Sandcastle Beach--Includes a Bonus Novella

by Jenny Holiday

  “What are you doing?” she whispered, even though she knew exactly what he was doing.

  He dipped his head so their faces were inches apart. “I’m going to kiss you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s a thing we do now, I think?”

  It was a question, and though he moved even closer—she could feel his breath against her lips—he was waiting for her to answer it.

  “Yeah,” she breathed. “I guess it is.”

  This time, she vowed as his lips came down on hers, she wasn’t going to freak out and pull away. She was going to…see what happened.

  What happened, it turned out, was that she was going to act like a starving woman being given a meal, and she wasn’t even going to be embarrassed about it. She wrapped her free arm around his neck—he was still pinning her other arm to the wall—and as their tongues tangled, she moaned. Her body was alive all over, overtuned to the sensations of the wall behind her and the air in front of her. She didn’t want that air there, so she tried to hook one of her legs around him to draw him closer. It was a clumsy attempt, and she stumbled, but he got the message and righted them, letting loose a low hum and pressing his body against hers. She gasped so loudly when his erection ground against her stomach that it broke the seal between their lips. He pressed openmouthed kisses along her jaw and down the side of her neck. She tilted her head to give him better access.

  “Your pulse is racing,” he bit out as his mouth slid around to the front of her throat.

  “How very observant of you,” she managed. Her lungs, constricted by the half corset she was wearing as part of her Beatrice costume, were starting to ache.

  He chuckled and went to work on a spot at the base of her throat. He was right. Her pulse was thundering. So much that it almost hurt. She wanted him to move off that spot. She wanted him to move down. She was wearing a blouse under the corset. She grabbed the neckline and pulled, exposing a good amount of cleavage.

  “Oh my God,” he bit out, and hearing him like that, at her mercy, made power surge through her.

  She shifted against him, standing on her toes to try to get his erection where she wanted it. “You have quite the hard-on.”

  “How very observant of you,” he panted, dipping his tongue into her cleavage. Having his mouth there made her nipples, so close to his mouth yet so far, even harder.

  She stumbled, and this time it wasn’t her own doing. He’d backed her against the wall next to the kitchen’s swinging door, but they’d migrated a bit as they’d been feasting on each other, so she was blocking the door—the door that someone was trying to push open.

  Since she’d been standing on her tiptoes, she pitched forward. He caught her with a mumbled curse and pulled her against his chest, probably to cover the fact that her boobs were half hanging out, and shot out an arm to block the door from opening. “What?” he barked at the intruder.

  “Mill Street keg’s empty.” She recognized Carter’s voice.

  “Give me a minute.”

  He stepped away from her after the door closed, and she wanted to wail. Her body was all wound up. She glanced at the fly of his jeans. His was, too, which was strangely comforting. They were in this together.

  “How do I fix this?” He was trying to put her blouse to rights. It was loose and flowy and had fabric tape that could be used to adjust the neckline. She batted his hands away, fixed her shirt, and took a deep breath—or as deep a breath as she could manage. The corset was a short, underbust variety, and since it was purely for visual purposes, she’d had Eve lace it loosely. Or so she’d thought.

  “You want to escape out the back?” he asked. “I’ll make your excuses.”

  She gave half a thought to going across the street to find Holden to make sure everything was okay with them, but she found she didn’t want to. She could text him. “Nah. I can’t leave my own party.”

  He nodded as he adjusted himself and reached for an apron—he did not normally wear an apron—hanging on a peg nearby. He was covering the evidence of his arousal. She smirked.

  “Good?” he asked after she’d fixed herself and smoothed her hair.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Good.” And even though she’d come into this kitchen discombobulated and pissed off, and even though she was now disheveled and turned on with no relief in sight, she really was.

  The rest of the party was interminable. Law had no idea if Maya was still planning to come upstairs for the match. He wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t want to anymore. A lot had happened today: her play, her fight with Holden—that absolute asshole.

  Their, uh, interlude in the kitchen.

  He adjusted his apron. He kept having to do that, every time he caught a glimpse of her standing there in that corset chatting to someone or other, like it was no big deal.

  Oh, that corset.

  It was messing with him. Her costume was some kind of old-fashioned-lady outfit. It was surely more specific than that, but to him she looked like a fancy version of his idea of a serving wench. She was wearing a long, flowing blue skirt and one of those puffy blouses he associated with Shakespearean plays. Nothing about her outfit could reasonably be called risqué. It covered her from midcalf to neck—at least when she didn’t have the blouse gaping to make way for his mouth. But that brown leather corset over the whole thing, cinching in at her waist—God help him. Here he’d had the idea that corsets went under clothes.

  He tried to act normal, to pull pints and mix drinks. He kept his eye on her glass of wine and topped it up once, but she wasn’t drinking very much, he supposed because she was taking her own advice to Holden about the need to stay sharp for the show tomorrow.

