his lap and buries his face in my hair.
“Shit!” He pants it hot over my scalp. “You okay?”
I look up at him, the red sky reflecting in his eyes like blood-filled mirrors. His dark brows spread out and up like wings in flight, and, for a brief moment, I’m grateful that he stopped me.
“I’m okay,” it croaks out of me, unsure if I’ve ever been okay. “Told you I’d be your worst nightmare.”
He gives a little laugh as his chest expands and retracts, cutting the landscape in half with every other lungful. His face presses against the burnt orange sky like a cutout silhouette of a romance novel. A dull ache stirs in me to have this beautiful man. I pull him down by the cheeks and crash his mouth to mine. His lips brush hard before his mouth falls open and lets me in. My tongue does a pirouette over his, and then he’s on me, in me, drilling for oil, fucking me with his tongue, filling me with the promise of sixty nine lewd acts that he’s ready to impart. His touch softens. He’s making love to me, pulling me in with desperation, delivering deep, sensual kisses as if we’ve waited an entire millennium for this very moment. This is the kiss of the ages, the kiss of my brief lifetime, right here under the dragon’s blood sky, making wishes for a someday that I would never own.
He wraps my horse’s reins around his wrist and leads us out of the water.
“So I guess I watch the ceiling.” His dimples dig in deep and a fire touches down in my stomach at the sight.
“I guess you do.”
“Who are we kidding?” His lids hood low. “I’ll be watching you.”
“Do you like Zeppelin?” He thumbs through his phone trying to find just the right mood music to fuck me to. It’s almost romantic. I sigh as I fall back onto the mattress. Oh hell, it is.
I imagine this is where things get awkward. I’ve never actually had a one-night stand, but I’m betting most of them are fueled by alcohol and far less analytical behavior than we’re currently demonstrating. First off, we’ve both showered—separately. I’m currently wrapped in a fluffy white towel, and he’s wearing the same, low across the waist with the threat of falling off. We’ve gone from strangers on the beach to an old married couple about to have their Saturday night special in a single bound.
“I don’t know.” I bounce over the bed, and my towel unhinges, exposing the entire left side of my body.
He extends his gaze and suppresses the smile already pulling on his lips.
“Do you think we have chemistry?” It seems fitting to ask since there’s a three-foot clearance between us.
His chin inches back as if he were baffled. The room fills with sappy music as he sets his phone down and snaps off the lights. Moonlight floods the room in watery hues, giving it a haunted appeal that makes me moan with approval. Ford glides in beside me, sans the towel, and my eyes snag on that dark shadow at the base of his hips.
“Wow, you really are a magician.” I run my finger down his happy trail and am shocked to trace out his hard-on, already locked in its upright position. Dear God. My fingers retract as if pulling out of a fire.
“My brother is the magician in the family.” He takes up my hand and replaces it over that iron rod pointing at the ceiling. His eyes stay on mine, forcing me to look at him as my fingers curve over him—his skin soft as velvet. A series of prickling shockwaves trace up from my fingers. He offers a brief smile as he plucks the towel from my body like swiping a tablecloth from under fine china—his smile broadens—not a teacup out of place.
He’s still looking at me, locking eyes in the moonlight with those luminescent beams of his, watching me as I wrap my hand around him. Ford pulls me on top of his body until his hot breath burns over my forehead. His skin singes against mine, his very naked skin, and every one of my cells detonates from his touch. His rock hard abs, his manhood scraping against my thigh, the rough hair on his legs gliding over mine—I soak it all in. It’s as if Ford’s body is the exact thing mine needed to finally breathe.
“Your brother’s a magician, huh?” I tease, giving his ribs a quick squeeze in the process.
“A lousy magician at that. Vegas vomited him back about six months ago, and now he works for me.”
“As a driver?” I tilt my head, endeared by his blue-collar endeavor. After years of slogging through my father’s expensive boarding schools, then moving to over-privileged Rigby, I’ve grown to yearn for my own people, the working class universe from which I was born and bred. I was nothing but a fake in the world of dollar signs and designer purses. That was Kinsley’s domain, never mine, never Claire’s.
“It’s not important.” He lands his hot mouth in my hair and rolls his face over my scalp. “You’re important.” His fingers glide up my thighs and dig into my hips. “This is important.”
“I bet you say that to all your pointless sex encounters.” I pull back and drill my gaze into his because a part of me is daring him to say it’s not true.
