AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She made a show of looking out over the ocean, likely because she was afraid she’d break if she looked my way.
I waited it out. Let her think this through.
“It’s nothing big,” she said, at last. “I’m crying because I feel a little – I don’t know. I was with a guy who made me feel less than what I was? Maybe that’s not fair.”
“Why?”
She worried that luscious bottom lip with her teeth. “Because I’ve always been a little insecure. Least attractive quality ever, I know.”
“What did this guy do that made you feel this way?”
Hazel gave a small laugh and I squeezed her, afforded her some strength. “Well, for starters, he broke up with me the minute we arrived here. Just told me there was someone else and it was time for us to move on because things hadn’t been working out for either of us.” Another smile, and thankfully, tearless – I didn’t like that she was hurting or that another man had touched her in the first place. “Funny thing is, I thought everything was fine, ya know, apart from the fact that he wouldn’t introduce me to anyone. We have the same friends but I’ve never even met his family.”
“Wow,” I said and kissed her shoulder. “I’m sorry about that, Hazel. You deserve better.”
“Do I?” She looked at me at last. Christ, she was beautiful. Her blond curls danced with the breeze, eyes the color of a clouded sky. “I don’t know that I do. I mean, clearly he thought he deserved better than me.”
“Hazel.”
“Seriously,” she continued. “I could be an axe murderer or something. You don’t even know me.”
“Ten bucks says you can’t even wield an axe,” I replied.
“And you can? What are you, the lumberjack stripper?” A smile lifted the corners of her lips, and the overwhelming urge to kiss her swam through my gut. Or was it my dick?
I couldn’t bear to break her illusion of me. Maybe she needed to think I was a stripper to make sense of this.
The sooner I told her the truth, the sooner the illusion would shatter. The mystery would be gone. The romance with it.
“You’d be surprised. There’s a lot of things I know how to do,” I said, after a minute.
“Oh, yeah? Like what?”
Like steal cars, get clean, build billionaire dollar businesses. Like avoid complicated emotions. “You sure you want to know?” I asked. “I can show you, right now. Right here.”
She chewed her bottom lip. “What is it?”
I grinned at her innocence, then rose from the rock, hopped down and turned, offering her a hand. “Come on,” I said.
“Where are we going?”
“Nowhere. Right here. To paradise.” She took my hand and I helped her down, then pressed her against my chest. Slowly, I swayed from side to side and turned in circles.
Her bare feet, toenails painted as pink as her lips, crossed the sand. She mis-stepped a couple times.
I spun her around on the spot, dipped her and lifted her upright again.
“Oh, my gosh,” she said. “Dancing. I love dancing. I mean, I can’t dance, but I love it.”
I laughed, low in my throat, and swung her closer, held her flush against my loose cotton shirt. “It’s all rhythm. The moves don’t matter that much.”
“See? That’s my problem. No rhythm. Two left feet.” She separated from me and pointed down at her wriggling toes.
I drew her back into my embrace again. “I’ll teach you,” I said, then slid my hands down the cotton back of her dress and rested them on her ass. “Rhythm starts in the soul, and it shows in the hips.”
Her breath hitched in her chest. “That’s not my soul. Or my hips.”
“Move with me,” I said and wound my hips in a slow circle, a trick I’d picked up in Cuba. I’d traveled a lot over the past ten years, one country to another, and in between meetings I’d fully appreciated the culture of each place I’d visited. “Just like that. Press your body into mine.”
The breeze wasn’t cool enough for us. Tension and heat swam in the tiny spaces separating our bodies.
“That’s right,” I said.
Her nipples puckered beneath the cotton. I admired them, then her, and the slack-jawed expression she bore, looking down at the space between us where my throbbing erection, trapped beneath chinos, rubbed against the front of her dress.
“Wow,” she whispered.
Wow is fucking right. “You’re doing great,” I said.
She looked up at me, then, and slung her arms around my neck. “Who are you, really?”
“Does it matter?” I asked. Maybe it does. Maybe it should matter. Christ, one night and I want to tell this chick my entire life story. Too soppy. I can think of way better uses for our time together. “All that matters now is this moment, Hazel. How do you feel?”
She pouted a little, and I squeezed her ass, encouraging her to grind on. Grind right up against me, drive me through the fucking roof with that winding movement.
