by R. Linda
We took the stairs carefully, making sure not to slip because they were all wet from every other person on the roof escaping the rain. Once were reached the top floor, we had to wait for the elevator to come back up and get us.
“Hope it doesn’t rain for the wedding,” Linc said, wiping water from his face. His shirt clung to him, accentuating each and every muscle on his torso. He looked like a god. And I looked like a drowned rat. I frowned at my appearance in the mirror beside the elevator doors. Smoothing my hands over my face and hair didn’t help at all.
The doors opened, and we took the lift downstairs, only to realise we had to run to our building through the rain. By the time we got upstairs to our rooms, we were saturated. And…
“Dammit!” I banged my head on my door.
“What?” Linc asked with an amused smile.
“Nate has my key and my phone. Again. I can’t believe I did it again.”
“I’ll let you through to your room from mine.”
“Thanks.”
I followed him into his room and over to the door that separated our rooms, but it wouldn’t open.
“What the hell?” Linc said, trying again.
“Use your key,” I suggested helpfully.
Grabbing his key card out of his wallet, he looked at the door handle. “There’s no slot for the card. Dammit, look. It needs an actual key. Did you lock it from your side?”
“No.” I shook my head, confused about how it got locked when I knew I hadn’t done it, not since I unlocked it last night after the club.
“I’ll call Nate.”
“Okay.” I shivered, the rain well and truly seeping into my bones now.
“Shit, sorry, Princess. Go dry yourself off. There are spare towels in the bathroom.”
“Thanks.” I left him to call Nate and went in search of clean, dry towels.
Peeling my wet dress off was a great idea. I felt warmer at once without the cold, wet fabric sticking to my skin. Grabbing a towel from under the sink, I squeezed the excess water from my hair down the drain and then rubbed the towel through the ends.
“He’s not answering, but—” Linc’s voice stopped immediately.
I looked over my shoulder at him, staring wide-eyed. Crap. I didn’t lock the door. Holding the towel in one hand, I was frozen to the spot. Linc was shirtless. In fact, he didn’t have pants on either. Clearly having the same idea as me about getting out of wet clothes, he was standing there in only his boxers.
He didn’t move. He didn’t speak. And neither did I. I didn’t know what to do. Yell at him for walking in on me in only my underwear—thankfully, black this time, and not see-through at all? Wrap a towel around me so he couldn’t see anything? But that would be stupid. He’d seen it all when we went swimming yesterday. Instead, I stood there like an idiot and waited for him to leave.
Why wasn’t he leaving?
He pinched his bottom lip between his fingers and stepped farther into the bathroom. And still I didn’t move. His grey eyes were so much darker than before, and his gaze travelled down my body deliberately before coming back up and resting on my face.
Another step closer.
And another.
He was directly in front of me, so close the heat from his body warmed me. His fingers wrapped around the towel and plucked it from my hands. Taking one step behind me, I moved my gaze to the mirror to watch him as he rubbed the towel over my wet skin. Across my shoulder blades, down my arms, dragging painfully slow. Goose bumps erupted on my skin everywhere he touched. I watched his hand travel across my stomach, around my back. My breath stopped when he brought the towel over my chest and down across my hips before pulling my hair over one shoulder and wrapping the white cloth around the end of my locks.
I watched him as he watched me.
I watched the towel fall from his fingers to the floor.
I watched his hands skim over my stomach, tickle my ribs.
I watched him kiss my shoulder, his lips barely grazing the skin and sliding along to where my neck and shoulder met. My breath caught in my throat.
What was he doing?
My eyes drifted closed, and my head fell to the side. This was too much. I couldn’t handle it. I had wanted this for so long, and now I didn’t know what to do. What did it mean? Did it mean anything? Or would he just brush it off as nothing again? If he turned into a jerk again, it’d be the end of me. I’d pack my bags and get on the next plane out of here, wedding or no wedding. I couldn’t keep going back and forth, not when he did things like this.
My legs were like jelly. They could barely support my weight as I struggled to catch my breath. He literally knocked the air out of me, simply by kissing my oversensitive skin. I’d wanted his lips on me again, ever since my eighteenth birthday, but I never imagined it would have me feeling that way—so nervous, excited, scared. All these emotions bubbled inside me, and I was struggling to maintain my calm.
His nose dragged along my skin, up my neck to where he placed a kiss behind my ear and groaned my name. Shivers ran up my spine.
“I’ll get you something to wear,” he said, meeting my gaze in the mirror. If I wasn’t mistaken, he looked like he was in pain, confused, like he didn’t know what to do. He was struggling with whatever this was between us as much as I was. I just wished I knew what he was struggling with. Was it because we shouldn’t be this close? Or was it—hopefully—that he wanted more too and was just as unsure as I was about this? No, he’d never be unsure. He was the one person I knew who always seized the moment and went for whatever it was he wanted. But this time he looked so uncertain. His eyes were guarded, hesitant.
He squeezed my waist and placed one last kiss against my jaw and walked out of the bathroom, leaving me to fall in a heap against the counter.
Hell.
I was done for.
A couple of minutes later, he returned with a white tank for me. That was it. No shorts? Not even a t-shirt? Just one of those tanks with the wide armholes. “Thanks.”
