The One Who Changed Everything (The Cherry Sisters)

by Darcy, Lilian

  She grabbed onto his hips, needing the contact and the support, needing to arch against his touch. Her top slipped lower, taking the black lace bra with it. He found her nipple with that hungry, seeking mouth and she gasped and he covered the tender skin in wet heat, caressing her with his tongue and lips until she was so sensitized she was primed to explode.

  I can’t bear it, it’s too good...

  The sudden dart of cold as he took his mouth away made her gasp again, as he found her other breast and gave it the same intense suckling pressure, while his thumb moved in slow circles over the moisture he’d left behind. Her breasts had never felt so cherished, so sensitive.

  “Lift your foot,” he said softly. He reached down, ran a silky caress against her thigh and down the front of her calf. She felt the hook of his finger on her heel and her shoe levered off into his hand. “I like these.” He tossed the extravagant pump onto the floor with a clack, then said in a growl, “Now the other one.” It went to join its twin.

  He came back to her breasts, burying his face between them and cupping them in his hands, his big, work-hardened palms unbelievably tender and gentle while his mouth was exquisitely rough.

  “Please strip for me,” he whispered.

  “And you. Else it’s not fair...”

  “Mmm.” He wrenched at his shirt and flung it off in one long, twisting movement, then stood back and watched with bright, hungry eyes while she unfastened her skirt and slid it down. Bra and top went the same way, and all she wore were the matching lace briefs, deceptively modest. They covered her from low on her hips to the creases at the tops of her thighs, but the transparent pattern of the lace hid nothing.

  He liked the lace. Still in his jeans, he closed the space between them once more and ran his hands over her backside, hooking his fingers inside the stretchy fabric and tracing the soft seam where her thighs and butt met. She tried to find the snap fastening at the front of his jeans, but he covered her hands with his and held her back.

  At first she didn’t know why. Weren’t they supposed to be stripping? But then she heard the ragged whoosh of his breathing and understood. He was afraid of losing control too soon. Yes, he was that close. His hardness strained at the denim fabric and she wanted to set him free, but he kept stopping her, distracting her with the touch of his hands and his mouth and in the end he made it impossible for her to think of anything but what he was doing to her.

  She barely knew how she’d reached the bed in the next room. He’d carried her or pulled her, or something, and she’d stumbled there with her hands still reaching for any part of him she could find. The big, hard knob of his shoulder, the soft skin above the waistband of his jeans. She fell back onto the satiny, puffy fabric of a comforter and he stretched her arms above her head and held them there with one hand while he ravaged her skin with his mouth, from her lips to her neck, collarbone, breasts, ribs.

  Then he pulled at the black lace, stopping to explore its texture, his fingers whispering through the fabric against the seam of her wet core. She was on fire, so aroused that her patience fled and she lunged for him, wanting his whole body against hers. He groaned and gave in and they lay there side by side, twisted together. This time he was the one who fumbled for the fastening of his jeans, and moments later he was naked against her, hot and hard and so close to readiness that every breath was a groan.

  She wanted him inside her.

  He grabbed a packet from the bedside table, but then flung it back there and rolled away from her, fighting with himself. She tried to sit up, her body throbbing and her thighs slick with her own moisture. “What’s wrong?” She trailed the tips of her fingers across his warm back.

  “Nothing’s wrong.” He hunched himself at the edge of the bed. “Just want this perfect, that’s all. Don’t want to finish it too soon.”

  “It’s not too soon.”

  “Says who?” He toppled her back again, and made his argument not with words but with touch, caressing and claiming until she was humming, writhing, whimpering, so close to the brink that she hadn’t known it was possible to be this close without spilling over.

  He had to give in. He had to give in right now. He had to take her and fill her and finish her this instant. She couldn’t stand it if he didn’t. She really, really just needed...

  “Tucker... Tucker, please...”

