Lucky Charmed

by Sharla Lovelace

  “No, thank you.” I turned back to the boat.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Back.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this was a dumb idea,” I said, nearly tripping on a tree limb.

  “Seriously, Carmen.” Sully came up behind me and grabbed my arm. “What was your idea?”

  I looked up at him. I didn’t need the flashlight anymore; my eyes had adjusted to the low light from the moon. Being with him there was the weirdest kind of déjà vu, and yet incredibly different at the same time. And I needed to tell him that I was leaving. It had gone so well with Lanie, I couldn’t imagine what my hesitation was about… but regardless of our issues, I needed to tell him goodbye.

  And that last thought nearly buckled my knees.

  “I leave tomorrow,” I said.

  “The vacation,” he said, nodding.

  I licked my lips and looked back at the boat. It was calling to me. I really didn’t want to get fussed at again.

  “I’m leaving,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

  A million crickets sang in that pause, as Sully looked at me, soaking in my meaning, not blinking. Then he looked past me to the water.

  “So tonight is your last night here,” he said softly.

  I couldn’t open my mouth to speak. It hurt. It physically hurt to think of saying it out loud. I nodded slightly. He might not have even seen it.

  He exhaled slowly as he walked past me, down the rocks; the moonlight shining on him as he pulled off his shirt and tossed it on the dock.

  “What are you doing?” I asked

  I could see the tattoos, the outline of the muscles in his back, and when he turned, his jeans were unzipped.

  “Going for a swim,” he said as his jeans hit the ground. “Coming?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  He was beautiful in the moonlight. Carved from marble, his hair just long enough to swing around his face and into his eyes. Muscles rippling, and an ass that—oh my God, I needed to walk away. Float away. Get in the boat and row away, now.

  Except he was standing between me and the boat.

  “I—” I laughed to cut the tension. “I can’t.”

  “Because?”

  It would have been better if he’d gotten mad and yelled at me. I was getting to be an expert on angry people. This was uncharted territory. Or not uncharted. I’d been here before. And it was scary as hell.

  “Because I…I’m going to Lanie’s after this?” Why did I pose it as a question? “Because I’m not eighteen.”

  “I wasn’t eighteen,” he countered.

  “No, you were old enough to know better,” I said.

  “I always know better,” he said, walking into the water. “That doesn’t change anything.”

  “Sully—”

  “Scared?” he said, turning just enough for me to see everything I remembered. “Can’t handle it?”

  “I’m an adult, Sully,” I said. “I don’t go skinny-dipping in the pond with houses nearby.”

  “The Carmen I knew was fearless,” he said, resting back in the water. He went under briefly. When he surfaced, his hair was slicked back with water.

  Sweet Jesus.

  I wasn’t fearless now. I was absolutely terrified. What was I doing? I was a grown woman. A business woman. I had no sensible, logical, sane reason to do this.

  I tossed my shoes onto the dock.

  And unbuttoned my shorts, sliding them down slowly as he watched. This is a bad idea. I pulled my T-shirt over my head and threw my clothes on the dock, feeling like I was doing a strip tease. Such a bad idea.

  “Turn around,” I said.

  “Yes ma’am.” Chuckling, he swirled around to give me a view of his back.

  “Dear God, I’ve lost my mind,” I whispered, shimmying out of my underwear. I couldn’t bring my phone in the water with me, so I followed the moonlight and picked my way down to the grass barefoot, praying I didn’t step on something or do something that would require medical attention naked.

  The water was warm from the hot day, and the bottom was muddy over the rocks. I slid in, and he turned around just as the water reached my breasts.

  “That’s cheating,” I said, going lower.

  “I don’t always play fair,” he said, pushing off and treading water.

  There’s something very intimate and vulnerable about skinny dipping. You can’t bullshit, you can’t lie, you are exposed and bare and everything feels more raw. More personal. More naked.

  Watching him in the water was so familiar, like we had gone back in time. It took my breath away. My chest burned. I had to either keep it together or get out and leave.

