by Serena Bell
Auburn and Trey stood in the doorway of Beachcrest and waved goodbye to the last of the guests, all declaring they’d be back soon with their friends and families.
“I think that was a success,” he said to her, smiling.
“It was pretty great.”
“I think we should make it a yearly event.”
“We?” she teased.
He’d been amazing this weekend—leading hikes and bike rides, building beach fires, frying bacon—and generally charming the crap out of their guests. He acted like he’d been made for the beach inn life, like there was nothing he’d rather do than carry towels and chip in to make up beds in a pinch.
“We,” he said, nodding. “I want to ask you something.”
His voice had gotten very serious, and she turned her undivided attention on him. After a weekend in which they’d been too busy even for a quickie, she was ready for some alone time with him tonight. He looked good enough to eat—hair longer now, and perpetually rumpled, eyes still as intense as the first time she’d found herself caught in his gaze, and a body that could fill out an expensive suit or stretch the confines of a soft cotton tee with equally breath-stopping results.
“Okay.”
“When the sale of Home Base went through, even with all the debts, I made some money, as I told you.”
“Yes.”
“My original plan, before I met you, was to use most of that money to try to build to the next level.”
“To get richer. Build bigger companies. Make sure you could buy all your relatives stuff they don’t want.”
He made a face at her. “Smartass. Yes. That was the old plan. But I’ve been so happy these last few months. Making Beachcrest stronger, sturdier, safer, more beautiful. With you. I want—I want to keep doing it. Building on what we’ve done so far. And that would be a hell of a lot easier if I weren’t going back and forth between here and San Fran. If I were here—permanently.”
Her breath stuttered in her chest.
“If that works for you, of course,” he added. It was a tease, but also a question.
“That—works for me.”
“I’ve been doing some research, and there’s enough free land on this lot for another ADU. A little owner’s cottage. I could build it. For you to live in. And if you were up for it, for—for us.”
“Oh, Trey.”
Her heart was so full, her chest ached.
“Is that a yes?”
“That’s a yes.”
He bent and kissed her.
“Marry that girl!” a voice called.
They laughed and broke apart. It was Carl—and that was his favorite line when he caught them in a public display of affection, however tame. He strode toward them now, cheerful and healthy—and a good twenty pounds slimmer than he’d been before his heart attack, thanks to a better diet and cycling with Trey on a gentle beachside path.
It had taken a while for Carl to forgive Trey for almost selling Beachcrest, but once he’d seen that Auburn held no grudge, he’d softened up, and before too long, the two men had started tackling overdue projects around the inn. Both Auburn and Trey made sure that Carl didn’t take on anything too taxing—sometimes Mason or Levi would come over to help out if an additional share of brute strength was needed. Luckily for Trey, neither Mason nor Levi knew the whole story of how close Beachcrest had come to being lost. Someday, when they were both in extremely good moods, Auburn might tell them.
“Trey. This is the tile I chose for the new kitchen island. What do you think?”
Carl held up a piece of cobalt glass tile the exact color of Auburn’s eyes.
“I think it’s beautiful,” Trey said. “But it’s Auburn you have to ask. It’s her inn.”
She grinned at him. Half the time he forgot to ask her approval himself, and they’d had a few all-out fights—including one in which she’d called him an alpha asshole with a control problem—but they’d also had some pretty epic makeup sex. She knew he respected her—and she also knew she was never going to let him get away with shit. Or—at least—she was going to dish out as much as he did.
“No one said anything to me about a new kitchen island,” she said. “I’ll have to think about that one for a few days.”
“But—” Carl and Trey protested simultaneously, and Trey said, “We were going to get started on it today.”
“Find something else to do. That front garden needs weeding pretty badly.” Then she relented, laughing. “I’m just yanking your chains. The tile’s gorgeous and that island is crap. Go to it. Just—I’m going to be making cookie dough later, so make sure I can still work in there.”
When Carl had gone off with his piece of tile, she turned to Trey. “And? You have to let me photograph you working shirtless for the marketing materials for our next romance weekend.”
He grinned at that. “Whose idea was that? No, wait, let me guess: Aria’s.”
She laughed and nodded.
He stepped toward her and gathered her into his arms. His breath brushed against her hair as he murmured, “You know I’ll happily go shirtless for you any time, anywhere.”
“You might want to experience Tierney Bay Beach in January before you make any promises you can’t keep,” she warned.
He laughed, and pressed her closer. “I’m not worried,” he said. “I have beach magic to keep me warm.”
“It doesn’t work like that!” she protested.
“Oh, I think it does,” he said, and bent and kissed her until they were both plenty warm.
Thank you for reading So Close! I hope you’ve loved spending time with Auburn, Trey, and their friends and families. Chiara’s story, So True, is up next.
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Find out more about SO TRUE here.
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In the meantime, I wanted to introduce you to another series you’ll love! It’s my Returning Home series, four standalone novels about heroes returning from the front, wounded in body and spirit, and the women who help heal them.
