Holding Out for You

by Anna Paige

  I hurried to explain while I still had the nerve. “They ache, mostly, but pressing on them is really painful.” His eyes still hadn’t opened and both hands were fisted in his hair. “The way you kissed me, it made me forget for a minute. Forget everything but the feel of your lips on mine. All I could think about was you, the fact that after all these years, I was finally kissing Ashton Hunter.”

  I’d hoped by refocusing on how amazing the kiss was I could get him to calm down, but he still stood there, frozen, seething.

  “The kiss is all I want to remember about this moment, Ash. Remember what we said about not sharing it with anything, especially not him.”

  That time, his eyes opened.

  He looked as if he was fighting an internal war, so I stood there, one hand on his arm now that he’d dropped his hands from his hair, holding his gaze and waiting for him to come back to me.

  His phone dinged in his pocket, but he didn’t even blink.

  He was searching for something in my face and I did everything I could to give it to him, whatever assurances I could summon, because I could see he needed that.

  “Do something for me?” I asked on a whisper, reaching up to grip the back of his neck as I pulled him down to eye level.

  “Anything. Name it.”

  “Kiss me again. I wasn’t finished with that mouth of yours.” To punctuate the sentiment, I flicked my tongue over his lower lip.

  His phone dinged again, and again it went unanswered as he leaned in and ran his tongue across the seam of my lips, giving me exactly what I needed, what we both needed.

  I backed up a step, retaking my place against the bed, and pulled him into me. His hips pressed into my belly as he deepened the kiss, but he only put the barest of pressure on my chest.

  I could feel his erection through his jeans, and it was all I could do to keep from reaching for it. We didn’t have time to delve that deep into things, not with Becker and Charli due back in a few minutes.

  My hands tugged at his hips, loving the way he ground into me in response. I nipped his lip and ran one hand over his ass, feeling a delicious heat build between my legs. Dammit, why did we have to be so short on time?

  My phone dinged in my pocket and I groaned into Ash’s mouth.

  He pulled back, breaking our kiss for a second time but leaving his hips pressed into me, rotating them in small circles that were driving me crazy. “That’s both of us. I’ve got mine set so only people on my favorites list can get through.”

  “So do I.”

  He nodded, groaning a little when I gripped his ass tighter and pulled his erection further into me. “It’s probably Beck or Charli. We need to be sure they’re okay.”

  Shit, he was right.

  Grudgingly, we took out our phones, still practically joined where his erection pressed into my belly.

  “Yep. The old man is running behind.”

  “Thirty more minutes,” Ash added, scanning his phone. “The other text is from Phil. He said there was bait in the fridge from last weekend. Two kinds of worms that the fish seem to favor.”

  “That’s sweet of him.” I met his eye and wondered what the smirk on his face was for.

  “Now, do we tell Beck and Charli we already have bait, or do we pretend we didn’t see Phil’s message until after they get back?”

  I thought about it for a second. Okay, it was a sneaky, underhanded thing to do. But what if they were enjoying their time alone the same way Ash and I were? Sure, they were still dancing around their attraction, but the way my brother had been doting on Charli the last twenty-four hours told me he wasn’t as indifferent as he’d wanted us to believe.

  But he was still my brother and she was still my best friend. I couldn’t lie to them for my own selfish reasons.

  I gave Ash a small smile, hoping he wouldn’t be too disappointed with my response.

  He surprised me by not even waiting for the words, instead pulling out his phone and calling Becker even as he continued to grind himself into me.

  “Beck, sorry, I didn’t hear my phone. Look, Phil just sent me a message and it turns out there’s some bait already in the fridge, so you guys don’t have to wait.”

  I could hear my brother speaking but couldn’t make out the words.

  “Okay, that’s fine too. I just thought you should know.” A pause while Becker responded. “No, you’re right.” Another pause, during which Ash winked at me. “Yeah, she’s fine. Something about this place perked her right up.” He gripped my side with his free hand and dipped down so his erection was lined up with the juncture of my tights, making me hiss in pleasure when he thrust sharply and grinned at me.

