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He barely noticed what they were served. He had no conversation for the other guests at the table. He suffered through the speeches, toasts to the future Mr. and Mrs. Alex Astor. He was ready to whisk Fin back to the pool house when the band started up.
“Dance with me,” she said.
All night, if that’s what she wanted. They were one of the first couples onto the dance floor. The music was smooth, the singer crooning Train’s “Marry Me,” and the mood was pure unadulterated romance because the woman in his arms was his triple threat—captivating, smart, funny, and the night was brilliant with possibility.
“You can dance the old-fashioned way.” Fin was delightfully shocked.
“I have a lot of tricks up my sleeve.”
With Fin smiling up at him, he felt a kind of powerful weightlessness, a separateness from the world and its chicanery, a closeness that felt like a healing wound. A return to health after a long illness.
He hugged her closer than the dance demanded. His head was full of nonsense. It was the singer’s voice, the poetry of John Legend’s “All of Me,” the sensation of Fin in his arms. He hadn’t known it was possible to feel so burned through with light and seared with happiness.
She touched his cheek. “What are you thinking? You have the strangest expression.”
“That as much as I love dancing with you I’d love being alone with you more.”
She wanted one more song and then one more, and it was no hardship to oblige, and when they finally left the dance floor and the party, it was to stop on the lawn for the fireworks.
With rockets squealing and pink starbursts streaking across the sky, he put a hand to the column of her neck and his nose into her silky hair. She watched the sparkles, and he watched her, letting his fingers trail down her back, flattening his palm under her waist, cuing her to a whole new language of love they’d finally make together.
Chapter Nineteen
Under the starlight and firework sprinkles, Cal’s touch felt different. Fin had learned to distinguish between his professional cues, firm but glancing, and his affectionate touches, which were gentle, lingering, and assertively possessive. But since Beacon, the way his hands moved over her body when they were in public had changed. It was as if he couldn’t stand not to have physical contact with her; as if he craved it.
When he wrapped his hand around the back of her neck and stroked down her spine, he made her tremble. When he rested his hand in the small of her back and whispered his desire in her ear, she felt invincible.
She leaned into his body while an orange and silver flower exploded overhead. It opened from a pinpoint of light, wider, wider, expanding fast at the center, slow at the farthest edges until it froze in momentary perfection before falling in a shower of winking sparks.
“Ah, that was lovely,” she breathed as Cal kissed her neck.
“That’s how I want to make you feel inside. An explosion, bright and hot, petals unfolding, rippling out and growing bigger and more perfect until it shatters and flashes out.”
“Oh.” Her head dropped back to rest on his chest.
“How many times, Fin? How many times can I make you come?”
“You’re asking the wrong question.” He nipped her. “You should be asking how easy i
t will be. For your information, if you describe a firework as an orgasm again I might come on the spot.”
He spun her so they were face to face, and she looped her arms around his neck. His eyes were bright, reflecting none of his secrets but all of his wishes, and that was more than she’d expected to win from him. “Take me to bed and make me sparkle, Cal.”
He kissed her while the sky lit up above them and the sound of rockets echoed, soaring in her chest. They took a golf buggy back to the pool house which was deserted, not a light on, outside of those illuminating the pool itself, the color an echo of Cal’s eyes. She felt giddy from his attention, and while he parked the buggy, she took off her heels and tossed them on a sun lounge and turned to look for him. He was right there, shrugging off his coat and undoing his tie. She added the jeweled pins from her updo to the pile of clothing and accessories they no longer needed. He added cufflinks, his watch, and then his shoes and socks and belt.
She’d started this, but she wasn’t sure what she was doing. He was right—sex would change things between them. They’d already changed; they could never go back to the Fin and Cal from barstools at the Blarney.
Everything before they had sex was discovery and boundary pushing, working together and falling, falling like so much gunpowder from the sky without any trace of how they’d blasted into each other, marked each other. But that time was done. The moment they went upstairs and abandoned the roles they’d played—coach and protégé, mentor and newbie, director and actor—they’d become something new. And Fin wasn’t sure who she’d be to Cal when she wasn’t his favor to promote, his One Night Wife.
“What’s wrong, my darling?” His strong arms circled her from behind.
“Stage fright.”
“Inconvenient.” He groaned into her neck.
“I’m having second thoughts, but mostly they’re about what you look like when you’re not all buttoned up.”
He laughed and stepped away. His shirt hit the pile. Oh. “Come swim with me.” His trousers hit the pile.
