Never His: A Second Chance Romance (Second Chances Book 1)

by Amelia Wilde

  “Oh, don’t,” she says, but it’s half-hearted as fuck and a little smile plays across her lips. She always hinted, during that long lost summer, that she wanted to do something a little dirtier, a little kinkier, but she didn’t have the words to describe it, just the heat that rose to her cheeks whenever she tried to tell me.

  I know exactly what she wants now, but there’s no time right now for anything complicated, anything that would require another set-up. We’ve been waiting a decade for this. We’re going to have to stick with the basics.

  Once I drop the panties to the carpet, she stretches out against the comforter, and it damn near takes my breath away.

  She is the most perfect woman I have ever seen, or ever will see.

  I don’t like that the thought is followed by a cold twist deep in my gut. She’s too perfect. I’m not nearly fucking perfect enough, an Air Force failure who’s right back where he started from—

  I shake my head. This is not the fucking time to dwell on that shit.

  I put one hand on either side of her creamy thighs and climb back onto the bed, positioning myself between them, ducking to kiss at her breasts, taking one of her nipples into my mouth, swirling my tongue around it until she’s writhing underneath me, her ponytail a mess against the smooth fabric of the comforter.

  She reaches up mid-moan and puts her hands on either side of my face, her blue eyes laser-focused on mine. “Brett Miller,” she starts out, her voice breathy and low, so taut with need that it makes my cock harder than I thought it could be. “If you don’t fuck me right now, I won’t speak to you for another ten years.”

  I don’t wait to find out if it’s an empty threat.

  “My pleasure.”

  I line myself up with her opening, and then I kiss her again, slow and purposeful, and she starts rocking her hips against me, the head of my cock pressing into her wetness, and when she starts to rock harder, I lean into it, entering her in one single, powerful thrust.

  It feels so damn good to be inside her that my vision blacks out for a second, and all I can do is pull her closer while her muscles pulse around me, drawing me farther in. I’m completely enveloped in her soft wetness, and my chest aches and releases so strongly that under any other circumstance I’d think I was having a fucking heart attack.

  There’s nothing sweeter in the goddamn world, nothing that takes away more of the guilt and tension and stress of the last ten years than this moment. It can’t get any better than this. Not one bit fucking better than it is right now, this very second, and I don’t even want to breathe because that will mean the next moment has arrived and this one has ended.

  Then Addison pushes up into me and proves me wrong. It can get better. And it does with every move that she makes, every thrust I pound into her, and better and better and better until we’re both hovering on the edge.

  She doesn’t hesitate. She takes us both over into the sweetest fucking release in the history of the world, holding on tight.

  Flashback

  Brett, 18

  My dad is making it hard for me to see Addison, which pisses the hell out of me. It’s not like I don’t have enough to do with working at the marina fifty hours a week. But what am I going to do? It’s not like he has a wife to help him with remodeling the damn houses.

  Still, I don’t understand why he’s choosing to do all of this on my last summer in town.

  Not that he knows it’s my last summer in town.

  He never went to college. I don’t want to rub my acceptance to the U in his face. And we both know the state of his finances. Shit, since Mom took off, things have not been rosy. The last thing I’m going to do is ask him for a loan. I’ll figure all that bullshit out when I get there. I got a student loan that should be able to get me through the first couple of semesters. That’s more than enough time to find…whatever solution there is to find.

  I sigh and take the crowbar to another section of trim, shifting my frustration into the job at hand. My dad wants to replace all of it, and he’s left that to me while he repairs some of the siding on the house. I’d much rather be out there doing that, but he thinks I should “practice on this.”

  Dad might have spent all his working hours at his job in the factory, but I bet if he ever had the chance to quit, he’d become a builder. I’m pretty fucking sure he could build an entire house from the ground up. I don’t really care about building houses. It seems like something any idiot could do. But you need a license, and he’s never said so, but I bet the money just wasn’t there to suddenly change careers—not with a kid and a runaway wife.

  “How’s it going, son?” he says from the kitchen door. When I look up at him, he’s got an odd smile on his face despite the sweat-soaked shirt and the dark bags under his eyes. I might be tired from working on boats all day, but he’s got to be fucking exhausted. Yet here we are on his day off—and mine—fixing the fucking house.

  “Great,” I say, the smile that starts out as fake on my face turning genuine. The only thing on my mind is Addison, and it lights a fire under my ass. The sooner I finish a bunch of this bullshit trim, the sooner I can see her and watch her face light up when my car pulls into the lot by the Dockside to pick her up. Nobody has ever smiled at me like that.

  At the end of this summer everything is going to be different.

  My dad gets himself a glass of water and goes back outside, and I attack the trim again, with Addison on my mind, Addison making me hard, Addison waiting.

  I’m not going to keep her waiting for very much longer.

  I’m not.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Addison

  At some point, when it’s all over—and that takes a long time, maybe several hours, I completely lose track of time while Brett and I move against each other on top of my comforter, then underneath it, the sheets tangling around us and over us—I fall asleep snuggled up against the length of Brett’s body, one leg thrown over his, his arm wrapped around my back.

