Then she’s kissing me, pressing hot, openmouthed kisses along my shoulders and upper back. I shudder even as I lean back into her, tilting my head to the side to give her better access. She takes the hint, licking and sucking her way up my neck—and can I say, again, how cool it is to have a woman as tall as Sage is, who can so easily reach all these spots on me—before sliding back down to my shoulder and kissing along the lines of the compass I have tattooed there.
Tenderness merges with the fire, the first stirrings of something more—something important—blending with the need that is a near constant burn inside of me until I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. It’s a cacophony of sounds jolting around inside of me, of feelings—so many feelings that I don’t know what to do with them all. Which is why, when Sage tries to step back, tries to turn me gently around, I grab her instead.
I pull her between me and the side of the pool.
Press her up against the wall.
And then I devour her.
My mouth slams down onto hers in an act that is as much a battle as it is a kiss. Lips, teeth, tongues. Biting, sucking, licking, taking, giving. I want to take from her, want to take everything she has inside of her, but I want to give her just as much. I want to give her everything that’s in me and that’s something I’ve never felt before. Never wanted before.
It scares me even as it entices me. Even as it makes me hold her closer, kiss her harder, take more and more and more.
My hands are in her hair now, pulling hard enough to have her gasping as I yank her head back so that I can go for her throat.
“Shawn!” she cries out my name, her body arching against mine as I ravage her neck, the hollow of her throat, the sharpness of her collarbone. I suck bruises into the delicate skin again and again and again, loving the darkness of them in the light from the pool. Loving that they’re there and that they’ll be there for days. A reminder of this night. A reminder of all the things I’ve begun to feel for her and that I want her to feel for me.
I move lower, sucking my way across her breasts to her hard little nipples. She cries out as soon as I pull one into my mouth, reaches down and cups my ass in her hands. Squeezes. Pulls me forward until my dick is lined up with her sex.
It would be so easy to plunge inside her now, so easy to take her right here, right now, need rampaging through me like a wild animal. I think about it, imagine it as I continue to kiss and suck and lick my way across her breasts, her nipples.
But Sage pulls away before I can slide home, ducks under the water. I reach for her, but she shrugs off my hands as she powers deeper into the water. And then, just as my hands close around her upper arms, she wraps her lips around me and sucks me deep into her mouth.
It’s a strange sensation, but an amazing one. Being surrounded by her hot mouth and the cool water all at the same time—it’s crazy how good it feels. Crazy how fast it ramps me up. And even though I try to be gentle, I can’t stop myself from thrusting my hips forward until she’s taking all of me deep into her mouth and down her throat.
Her hands clench on my ass as I pull back and thrust again, but she doesn’t try to control the rhythm. Instead she lets me fuck her mouth for more than a minute before she surfaces, gasping for air. She shoots me a wicked grin, pauses to take a few breaths before starting to duck back down.
But I’m too close. If she puts her mouth on me again, I’m going to go off long before she does.
So I grab her by the waist instead, lift her up and all but throw her onto the side of the pool in front of me. She sits there on the edge, stunned and naked and so fucking hot I can barely breathe as I look at her.
Our eyes meet and for long seconds I get lost in the swirling green depths of her. In the emotion there she’s trying so hard to hide.
But then she moves, her hips sliding restlessly against the patio, and her obvious impatience is more than I can take. I yank her legs out of the water, drape them over my shoulders. And then I dive in, burying my face between her thighs and my tongue deep inside her pussy.
She lets out a strangled scream at the first touch of my mouth on her sex, and though my neighbors aren’t close, sound carries out here near the ocean. Instinctively, I clamp my hand over her mouth to muffle the sounds she’s making. I love them, but they’re for me. No one else needs to hear how beautiful Sage sounds as she falls apart.
She responds by moaning low in her throat and then biting down on my palm, hard. The little shock of pain only makes the need greater and when she sucks two of my fingers into her mouth, I nearly come before I even think about getting inside her.
Forcing down my own need for just a little while longer, I concentrate on Sage instead. I circle her clit with my tongue hard enough to have her moaning into my hand, and then—with my free hand—I pinch her nipple at the same time I shove my tongue deep inside of her again.
She goes off like the Fourth of July, her pussy clenching around my tongue, her hips thrusting against my face, her teeth biting into my hand as she comes and comes and comes.
The second she’s done, though, she yanks away from my hands. She pushes herself off the side of the pool, and slides straight into the water—and straight down onto my dick.
She grabs my head in her hands, yanks my face to hers. “Fuck me,” she tells me as she licks her way into my mouth.
I don’t have to be asked twice.
My fingers dig into her hips as I thrust against her, lifting and lowering her onto my cock. Her legs are wrapped around my waist, her hard nipples flush against my chest, her teeth biting into my lower lip.
My head’s a mess, all kinds of thoughts and feelings racing around inside of it. Inside of me. But that only makes holding her, kissing her, fucking her even better.
I keep pumping into her, loving the feel of the cool water lapping against my back as her hot pussy clenches around my dick again and again and again. Nothing has ever felt this good.
