by Amelia Wilde
“I—” Another long lick, starting at my opening and ending at the tight bundle of nerves at the top. “I—” Another. “Oh—” Another.
It stops.
I thought I wanted it to stop, I thought I couldn’t take another moment of sensation, but Ash pulls back and drags his hand over his mouth and I could cry. Tears gather at the corners of my eyes.
He’s there instantly, nipping my bottom lip between his teeth. “No tears, Sophie. Not on your wedding night. Can you take me again?”
I’m so desperate for more of him that the only sound I can make is mmmm, but he hears my plea for what it is and drives himself inside me one more time.
He’s harder than before, thicker, somehow, and I throw my arms around his neck and hang on for dear life.
Ash is all hard muscle and hard lines and hard thrusts. I’m nothing but nerves and warm flesh. I can feel myself opening for him, I can feel myself taking him in, up to the very limit and past it. He stretches me. Oh, God, he stretches me.
I never want this to stop.
I never want to unlock that door.
Never, never, never…
Ash presses his head into the curve of my neck, his pace changing, and I can feel from the way his muscles bunch against me that he’s close.
Very close.
“Do it,” I whisper into his ear. “Come inside me.”
He lifts his head then so that he can cover my mouth with his. He reaches a hand under my chin and my body quivers. “I’m going to fill you up,” he warns.
“Please.”
He does.
Ash’s release is one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever witnessed. Every muscle works together. His eyes never leave mine. He doesn’t flinch away from any part of it. He makes me watch.
My heart turns inside out, throwing itself wildly against my rib cage. He’s showing me himself. He’s showing me himself at his most vulnerable, in the grips of an orgasm that shakes him from head to toe. The heat pours into me in waves. His hips pin me to the bed. I have no escape, and I don’t want one.
It’s so intimate it takes the breath from my lungs. Goose bumps rise at my hips and move outward, covering everything and diving back beneath my skin as quickly as they came. I’ve never felt this particular tumbling sensation before, but I know what it is—it’s falling in love.
I’m falling for him.
I’ve fallen for him.
Ash stills, breathing hard, and for a series of heartbeats we’re frozen with him between my legs and my arms around his neck.
Breathing.
In the same space.
Closer than we’ve ever been before.
“Sophie.”
I know what he’s going to say. He’s going to say that we’re out of time, that we have to go back downstairs and deal with the wedding guests. That I have to deal with them. I’ve never known Ash to leave anything undone. It was something Gunnar used to gripe about on his visits home—how leaving a task incomplete was anathema to his best friend. Ash could never just walk away from a responsibility.
But all of that is wrapped up in the wedding dress we’ve abandoned on the floor, and I don’t want to put it on.
“Don’t say it.” I put my finger to his lips. “Don’t say it just yet.”
A grin with an edge of laziness spreads across his face, the first of its kind that I’ve ever seen. “Say what?”
“Say that I have to go downstairs. I know I do. I know we can’t stay up here forever.”
My heart pounds, throbbing. Maybe he will say we can stay up here forever. I wouldn’t argue.
His eyes trace over my lips. “I wasn’t going to say that. Not exactly.” He threads his hand through my hair, making space between me and the pillow. “I was going to say…I hope you enjoyed your wedding night.”
I’ve opened my mouth to answer when the door shudders under a loud, thudding knock.
Ash
Fuck.
I roll away from Sophie, which feels like rolling away from my own soul, and get my feet underneath me on the floor. My entire body is wrung out, but my head is as clear as it’s ever been.
This has to be over.
We got caught up in the rush, in all the excitement of what happened, and that’s all this can be. I do hope she got what she wanted.
But our time has run out.
Another knock sounds at the door. “Sophie? Are you in there?”
Mallory.
Her maid of honor knows her too well.
I pick up the wreckage of my tuxedo piece by piece and toss it onto the bed. The damn thing took fifteen full minutes to get into this morning. Even with my focus laser-sharp from the adrenaline of that knock, it’s a struggle.
Sophie perches on the bed, on her knees, looking down at me. “You don’t have to get dressed,” she whispers. “There’s no rush.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Your maid of honor is here.”
“She’s not going to come in. There’s no way she can—”
A soft click at the door drains all the color from Sophie’s face.
Boxers. At the very least, I need boxers. They’re underneath my left foot and I reach down and pull them on as the door to the main suite opens. The change in the air pressure pops in my ears.
Sophie tucks and rolls, coming up on the floor with the petal-covered top quilt wrapped around her shoulders. I’ve messed up her hair. There’s no getting around it. The flower crown is on, but askew, and the perfect waves of her hair have been mussed.
“Sophie? People are getting a little antsy downstairs.” The outer door closes again. Pants. I try to put them on backward at first, then spin them and shove my feet into the legs. The master bedroom has a pair of wide double doors leading into the living room, and both of them stand open. “Did you and Clay seriously—” The voice cuts off.
I straighten my back and turn around.
She’s seen me, clearly, since I’m centered in the double doors.
“Hey, Mallory.” There’s no casual way to zip your pants when the rest of your clothes are in an explosion on the bed behind you, so I do it un-casually, then hook my hands into my pockets like this is not a big deal.