“I’ll give you a minute,” he said quietly and walked back out of the room that felt increasingly smaller with each passing second.
I slide the shirt over my head and ran my fingers through my hair to try to get some of the tangles out, but it was futile.
Returning to the room, I found Linc lying on the bed with the television paused on the beginning scene of Dirty Dancing.
“Thought we could watch this?”
“Okay.” I shuffled on my feet and twisted the hem of his tank between my fingers. My nerves were shot. We’d never done anything like that before. And everything I’d thought was intense and meaningful up until tonight paled in comparison to that moment in the bathroom. And what was even harder to wrap my head around was that Linc was acting normal. He wasn’t brushing it aside as if it were nothing. He was simply behaving like he towel-dried me and kissed my neck all the time.
“Indie?” He patted the bed beside him.
I walked over slowly and paused at the edge of the bed, unsure about how I felt lying next to him now. Would he expect something else? Would I expect something else?
I didn’t get to dwell on it for too long, though, because he reached for my hand and pulled me down beside him, wrapping an arm around my back until my head was settled comfortably against his chest.
“You know, as hot as you look in your lace underwear, I think I prefer you in my clothes,” he said softly, pressing play on the movie and tracing soft circles on the bare skin of my hip, because obviously his tank had ridden up the moment I lay down.
Chapter Sixteen
Linc
I woke in the morning wrapped around Indie, legs tangled together, my head on her chest, and one hand on her breast. I knew I should move, that I shouldn’t have been holding her like that, but I didn’t want to. I was going to enjoy every moment of it until she moved or woke up.
I’d lost my mind last night when I saw her standing in the bathroom in her underwear. It wasn’t any different tha
n when we went swimming at the waterfall, but last night something in me snapped. I didn’t care that what I was doing broke all sorts of codes and friendship rules. I didn’t care about anything but getting closer to Indie. I thought I realised, or had at least finally made up my mind, that she was worth risking everything for. I just had to be sure she felt the same way.
But it was hard to figure out because she had a boyfriend. Who never slept in her room, here or at home. She’d spent every night with me so far instead of him. Something didn’t add up. Why was she sleeping with me if she had a boyfriend? Why didn’t he care that she was spending more time with me than with him? All these questions and I didn’t know how to answer them.
Indie woke up a little while later. I could always tell when she woke but pretended to be asleep. She used to do it all the time, hugging me closer—I let myself believe it was because she didn’t want me to leave, that she didn’t want to let me go. I was motionless, hand still comfortably on her breast, and waited for her to move, to shift in some way that caused me to drop my hand, but she didn’t. She didn’t move at all. I didn’t know what that meant. There were so many possibilities. Maybe she didn’t want to risk waking me if she thought I was asleep, or maybe she liked that I was holding her like this.
Her fingers danced along my back up and up into my hair, twisting and twirling a dreadlock, yet she still didn’t move or push my hand away. I was going to enjoy every second until it came to an end—
My phone rang from the other side of the room and ruined the moment. Faking a yawn and a stretch, Indie pretended to wake up, shifting under me so I had to roll away.
“Morning, Princess. How’d you sleep?”
“Mmmm, great. You?”
“Better than ever.” I stretched out beside her.
“You gonna get that?”
“No.”
“It could be important. Could be Nate wanting to bring my key up.”
“You don’t need your key. You’re here.”
“I can’t stay in my underwear and your top all day, Lincoln.” She was cute when she tried to scold me.
“You won’t hear any complaints from me.” I laughed, rolling off the bed when my phone rang again. “Yeah,” I answered gruffly, disappointed that I had to get up.
“Hey.” Dammit. It was Nate. “I just saw your call and realised I had Indie’s room key all night, didn’t I?”
“Yeah.” I ran a hand over my face and tried to wake myself up a little better.
“Where is she?”
“Here.”
“With you?” he asked, a challenging tone to his voice.
“No, I let her sleep in the hallway. Of course, she’s here with me.”
“Okay, I’m on my way up,” he said and hung up.
“Nate’s coming.” I threw the phone down on the bed and grabbed a pair of shorts and t-shirt for Indie to wear instead. “As much as I like the view, you should put on something a little more modest so Nate doesn’t freak out.”
“Thanks.” She smiled and climbed out of the bed to do the one thing I didn’t expect her to do. She pulled the tank off, right in front of me. My mouth went dry instantly.
“Dammit, Indie.” I stepped around the bed until I was face to face with her.
“What?” She raised her eyebrows innocently.
“You’re walking a very fine line right now,” I ground out through a clenched jaw. We were chest to chest.
“It’s not like you haven’t seen it a thousand times already this week. What’s the point of hiding in the bathroom?” Her breath was rapid.
Valid.
“Because I’m barely controlling myself right now,” I whispered against her cheek. Pulling back, I reached one hand up and touched the base of her throat, spreading my fingers out over her collarbone. I felt the beat of her heart beneath my palm, getting faster and faster with every second.