  “No worries. We’ll wait for you guys to get back before we head to the lake.”

  Becker spoke again.

  “Okay, see you in a bit.”

  He ended the call and tossed his phone up onto the bed, redirecting his attention to me. “Beck says he’d feel bad if he split on the old guy after calling twice to ask him to come open the store.”

  “Sounds like Becker.”

  Ash crouched down and wrapped his arms around my thighs, pulling me off the floor until my legs wrapped around his waist. “Thirty minutes isn’t nearly long enough for what I want to do to you, but that doesn’t mean we have to stop what we’re doing.”

  “I sure hope not,” I said, tugging at his hair. “I’ve been wanting to taste those lips since I was fourteen years old. A thirty-minute make-out session would suit me just fine.”

  “Even that won’t be enough, but I’m willing to take what I can get.”

  “What you’ve got is all of me, Ash.” I locked my legs tighter around him, working my core against his erection.

  He blinked down at me, and for a moment I thought he was going to speak. Instead he sealed his mouth over mine and kissed me in such a way that speech would have been pointless. He kissed me so long and hard and deep I wouldn’t have recognized my own name if I’d heard it.

  And he didn’t stop until we heard the sound of Beck’s tires on the gravel driveway.

  Ashton

  The rest of the day was spent fishing and laughing, telling progressively dumber jokes as the day wore on, anything to keep us all distracted. Tommy wasn’t mentioned once, and apart from a slightly annoyed look from Becker when he walked in and saw Blair’s reddened face and kiss-swollen lips, there wasn’t any drama.

  It was fantastic. Exactly as I’d hoped it would be.

  We left after dark, all of us exhausted in the best way. Since the fishing was catch and release as always, Beck ducked into the first drive-thru we came to and everyone scarfed down their burgers on the road, too tired to go in and sit down.

  Back at the Martells’ house, everyone took their turn showering as we had the night before. As the evening hours ticked by and we prepared to turn in for the night, I saw that familiar tightness returning to their faces, Blair’s in particular. Our escape had worked its magic for a while but had been temporary, and it was dawning on everyone just what waited for us tomorrow.

  Not wanting to press our luck with an as yet silent Becker, Blair and I decided to at least start the night out in our own beds, but I let her know I’d be right there if she became the least bit frightened in the night.

  I lay there for a long time that night, staring at the ceiling and remembering her wince when she pressed her breasts too hard against my chest.

  I drifted off with so much regret in my heart.

  Regret that I hadn’t snapped his fucking neck when I’d had the chance.

  Ashton

  She was scared to go.

  Tommy was safely in a cell, locked away where he couldn’t get to her, but the look on her face told me her anxiety was through the roof anyway, bars or no bars.

  “You okay?” I asked her as Beck and Charli went to grab their shoes.

  “Yeah. Just nervous.” Her hands shook at her sides.

  “He won’t be able to get to you. You’ll be safe. And I’ll be right
there with you.”

  “I feel like such a coward, because I know all that, but I’m afraid anyway.” She looked as if she was about to cry. “I hate him for making me this way.”

  I pulled her into my body and wrapped my arms around her. It seemed my arms had become her safe place, and I was happy to have her there any time she needed. “He’ll pay for that, and you’ll be back to your old, bratty self in no time. When all this is just a hazy memory, he’ll still be rotting in a cell.”

  “You can’t know that for sure.”

  “Baby, I saw what happened. There’s no way he’s getting out of it. Not with your testimony and mine. We’re gonna bury his ass.”

  She looked up at me, her arms still wrapped around my waist. “You keep calling me baby.”

  I honestly hadn’t realized I had. “Do you not like that? I can stop.”

  “No, I like it,” she said, looking amused, which was a vast improvement over the desolation on her face a few minutes before. “I never thought I would, given how much you’ve always teased me about being younger. Even when other couples use that word, it’s always made me scoff, but hearing it from you now, the way you say it, I understand why so many people use the word.”

  “You sure? I can switch to something more personal, something more specific to you.”