  Sawyer, who Law thought had left when Eve had a while ago, startled him by sidling up to the bar. He turned. Jake was there, too. Uh-oh. Was it bromance intervention time? He’d been on the other side of these kinds of “chats” enough that he could recognize the signs. The two of them without Eve and Nora, huddled at the corner of the bar, looking at him all intensely, like they were all-seeing, endlessly patient Jedi masters and he was an untested, ignorant kid.

  “Well, that was interesting,” Sawyer said.

  “What was interesting?” Law tried, though he knew it was probably futile.

  Jake raised his eyebrows, and Sawyer said, “You throwing Holden Hampshire out on his ass.”

  Law had to tamp down a smile. “I’d do it again. That guy is an ass.”

  “I don’t disagree,” Sawyer said, “but people were taking bets on whether you and Maya were going to come to physical blows or make out.”

  “Well, neither,” he lied, “but if I had to pick one, it’d be come to blows.” And that was the critical difference between this intervention attempt and the ones he’d been on the other side of. Sawyer and Jake had been sleeping with their respective ladies but insisting it was just sex, that there was nothing actually happening, blah, blah. Meanwhile, it had been obvious to anyone with a pair of eyeballs that they were head over heels and needed to get out of their own way.

  “So you dragged Maya away for ten minutes so you guys could have a fistfight?” Sawyer asked.

  “No, no. God, give me some credit. We just went to the kitchen to…argue.”

  With our tongues in each other’s mouth.

  “You sure about that?”

  “Are you kidding? She is not going to say a civil word to me until the grant competition is over. And when I win it, she will never speak to me again.” He tried to smirk. “I look forward to it.”

  Sawyer stared at him like he was trying to administer a lie detector test by ESP. “Well, you might have to watch your back when it comes to the grant. That play was great.”

  “It was, wasn’t it?” Law said before he could think better of it. Sawyer narrowed his eyes.

  Law picked up a spoon and clinked it against a glass. “Last call!” he hollered. Finally. It was only one fifteen, and a little earlier than he usually did last call, but whatever. He was done
with this day and this conversation.

  Last call triggered a line at the bar that had Carter and him working steadily for the next fifteen minutes—and got Sawyer and Jake off his back.

  As things started to slow down, Maya appeared. She set her empty glass down. “I’ll take my bill, please.”

  He printed it and slid it to her as he took a couple more orders.

  By the time he had circled back to take her payment, she’d settled on a stool. “You only charged me for one glass.”

  “First round was on me, remember?”

  “Yeah, but you always top up my glass before it’s empty, and you only ever charge me for one glass.”

  He shrugged. Busted. He was surprised she hadn’t called him on it earlier. Like, years earlier.

  “Why do you do that?”

  He didn’t know what to say. Lately the answer was that he realized how stressed she was financially. A glass of wine here and there made no difference to him. But that was a new realization, so how did he explain the long-standing preferential treatment?

  Well, he knew how to explain it to himself, if he was being honest, but how did he explain it to her?

  Thankfully, Carter came over saying they didn’t have enough change in the till, so he said to Maya, “Sorry, I have to deal with some closing stuff. Maybe we can talk about this later?”

  “Sure.” She smiled. Her easy agreement was disconcerting. “We can talk later.”

  And then she got up and left.

  Did that mean no soccer?

  Well, whatever. He was beat, his body battling the opposing forces of exhaustion and agitation. It was time to call it a night. To end this day in which he’d lived an entire lifetime. He sent Carter home, cashed out, and yawned through the cleaning.

  When he left through the back door, he jumped about a mile when he found Maya sitting on the bottom step in the vestibule looking at her phone. “What are you doing here?”

  “I thought we were going to talk later. It’s later.”

  “How’d you get in?” He’d locked the exterior rear door a while ago. People had to come and go from the front in the last hour the bar was open—a safety measure he’d instituted so he could keep an eye on everyone, make sure the drunks got taxis or rides.

  She raised her eyebrows like he was a simpleton. “I never left.”

  Oh. “Right.” So she’d been hanging around back here while he thought he was alone in the bar. The idea made him…uncomfortable and comfortable at the same time.

  “I’ve been sitting here using your secret Wi-Fi to read about the match.” She’d been sitting a little way up the staircase, so when she stood, she was taller than he was—which meant that damn corset was right at his eye level. The top edge of it was an upside-down V. He supposed the point of it was to shove her breasts up and out—that was what corsets did, right? But of course you couldn’t see anything because of the puffy blouse.

  He took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. They were going to talk now. Fine. That was fine.

  He locked the door to the bar, double-checked the exterior door, and gestured up the stairs. “After you.” She started up, which gave him a close-up view of the back of the corset. It laced up and was tied in a bow, but a lopsided one. One end was dangling down quite a bit farther than the other, like it wanted him to grab it and pull. His fingers felt like they were vibrating. He thought suddenly of her swimsuit, the sailor-themed one with the buttons. He had wanted to grab one of those buttons, too.

  He ordered his brain to concentrate on more pressing questions. Namely, what the hell was he going to say about the wine situation?

  Actually, maybe that wasn’t the topic. Maybe she’d want to talk about what had happened in the kitchen. She’d surprised him the other day by not insisting they talk about that kiss, but he could sort of see how if making out was going to be a regular thing—Please let it be a regular thing—they might have to establish some guidelines.