According to Mallory’s expression, this is a very big deal.
“Ash?” Her arms are still full of the bouquets from the ceremony, all white and pink and perfect. “What are you doing here? How did you—” A rush of color flies across her face. “You’re half-dressed.” Mallory turns her face to the side, but I see her peek out of the corner of her eye. “Does Sophie know—”
“He’s here with me.” Sophie steps up next to me, wrapped in the coverlet, shedding flower petals. “Me,” she says again, as if the message wasn’t clear the first time.
Mallory’s eyes go wide, then wider. She looks at Sophie, then me. If she snapped a picture right now, you could still mistake it for a wedding ceremony. All the hints are there. Half a tux, a white “gown,” and flowers.
“You—” Mallory points a finger from out behind the enormous bouquets in her hands. “You brought him up here in the middle of your wedding ceremony?” The finger swings over to me, looking hilariously small next to the bouquets. “And you came up here with her? What happened to Clay?” A rush of color sprints across Mallory’s cheeks. “Is he in here, too? Oh my god. Is he in here too?”
“Clay’s done,” Sophie says. “He had a getaway car and a getaway girlfriend, too. A redhead,” she adds. “She had truly red hair.”
“Are you serious?”
Sophie laughs. “Mal, I wouldn’t make it up.”
Mallory purses her lips, her face doing a contortion that looks like a bizarre cross between disapproval and…something else.
Then her shoulders sag, and she lets the bouquets fall from in front of her chest. “Oh, god, I’m so relieved.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Sophie’s mouth drop open. “You’re relieved?”
“God, Soph, yes. He was the worst. I don’t know if I could have
spent the rest of our friendship watching you cringe away from him. He was terrible at sex, and he never paid attention to you…” Mallory ticks each item off on her fingers. “And we planned our whole wedding. He didn’t care because he had a backup lady in the works. Which, how? How did he have a woman on the side, when he was so…” A shudder runs through her body. “I know you wanted to be there for him, after he was there for you in college. Kind of there. He was a warm shoulder. I don’t need to tell you this. You know all this.”
Ah. The last puzzle piece clicks into place. The sailing accident, Gunnar and Sophie’s parents…it happened when she was in college.
“Why didn’t you say something?” Sophie shakes her head. “You could have said something.”
“Who wants to say something about somebody else’s fiancé? You think I wanted to be the one to step in front of the bullet?”
Sophie sticks one arm out from beneath the coverlet. “I don’t even own a gun! You should have said something. I really didn’t like him.”
“I know. But you were so…” Mallory cringes. “You were so valiant about it, even when I know you had a massive crush on—” Mallory presses her lips shut. “Even…” She trails off. “Listen, what’s the plan here? Are you two just…if you want to hide away in the suite, I can’t blame you. I’ll go back down and say some things, make some excuses…”
“No. I’ll do it. It’s my wedding. These are my guests.” Sophie lifts a hand to her hair.
“Yeah, not looking like that you’re not.” Mallory tosses the bouquets onto the sofa and marches into the bedroom. I step out of the way just in time. “Damn, this is a suite.”
It’s…mildly destroyed. The sheets are hanging off one side of the bed from when Sophie rolled out. The remaining pieces of my tuxedo are trapped in the vortex. The flower petals have multiplied.
We look at it in silence.
“Okay. First, hair. No. First, clothes.” Mallory bends and sweeps Sophie’s dress from the floor. She hustles it into the master bathroom, shakes out a fall of petals, and drapes it over a pristine stretch of countertop with no other seeming purpose. Then she bends and opens a drawers. “Yes. Tools.” This is serious maid-of-honor action. Mallory brandishes a curling iron. “I can fix this in ten.” She busies herself with the cord.
Sophie stares straight ahead for another long heartbeat, and then those eyes are on mine again, boring a path straight into my soul. “You can stay,” she says softly.
“I shouldn’t.”
There it is—the brick crashing through the surface of the water, disturbing everything underneath.
Sophie flinches. “All right.”
“I want to stay.”
But staying means that the dominos start falling, here and now. If I stay with her any longer, I won’t be able to leave.
The first casualty will be my friendship with Gunnar.
It’s code between us, and it doesn’t matter if it’s unspoken. We’ve been to war together. There is no room in the bond we share to date each other's exes…or family members. He would be so fucking pissed if he knew I’d taken Sophie up to the honeymoon suite for us to have our way with each other.
And that’s only one risk. If it ever went wrong between us, I’d lose both of them.
“Then stay,” Sophie says, the words barely audible beneath the clicks and clacks of Mallory setting up in the bathroom. “We can…” She shrugs, bare shoulders peeking out from above the white comforter. “We can talk it through, or…”
“I think we both know where this ends.”
I’m trying to do the right thing, damn it, but the expression on her face guts me. Shirtless like this, with nothing between my skin and the air, I’m completely exposed. It’s almost a surprise that there’s no knife in my belly.
“Sophie—”
She whirls toward the bathroom then, the train of her comforter gown lifting from the floor. “Just go, Ash. Be where you need to be.”
“I’ll be downstairs.”