  He didn’t answer. She ringed her fingers around his rock-hard length and felt him buck. Yes! She could tell how close he was, and how easily he would give in to the power of what she did to him. If she could just stroke him like this, draw him in with the rhythm and pressure—

  No...

  He pulled away from her touch and she had to chase him, roll him onto his back and straddle him and slide her hips and stomach against him, rub the hard peaks of her nipples across his chest. She wanted to ambush him now. She wanted to defeat his control completely.

  She wanted to make him come inside her, even while he fought to make them both last longer. It had become a desperate, fantastically erotic game.

  Who would win over whom, here?

  Was the winner the one who lost control first, or the one who kept it?

  Finally—finally!—he reached for the packet once more and she was so slick that he filled her effortlessly before she even had time to gasp. The sound that broke from her seconds later was part shudder, part moan, and she heard him groaning, too, as he bucked against her, over and over.

  Seconds later, he took both of them over that trembling brink with such a surge that it lasted...oh, who even knew how long. It was simply a dark mass of movement and feeling and rhythm and crying out that left her breathless and weak and almost in tears.

  Chapter Thirteen

  They lay together almost without moving for a long time. There was just the rhythm of their breathing slowing and slowing, the soft tracing of his fingers on her hips and her mouth against his neck. Neither of them wanted to break this with words.

  He spoke finally, his voice just a creak. “You falling asleep?”

  “No...”

  “You hungry, then?”

  “Getting that way.”

  “Except I don’t think I can move.”

  “Me neither.”

  So they lay there some more, until the soft tracings found a purpose, and her mouth stopped feeling lazy and began feeling full of need once more. This time the way they made love was so gentle and quiet that Daisy thought they’d both fallen asleep for a while, holding each other, her head pillowed against him.

  She must definitely have fallen asleep because the way he touched and tasted her with his mouth felt like part of a dream. She floated on a billowing cloud of sensation and her climax surged over her like a wave on a summer beach. He entered her while she was still lost in it, bringing the intensity of her response still higher, breaking just moments later.

  “I have to get better at taking this slow,” he muttered, flung out beside her. They were holding hands.

  “You almost killed me with taking it slow the first time.”

  “We can go a lot slower than that. You wait. You just wait. Give me a chance to refuel and then I’ll show you.”

  He lunged off the bed and reached for his jeans, and she laughed at him for his sudden determination and energy. “You got something to prove, Reid?”

  “I don’t know. Do I? Let’s find out.” He stared her down, wicked and strong, his still-bare torso towering above her with all its smooth, tanned muscle, while she hadn’t yet moved from the bed.

  “Sounds as if I might need a little refueling also...” she answered unsteadily.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t bother to get fully dressed.” He threw her a toweling robe from a hook on the back of the bathroom door, and didn’t bother to put a shirt on, above the jeans. The robe was miles too big and she felt deliciously lost
in it, wrapping it around her like a blanket, her skin still so sensitized against the soft swish of the thick cotton.

  “And maybe we shouldn’t bother with a lot of cooking,” she suggested.

  “I’m way ahead of you there.”

  He’d bought deli food for their meal, and it fit their mood. She helped him set it all out untidily on the coffee table—cheese and cold cuts and olives and cherry tomatoes, crackers and bread sticks, a bottle of red wine. They ate messily and hungrily, laughing at themselves, and she never put together her dessert. They just ate that the same way as the deli food. Daisy cut up cubes of cake and hulled the strawberries and they speared the pieces with forks and dipped them in cream and chocolate sauce and Irish cream liqueur.

  What happened next was all too predictable.

  They got in a mess.

  Holding a forkful of strawberry and cream liqueur to Daisy’s mouth, Tucker let it drip and the drips landed on her left breast and began to run down. He bent and licked them off, then looked into her eyes with an evil smile. “Sorry ’bout that.”

  “Can I be sorry, too?” She dipped a finger into the cream, ran it down the center of his chest and cleaned it with her mouth.

