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“Hey, hey.” He set aside the mug and turned, tipping up her chin with two fingers. “You told me you weren’t a crier,” he said, cuddling her so close that she felt comple
tely surrounded by him.
“I wasn’t before I met you. I never cried. Never. But now it keeps pouring out of me.” She brushed her wet face over his neck and breathed in his reassuring scents of motor oil and clean male. “You make me feel things I’ve never…I can’t hold them back. You’re too honest. How can I pretend?” She knew she was babbling. Couldn’t stop. “You need to know what you’re dealing with, Sam.”
He only held her tighter. “Tell me.”
“I’m the good-time girl. The one who sleeps with her friends and buys the rounds of beer and springs for extra wings on Saturdays. I don’t fall in love. I don’t know how. And God knows, no one’s ever fallen for me.”
He didn’t say anything and she was glad. Because she had to get this out and if he spoke it would only make it harder. “Sex filled in the holes. It gave me enough of what I needed to get by until the next time. Then I got that first order for your billboard and I laughed at it. Actually laughed. I thought you were a lovesick sap.”
Still nothing. Just his hand moving up and down her back.
“But you kept sending them, and they kept getting more and more personal, like you didn’t care if you ripped your heart out and hung it up on a peg for everyone to see. It was so beautiful and brave and I didn’t even know if I had a heart, never mind know how to share it. If I’d ever had one, it was so scarred over I didn’t think anyone would ever be able to find it. But you did. You found it before we ever even talked that first time.” She jerked back in his arms and stared up into his face, refusing to analyze what she saw there. This wasn’t about him. It was about her coming clean. “My aunt told me I fell in love with you before we ever met,” she whispered, scarcely able to force the words out. “And she was right.”
He looked at her without saying anything for so long that she began to shake. She shouldn’t have told him. It was too soon. She’d ruined everything. God, she’d lost him before they’d even had a chance.
She had to try to take it back, to explain. To somehow make the night light and fun again, without this heavy pressure she’d just set upon him. Telling a man she barely knew that she loved him was madness. It was hormones. She hadn’t had sex in a while and everything was getting all scrambled in her brain. Once she got back outside into the fresh air, she’d realize she was blowing everything out of proportion.
“Sam, I—”
He picked her up so fast that her head snapped back over his arm like a broken doll’s. She clamped an arm around his thick neck and hung on while he toted her back down the hall as if she weighed nothing. Lighter than air. More see-through than the panties and bra set she’d picked out optimistically, just in case.
When he laid her down on a blanket on the living room floor, she was sure he could see every nerve and synapse inside her, firing to life. She’d become transparent to him. And from the look on his tight, strained face, he wanted her that way.
He knelt beside her and reached up to do undo the buttons on his shirt. She didn’t move, hardly even breathed, so afraid she’d do or say something that would make everything stop. Only her restless fingers sifted through the sand just beyond the edge of the blanket. Lots of sand, heaped all around her oasis of terrycloth in the center.
Wait a second. She lifted her hand and scooped the white grains into her fist. “Sam? Where’d you get all this? How—”
“You made me think of the beach the first time I saw you. I could see firelight in your eyes, could smell the toasted marshmallows and the smoke. You were summer and freedom and everything I hadn’t had in so long. Everything I hadn’t allowed myself. I’m going to allow myself tonight.” He tossed his shirt aside and she glimpsed his broad chest in the flickering light from the portable woodstove she’d noticed out of the corner of her eye. “You’re going to be my ocean and I’m going to drown myself in you.”
She moistened her dry lips. He hadn’t answered her question but it didn’t matter. That had officially rendered her speechless.
He reached out to close his big hand around hers, trapping the sand between their fingers while his gaze skipped across her face, his expression almost molten with lust. “I hope you’re ready.”
“Oh yeah, I’m ready.” She slipped out of his grip, scattering sand as she grabbed his wrist and brought his hand between her legs. “And look at that, I even came prepared. One tidal wave, at your service.”
Sam didn’t laugh, just held his fingers lightly against the heart of her while he fumbled open his jeans with his other hand. The jerk of his zipper lowering sounded thunderous over the cheerful music of Jimmy Buffett. Her heart was pounding so fast and loud she was surprised she could even hear it.
He rose to shed his jeans and boxers, yanking them down and kicking them off his legs. Between the shadows created by the fire and the angle he looked positively massive. Especially the part of him that curved so far outward she could almost lean up and take him in her mouth without moving closer.
She swallowed and tried to stop staring at his cock. This was an emotional moment. Surely being so caught up by such relatively trivial things as penis size wasn’t appropriate. But oh God, she couldn’t wait to be laid wide open by him. Because that’s what it would be. He might go slow—and hell, she hoped he did, she’d probably shatter otherwise—but there was no other way to describe what joining with him would be like.
“Your turn,” he murmured.
Her gaze remained glued to his huge, sexy body while she reached up to unbutton her coat. No wonder she was hot. She sat up and he helped draw it off her arms before setting it aside carefully on the arm of the couch. Her V-neck sweater came next, followed by the skirt she wiggled down her thighs and tossed into his waiting hands. When she wore only her lacy bra and panties and her calf boots, he motioned for her to stand.
She shook her head. Her body was still a little too full for firelight. Especially right now, when she’d maxed out her capacity for vulnerability. “I’m good here, thanks.”
“Up,” he instructed, his voice warm and insistent. “You’re on my beach,” he said when she dug her hands into the sand and held her ground.
It made her laugh and also eased her anxiety. She clambered to her feet and stood like a shy virgin on the blanket, feeling oddly and painfully on display. As many of her body issues as she’d laid to rest over the years, some refused to disappear completely. And when a man like Sam was prowling in circles around her, examining every nook and cranny from all angles, they roared back to life.
“You’re incredibly beautiful.” Even the words didn’t have anything on the provocative rasp of his voice. Or, she realized as he came to a stop in front of her, how much harder he’d become during his perusal. He nudged her bra straps down with his fingers and then reached behind her to flick open the clasp, leaving her clutching the cups to hold them up. “So curvy and luscious.”
His eyes bored into hers, not asking, not demanding. Waiting for her to make the next move.
Her throat closed as she spread her arms and let the bra fall on his feet. With his silent, steady approval pushing her on, she lowered her hands to the band of her panties. She tried to tug them down with a sexy flourish but she was shaking again and just getting them off over her boots was difficult enough.
