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I never thought I’d see my mother fall in love with my boyfriend’s—friend? Neighbor?—father. Perhaps that was just my crap luck.
“Sure,” I murmured, putting all of that aside to deal with the current emergency. “Isn’t it a little late in the season to be getting a storm like this?”
Dec waved his hand for me to follow him as he went into the garage to peruse the supplies Maeve had stored there. “Hurricane season goes through the end of November. This one isn’t slated to be bad though. Might even just be a tropical storm, but you never want to underestimate Mother Nature and find out you were wrong.”
He handed me flashlights and a pack of batteries. He held on to the hand-crank radio and checked the stack of water bottle pallets. “Plenty of water and I know she kept frozen water bricks in her freezer. You didn’t remove those, right?”
“No. Although we did drink some of the water bottles.”
Dec ushered me back in the house. “That’s fine. She had plenty and I have more at my place. If the power goes out for any length of time, we’ll want light, clean water, and plenty of nonperishable food.”
I was officially freaked out. I put the flashlights and batteries on the kitchen counter and spun back around to Dec. “I’m scared,” I said simply.
The next moment I was in his arms, the steady beat of his heart below my ear. “I’ll keep you safe, I promise. If I thought this one would be bad, I would have already evacuated all of us.”
Mom, having gotten over her fear rather quickly with Daniel’s arrival, broke out a bottle of wine and Dec moved us all into the living room for a rousing game of Go Fish on the floor. As the evening went on, the wind began to howl and the rain pelted the roof and windows, but there were no clatters of objects hitting the house. It got late and still the power hadn’t gone out. Mom and Daniel went to her room to sleep the storm away. If anything else was happening in her bedroom, I didn’t want to know about it.
Dec turned all the lights out except for one, casting the room in a soft yellow glow. He got a gleam in his eye that automatically allayed some of my fears. “Have you ever built a blanket fort?”
I shook my head and he pretended to be appalled. Gone was the stranger of the last few weeks. Dec was back to being charming, warm, and someone who knew me almost as well as Liz. He held out his hand and helped me to stand. We used every last blanket in the house to make a fort in the expansive living room, chairs, couches, and lamps making the walls. We had to crawl inside the fort at the flap between blankets, but once there, the place was small and intimate and perfect for blocking out everything happening outside. Dec pulled me into his arms, my back to his front, as we lay inside the blanket fort, propped up by pillows. His thumb brushed back and forth across my wrist, a metronome of comfort.
“My dad used to build these with me when I got scared as a little kid,” Dec said quietly. “Sometimes I wish I could still build them.”
I raised my gaze to the blanket ceiling. “You clearly still can.”
He squeezed my waist tighter. “I just mean I wish I could have that same level of complete comfort again. That feeling like the outside world can’t touch you here.”
I turned, his hand now on my lower back where my shirt had pulled up. I curled my arms around his neck, living for every twitch of his fingers against my skin. “What is it you fear, Dec Boggs?”
His dark eyes burned as hot as the lamp in the corner. “You. This. Us.”
“I won’t hurt you.” I wouldn’t. After all the damage Justin had done to my heart, I would rather face that damn gator again than hurt someone I loved. And I thought I did love Dec. Not as a friend as I’d been trying to convince myself these last few weeks.
“That’s not what I fear, sunshine.” He leaned into me, his face burying in my neck, his lips plucking the tender skin there as he spoke. “I worry I’ll hurt you and you’ve been through enough.”
But that was just it. I’d learned this summer that I was much stronger than I gave myself credit for. My life had changed in every way and yet here I was, thriving, happy, making plans for the future. It was time to be a big girl and ask for what I wanted.
“You can only hurt me if you keep pushing me away.”
Dec pulled back enough to stare into my eyes. I held his gaze, determined to make him see that I was stronger now. I was ready for whatever came from us giving this thing between us a true try.
His lips came down on mine, soft at first, always so careful before the heat between us blazed out of control. His hand slid into my hair, tilting my head exactly where he wanted me, our bodies plastered together. Light shot behind my closed eyelids and Dec hesitated. I blinked open my eyes to see that it was pitch black in the blanket fort.
“Power’s out,” he mumbled.
I pulled on his head and rolled to my back. “What will we do to pass the time?” I asked innocently, rubbing my hips against the obvious answer in his shorts.
He chuckled, the sound a vibration that made me shiver. We slid out of our clothes, still kissing as often and as long as possible, careful to keep our voices down.
“I don’t…”
I sealed my lips to his and wrapped my legs around his hips. “I’m on birth control,” I managed to say.
The man didn’t waste any time. The head of him was right there, and with a quick thrust of his hips and a growl from his mouth, we were joined. I groaned, my head falling back at the sense of delicious fullness. His lips kissed down my throat and to my breasts, praises spoken against my flesh as he went. God, I’d missed him. Missed this. Missed this feeling of being connected to someone so intimately that for a short period of time we were one and the same. He moved, I followed. He gave and I received. The storm howled outside, a nonevent for us as we made our own heat in this blanket fort where nothing could harm us.
Dec pushed onto his arms and knees, looking down at us in the almost complete darkness. His hands pushed on my knees, opening them wider. “I wish I could see every inch of you. See you spread out like this for me. God, Kenna, I’m crazy for you.” He pulled almost all the way out and thrust back in, both of us groaning. “Can’t stop thinking about you. You’ve taken over my brain.”
I grinned, but he couldn’t see it as he was staring down at where we were connected. Ultimately I wanted his heart, but for now, I’d take his brain. “Quit ignoring me and maybe you won’t be so obsessed.”