  It escalated, and ended exactly the way they both wanted, and when Daisy finally crept into the darkened Cherry residence well after midnight, she didn’t need her mom’s sleepy voice coming from her parents’ bedroom—“Glad you’re home, honey, it’s so late”—to tell her that she was in trouble, and not of the teenage kind.

  She was home, it was late, and all she wanted was to be back in Tucker’s arms.

  * * *

  Denise and Marshall drove down to pick Mary Jane up from Albany airport, and the three of them arrived back at Spruce Bay just before lunch. Mary Jane seemed giddily happy to be home, while at the same time she enthused about her trip and threatened to show hours of photos.

  She’d celebrated her thirty-fifth birthday around a campfire in an African safari park, with the sound of lions roaring in the background. She had a light golden tan, and her medium brown hair had bleached in the African sun, with strands in the mix that had turned to white gold.

  “Wow, I am so excited about what’s been happening here!” she said, taking herself on a tour, which Denise, Marshall and Daisy all followed. “I love the bathrooms. Are they all done?”

  “In the motel room wings,” Daisy said. “But not all the cabins, yet.”

  “They’re making good progress there, too, though,” Dad added.

  “So, we’ll be able to start getting the rooms ready for opening, get all those plastic sheets off the furnishings, give all the rooms a good cleaning and airing?”

  “We’ll do it together, you and me,” Daisy suggested, “with loud music playing. It’ll be fun.”

  They all trooped upstairs to the family apartment, and Mom began getting out sandwich fixings for lunch, with Dad hunting down a new jar of pickles from the pantry.

  “And the restaurant remodel?” Mary Jane asked.

  “Priority is on the exterior work, before we lose the good weather. The restaurant interior is on schedule and close to being done.”

  Mary Jane announced abruptly, “We should open for Thanksgiving.”

  “You mean Christmas? Hasn’t that always been—”

  “No, I mean Thanksgiving.” She seemed restless, suddenly, as if she needed activity to fight off the anticlimax of her arrival home. “We could do it, couldn’t we? Not the whole place, just one wing of rooms and a few cabins. Advertise a renovation special, with a big Thanksgiving dinner included?”

  “I suppose... It’d be tight. There’s a lot to do.” Daisy waited for one of their parents to chip in with their opinion, but they’d stayed very quiet during Mary Jane’s tour. They were starting to let go of this place a little, and that was good.

  “Let’s,” Mary Jane insisted. “I want to. I don’t mind some hard work. We still have a few weeks. Let’s do it.”

  “Well, let’s think about it.”

  “No, let’s make a commitment to making it happen, or else it won’t.”

  Daisy decided not to argue. “Okay, yes, if you really want.” If Tucker or any of the other contractors came up with a stumbling block, Mary Jane might be more prepared to listen to it once she’d unpacked and unwound and had some sleep.

  Mary Jane moved to the other window. “I won’t go into the grounds. It looks a mess. I’d get in the way.”

  “It’s going to be great, though, Mary Jane. I’ll show you the plans. Do you want to see—”

  “Not right now.” Mary Jane headed for her room and slumped down on the bed, her energy about the Thanksgiving plan already gone, while Daisy followed her and Mom began talking about getting a load of Mary Jane’s laundry on before they ate. Dad had returned to his quest for the pickles, which were proving hard to find.

  “Mom, I’m thirty-five years old, I can do my own laundry.” She caught herself. “Sorry to snap. I’m pretty tired.”

  Daisy lingered in the doorway of her sister’s room after their mom left. “Just tired, Mary Jane? Was the trip not all you’d hoped?” She looked more than tired, she looked dispirited and limp, and even the lingering glow of the African sun and her earlier excitement about reopening the resort couldn’t hide it.

  She sighed. “It was everything the brochure promised and more. I had a great time.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And now I’m home, and it’s over, and the only reason I go on all these damn trips is so I can pretend to myself that I have a great life, and I’m actually not a natural traveler, Daisy.” She gave Daisy a beseeching look that said, Please try to understand.