  I’m buzzing with the warmth of the afterglow, my mind somewhere between here and ten years ago, remembering the way we’d curl up around each other in the tiny backseat of his car after the sex was over, our breath fogging the windows. I don’t know when, but I fall into a dream taking me back to one of those nights, dozing in the backseat before we had to tug our clothes on, feet against the headrests, and drive back home, sneaking in through the window.

  It’s the happiest and lightest I’ve felt since I moved back to Lockton. Since Jamie packed up and left. And nothing—nothing —is going to ruin this moment.

  Until I’m jarred out of sleep by a low growl coming from Brett’s throat.

  I jerk upward, trying to figure out where I am—this is a bed, not a car, and no, I’m not a teenager just out of high school. But it is Brett next to me, even if the silhouette of his face is harder now, more chiseled than it was back then.

  Only now his face is not relaxed. His entire body is wound tight, hands bunched into fists, and he growls again, his teeth grinding together.

  “Fuck,” he spits, twisting away from me. I duck my head so he can free his arm, and he turns over onto his side, shoulders hunching.

  “Brett,” I whisper, trying to wake him up without startling him. My heart beats hard in my chest and my vision sharpens. I can see every line of his body, even in the darkness swallowing up the room.

  “Brett,” I say, this time a little louder, and I press the palm of my hand against his shoulder, shaking him just a little.

  He whips around, his hand clamping on my wrist, eyes wide and wild. “Don’t!” he thunders. “Don’t touch me! Just stay the fuck away from me! I’m never going to get there!”

  “Brett,” I say again, trying to keep my voice level, though there’s a tremble in it that I can’t keep under control. “It’s me. It’s me.”

  His grip on my wrist loosens, and his breath picks up. His eyes narrow, searching my face, but it takes an endless minute for his jaw to relax, for the haunted look
to fade from his eyes.

  Then he runs a hand through his hair and brings it back down over his eyes, falling back onto the pillows with a muted thud.

  I’m frozen beside him in the bed, not wanting to make the wrong move, and my mind races through all of the possibilities. If I speak, will he lash out again? If I touch him, will it trigger another nightmare, this time a waking one, with me looking on helplessly?

  And, most shamefully of all, the tiny cold fear blooming in my gut—is this what a life with Brett would be like? Falling asleep every night not knowing if something terrible will suddenly appear in the dark? Even as I sit, propped up against the mattress, my muscles shake no matter how much I try to control them, and an iciness takes root and grows in my gut.

  “Addi,” he says, hand still over his eyes. His voice is taut and gravelly—it’s the middle of the damn night, I don’t even know how late it is—and I swallow the dryness in my throat.

  “I’m still here.”

  “I know you’re still here.”

  He reaches out in the dark and finds my hand again, curling his fingers through mine until they’re locked together on his stomach.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  He shakes his head, then uncovers his eyes and wraps his arm around me again, putting a gentle pressure on my back until my head is nestled back down on his chest. I lie perfectly still, listening to his heartbeat, feeling each muscle in his body relax from the toes on up, until even the arm around me loses its tension.

  But my heart still pounds.

  “Are you all right?” I whisper the question into the dark from behind closed eyes, and I feel the pressure of his hand on my back.

  “Yes,” he whispers back.

  “What was that?”

  “A dream, Addi,” he whispers, and then he sighs, so deeply I think it might not ever end. But it does. “It was just a dream.”

  I know this isn’t true. I know it. That was no ordinary dream—that was something much deeper, much more frightening. But even though I open my mouth, I can’t find the words. What am I going to do anyway, disagree with him now in the middle of the night?

  The adrenaline leaves my veins and my head clouds over again, slowly, slowly, with each breath Brett takes. Nothing is wrong, I tell myself. Well, something is wrong, but we don’t have to have everything figured out right now.

  Plus, there’s always the possibility that this could just be what Brett said: a bad dream. Unconnected to anything else.

  He reaches down and pulls my leg over him again, letting out a long, slow breath.

  “Everything okay?” I’m just on the edge between waking and sleeping, and my tongue feels heavy in my mouth. I’m not sure that I’ve even spoken the words until Brett answers. I don’t even hear him until he’s two or three words into his sentence.

  “Don’t worry. Don’t worry, everything’s all right. We’re here now.”

  It sounds like something he used to repeat to himself when things were going wrong—not that I’ve ever heard him say it before. The thought fades away, and then I’m tumbling back into sleep against the man I can’t stand to be without.

  The man I love.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Brett

  We spend the weekend together, inseparable, going back and forth between our houses to get clean clothes, to step into the shower together. I run my hands down the length of Addison’s wet hair, working in the soap while she stands just outside of the hot stream, looking up at me with those huge blue eyes. It’s a hard life, now that my cock is almost always hard. She’s so fucking gorgeous that one look at her makes me want to take her back to bed.

  So I do.

