Journey: A Cariad Romance Three Book Bundle (Cariad Collections)

by Grace, K D

  He employs both weapons to keep me right where I am. Worse – he seems to anticipate that I’ll immediately bolt for the hills. His arms loop around my thighs before the first syllable of his name is out. I can feel his biceps tensing against my leg, as he exerts enough pressure to immobilise a rabid wildebeest.

  Which is, let’s face it, an accurate description of my current state.

  Not that Steven seems to mind. Quite the opposite, in fact. Once he’s cemented me in one place, he isn’t content with some light, tentative licks and maybe a kiss for good measure. He buries himself between my legs. He rubs everything he’s got against everything I’ve got, and when he’s done with one weird face-rut he just starts all over again at the beginning – as though he likes it.

  No … No … Correct that.

  As though he loves it.

  And just when I’m on the verge of laughing at myself for believing such a thing, he makes it 500 per cent clearer. He lets out this helpless groaning sound, right into my spread sex – so loud I actually feel it vibrating through my over-sensitised flesh and up through my trembling body. His fingers clench too tightly around my thigh; his biceps gets tauter, tenser.

  And, best of all, I can feel him shaking.

  Whatever this crazy thing is, it’s making him shake. The taste of me, the feel of me … Something on me is making him shake. He has to take a small break, I think, and oh God I really want to see what that looks like. I’m so eager to check if that’s what he’s doing I almost fall over him, while trying to glance behind myself.

  But nothing is clear. All I can see is the top of his dark head, and that one killer biceps – after which, my priorities shift somewhat. They go from trying to see him and how much he’s enjoying this, to something much more quantifiable.

  Like how it feels to have Steven Stark lick you.

  And the answer is, of course: oh my God oh my God.

  ‘No don’t,’ I say, though I don’t really mean to. The sensation is just so intense it’s all I can come up with. I’m frightened of a sensation like this one, so he should really stop making it happen.

  Though naturally he doesn’t. He just licks again, so I can get the full benefit of his insane skill. I wasn’t able to process it before, because the back of my head came off. But now that I’m more reasonable I can appreciate a thousand weird nuances – like how wide and flat his tongue feels. Is that because he’s doing it like this, all back to front and from below? Or is it just that his tongue is infinitely superior to most other men’s?

  I’m going to go with the latter, though there’s something to be said for technique too. He holds me tight to him, so I have to experience every single sensation fully. And the way he strokes through my folds in this weird, darting flicker … Ohhhh yeah that’s so good.

  It’s too good.

  I think I’m going to come, and he’s barely been doing this for 30 seconds. He’s only just warming up to some of the truly amazing stuff: like the way he eases his fingers into my clenching pussy, just as I’m aching for something more. And the sensation of his tongue rubbing and rubbing over my clit, soft and slow then quick and fierce.

  It totally shouldn’t be possible.

  But either way I know it’s happening. I’m holding my breath the way I always do, when I’m close. And once I’ve fully processed everything he’s doing, it’s kind of hard to stop the out of control car that is my orgasm. The idea of him doing this is exciting enough – then coupled with the solid, driving sensation of his fingers and those long, slow laps around my clit … It’s just too much.

  I can’t hold myself accountable.

  Though I can hold myself accountable for the words I speak, when it hits. Oh, I know I’m going to pay for those, later. There are years of humiliation ahead of me, and all because I lose control at the last second. Just when I’m almost safe and out of this, I let that strange silence – the silence that has wrapped around me for as long as I’ve known him – drop completely, and I tell him exactly what I want to:

  ‘I adore you,’ I say, as I drown in pleasure. ‘Oh God, I adore you, I do.’

  Chapter Four

  I think I could have gotten away with it if I hadn’t said that “I do”. Those two words not only confirmed that I’d just said what he probably feared I’d said, they also hit some rather unfortunate notes. Like the notes that sound during the wedding march, for example.