  “You’re not?” Daisy said gently. “But you travel every year. Mostly twice.”

  “I get scared before I leave, and homesick a lot when I’m away, and half the time I’m only telling myself that I’m having fun because I know I should be. Maybe I should just stop. Give in.”

  “Well, yes, stop if you don’t enjoy it. Give in, though?”

  “Every year, I say to myself it’s going to be my last trip, and then I start thinking about what my life looks like to other people. What it looks like to me.”

  Daisy knew exactly where this was heading now. She gave the only comfort that she could, saying gently, “You fake it pretty well, honey.”

  “I know, right? Mary Jane, the Traveling Cherry Sister. It sounds like a one-woman show. But I’m sick of faking it. Maybe I should just admit it. I want marriage. I want babies. At the very least, I want a travel companion sharing my bed. And I’m thirty-five now, and there’s nothing on the horizon, and what if it’s already too late?”

  “You don’t look thirty-five. Not now, with your hair all sun-kissed and that outdoorsy glow. You look gorgeous, even with jet lag.”

  “Yeah, but my eggs are thirty-five, and they can’t fake it.”

  “You never meet anyone on your trips?”

  “A few times, but it never feels real. It’s always felt as if we’re both doing it because you’re supposed to have a holiday romance. As soon as I’m home, it fades and doesn’t seem to count, and since the guy is from Ohio or Illinois, or even Scotland, how do you keep that going unless there’s a really strong sense of connection?”

  “Ah, Mary Jane...”

  “I don’t expect you to understand this, Daisy.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because there’s a huge difference between thirty-one and thirty-five. Because you lived in California for ten years. You didn’t just...oh...stay on the family farm, like I did. You give off this sense of belief in yourself, Daisy—today you’re practically radiating sunlight—and my eggs and I can’t fake that, either.” She wore a half smile that said she could mock herself, even when she was this low. Daisy thought this was a good sign, bu
t had no concrete answers. Her sister was a terrific woman, but there were terrific single women everywhere.

  She thought about Tucker.

  Just thinking his name made her blush and heat up. If she and Mary Jane were having a heart-to-heart, should she confess what she’d done last night? And how she was feeling about it? And how maybe she wasn’t a single woman now, and that might be glorious. She was so tempted.

  Last night was amazing. I’d never realized chemistry could be so strong. But it feels dangerous, Mary Jane. What if it fades in a few weeks? What if I’m fooling myself, getting dazzled by things that don’t count, the way I did before?

  But would Mary Jane really want to hear that?

  “Daisy? Did you hear what I just said?” Mary Jane queried impatiently.

  “Oh, no, sorry...”

  “You look like you’re a million miles away.”

  “Mmm, yeah, the website. I’ve been...” Daisy let the sentence trail off, hoping Mary Jane would accept the vague explanation for the whereabouts of her thoughts. “But you were saying?”

  “Trying to decide whether I should make myself stay awake until tonight.”

  “You usually think that’s the best plan when you’ve flown west. You keep yourself awake, eat early, and you’re conked out like a light before six o’clock.”

  “It is. You’re right. I’d better get off this bed or it’ll swallow me up. Six o’clock is sounding too far away. Maybe Mom’s sandwiches will help.” Mary Jane jumped to her feet. “I’m going to get that laundry on first so that Mom doesn’t do it for me, then you’re going to show me what you’ve done with the website and the menu planning, because if this Thanksgiving thing is happening, you’re right, we don’t have a lot of time.”

  * * *

  Tucker sent a text message to Daisy as early as he decently could, after as long as he could make himself wait.

  When can I see you?

  She didn’t answer right away. He waited for ten minutes, pulled over at the side of the road, drinking coffee out of a paper cup and pretending to himself that he was taking notes following a site visit so that he could draw up an estimate for a new client.