Chapter 10
Callie nodded off almost as soon as her head hit the pillow. But not Noah. He lay beside her, thinking about what she’d said in the hospital, all the ways she could be hurting and no one else would ever know. He thought about the last time he’d seen her in a hospital bed, the tubes and the beeping machines and the helplessness knowing there was nothing he could do. Knowing that it might have been his fault she was there in the first place.Just like tonight.
He didn’t want to think about her being in pain. Instead, he shifted his attention to the way the hair around her face fluttered with each of her sleepy exhalations. He couldn’t look away—except, of course, when his eyes traced her curves beneath the blanket. Lying beside her and not touching her was a special kind of torture. So when, in her antihistamine-fueled sleep, she exhaled a little whimper and tucked herself against his side, her hand pressing to his chest, it was more than he could take.
He slipped from their bed and, after pulling on a pair of gym shorts, went down to the first floor of the hotel to walk off the need pounding through his veins.Just lust, he told himself.She’s a beautiful woman half naked in your bed. It’s just lust.
He swiped a few sheets of paper and a pen from the front desk and took them out to the back patio overlooking the lawn and leading down to the ocean. The moon was bright, making it easy to see even at that late hour. He drew a deep breath of the muggy August air and repeated his lie to himself as he sketched a quick music staff and began jotting the notes that had been playing on repeat in his head all night. He hummed it back to himself, crossed out a note here and there and wrote in the corrections until he had it exactly the way Callie had hummed it in the car.
But he didn’t stop there. His pen flew over the paper, marking accents and appoggiaturas, scribbling in a figured bass line. He wrote until he ran out of paper, until every bittersweet note she’d devised had been recorded and highlighted to its fullest. He wrote as he hadn’t written in years, like the music was inevitable, irrepressible. When he was done, he took his new score into the restaurant and played it on the baby grand piano, adjusting bits of the accompaniment as he felt the music flow through him. As the last notes floated through the air, he hung his head in his hands, frustrated that putting the music on paper hadn’t purged it from his mind.
By the time he returned to their room, the sun was almost up. He slipped back into bed beside Callie. This time, when she pressed herself against him as she slept, he wrapped his arm around her and let his head rest in the curve of her shoulder, his face turned into her neck. That was how he finally drifted off to sleep, cradling Callie in his arms with her song playing through his mind.
He woke up alone.
It was mid-morning, the sun streaming through the window a too-bright rebuke for sleeping half the day away. Callie was gone, likely down on the beach with his sister and their friends. Noah was in no rush to get up, pressing his face into her pillow and inhaling her citrus and rain scent.What the fuck am I doing?he thought with a groan, the scent making him instantly hard. He forced himself from the sheets that smelled like her and into the bathroom. But the bathroom smelled of her, too, and it was too much.
He flipped the lock on the bathroom door in case she should come back to the room and climbed into the ridiculously large shower. The floor was covered in river rock, the walls giant slabs of marble only interrupted by the multiple shower heads placed throughout the enclosure. The warm water slid over him and kicked up the residual scent of her body wash. He thought of her standing in that same spot earlier that morning, the water splashing over her curves, between her breasts. It was too much to ask for a man to be unaffected by that image. If he gave in to the fantasy of it, maybe then it would be easier to remember that none of this was real.
He took himself in hand, his fist sliding over his engorged shaft. He moved slowly at first, up and down from root to tip, squeezing as he neared the swollen head of his cock, and he imagined it was her. Her hand wrapped around his length, working him slowly, methodically. He thought of the way the water would flow over her breasts, how it would gather in the curls at the apex of her thighs. And then all he could think about was that secret place between her legs, the soft heat that waited there and would feel so good wrapped around his cock. The way her pussy would welcome him in, and how she’d rock her hips faster, begging him with her body to make the ache in her core go away.
His strokes quickened, growing rougher with each pass as the beginnings of his climax gathered at the base of his spine. He pictured how her pussy would look stretched around him as he fucked her, and how she’d writhe when he pressed fast circles to the swollen bud of her clit. He’d make her come at least twice before he let himself go, would want to feel her body grip his before he’d give himself over to the immense pleasure of being inside her.
Noah’s breath caught in his chest and he slammed his hand against the wall of the shower, his orgasm ripping through him with the image of Callie’s lips parted in her own climax and the scent of her hair all around him. Streams of cum shot from his cock, mingling with the water and washing down the drain, again and again, robbing him of his breath. He imagined filling her, watching his release spill out around himself as he pumped into her and she begged for more.
In his dreams, she always begged for more.
When it was over, he washed his hands and his hair, made sure the shower was spotless, just as he always did. Just as he’d done every time he’d given in to the thoughts of Callie that had plagued him for the last six years. And, as he’d done every time before, he promised himself it would be the last time. But this time, he knew he was lying.
Chapter 11
Liv loved a beach day more than anyone Callie had ever met. As teenagers, Callie had tolerated the occasional long weekend in Sag Harbor at her father and stepmother’s house only because Liv would go with her and they’d spend the entire day lying out in the sun. Well, Liv would. After a day on the beach, Liv’s skin turned a golden bronze, her hair taking on honeyed highlights. But after only an hour or two, Callie’s porcelain skin burned bright red. Boiled lobster red. And, unlike the handful of times when Liv’s tan had edged into burn territory, Callie’s skin didn’t settle into a beachy glow after—it just went right back to porcelain. Which was the cosmetic industry’s polite way of saying pale. But Liv came alive when the waves crashed around her, so Callie hadn’t been surprised when Liv scheduled a beach day smack in the middle of her wedding week extravaganza.
The expansive lawn of The Barclay sloped down to a rocky stretch of ground covered in flat stones smoothed by centuries of waves, before the rocks finally gave way to the sandy shoreline. That morning, after once again carefully extricating herself from Noah’s sleeping embrace, Callie had taken her beach bag and met the rest of their party under a cabana on the private beach. Liv and Daemon were already looking sickeningly adorable sharing a lounger with their toes in the sand.
“How’re you feeling today?” Liv asked as Callie settled herself on a lounger under the cabana.
“Good as new.”
“I’m sorry Noah dragged you to the ER.”
Callie waved off the concern with a flick of her wrist. “That’s just Noah. Overbearing as always.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t know about your allergy.”
“It just never came up before,” Callie said, avoiding Liv’s eyes.
She and Noah would need to spend some time getting on the same page if they wanted to avoid raising suspicion any further. Her mother had already intimated over breakfast that she saw Noah’s lack of awareness of Callie’s allergy as a sign that he wasn’t as committed to their relationship as she thought he should be. If her mother didn’t believe Noah was in it for the long haul, she’d never move to Ohio.
Liv sat up, bracing herself with a hand on Daemon’s chest. His hand closed over hers, his thumb sweeping back and forth over the skin just below where Liv’s engagement ring sparkled. Callie’s eyes were drawn to the movement and something uncomfortably like envy twisted in her gut.
“Hey, Cal,” Liv said with a mischievous smile. “Daemon’s never had his cards read.”
Daemon groaned at the exact same time Callie gasped. How had this man been dating her best friend for so long and she hadn’t read his cards yet?
Liv continued, “Aside from when you read my cards that one time—”
“That I told you about,” Callie interjected.