  I held my breath and went under. The crickets disappeared as the water closed in over my head and there was only the sound of bubbles drifting upward. Nothing in this world gave more clarity than being underwater. Things made sense there.

  Sully’s fingers intertwining with my left hand in that silent simple world made sense, too. If only I didn’t need to breathe.

  When I rose to the surface, still holding his hand, life got complicated again. He tried to pull me to him, but I kept my arm rigid.

  “Not so fast,” I said.

  A small smile pulled at his lips. “I figured that.”

  “But you had to try,” I said.

  His fingers squeezed mine, the playfulness fading a little from his expression. “You’re here. Two feet away and naked, holding my hand and talking to me. I’m thinking I’ve already beaten my odds tonight.”

  “What were you doing at the cave?” I asked.

  “Same as you, probably,” he said. “Seeing where they put the bees.” He grinned. “Revisiting history. Been a long time since I’ve been there.”

  “Your last time was mine,” I said.

  He looked surprised. “Really?”

  “I couldn’t go back there,” I said. “I couldn’t even—I only came out here once afterward, and then never again.”

  I looked at our hands on the water’s surface, fingers laced together like lovers. How many nights had we done this? Truthfully, not many—we’d only had three weeks—but it felt like so much more. How I could fall so hard in such a short time? So hard that I would never be the same. So hard that fifteen years later, those memories both warmed me and stabbed me in the heart, hurting so much I couldn’t breathe.

  “You okay?”

  I swallowed the burn. “You should have told me,” I said finally, my voice a whisper. “Then. Now. I shouldn’t have heard it from my ex-husband.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You were protecting my mom.”

  “No,” he said. “I was protecting you. She’s all you had. I didn’t want to take that away.”

  Burn, burn, burn. Shit. I turned away as the tears came, unbidden, and let go of his hand. I ducked under the water to cool my head and wash away the tears as I treaded over to the dock, automatically landing in the spot where we used to lean against the rocks and make out and talk for hours.

  “So what’s going on with your brother?” I asked, wiping the water from my face.

  “Subject change?” he asked, following me.

  “Necessary.”

  He nodded and stopped very close, probably aware that I’d backed myself into a wall. Into the wall. I ignored the fact that all my sensations were traveling to one specific place.

  “Aiden has problems,” he said.

  “So I gathered.”

  “Everything with him is about anger,” he said, stretching his arms and somehow using every muscle in his body to do it. “About entitlement and being wronged in every possible way.”

  “You inheriting the business?”

  “Oh yeah, that didn’t help things,” Sully said. “You’d think I orchestrated that on my own, to listen to him, but in all honesty, I never saw it coming.”

  I frowned. “Really? Who else would it be?”

  “No one,” Sully said bluntly. “It’s
been in the red for years. I thought it would shut down to pay everyone. My dad was an excellent carnie host. He was an entertainer. He was from the smoke-and-mirrors days where charm and a slick acting job got you by. Everyone loved him. But slick doesn’t cut it anymore, and charm didn’t pay the bills.”

  “Enter free spirit, Sully?”

  “Exactly,” Sully said. “That free spirit was great until we couldn’t afford food. That’ll change things. Then I became the one who’d stay up all night poring over the books to figure out which towns were usually profitable and which ones were a drain and should be skipped.”

  “Wow,” I said. “And Aiden?”

  “Drank every penny that landed in his pocket,” he said. “And then started drinking the profits, too.”

  I took a deep breath. “And Kia?”

  Sully’s jaw tightened. “Kia was raised by her grandmother, who’d been with the company since before my dad, even. She’s family. She—” Sully stopped and looked away, like he needed to catch his breath. “The carnie world tends to be a little freer with things. People walk around half naked all the time, no one thinks a thing of it. That being said, Kia does like sex.” Sully held up his hands. “Not with me. I’ve never touched her that way. But just because you like it doesn’t mean people should take advantage of it. And Kia isn’t perfect; she is too blunt sometimes and pisses off the wrong people.” Sully’s eyes flashed in anger, something even the dark couldn’t hide. “Aiden had a thing for her and she rebuffed him one too many times, so one night she was drinking and he put something in her beer and took what he thought was his right to take.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “Did she press charges?”