  It’s really no wonder he ran away the second he had the chance. He practically leapt for the stairs when Jason called down to ask us if we’d died while making drinks, and I don’t blame him. I wanted to leap for the stairs too, only I couldn’t.

  It’s hard to make sudden moves, when you’ve still got a pair of panties around your ankles. And it’s even harder if you’ve just been punched all over your body by an enormous orgasm. I think my hands somehow melted to the bar in the middle of it all. At the very least, they refuse to come unstuck for a good five minutes or so.

  And even after I’ve managed to get them free, the rest of me doesn’t want to follow their example. My shoulders have locked into place. My knees are frightened to bend, in case bending collapses the fabric of my body and turns me into some kind of unspeakable gelatinous mass.

  The word “stunned” doesn’t really cover what just happened. “Immobilised by Steven’s insanity-venom” would be more accurate, even though I’ve no idea what that means. It makes no sense at all. It just seems to fit much better than any other explanation.

  He’s a supernatural lizard who briefly went nuts, and then attacked me.

  He is not, under any circumstances, a good friend who just administered oral sex.

  Mainly because I don’t know what to do if that’s the case. I don’t know how to explain it. A week ago, he voiced his very loud and unfortunate opinion about less than slender women. And though I still kind of hate him for that, I can’t completely erase it from the insides of his head. I don’t have that kind of access.

  So what, then?

  Was this some sort of oral sex based apology? Maybe he felt his attempts at making me feel better – through ordinary means like swimming and conversation – had failed, and something more robust was in order.

  He threw me a pity-lick.

  Which sounds even more insane than the lizard theory, I have to say. There’s no such thing as a pity-lick. Nobody does this to say sorry and help validate someone. At a push, they might have really sad, slow, creepy sex on a creaking bed, while crying.

  But they don’t do this big exciting thing, all in a mad jumble. No jumbling is allowed when you’re just quite sad for someone. He didn’t seem quite sad for me when he was busy grunting that I should get my legs open, and he definitely wasn’t melancholy in the middle of all that groaning.

  Oh God, his groans. Even if I do my utmost to forget all of this, I know those groans will come back to haunt me. They’re haunting me now as I slowly fumble my way back up on deck. I have to grab onto the rail around the boat just to keep myself upright, and each step is interesting, to say the least.

  Is it possible for a vagina to suddenly triple in size? Because that’s what it feels like has happened, between my legs. The whole area is swollen and slippery and way too hot, and of course every time I remember the sounds he made the problem intensifies. By the time I get to the table I’m a shivering wreck, glassy-eyed and completely gone.

  And of course Steven is just sitting there, as though nothing ever happened. In fact, his nothing ever happened stance is so convincing that for one long, horrible moment I actually wonder if I just imagined the whole thing. He’s got his arm spread out over the rail and this laidback, lopsided expression on his handsome face … He could have just finished telling an off-colour joke after a leisurely lunch.

  He doesn’t even look my way, which pretty much seals the deal. I hallucinated it. The heat and the apologies and the hair touching sent me round the twist, and now I’m living out a sex life that didn’t happen with a man who’s currently talk
ing about biscuits.

  No really. I swear to God, he’s talking about biscuits. They’re not even euphemistic biscuits, either, with a secret code-like hint of what he just did to me. A Kit-Kat would have said so much, here, but he’s discussing custard creams.

  Custard creams! The least sexy of all the teatime treats.

  ‘I always think they taste like pineapple,’ he says, even though they totally don’t. Their subtle custardy flavour has probably just been altered, by something else he recently ate – like the half-demolished paella still on the table, or the warm crusty bread they’ve eaten with it, or I don’t know … Maybe my vagina.

  Does my vagina taste like pineapple? It could be that this is the code word, I think, though if it is he’s being very guarded about it. He’s still not looking at me, and now he’s talking about something even less related to random sex.