“I say it when I mean it.” His Adam’s apple dives then corks back up. “I promise you, there will be nothing pointless in what we’re about to do.” His fingers slip down my thigh, touch that tender part of me that’s been aching for him all night, and I gasp. “In fact, I’m about to make the first major point of the evening.”
I push his wrist away and back up an inch trying to catch my breath.
Crap. He would’ve had me quivering over his palm by now if I didn’t stop him. I’m right there, teetering on the brink of peak arousal—ready to shake out all over the room with one more wayward glance.
“Admit that this is nothing but a one-night stand, or don’t pass go.” I pin his arms up over his head, and his chest rumbles with a dull laugh. “I want to hear you declare my nothingness with your own lips, or else I might get carried away and explode into tiny pink hearts all over the nice clean walls.” It’s my way of saying I don’t buy into any love-struck fantasies. The human heart was designed in the shape of a fist for a reason.
“Who said anything about a one-night stand?” He shakes his arm loose and reaches past me before holding up a square foil packet. “I plan on keeping you hostage for days.”
“Very funny.” I snatch the foil square from him and flick it across the room. “I’m on the pill.” I lie. The thought of barreling into paradise with a baby in my belly pleases me to no end. I think Claire would get a kick out of it, too—sort of a fleshly memento from this dark, twisted planet.
He falls back on his elbows, and I watch as his features morph from godlike, to angelic, to downright demonic.
“What planet are you from?” I trace out his brows, and my insides quiver. This man drips sex like honey. Hell, he’s sex on a stick with a body designed for pleasure. How the heck did I get so lucky?
“Krypton.” His smile slips right off as he continues to study me in the shadows.
Krypton. I shake my head.
“I’m not calling you Superman if that’s what you’re hinting at. You have to prove yourself to me first.” I tickle his ribs, and he flinches as those dimples embed deep in his cheeks. “Besides, I was sort of hoping for the Hulk. I wouldn’t mind being manhandled a little tonight. I like my men a little rough around the edges, slightly dangerous, and green with envy.”
He belts out a laugh. His eyes skim over my features. His brows narrow with a hint of sadness.
“You do this often?”
“Only on days that end in Y.” There I go, pouring out lies like fish from a bucket.
“I call bullshit.” He leans in and takes a bite of my earlobe. My entire left side erupts in flames.
A dull moan escapes my throat, and he rumbles with a quiet laugh.
“That’s the sound, Stevie. I want to hear that all night long.” His fingers bounce up my thigh, tracking to the curve of my hip before fully cupping my breast. My heart ticks like a bomb. My legs tremble for what’s
to come.
His fingers glide to my nipples, smoothing over them, slow and soft like an erotic feather massage.
I drop my head back and let out a stronger, viral groan. This is electric—something just this side of ecstasy that’s already enlivened every last nerve in my body.
His hand slides back down my belly, straight to that intimate part of me.
“Open your legs,” he says it stern like a command, and my knees part without hesitating. He runs his fingers over my sweet spot, his eyes still fixed on mine. “I want to see if you’re ready for me.” He gives a quick circular sweep with his thumb before slowly inserting two fingers deep inside me, and I’m gone. A strangulating sensation spirals all the way up my body like a hurricane gaining momentum, escaping through my throat by way of a moan.
My eyes clamp shut, my mouth fills with cotton, and, before I know it, Ford has me over his hips, impaling me with that steel scepter of his until it feels as if he’s about to burst through my stomach. A white-hot pain sears through me as my body stretches to accommodate him. I give a hard bounce and feel the pain ricochet through me like a gunshot. I want this to hurt. I want all of my pain to manifest itself physically tonight. I’m so damn tired of bottling it up and saving it for someday.
I swivel my hips over his body, slow and smooth like a belly dancer, rolling my head over my shoulders, from one end to the other until I’m drunk off this newfound madness.
I’ve only slept with two other people. The first time I was drunk at a frat party. I gave my virginity away after a rousing game of beer pong in a room with two other couples engaging in their own carnal depravity. The second time it was with my study partner from Business Law. We were pulling an all-nighter that ended with him grunting over me in the closet so as not to let my roommate in on the action. Pathetic. But this man—Ford, growls beneath me, his fingers hook into my thighs so hard I can already feel the bruises forming beneath him. And I want them. I want all of the scars, all the broken blood vessels, the broken heart he’s willing to give me. This is ecstasy. This is bliss.