My head is spinning, my muscles clenching, that spot at the base of my spine telling me I’m close, so fucking close. The only thing keeping me in check is a desperate need to make her come again—to know that, at least in this, she’s feeling the same things that I am.
I slide a hand between us, move it over the gentle swells of her breasts and down the flat plane of her stomach. I move lower still, until I’m touching where we’re joined, stroking the lips of her sex with my fingers even as I brush my thumb over and around her clit in a continuous motion that has her screaming my name. This time I don’t even try to stop her.
Instead, I just hang on for the ride as she rips her mouth from mine, kissing and sucking her way across my jaw and down my throat with a desperation I know is going to leave bruises in the morning. Which I am so totally okay with.
“Fuck, baby, you feel so good,” I tell her as I slam into her again and again, taking her higher. Taking myself higher. Scaling walls with my body that, so far, she won’t let me scale any other way. “I need you so bad. I need—”
I break off as her teeth sink into the muscle at the top of my good shoulder, and it’s my turn to go off, my body slipping the tight leash of control I’ve kept on it and erupting in an orgasm so powerful that I feel it in every nerve ending in my body.
My release triggers hers, and then she’s coming, too, calling out my name as her pussy clenches around my dick in a rhythm that empties me out even as it makes my eyes cross and my heart stop.
When it’s over, when I can think and breathe and—finally—move again, I lift her gingerly onto the side of the pool. I swing myself out, and gather her into my arms before heading back through the foliage to my townhouse. I leave our clothes by the side of the pool, not wanting to let go of her for a second. From the way she wraps her arms around my neck and burrows into my chest, I figure she feels exactly the same way.
Chapter 18
Sage
“I am so screwed.” It takes every ounce of self-control I have not to bang my head over and over again on the edge of the table at my favorite coffeehouse. “I can’t believe I was this stupid, can’t believe—”
“Stop being so dramatic,” Emerson tells me with a roll of her eyes. “Don’t you know by now that’s my job? You’re fine. Everything will be fine.”
“Fine?” I stare at her incredulously. “Tell me, please, how things will ever be fine again. I’m stuck managing a yoga studio I have absolutely no interest in, my mother just gave her life savings to some dude running an ashram on the other side of the world and, worst of all, I’m stupid enough to be falling for a total baller—”
“ ‘A total baller’?” My BFF chokes on her coffee.
“Excuse me.” I narrow my eyes at her in warning. “A professional football player. Is that better?”
“So much better,” she says as she wipes up the sip of coffee she just spewed halfway across the table. “And can I ask that you never use the term ‘baller’ again? Hearing that word come out of your mouth just blew my mind wide open.”
“I don’t know why. Shawn’s a total—”
“Don’t say it!” She holds a hand up. “I really don’t think that term means what you think it does.”
“I know exactly what it means.” It’s my turn to roll my eyes. “Is man-whore who plays football a more acceptable term? Because that’s what Shawn is. And he’s not just your run-of-the-mill man-whore, either. He’s like the most whorish of the man-whores. The king of the man-whores. The—”
“Okay, I get it. He fucks around. Almost all of them do. But you also need to remember that only about one-fourth of what gets published about these guys is actually true.”
“If one-fourth of what’s been published about Shawn is actually true than it’s even worse than I thought.” I channel my mother for a minute and drape myself very dramatically across my half of the table. “I mean, it’s not like I didn’t go into this with my eyes wide open. He fucked me in the back of the bar the first night we met.”
“Which was totally out of character for you—”
“Totally.”
She takes another sip of her coffee, watches me over the rim of her cup. “Have you ever thought that maybe it was out of character for him, too?”
I just look at her, eyebrows raised. “I remember what you and Hunter did that time you were house hunting. Are you trying to tell me it’s out of character for any of these guys?”
I watch as Emerson’s cheeks turn bright red. One of the joys of having a redhead as a best friend—right next to watching the towering temper erupt at various unexpected moments—is how easy it is to make her blush. “Those were extenuating circumstances!”
“Of course they were. Just like the parking lot and the beach and the—”
“Okay, I get your point. But I think you’re missing the fact that all the sex that Hunter’s been having in unusual places has been with me. He might have been a total baller”—she grins as she uses the word—“at one time, but now he’s a totally devoted guy. That has to count for something when you think about Shawn.”
“Yeah, well, that’s Hunter. Shawn’s a total adrenaline junkie. He’ll never be satisfied with just me. The most excitement I’ve got in my life is when I actually manage to balance my mother’s books.”
“Has it ever occurred to you that maybe you’re selling yourself and Shawn short?” She puts her coffee down and reaches for my hand. “And that maybe you should talk to him about all these things you’re feeling?”
Just the thought has the butterflies in my stomach turning into vultures. “I don’t think we’re at that stage yet—”
“You’re totally at that stage, otherwise you wouldn’t be sitting here agonizing—”
“Agonizing seems kind of dramatic—”
“Agonizing,” she repeats with a shut-the-fuck-up look, “over the fact that you’re in love with him and you don’t know if he’s in love with you.”