  Her eyes roamed my face for a minute. “Have you called a lot of girls baby?”

  I thought about it and shook my head. “No. I don’t think I ever have. It’s not like I’ve had a lot of actual relationships.”

  Her smile slipped, but she recovered quickly. “Just hookups?”

  “Mostly. At least in the beginning. The last couple of years, I’ve gone out on dates but—”

  “You two ready to go?” Beck walked into the kitchen through the hall door and Blair stepped back, blushing at being caught with her arms around me. She did it every time he was around, although he’d yet to say a single thing about it.

  “Sure. Just let me get my purse.”

  Beck stopped her as she tried to hurry by. “You okay?”

  She ducked her head. “Yeah, just ready to get this over with so I can stop stressing.”

  He patted her arm and let her go. Once she was gone, he came over to me and let out a long-suffering sigh. “She’s not okay, no matter what she says.”

  “I know.” I hated it, wanted to fix it, and was trying to do just that, but Beck was right. She was definitely struggling. “How’s Charli?”

  He pursed his lips, shaking his head. “Pretending, same as Blair. Neither of them likes to admit when they’re afraid. Blair is worse than Charli, but they’re both so goddamn independent that it’s like pulling teeth to get them to admit they’re rattled. Apart from that first hour after it happened, Charli has completely shut me out. She talks about the most random shit, like her mind is going a hundred miles a minute and she can’t focus on any one thing.”

  “Blair’s kind of all over the place, too. But not all the time. And she’s talking a little, which is good.” I didn’t tell him what she talked about, about the bruises. He would react about as well as I had, which was to say he too would be wishing he’d killed the son of a bitch.

  He snorted under his breath. “Then you’re doing better than me. Care to share your secret?”

  “I’m not sure what works for Blair will work for Charli. Or that you’d be comfortable trying it anyway.”

  He furrowed his brows. “Trying what?”

  “Nothing, never mind.” I turned, intending to get my boots from their spot by the front door.

  He grabbed my arm. “No, don’t ‘never mind’ me. Tell me what you were going to say.”

  “Fine, but I’m not sure you’ll like it. For a couple of reasons.” I leveled my gaze at him and gave him as honest an answer as I could muster. “Blair opens up the most when I hold her. I think she feels safer that way, more protected. I can actually feel the tension leave her body the longer I hug her to my chest.” Though I was doing it much more carefully now that I knew about the bite marks.

  Beck just looked at me, an unfathomable expression on his face.

  “Now, forget for a second that I was talking about your baby sister and focus on the original problem you had. You want Charli to talk to you, you want to help her, but are you willing to do what I did with Blair? Because we both know Charli’s been into you since forever. You know what she might take it to mean.”

  “Yeah, I know how she’s apt to take it. And with you and Blair dancing on the edge of whatever the fuck is going on between you, things are complicated enough.”

  I considered keeping the conversation on its original track, but since this was the first reference Beck had made to what I told him at the hospital, I figured I owed him at least the opportunity to talk about it if he was finally ready.

  “It seems complicated, I agree. But that’s mostly because we’re kind of in limbo, waiting to see how you react first. At least, I am. I’m not sure Blair has even registered that you know anything.”

  He didn’t acknowledge my statement, asking instead, “Did she sleep in there with you again last night? You both were up before me, so I couldn’t tell.”

  “No. She wanted to spend some time with Charli, see if she could get her talking. I’m not sure how successful she was, but I heard her stirring around six and got up to see if she was okay.”

  “Was she?”

  I tried to hide my wince when I recalled finding her standing over the kitchen sink, tears streaming as she stared out the window. “Nightmare woke her up. She was . . . shaky. So, I made her some coffee and we sat on the porch under a blanket, watching the sun come up. She didn’t say five words the whole time, but she was calmer by the time we came inside to start breakfast.”

  He nodded, but the tell-tale working of his jaw gave away his frustration. “I should have been there to comfort her. I didn’t even hear her get up.”

  “You aren’t Superman, Beck. And you needed to crash just as much as the rest of us.”