“Wherever. Okay?” Sophie turns her head, her profile cutting into me again, and she gives me the saddest smile I’ve ever seen on a person. “Thanks for the wedding night.”
She sweeps into the bathroom, still regal even wearing a blanket.
“Are they pissed?” Sophie’s voice echoes over the bathroom tile. I reach for my shirt. My jacket. All the other bullshit accoutrements that come with a tux. “How long have I been up here?”
“Not quite an hour,” Mallory answers. “But the appetizers are running out, and I think everybody’s starting to wonder…you know.”
“Yeah.”
I head out toward the main suite.
“Did you two…” Mallory doesn’t have to finish the question, and the acoustics from the bathroom carry it out to where I’m tugging on my undershirt, then my dress shirt.
“Yes,” sighs Sophie.
“How was it?”
I leave before the answer destroys me.
Sophie
So, this is not going how I planned.
Mallory stands behind me in the bathroom. She found a cushioned stool of the perfect height somewhere else in the honeymoon suite—the Bliss Brothers really think of everything—and once I got my dress back on, she went to town on my hair.
The damage wasn’t as bad as it initially looked. Still, it’s not something I could fix for myself. I have always sucked at curling my own hair. As a kindergarten teacher, it’s not an essential part of entering the fray, so I haven’t put much time into it.
Ugh—there’s another hit. All of my students are ridiculously excited for my wedding. There’s not much about my personal life that I bring into the classroom, but since the wedding and honeymoon meant getting a sub for a few weeks, I told them about it.
Mistake number one.
Mistake number two was thinking I could sleep with Ash and just…go on with my life after it happened.
I never heard him leave.
He was there one moment, gone the next. Like it’s always been.
“There,” Mallory says, and I meet her eyes in the mirror. “You’re good to go.” She fluffs my hair one last time and lets it fall over my shoulders.
It’s a bizarre mirror image of this morning, when the hairdresser did the same thing in the bridal suite downstairs. Back then, all those many hours ago, I felt jittery. Over-caffeinated. Ready to do this thing and launch myself into a better version of my life. A married version, whatever that was going to look like.
Now I feel like I reached the optimum height to ride the good coasters only to have the amusement park gate shut in my face.
It’s not the best metaphor. Riding Ash was better than any coaster. My entire body still vibrates with it like the aftershock of a ringing enormous bell.
“You’re a miracle worker.”
“I don’t know about that.” She smiles at me in the mirror. “You sure you want to go back down there? I can handle this for you, I promise.”
“You’re a good friend, Mal.”
“Hell yes I am.”
“I gotta face this, though. It’ll haunt me.”
That’s not the only thing. I will forever be haunted by the ghost of Ash’s body between my legs. Who’s ever going to match up with that?
The pit in my stomach grows on the elevator back down to the main level. I always knew he was off-limits. I always knew that getting a crush on one of my brother’s friends would be a bad, bad idea. The one crush I let slip through my defenses never left.
Maybe I thought I could escape it with Clayton. I don’t know. I’ve thought a lot of stupid things in my lifetime.
“What do you think I should open with?”
Mallory turns to face me. She taps her maid-of-honor bouquet against her leg. “Probably whether the reception is still on. Is the reception still on?”
“I already paid for all the food.” I shrug one shoulder. “Everyone’s got to be hungry. I’m starving.”
“Yeah…starving for more of Ash.”
/>
I thwap her with my own bouquet. “Don’t say that to me.”
“Why? It’s true.”
“That was…” I can’t even describe it as a one-night stand. “That was an afternoon delight.”
Mallory stares resolutely ahead, but the set of her lips gives her away.
“Fine. That was a long time coming.”
“I bet you spent a long time coming,” she whispers.
“Oh my god.”
“You did, didn’t you?” The elevator slows and stops, and she turns to face me. “Why not own it? You have had a crush on him since the day he showed up at that cottage.”
“How is that relevant to this situation?” I hiss. “I have to tell people the wedding is off, but we’re still having a reception. Do you want me to throw in that it’s all going to be fine because Ash’s magical penis fixed everything in the honeymoon suite?”
She bursts out laughing. “No, but…”
“But what?”
“You could leave with him, is what I’m saying. There’s no need for you to play games with each other now. You’re obviously meant to be.”
“He didn’t think so.”
“Oh, please, Soph. He totally thought so. I’ve never seen such a tragic expression on a man’s face before. He wants you. He needs you.”
“He thinks it’s a bad idea. He said so.”
“His heart doesn’t say so.”
“What would you know about his heart?”
“I’m good with reading people’s faces,” Mal says primly. “And yours says you’re desperate for another roll in the honeymoon suite with—”
The elevator doors open.
“Ash,” says Mal.
I look down into my bouquet, trying to gather myself for the ordeal ahead. “Yeah, I got it,” I grumble into the flowers.
“And Gunnar,” she says. “Hi, guys.”
What? What?
I pick up my head, and there they are.
My brother’s best friend…and my brother.
They’re opposites, the two of them. Ash is tall and dark-haired and chiseled out of marble, and my brother looks like he’s made out of sunshine. Blonde hair. Tan skin. I can’t breathe.