  ‘Remember that time we blew up your grandma’s toilet?’ Steven’s saying, which is practically a double whammy of non-eroticism. There’s an elderly person in that sentence, and a device that whisks away your waste.

  It’s of no use to me whatsoever, so I just sit back and half-listen to a story I’ve heard a thousand times before. Steven had found some fireworks stuffed in a skip, and convinced Jason they should set them off in our grandma’s massive cast iron bathtub – for reasons they still don’t seem clear on.

  ‘It was because it seemed safer,’ Jason says, but Steven disagrees.

  ‘No no no. It seemed cooler.’

  ‘So you just lied about it being the only way to contain the explosion.’

  ‘Of course I lied about it. When have I ever wanted to contain an explosion?’

  He has a point. He’s always the one shaking the champagne bottle, instead of gingerly easing out the cork. When someone needs a fork jamming into a plug socket, Steven will be there for them. I’ve seen him blow up hair dryers while trying to fix them; I’ve watched him fire himself out of a cannon that wasn’t designed to fire people out of it.

  Yeah, that’s Steven, all right. Raring to get things started, ready to plunge into danger, always wanting to drag my brother with him. And of course my brother is all too willing to go along with it. Of course he is – without Steven, he’d just be a boring bank manager now, with a mortgage and a middle-class wife.

  And then it hits me, in a large unsettling jolt.

  That whole scenario I’ve just described … It could equally apply to me. It all sounds very familiar: timid little mousy Judy, and Steven seeing how far he can push things, how far he can take things, before I break just like my brother. He certainly pushed things to the limit down there in front of the bar.

  Or did he? Maybe that was just a taster – the warm-up before the big challenge. Because that’s what it looks like to me, now. Like he saw a challenge, and couldn’t resist going for it. In fact, that idea makes so much sense I’m momentarily giddy with it – I almost blurt it out to him right there in front of polite little Kimberley and the brother who almost definitely believes I’m still a virgin.

  ‘So that’s why you buried your face neck-deep in my vagina!’ I want to cry out, like I’m suddenly Miss Marple and he’s the master criminal.

  Only much weirder and more sex-based than that.

  Lucky, really, that I manage to restrain myself. Instead of shouting bizarre accusations that don’t make any sense, I nibble on a bread stick and stew inwardly, while they continue with this conversation about nothing that actually matters.

  God, if only Jason knew.

  I don’t think he’d be laughing it up with Steven about Gran chasing them around the living room with a frying pan if he did. He once went deathly pale when a high school boyfriend accidentally brushed my bottom with his coat, so I doubt he’d be happy and carefree about this.

  Especially after Steven has turned the conversation on to other things.

  Namely:

  ‘I just wanted to impress the 17 girls I was dating.’

  And all right, he doesn’t say 17. But everyone knows that Steven is a revolving door of women, which is bad on a number of levels, here. The first level is that Jason is never going to like the idea of a revolving door of women being anywhere near me. And the second level is that the door is probably not going to be near me for long, because it’s already swung around to the next 17 girls.

  Any way you look at this whole situation, I am totally screwed.

  ‘My favourite of your many conquests is always and forever Melanie Martin.’

  ‘Meeee-laaaanie,’ Steven says. He even closes his eyes in memory of Melanie’s flawless face – those pouty lips, those blue eyes, that raven hair! It’s really no wonder I spent that summer trying to apply Clairol Number 47 to my own dull brown mess. ‘Man, she was a peach.’

  Ugh, does he have to talk about fruit, now?

  I’m already aware that I’m a mouldy potato, Steven, all right? You don’t have to start talking about other women to convince me that five minutes ago was just some terrible mistake. I get it. A blind, feeble monkey would get it, by this point.

  And yet still, he continues.

  ‘Or what about Donna Lincoln?’

  Ah, Donna Lincoln. I once found him making out with her in my Dad’s shed, right smack in the middle of me feeling like I was totally over any crush I’d ever had on him. I’d just started college, and was full of adult, college sorts of things. He was still a laddish loser, working at the local swimming pool, drifting from this to that.