  “You haven’t slept for shit the last couple of nights either,” he shot back, still looking annoyed, maybe even a little angry.

  I couldn’t help the smile that spread across my face. “Not meaning to piss you off, but the other night when Blair crashed in my bed, I got more rest in those few hours than I normally would if I slept a week.”

  “Technically, it was my bed,” he reminded me absently then took a deep breath, adding, “I’m trying really hard to understand how this all happened so fast. How it went from thinly-veiled hatred to ‘I don’t love her in a brotherly way’ to whatever has happened between that statement and now.” There it was, the first jab. Not malicious, but protective and understandably so.

  “This has been coming for a long time. At least it has on my end. I can’t speak for Blair.”

  He glanced back toward the hall and when his eyes fell on me again, there was unmistakable anger. “See, that’s the part that’s tripping me up. How long is a long time to you? Because not two weeks ago, I watched you walk out the door with Chastity Neely and you didn’t come home until dawn. So where does my sister fit into all that?”

  The sound of approaching footsteps halted the conversation. A moment later, Charli and Blair walked in through the dining room doorway.

  “Sorry, had to touch up my face a little,” Blair announced before catching the expression on her brother’s face.

  Both girls stopped in their tracks.

  “What’s going on, Beck?” Charli asked, sounding incredibly nervous.

  Blair stepped over to my side but didn’t touch me. “Why are you two staring each other down?”

  “Not a good time, Blair,” I said, heading Beck off before he said something he’d regret. “Your brother and I just need a few minutes to hash out a little misunderstanding. No big deal. Why don’t you and Charli go out and warm up the truck?”

  “Beck?”

  He mustered a genuine-looking smile and waved off her concern, tossing her his ke
ys. “Listen to him, Blair-bear. We’ll be out in a sec. Nothing for you to worry about.”

  I didn’t look over at her, didn’t want her to see the lie on my face. Eventually, Charli came in and grabbed her by the arm, ushering her out.

  Becker just stared at me until we heard the distinctive click of the front door closing. A second later, Beck’s truck roared to life, assuring us they’d actually listened instead of trying to snoop.

  As soon as it did, I put up a hand to stop him from resuming his tirade. “I told you how I feel about her and I meant it, every word. As for how long it’s been going on, I’ve felt this way about her for several years, and it really took hold two years ago. Since we came home for her graduation. I was attracted to her even before, but it was her graduation when it hit me that it was something more. Something real.”

  He frowned, watching me with clear doubt on his face.

  “You might not want to hear it, but it’s the truth.”

  “And I suppose you were thinking of her the whole time you were banging all those random girls between then and now, right?”

  “Why do you assume I banged them?” I knew he wasn’t usually judgmental about other people’s personal lives, which meant he was only lashing out because I was talking about wanting his little sister.

  He tilted his head to one side and studied me like he thought I might have brain damage. “Why? Maybe because it’s kind of your MO. You don’t go out with anyone who’s not down to fuck on the first date, mainly because you never go on second dates.”

  “It was my MO; I’ll give you that. But for the last two years, I haven’t slept with a single girl. Not one. Don’t believe me? Ask them yourself. I can give you phone numbers and wait while you verify every fucking ‘date’ I’ve been on since Blair’s graduation has ended without so much as a peck on the cheek.”

  “Then what the fuck were you doing until dawn, Ash? Whittling?”

  “Honestly? After I dropped them off, I’d go to O’Malley’s and shoot the shit with Bryan while he closed down the bar and counted out the till. After that, on the nights I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep, I usually drove around in my truck, listening to my music and asking myself if I was insane for what I was doing. Hating myself for not being able to control how I was feeling. Wishing I could stop wanting her, because then I wouldn’t be running the risk of you hating me. Wishing I could just give in and bang my way through the entire state, anything to get her out of my head. But I couldn’t do it.” I scrubbed a hand over my hair, wincing. “God help me, I came close once or twice, but I couldn’t make myself want anyone else. I couldn’t even kiss any of them. One girl, I actually recoiled when she tried to run her hands up my chest.”