  “Ben?” She paused outside the door to his apartment.

  “Hmm?” And since when did she call him Ben?

  And since when did he like it?

  “What would happen if we just…didn’t talk?”

  “What do you mean?” he said to her butt, because she was at the top of the staircase and he was a few steps behind her. Or said to where he imagined her butt might be under her voluminous skirt. He had to revise his earlier thought about her costume being too modest to be risqué. There was something intensely erotic about a garment that concealed so much.

  But then he thought again about that swimsuit, which had not concealed anything but had given him the same feeling.

  “I mean, what if we go in there, and we make a rule that we don’t talk?” she said.

  “We’ve spent months in there not talking.”

  He wasn’t sure why he was arguing. He’d just been fretting over what to say to her. But suddenly the idea of sitting silently side by side on the sofa while they watched soccer felt like a big step backward. He didn’t want to regress. He liked talking to her, even when talking took the form of fighting.

  Maybe especially when it took the form of fighting?

  Aww, shit, he was getting confused. Skirts, swimsuits, corsets. Talking, not talking. Everything was all jumbled up in his mind.

  “That’s not what I mean,” she said slowly, like maybe she was working through her own brain jumble. “I meant…a different kind of not talking.”

  Oh. Oh, shit.

  “Ahh!” She shrieked and grabbed for him, because he’d started to fall down the stairs. Her statement had caused him to rear back, not in revulsion, which he supposed rearing back usually signified, but because he was just so shocked.

  But he needed to get over himself, because every cell in his body wanted him to get his ass inside and start not talking.

  He grabbed the railing and pushed himself up to stand next to her. There wasn’t enough room on the small landing for two people to fit comfortably, but that was fine because when had she ever made him comfortable? He let himself brush against her as he leaned past her to unlock the door. She sucked in a breath, held it, and looked up at him with what he could only describe as bedroom eyes. He’d heard that phrase before and thought it ridiculous, but nope, turned out it was a real thing. Her pupils were blown, and her eyelids drooped a little. But then she opened her mouth, like she was going to talk. As he pushed the door open with one hand and pointed inside, he laid the palm of his other hand across her mouth—gently, because he didn’t want to seem like, say, a deranged kidnapper. He just wanted to get a message across. She’d said she wanted to go inside and not talk, and unless she had changed her mind, that was damn well what they were going to do.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Hooboy.

  Maya sucked in a breath as Ben pressed against her from behind.

  It was pretty clear what was going to happen, but as was becoming their custom, there was no frantic coming together, no crashing of mouths, no tearing off of clothes. They were still turning the warship, maybe?

  When Ben laid a hand over her mouth, it made all the little hairs on the back of her neck stand on end and a clenching sensation take hold between her legs. His hand was resting against her so lightly, it almost tickled. She wanted to put her own hands over his and press down, increase the pressure.

  Interesting.

  She wanted him to touch her, to really touch her. She wanted to touch him. She wanted to jump him.

  Even more interesting.

  But no. He was being cool, with his smooth, understated pointing gesture. He wanted her to go inside. He took his hand off her mouth. She wanted it back.

  Extremely interesting.

  He was holding the door for her. What could she do but walk through it?

  She entered the dark apartment and made for the living room. She heard him throw his keys on the kitchen counter, and the snick of the little lamp he had on a sideboard in the dining room as he turned it on. She was pretty sure he’
d passed a switch for the overhead light on his way in. That must have been intentional, right? Mood lighting?

  What now? She made her way to the window, like she always did, to look out at her apartment. There were no lights on. She could feel her mind starting to fire up, wondering if Holden was there, already asleep, or if he was out doing something guaranteed to be bad news for Much Ado and therefore for her.

  She should turn off her brain.

  She laid her forehead on the glass. In her mind, the pane was going to be cold. Like, it was going to cool her feverish mind or something. But no. It was August.

  If she wanted to turn her brain off, how would she do that? Her theatrical training suggested the answer was to get out of her head and tune into her body. God knew she’d sat through enough “relax your toes, relax your ankles, et cetera, et cetera” exercises in her day. Was there a part of her that was tense that she could make a conscious effort to relax?

  Yes. Her lungs. Her ribs. She could get this corset off. It had been bugging her all evening and now, suddenly, it was torture. She reached around to try to undo the bow. She wasn’t even sure if she could get it off by herself.

  Well, she didn’t have to get it off by herself, did she? That had been the whole point of coming up here. She could kill two birds with one stone—a sexual overture and the ability to breathe!

  She lifted her head off the windowpane and turned. Ben was staring at her. He’d stopped under the archway that divided the dining area from the living room, light from the lamp behind him backlighting him. She couldn’t make out his expression, so it was hard to know what he was thinking. What if she was overreaching? When he’d said, That’s a thing we do now, he’d been talking about kissing. Maybe that was all he wanted to do.

  But how would she know unless she asked? She was getting that stage-fright feeling again. Way worse than before the curtain had opened earlier. But the show must go on, right? “Can you help me get this corset off?”