  When we’re not in bed, we eat breakfast at the Dockside—this time without any storming away—and lunch at a Mexican chain restaurant on the outskirts of town that Addison loves.

  She’s halfway through a taco platter stuffed with tortilla chips, shredded lettuce and refried beans, when she looks across at me, swallowing the latest bite of a taco. “Did you like the Air Force?”

  My shoulders tense, rocking toward my neck. I don’t want to talk about this shit, but it’s Addison. The Air Force—it’s all wrapped up in the ten years away from her, the leaving, the stupid fucking need I had to prove something to my father.

  “Yes and no.”

  She nods sagely and takes another bite of taco, then puts it down and picks up a chip, dipping it into the refried beans. I can’t help the smile that spreads across my face. My Addi is so goddamn devious. Here she is, pretending we’re just sitting in comfortable silence, while really she’s waiting for me to continue the story.

  “I thought it would be a way to prove myself.”

  “To whom?”

  “My dad.”

  Her brow wrinkles. “You never cared what your dad thought.”

  “I thought I didn’t. Right up until the end.”

  “The end—you mean the end of that summer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What the hell could he possibly say to make you care what he thought?”

  I shrug, one of my shoulders going up a quarter inch. “It wasn’t the shit he said as much as the repetition.”

  “You never told me much about that.”

  “Why would I waste my time telling a gorgeous girl about my asshole father?”

  She gives me a little grin, and this time when we both sit in silence, I’m pretty sure we’re thinking about of all those times we spent together. For once I imagine Addison in her bathing suit on the beach instead of naked in the back of the car, and the image in my mind is just as nice.

  “Going away for ten years seems a little extreme.”

  “It was extreme.”

  “So you just…snapped and ran off to college?”

  I give her a grin and we both laugh. That’s the dumbest fucking thing about the whole situation. I wasn’t even that far from her. I could have gone to see her at any time, and smoothed things over, but by then…

  “The Air Force had a recruitment office on campus. I signed up the day after I got down there.”

  “But why?” She doesn’t have to say that I was never into the military, didn’t swagger around like some of the guys in our class who just fucking knew they were cut out to be Army grunts.

  “You know when you do something completely fucking stupid and then it seems like you’re in a tailspin?”

  She nods, sipping at her Diet Coke.

  “It was just something to hold on to.”

  Addison bites her lip. “I get that.”

  “I should have told you.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “I should have.”

  “No, that’s the thing.” She’s smiling, but there’s a strange glimmer in her eyes, like tears before they form. “You didn’t have to at all. We weren’t—we weren’t a couple. You had no obligation to tell me. And it was half my fault, too.”

  “You didn’t ghost me.”

  “No, but I could have asked around. I could have hunted for you.” She says the last few words like she’s in some Halloween movie, and we both laugh.

  “All right. Fine.”

  “It’s true. I could have come looking, but I didn’t.” She waves a hand in the air, like she’s finally unburdened herself of some crucial fact about whatever the fuck happened ten years ago. “We were both too young and stupid to realize that we were—we were…”

  “Supposed to be together?”

  “Yeah.”

  Our eyes meet over the table and a shock goes through me, followed by a warmth that starts in the pit of my stomach and balloons to fill my entire torso. Everything in the past—now in this moment—seems to make perfect sense, although I want to reach back and slap my eighteen-year-old self so hard his head spins for ever leaving this woman.

  Addison looks back down at her plate, cheeks pink, a little smile on her face. Her lips form the words “together.” Then she takes another bite
of taco.

  The pleasant feeling deserts me fucking completely when Monday morning comes around and I watch her back her car out of her driveway. It’s getting cold in the mornings, so I sit at the kitchen table with coffee and wait for the day to warm up.

  Maybe everything will be fine. But what if it’s not?

  I can’t shake the lingering feeling that this, somehow, is an embarrassment—that to be in Lockton represents the failure I never wanted to admit. I worked so damn hard to get away from this place, and every time I get a minute to myself, that bitter taste reappears in my mouth.

  At ten o’clock, I get up and toss the coffee mug into the sink.

  Fuck this wallowing.

  There have been no replies to my job applications yet, but even if there are, I’m going to wait two weeks to start. I’ve got to get this house in shape before I do anything else, and sitting at the kitchen table pouting over the fact that I had to leave the Air Force isn’t going to get any of it done.

  I think of Addison’s face when I show her everything, when it’s all completed. She’ll never doubt me then.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Addison

  Now when I get home from work in the evenings, I go to Brett’s house first. Sometimes I’m so damn tired that all I can do is kiss him, wild and deep and free, before I head back over to my own house and flop down on the couch for an hour or two before I go to bed. Sometimes he comes with me. On Tuesday, he says he can’t.

  “Why not?”

  He gestures at the walls, which are taped and ready for paint. “I’ve got to get this shit done.”

  “Painting?”

  “Yeah. This entire house needs painting. Once I’m done with the outside, the inside will go faster.”

  “Okay.” A giant yawn overtakes me. “I’ll be sitting on my sofa, watching some shitty reality TV, if you get tired of painting.”