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Start with Jake and Mira’s book, Hold On Tight, the second-chances story of a badly wounded hero, the woman he never stopped craving, and the son he never knew he had. Keep reading to find an excerpt from Hold On Tight, or learn more here:
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Find HOLD ON TIGHT here.
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Then meet Nate and Alia in Can’t Hold Back, the story of a man in physical and emotional pain, the woman with the power to heal him, and the complications that lies leave behind.
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Find CAN’T HOLD BACK here.
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From there, journey with Hunter and Trina to discover To Have and to Hold, and meet a man who can’t remember the last year of his life—even the woman he fell for.
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Find TO HAVE AND TO HOLD here.
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And finally, fall for Griff and Becca in Holding Out. Becca’s done being a virgin, and Griff’s just the man to help her out. It’s perfect—no strings, no commitments, no muss, no fuss. Well … almost none.
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Find HOLDING OUT here.
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Join my newsletter list here.
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I appreciate your help in spreading the word, including telling a friend. Reviews are like hugs for authors, and they help readers find books! Please leave a review on your favorite book site.
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Turn the page for an excerpt from Hold On Tight, the first book in my Returning Home series!
Excerpt from HOLD ON TIGHT
He didn’t expect her to say yes. He asked on a whim, throwing the words out into the warm night as an experiment. “Let’s go in.”
They stood with their bare feet in the sand at the edge of the lake. The surface was a strip of glass—cool and mysterious, reflecting a row of spiky trees the moonlight had thrown between
sky and water.
Pale light shone in her eyes. Her bottom lip was glossy and begged to be nipped. Her hair was something he wanted to get lost in, the way he wanted to get lost in her. He was out of time, and it made him brave. In a week, he’d be fighting in Afghanistan, and this—whatever it was—would be a memory.
This wasn’t supposed to be happening. He wasn’t the kind of guy who could meet a girl and feel things for her. He was the type who should’ve spent his leave drinking beer with his buds and longing to get the hell back to the war. Whereas this guy he’d become, this new version of himself, couldn’t spend enough moments with his face pressed against Mira’s hair, breathing peace.
She was eighteen; he was twenty. He’d picked her up in a Seattle bowling alley, where she’d come with friends, the first night of his leave. He’d been raring to burn off training testosterone. They’d made it as far as his car before she’d confessed how young she was and admitted she’d never been picked up by anyone in her life. He’d been planning to take her to a hotel room, but she was only a month past her birthday and obviously not that kind of girl, so they took a drive instead, the night air rushing by their open windows, the narrow roads hemmed in by trees. He found himself telling her everything in his head. Stories. Favorite books, childhood vacations, old friends, anxiety dreams . . . as if the pent-up thing in him had never been lust at all, but words, months’ worth of thoughts he’d kept locked up tight.
At the end of that first night, she’d leaned over and kissed him, and he lost his mind in the softness of her lips.
Before he’d flown home, his fire team leader had gathered them together. “We deploy in a month. Don’t get distracted. And for fuck’s sake, whatever you do, don’t get married.”
Jake leaned over and nudged Mike, his buddy, his teammate, and said, “No fucking chance.” Because if there was one thing Jake knew, it was that he was never getting married. Never having a family.
When he first got home, he’d stopped in to see his folks. They were as miserable as he remembered, drunk when he arrived, snarling and snapping at each other. There were faded bruises on his mother’s arms and circles under her eyes. It had always been that way: his father on disability since Jake’s childhood, drifting through life since he’d fallen off a roof he was de-mossing; his mother using cheap wine and online shopping to drown the misery of a bad marital choice made worse by circumstance.
Jake had known at age twelve that he had to get out as soon as possible. And then at fourteen, the first plane had hit the first tower and he’d known where he was going to. He would take the fight to those assholes, wherever they were; he would rain destruction down on them like they’d rained it down on New York City. On his country.
He’d scoffed at the idea that he could be distracted. The month of post-training leave couldn’t go fast enough; deployment couldn’t come soon enough; he couldn’t wait to put a bullet through the first motherfucker’s head.
Except then there was Mira. Three weeks so far, nights strung together like shiny beads in his memory. Nights she told her parents she was with her friends, nights she stole from her life as a good girl. Movies, sitting side by side, the heat of her arm sinking into his skin and making it hard for him to sit still, a slow burn twisting in his gut. Nights at Dick’s, splitting french fries and chocolate milkshakes and passing iPods across the speckled table to share songs.
In the car afterward, Mira setting the pace, her kisses bolder every night, their mouths sliding over each other’s, slick and hungry, bodies tangled and sweaty, fighting the gearshift and the emergency brake, her kneeling over him, trying to press as close as possible.
Her hands gained confidence as they moved across his heated skin, as they unfastened the button and zipper of his jeans, as they slipped beneath the waistband of his briefs.