  Sully shook his head. “Doesn’t work that way in our world. You don’t…you don’t rat on your own.”

  “I would think you don’t rape your own, either!”

  “I know,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “But she wouldn’t tell anyone. She didn’t even tell me until she ended up pregnant. She was afraid I’d kill him.”

  “And you helped her get an abortion,” I said.

  “We left right after.”

  “Wait, this is recently?”

  “I couldn’t look at him anymore,” he said. “I didn’t care about the carnival, I was so full of hate and rage I just needed out before I did something I’d regret. I needed something else. Something real and permanent and—”

  “Here.”

  Sully’s breath came faster. It was all I could do not to wrap myself around him and make it all better.

  “Here,” he echoed, his voice strained. “Then came Bailey.”

  “And all the calls from your brother?”

  “He’s flailing like a fish,” Sully said. “The carnival’s sinking; he’s trying to play the big dog, and screaming at me one second and begging for help the next.” He came up next to me, facing the rocks, his hands splayed on them like he’d push them all out of the way if he could. “I feel bad for our people. They don’t deserve that. They don’t deserve to go down with Aiden, but… I can’t keep it afloat anymore. I’m fucking tired. I need something for myself.”

  I was moving before I let myself think about it. It was all I could do.

  Ducking under his arm, I slid between him and the rocks, filling the space, our bodies pressed together. I took his face in my hands and leaned it down to rest on mine. It felt right. It felt more right than in any other place in the entire world. Then I kissed him.

  Softly. Slowly. Giving him every ounce of comfort I could. I wanted this moment to be different. To be an emotional connection and not be a carnal frenzy. But at the same time I was hit to the core with exactly why it always became one.

  Because this hurt.

  This was… real. Every kiss, every touch, every stroke was a gut-checking reminder of what we had and lost and were losing again. This was it. My throat burned with tears. I refused to let them come as I buried my heart in him instead.

  “I’m sorry,” he said against my mouth. He sounded broken.

  The tears won, spilling over my eyes and my heart, breaking me in so many places.

  “I know,” I mouthed against him, tasting the salt and closing my eyes to will it away.

  “I need you,” he said, kissing my cheeks and neck and burying his face in my shoulder as I wrapped my arms around his head. His arms went around my body, pulling me in tight, making us one.

  “You have me,” I whispered against his hair. “You’ve always had me.”

  “And you’ve always had me,” he said against my neck, dragging his lips up along my jawline, back to my mouth. “God, I wasted so much time.”

  I shut my eyes tightly, breathing him in. “And now—tomorrow—”

  “Shh,” he said kissing my top lip and pressing his forehead to mine. “We aren’t talking about tomorrow. Not right now. Tonight, you’re not two feet away anymore.” I laughed through my crying and he smiled. “Tonight you’re here, in my arms. You’re mine.”

  I kissed him with all I had, exploring his mouth, delving my fingers into his hair and roaming the tight lines of his shoulders as his hands travelled my body. I could feel him hard against my belly. It was all I could do not to wrap my legs around him and bring us to a primal place really damn fast, but I wanted it to go slowly. I wanted to stretch this out and remember this night forever.

  Then he did the thing.

  I couldn’t remember slow anymore.

  Sully lifted me out of the water so that my chest was in his face and my back against the rocks, his hands pulling my legs around him and sliding up to caress my breasts as his mouth made love to them.

  God, I loved that. I’d forgotten how much I loved that. My fingers clenched in his wet hair as he drew a nipple between his teeth and sucked on it, taking more and more before deserting that one and sharing the love with the other.