“Hey, wait a minute. I never said I was in love with him.”
“You didn’t have to. The fact that we’re even having this conversation means you’re serious about him, whether you want to be or not. When it comes to your feelings, you’re not exactly a big talker, Sage. Not with me and certainly not with the guy in your life.”
“Words don’t mean shit, Em. My mom can emote with the best of them. She’s all the love, all the time, but what has all that love gotten me?”
“Your mom is an extreme case, and you know it. She follows her own path—”
“Now you sound just like her!”
“Hey!” This time the color in Emerson’s cheeks is from insult, not embarrassment. “Low blow, there.”
“I’m just saying. She can talk a better game than anyone I know. Words don’t mean shit. Actions are what matters, and Shawn hasn’t done anything to show me that he wants anything but a good time.” Even as I say it, I think about the dinner he made for me at his house. About the sex, both tender and fierce. About the questions he asked and the way I kept dodging them because I’m shit at opening up when it matters.
Hell, I’m shit at opening up when it doesn’t matter.
I hate being vulnerable, hate putting myself out there. Lessons learned in childhood and all that. How many times when I was young did I allow myself to grow attached to someone or something just to have it yanked away from me with no notice or concern? It started with that damned aardvark when I was six and it didn’t stop until I learned not to get attached to anyone or anything. It’s so much easier that way—easier to leave and easier to be left.
“I still think you should talk to him. Tell him what you’re thinking. Figure out what he’s thinking. Then you’ll know if you’re screwed or if you’re both jumping off the cliff together.”
“I think you have me confused with Shawn. I don’t jump off cliffs. Ever.”
Emerson quirks a brow at me. “Maybe it’s time you start.”
“So I can hurt my back and run the risk of screwing up my career, too?” I ask dryly.
She just shakes her head before finishing the last of her coffee. “You know, Sage, it’s that cockeyed optimism of yours that makes me love you so much.”
I flip her off, then grab my own empty cup and head for the nearest trashcan. Emerson follows without saying anything else—at least until we get to our cars.
“Hunter and I are taking the kids out on the boat this weekend. You and Shawn should come.”
“So you can try to force me into having a conversation with him I have no intention of having?”
“So Hunter and I can see how he is with you. I’ve gotten to know Shawn pretty well in the last year and Hunter knows him better than almost anybody. If he’s just fooling around, having a good time, we’ll know. And if he’s not—”
“He is.”
“If he’s not,” she reiterates, “we’ll know that, too. And then you can stop freaking out and just enjoy the fall.”
I look at her like she’s crazy. “Who the fuck actually enjoys falling?”
In my mind, the whole thing is terrifying, not knowing when or how hard you’re going to hit the ground but knowing that the very laws of gravity ensure that eventually you will.
“There are worse things in the world than falling in love,” Emerson tells me as she clicks the key fob for her brand new Mercedes SUV—courtesy of the commission she got when she sold Shawn his house last year.
“I know.” Like nuclear war or a double root canal.
As if she knows what I’m thinking, Emerson pulls me in for a hug and whispers, “Sometimes the reward outweighs the risk.”
I think of Shawn’s body battered all to hell from nearly falling off that cliff.
Of his dislocated shoulder from actually jumping off the cliff in Mexico. br />
Of the million times my mom packed us up in the middle of the night when her latest scheme went wrong.
I don’t say any of that to Emerson, though. I just hug her tight.
“I’m serious,” she tells me when she pulls away. “About the boat and the fall. We leave the marina at nine o’clock Sunday morning.” She pokes me in the arm. “I expect you to be there.”
“I have a class—”
“No, you don’t. I already called the studio and checked your schedule.” She climbs in her car. “Nine A.M., Sage. Slip number two thirty-seven.”
I want to argue more, but she’s closing the door and driving away.
I reach into my purse and pull out my phone to text her, but something stops me. A little voice deep inside of me whispering that maybe, just maybe, Emerson’s right. Not about jumping off a cliff—I’m a long, long way from that.
But maybe I could try sticking a couple toes in the water, just to see what happens. Worst-case scenario, I lose the toes. Which isn’t ideal, I admit, but a woman can live without her toes.
Her heart, not so much.
Chapter 19
Shawn
Sage’s eyes go wide as I pull into the parking lot at Belmont Park.
“This?” she asks. “This is where you’re taking me for our date?”
“What did you expect?” I comb the back of the packed lot for a spot, and end up lucking out when someone pulls out right in front of us. “Five-star restaurants are so cliché.”
“I didn’t expect five stars, no,” she says with a grin. “But an actual restaurant, yes. I did expect that.”
“There are restaurants here.” I climb out of the car and then book it to the other side to open Sage’s door for her. If I’ve learned anything about this woman since that night in the bar, it’s that she isn’t the type to wait around for a guy to do anything for her.
Which, in turn, only makes me more determined to do whatever I can get away with.