  Whereas I … Well. I was refined, and intelligent, and classy. I didn’t have time for men like him, in their silly T-shirts with their ridiculous hairdos and their terrible taste in anything.

  And then I’d seen him with someone else, and eaten my own heart out like it had a honey centre. I’d chomped on that fucker until there was nothing left – or at least, I’d assumed there was nothing left, at the time. But apparently it’s grown back in the intervening years, fatter and fuller and more prone to him than ever.

  And worst … I suspect he knows. I think he knew. He waited until the perfect time, and then he struck like a cobra. Now I’m just as much a mess than ever, only it’s even more painful than it was before. How can it not be? This time I’ve had a little taste of him, a little hint of what it could be like, before he snatches it away with things like this:

  ‘Dear, dear Donna. She had legs up to her face.’

  I do not have legs up to my face. I barely have legs up to my hips.

  ‘And lips like pillows.’

  In fairness to me, my upper lip is pillow-like. It’s just my lower one that’s letting the side down – though I suspect he doesn’t care. This is a very pointed “I made a mistake” sort of speech, and I know it.

  He couldn’t have made it clearer if he’d drawn a diagram.

  ‘Not to mention her arse.’

  He doesn’t need to say what made her arse so special. I can see it in my mind’s eyes, so much perkier – and more importantly – smaller than mine. And even if I couldn’t, my idiot brother is here to make things worse for me.

  ‘I too would mention her arse, if I was not sat next to the most beautiful posterior in the history of the world,’ he says. And though I know, rationally, that he’s just paying Kimberley a compliment – probably because she’s been rolling her eyes for the last five minutes – I can’t help seeing it as a dig.

  My brother loves me, and wants to protect me, but he’s never understood what it’s like to be less than svelte. He once bought me a rowing machine for my birthday, in all earnestness. He thinks being plump is a character flaw, and right now I agree.

  I feel so flawed I could fall through the floor.

  ‘Kimberley would concur, if she’d only seen it.’

  ‘I probably would,’ Kimberley says. ‘Was it akin to two apples in a plastic bag?’

  Both men laugh, of course. I’m wondering what my arse would be equivalent to. Two melons? Maybe some oddly shaped potatoes? I lean back against the canvas chair I’m in and
let my eyes drift closed – as though I’m tired. But really it’s just so I can better picture the fruit and veg aisle in Asda. And maybe eventually manage to tune this conversation out.

  ‘Oh, it was better than two apples.’

  ‘More like – tennis balls,’ my brother says, now that he’s got the green light to discuss another woman’s bottom in front of his wife. He’s really lucky to have someone like her – someone so restrained and refined and yet still willing to have a laugh.

  Who could ask for more than that?

  ‘Tennis balls?’ Steven says, and then he’s laughing. They’re both laughing. ‘Your arse metaphors stink.’

  ‘Actually it’s arse similes.’

  ‘Well, excuse me. I don’t have a degree in literature – just the degree in how to describe a woman’s body. And I’m pretty sure tennis balls never come into it.’

  ‘Then what does come into it?’

  ‘Anything round and soft. Clouds, marshmallows …’

  ‘So she had an arse like a marshmallow?’

  Steven’s laughing so hard now he can’t speak, which is perhaps my favourite state of his. His eyes always crinkle into these perfect little cartoon-a-like stars, and usually he actually squeezes some tears out. I used to live for those tears.

  But I’m already crossing him back off my “things I’m crazy about” list. It’s going to be hard this time, I can see it. Maybe even harder than it was when I first realised we were in two different leagues, and that he would never see me as anything other than his friend’s sister.

  But I know I can do it. I just have to focus on other things – like the lights over the harbour, so pretty in the darkness, and the gentle lap of the water against the boat. I’ve had a good time, I think. I should see all of this as a positive, as a little taste of heaven.