  Watching him, his head in my arms, his face in my chest, kissing my tattoo that was put there for him—it was surreal. Like some bizarre time warp that put us right back where we left off, but fifteen years older. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, I couldn’t stop touching him. It was like I’d opened a floodgate of everything I’d shut down.

  Then he moved. Against me. And we both groaned.

  “Carmen,” he breathed against my skin. “God, baby, you feel good.”

  My thighs tightened around him, pulling him in, pushing me against everything I needed. And I needed. Oh my God, I needed. I had to keep moving. Nothing was more important than moving.

  “Sully,” I gasped, pulling back on his hair so I could get to his mouth again.

  He let go of my breasts to grab my ass, water splashing around us as he dug his fingers into my flesh, guiding me as I moved against him. Because I had to move. I had to feel him or lose my fucking mind. And when he pulled me hard to him, I captured his growl in my mouth.

  “Fuck, baby—” he began, sucking in a breath when I reached down to stroke him against me. “You keep doing that—”

  “I need you,” I said against his mouth, not recognizing my own voice, my own desperation. I’d never begged a man in my life. Not even this man. “Please, I need you, Sully.”

  Even in the dark, I saw the rawness in his eyes, heard the ragged expel of breath as he changed one angle and plunged into me. Pushing, driving, burying deep with no mercy.

  The moan that came from him was primal, as pain and pleasure shattered me. I had no thoughts, no logic, no functional breathing, just muscles tightening and reacting around this man in my arms. We’d been here before, and yet nothing was like before. Nothing and no one had ever fit me so perfectly or known my body so instinctively. We moved like we’d been making love all our lives, touching, tasting, lifting my legs higher so he could drive impossibly deeper, harder, faster. My limbs were on fire with exertion and I didn’t care.

  “Carmen—”

  “Oh God—”

  “Are you—fuck—” he forced out like it was coming from his feet.

  I couldn’t an
swer. I couldn’t breathe. My climax climbed upon me so tantalizingly slow and muscle-curling that I was shaking violently, clinging to him in another state of reality when it finally crested.

  “Shit—Sully—Jesus—”

  I broke. The sounds coming from me were nothing I recognized. Words that weren’t even words tumbled from my mouth as wave after wave of body-rocking orgasm slammed into me. And then there was Sully.

  Bowing up like a beast and roaring through his teeth, he pounded his climax into me, following me over each hill, water splashing in our faces, both of us with a death grip, shaking with adrenaline and exhaustion, unable to stop the rhythm that propelled us forward.

  Gasping for air as we finally slowed, Sully collapsed against me and buried his face in my hair. I took every bit. I wrapped my arms all the way around his neck and latched my feet at the ankles, not willing to let it go yet. Not ready to—

  Emotion washed over me like another orgasmic wave, except not nearly as pleasurable. Trembling that had nothing to do with sexual exertion took over and I held my breath to try to stem it. I wasn’t this girl. I wasn’t sappy. I wasn’t a basket case who got weepy after sex. Even after astronomical sex. But my God, that wasn’t even—it wasn’t just sex. It was fucking mental. Damn it. I had to be delusional, but all I knew was that I couldn’t let go. I couldn’t let it be over yet. Because once it was….

  I pressed my face into his shoulder, willing the burn to go away, hating the knowledge that I was the one walking away this time. This was on me. I was leaving this. I was leaving him.

  Why?

  The question was as loud as if a voice had spoken it in my ear, and I jumped.

  “You okay?” he asked, actually against my ear.

  His voice brought all the feelings blazing to the surface. I nodded against him as my head screamed the opposite.

  “I’m good,” I whispered, kissing his neck, his jaw, his chin, meeting his lips as he met mine. It was soft, lingering. Two people who just wanted to stay right there forever.

  Sully leaned his head back a fraction to look at me. He brought a hand up out of the water to smooth back a strand of hair that had mostly dried and fallen into my face in the frenzy. He tucked it behind my ear and moved his finger along my cheek, down to my lips.