She’d never said she was a virgin, but he guessed she was because she’d seemed surprised when he’d flicked his thumbs over her nipples. When he’d tongued them. When he’d slid his hand down the front of her pants and worked a finger through the tangle of her curls to tap her clit. The first time, she’d come against his hand with a soft, broken cry.
That, like everything else, wasn’t supposed to have happened. Nor was the tiny ping in his chest, a seed bursting through its tough shell to germinate, at the sound of her voice.
And now there were seven days left.
Not much time for what he wanted from her, which was all of her, under him, around him, over and over.
But it couldn’t be more than that—not more than a week of sex. Because he was never getting married. Because she’d told him that first night that she’d deliberately chosen to get herself picked up by a stranger as an act of rebellion. Her father had just informed her that he wouldn’t pay for her to attend art school, but would only give her money for “a real college.” She’d been so pissed at her dad that night, she would have slept with a sixty-five-year-old hardened ex-con to get a rise out of him.
“My dad’s a total control freak,” she’d told him on their third date. She’d grown up on Bainbridge Island, college-bound before she’d popped out of the womb. Her parents were the same brand as his father, ex-hippies, but unlike his father, all whitewashed and clean living. She’d said, “My father would kill me. I never meant this to be anything other than a one-night thing.”
“You and me both,” he told her, but they didn’t push it any further than that.
There was only now. The sand under their feet, the gathering mist over the water, her mouth curving into a smile. There was no future.
This is all there is. Now.
He willed her to feel it, too.
He listened so hard to hear her answer that he almost missed it, because she didn’t give it in words. She unbuttoned the top button of her blouse instead. Long fingers fumbling with the pearl-white disk. No revelation at first, only that undoing. Then another button, and the shirt fell open, revealing her breasts mounded high in pink lace cups.
An ache bloomed at the base of his spine, the root of his dick, in his balls. His mouth ached, too. Before Mira, he hadn’t understood that sex could make you crazy. That it could take hold in your teeth and knees and chest. That you could want something so badly you’d beg for it.
He’d kept the begging inside because he hadn’t wanted to frighten her.
She undid another button and a sound came out of him he’d never heard before, something grating in his throat.
She smiled. “You like that?”
“Hell, yeah,” he said.
Another button, and another, and the shirt hung down at her sides. He cupped her breasts in his hands. Now the ache was in his throat and his jaw and God, fucking everywhere.
With other girls, he’d kissed them because it was the thing to do, the time to do it. With Mira, he kissed her because he couldn’t not. And he kept kissing her because it hurt to stop, played with her nipples and grabbed her ass and rocked her up against him because he wanted to have all, fucking all, of her; there wasn’t enough of her, he couldn’t get enough of her. That was how it was with Mira.
The way she got in his arms. Like something fierce, writhing and live. Like he could barely hold her. And that lit his craving worse. He wanted to trap her, wanted to rub his heat and need off on her, but she wouldn’t be contained.
She wriggled out of his arms and darted a short distance away.
“Come back.”
She shook her head and dropped her shirt to the sand behind her. She undid her bra and arched her back a little so her breasts swelled and her nipples tipped up. Something roared in him, but he stayed where he was because the visual was so fine he couldn’t stop looking. Saliva rushed into his mouth, blood poured into his dick. And then her hands found the button of her denim shorts and slid them and her underpants down her long, white legs to the sand. The whole, perfect fantasy revealed in the moonlight.
He lunged, but she ran into the water, laughing at him. She gasped at the cold. “Get in here and
warm me up.”
He got out of his own clothes so fast he tripped over his jeans and got an arm tangled in his T-shirt. The cool water slid across his heated limbs. His body tightened and shrank, but his desire stayed sharp beneath the surface of his skin, like an undercurrent. He kicked and swam out, then back, stretching his legs and luxuriating. She treaded water and watched.
“C’mere,” she said.
In the water, she was cool and slippery, heat hidden in the places where he buried his fingers and his face. They stood in water up to their shoulders, and her body warmed his until she pressed his erection between his belly and hers.
“Do you want to?” A gesture so vague she could have been asking if he wanted to go to the grocery store, but even in the dim light he could see the flush rise in her cheeks.
He wanted to. So much he couldn’t answer, couldn’t choke out yes, fuck yes, oh my God please yes.
“I have two blankets in my bag,” she said.
“I don’t have condoms.”
“I do.”
She’d planned for it and—he wanted to believe—longed for it. Jesus. He kissed her hard and lifted her off her feet and tried to press up into her despite the mad impossibility of those logistics.
She laughed at him. “Hang on. Hang on.”
He swept her into his arms and carried her up the beach. He squatted, balancing her across his thighs, ignoring the burn, grabbing the blankets out of the tote bag she’d brought and laying them out as best he could on the sand. He set her down on one and she spread the edges out, then reached for him and pulled him down so abruptly he lost his balance and fell beside her.