I dragged my hand tenderly down her chest, over the swell of her breasts, and across her flat stomach until I gripped her hips, and I pulled her even closer to me. “Better be careful, Princess, or I might do something that’ll get us both in all sorts of trouble,” I said, thinking that would be the end of this torturous game she was playing. But I couldn’t have been more wrong.
“Well…” She licked her lips. When did she get to be so seductive? She was always seductive to me, but when did she get so good at it? “Maybe I want you too.”
And with that, she stepped back and went into the bathroom to get changed.
I groaned and fell onto the bed. What the hell was she doing? What did that mean?
Reaching for the phone, I called the front desk for our complimentary room service and internally kicked myself when Indie came back into the room wearing my shorts and t-shirt. Was it too much to ask that she never wore anything other than one of my tanks ever again?
Room service arrived before Nate did, so we managed to enjoy half our breakfast on the balcony in peace. I expected things to be weird between us, a little awkward after all the flirting in the last twelve hours, but it wasn’t. We both simply relaxed.
I had just grabbed a bagel when there was a knock at the door. “That’ll be Nate.”
I answered the door and was disappointed to find not only Nate, but Jack-ass as well. “Ooh, bagel.” He clapped excitedly and took the bagel from my hand and headed straight to the balcony where Indie was wearing my clothes. Mine. Not his. I was a little smug about that.
“Baby cakes.” He really announced his presence no matter where he went. He was so loud and obnoxious. I didn’t see what Indie found appealing about him at all.
“Sorry, man. Thanks for giving her a place to crash,” Nate said as we walked outside just in time to see Jack about suck Indie’s face off. Where was that knife?
I didn’t know how much more I could handle watching him all over her every time they were together.
I needed to come clean about my feelings, but I’d wait until after the wedding tomorrow because I didn’t want to ruin it before it happened. At least I was considerate.
“So what’s the plan for today?” Jack asked, stealing an apple from the cart.
“I really just want to lounge by the pool or on the beach. I want a relaxing day,” Indie said as she poured a cup of coffee and added half a sugar. She handed it to me. Me. Not Jack-ass, her boyfriend. My chest might have puffed up a little bit at that.
“Sounds good,” Nate agreed, while Jack mumbled something that sounded like “yes.” But I was too focused on Indie, imagining her in her swimsuit.
“I’m definitely keen.” I gazed at her, making her cheeks heat up in embarrassment.
“Great. We’ll meet you down there in half an hour, then,” Jack said, pulling Indie out of the chair and throwing her over his shoulder. “Better make it an hour.” He winked and carried her inside, completely ignoring her protests and cries to put her down.
“I really hate that guy,” I mumbled to Nate.
He barked out a laugh and clapped me on the back. “Of course, you do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I frowned.
“That you’ve hated any guy who has ever paid her any attention. You’ve always put a stop to it, but this time it’s worse because you weren’t there to stop this train wreck of a relationship from happening.”
“Just looking out for her. Don’t want her to end up with an asshole.” I left out the part about wanting her to be with me.
“Or anyone else,” Nate muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing, I’ll go tell the others we’ll meet them at the pool in an hour,” he said and left.
Chapter
Seventeen
Indie
“You really need to stop throwing me over your shoulder every time we leave a room together,” I hissed at Jack the moment he put me on my feet in my room.
“But it’s so much fun seeing him all riled up. He hates it when I manhandle you.”
“So do I,” I said and went straight over
to the door that joined the two rooms and unlocked it. Jack threw his head back and laughed.
“Did you do that?” I asked, pointing at the door.
“Of course not! I’m offended that you could even suggest such a thing. But Bailey…”
So that was why she hung around yesterday while I got ready for lunch. What else did she do?
“You two are incredible!”
“Why, thank you.” Jack placed a hand delicately on his chest and tilted his head down with a shy smile.
“Not a compliment.”
“Maybe not to you. So?”
“So, what?” I knew what he wanted, but I wasn’t giving details that easily.
“What happened last night?”
“N-nothing.”
“That doesn’t sound like nothing.” Jack opened my suitcase and began rifling through it. “Spill.”
“Nothing. We danced, got caught in the rain, and watched a movie.”
“Dirty Dancing?”
“Yes.” I angled my head to the side. “How did you know we watched that?”
“What? No,” he said before ripping something out of my case excitedly. “Aha! I meant did you dirty dance together, not the movie. You actually watched that?”
“Yes. No. I mean—grrr, you’re so confusing sometimes. No, we didn’t dirty dance together. We waltzed, in the rain. And, yes, we did watch that movie. Linc’s never seen it.”
“I bet he looks mighty fine dripping wet in the rain.” Jack raised his eyebrows at me.
“Well, duh.”
“And then what?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re lying.” He narrowed his eyes and threw a bikini in my face.
“He kissed me,” I muttered and turned to walk into the bathroom, hoping to escape Jack before he realised what I said.
“He what?” Jack screeched as he followed me into the bathroom.
“It was nothing. He just walked into the bathroom, much like you right now, and took the towel from me and dried my skin then kissed my shoulder a little.”
“A little?”
“Maybe my neck too.” I felt the heat creeping into my cheeks. Why I found it so hard to talk about, I didn’t know, but it was embarrassing. Possibly because Jack tended to overreact.