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Hell, I wanted her, but I couldn’t make a move here. She’d already made it clear I shouldn’t muddy the waters by touching her, and I wasn’t a guy who was going to touch a woman who’d asked him specifically not to. But when she reached between us and took my hand lightly in hers, I swear a fuse in my brain burned right out. She was touching me and that simple touch felt better than any sex I’d ever had in my life. There was something here. Something incredible. I hoped she could feel it.
“Hey,” I breathed, unable to manage much more with the incredible buzz in my mind at the contact of her skin between my fingers. I was slipping into caveman mode, instinct taking over. Did cavemen say, “hey”? Maybe surfer cavemen.
I let my fingers graze gently up her wrist, stepping nearer until we were just inches from one another, each of our chests rising and falling with shallow breaths. Anticipation hung in the air between us, along with a rich fecund scent that reminded me of sweat, sex, and earth. God, I wanted to drop to the ground right here and bury myself in Tess. I wanted to feel that supple body in my hands, beneath me, on top of me, around me. But I needed to move slowly. Let her set the pace.
She was staring up at me, a fierce look in her eyes, a burning dare that I knew I’d take.
I bent my head forward and she closed the distance between us, grazing her lips against mine and then lifting her eyes again. I kissed her softly, mimicking her shy touch, her hesitation. When I pulled back, her eyes were shut, her cheeks glowing with high spots of color, and those petal pink lips were slightly open as she breathed. She was perfect. She was everything.
She tilted her head up more, inviting me back, and I didn’t hesitate this time, dropping my lips to hers again as my arms slid around her perfect body. I devoured her then. I should have been gentle, tentative. I should have waited for her to take the lead, to tell me this was all right, that this was what she wanted. But I didn’t wait. I didn’t ask, and her answer came in her actions, not in her words. I teased those lips open with my tongue and crushed her body against me, felt her panting breaths as she came alive beneath my lips, my hands. Every part of me was straining to get closer to her, and when she ground her hips into the aching swell in my pants I nearly lost it.
After a few moments—a few hours?—I broke it off, pausing to pull myself back together.
My head was spinning with desire, my hands possessively sunk into her body, caging her to me. I released her, running a hand through my hair, suddenly nervous as Tess just stood there, regarding me as she gasped for breath, making those glorious breasts beg for my attention.
And then she attacked me.
Chapter Twelve
Tess
Chalk it up to a long-unplanned celibacy, or life with Gran. Call it overexposure to sunscreen and bug spray. We can call it whatever we want, but the plain simple truth was that I had a movie star kissing me like he’d never get enough of me and I wasn’t about to push him away just because it made no damned sense at all. I’d figure that out later. But for now, desire was ricocheting around inside my body and Ryan McDonnell was pressed up against me—all hard and firm and muscled—and I never wanted it to end.
Maybe this was nothing but pretend to Juliet, but it felt a hell of a lot like heaven to me.
Ryan’s hands were all over me, massaging my back, gripping my ass, fisting my hair. He trailed kisses over my jaw, nibbling at my neck and making me gasp and wrap myself around him, trying to get closer and needing friction, needing something I couldn’t even define.
I pressed myself hard into him, feeling his erection at my center and gasping without meaning to—it was heady knowing I’d caused that. And ‘that’ was impressive, I was pretty certain. Unless he had a flashlight in his pants, and I didn’t think he did.
After a few moments, I stepped back, trying to catch my breath.
Ryan did the same, rubbing a hand through his now very mussed hair, a slow sexy smile spreading over his lips. My heart leapt into my mouth as I looked at him, my brain attempting to process that I’d just been kissing Ryan McDonnell. Who was not, I reminded myself, Juliet’s boyfriend.
It was a lot to wrap my head around.
“That was better than a Sasquatch sighting,” he said, as I moved back to his side and took his hand, heading for the lighthouse out on the beach.
“Really?” I asked, feeling a little shy suddenly, even though my heart was bobbing around excitedly inside me. I kissed Ryan McDonnell. I was holding his hand. Was this actually my life?
“Way better.” He bumped my shoulder lightly as we walked. “I’d still like to see him though.”
The packed dirt trail beneath our feet turned to sand as we walked, holding hands, meandering.
The wide swath of beach that curved around the southern tip of Maryland’s peninsula jutted into the water where the Potomac met the Chesapeake. Ryan plopped down in the sand, grinning up at me as he took off his shoes and then nodded for me to do the same as he stood back up. I did, rolling my jeans up to my knees, and then we stepped together into the cool water lapping at the edge of the beach.
“Look at that,” he said, looking out to the east. “It just goes on forever, doesn’t it?”
I bit my lip, unsure whether he needed correcting. Today didn’t seem to be about teaching Ryan Maryland’s geography, but I couldn’t help it. “Well, it goes until it hits the eastern shore, so I guess it depends on your definition of forever.” I lifted a hand to turn his chin to point southward instead of east. “There, look that way. That pretty much goes on forever.”
“Geography was not my strong suit in school.”
“What was?” I wanted to know more about him. I knew what the magazines wrote, I knew him as the hero I’d seen in the theaters, but I didn’t know much about the real guy besides what he’d told me today.
He took my hand and threaded his fingers through mine, the warmth of his palm soaking into my skin and contrasting with the coolness of the water swirling around my ankles. “School was not my strong suit in school,” he said. There was a low sadness in his voice that made me look up into his face. Given what little he’d told me about his childhood and his father’s work, I had the sense he might have had other things to worry about besides homework and classes.
“Switching schools a lot is hard, I bet,” I offered. I was speaking from experience. I’d had to switch after my parents died.
I couldn’t see his eyes because we were both wearing sunglasses against the glare of the sun reflecting off the water all around us, but I could guess at the sad acceptance they might hold. He nodded and then moved closer to me, his body pulling me like a magnet. His arms slid around my waist, and he pulled me into him, one hand coming up to cradle the back of my neck and the other staying low, holding me near. “How is it that you fit me so perfectly?” he asked, in a low whisper that made it seem like a rhetorical question.
