He was surprised when he opened the door to his room and found both Eli and Marcus sitting at the breakfast table out on the balcony. And a gorgeous black-haired woman wearing an oversized t-shirt had her feet propped up on the balcony railing, her face tipped toward the sun and a slice of mango between her fingers.
Jay’s mouth dropped open. She’d…stayed. Well, sort of. She’d fled from his room, but she hadn’t left the suite. And she was sitting there with his two best friends, wearing his t-shirt. Those bastards were enjoying the morning after that he’d battled for.
Torn halfway between jumping for joy and scowling, Jay opened the screen door and stepped out onto the balcony, his shirt still in one hand. Three faces turned to him. Mari’s face went pink and Marcus and Eli’s mouths dropped right open.
“Holy shit,” Marcus murmured, his eyebrows in his hairline.
“What?” Jay scowled.
“Jay,” Mari said, hiding her eyes behind her hand. “Put your shirt on.”
Eli just looked gleefully back and forth between Mari and Jay.
Jay dropped his eyes to his own chest, wondering what they were all staring at, and couldn’t help but grin in astonishment.
He was a wreck. He looked like he’d gotten jumped last night. Just from what he could see on his chest there were bruises from Mari’s fingertips, at least two sets of bite marks, and a line of hickeys across one of his pecs. Curious, he looked over his own shoulder, turning in a circle, trying to see what the damage was like back there.
“Holy shit,” Marcus murmured again.
From what Jay could see, he was completely scratched to pieces back there. Her fingernails had really done a number on him.
“You’re a wildcat, chica!” Marcus crowed, laughing and grinning at Mari.
She just dropped her face even further into her hands. “I don’t embarrass easily, but damn!”
Jay couldn’t help but grin at his two friends. Eli flashed Jay a thumbs up and Marcus continued to look back and forth between the two of them. Jay slid his shirt on, not because he was ashamed, but because he wanted her to stop hiding her face.
He skirted around the table, over to where she was sitting. Without hesitating, he slipped his hands under her knees and hips and picked her up easily. Mari squeaked, her head popping up at the unexpected motion. But she didn’t protest when he resettled her directly on his lap, his arms around her waist.
“Morning,” he grinned into her eyes.
“Morning,” she muttered, pink still staining her cheeks. “Sorry you look like roadkill.”
Jay laughed, utterly delighted. “That is something you literally never have to apologize for.”
Jay reached forward to grab the cup of coffee she’d been sipping on and downed half of it in two big chugs. Next he started in on the fruit on her plate.
Eli stretched his shoulders and his neck. “Any chance you guys would be into a beach day? Or snorkeling? Or something a little less intense than surfing? My muscles could use a break over here.”
“Aren’t you a professional athlete?” Marcus scoffed, reclining in his chair and lifting his face to the sun.
“Not anymore, son.” Eli grinned. He’d thought it would take a lot longer to get used to being retired from the one thing he knew he was born to do. He wondered if he’d have some sort of identity crisis after retiring. But here he was, ten days out and happy as a clam. He figured the Superbowl ring was easing the sting of the life transition.
“Snorkeling sounds good,” Mari piped up. She shifted forward to grab some more fruit from her plate and Jay tightened his grip around her waist. She frowned down at his hands, at the way it made her stomach flip to have him holding her so tight. So proprietarily, like they belonged to one another. “I know a good spot.”
Marcus’s phone beeped and he rose to take the phone call in the other room. Eli and Jay exchanged frowns as they eyed the tight set of their best friend’s shoulders.
“What?” Mari asked, looking between them. She knew it might be rude to pry, but she was starting to grow rather fond of Marcus and if something was the matter with him, she wanted to know.
“That’s the ringtone he uses for work,” Jay answered, absently smoothing one hand over her thigh. “He’s on leave right now. And it’s not a good sign if they’re bothering him.”
“Oh,” Mari frowned. She didn’t like the sound of that. Their obvious concern for Marcus both unsettled and warmed her. These three men were family. They’d cobbled together and become blood. She could see how easy it had been for them. For one horrible second, Mari yearned for that from them. She watched these three men together and wanted a family again so badly she could barely breathe. But everything was temporary, she reminded herself. Everything had an expiration date. And her life was painful evidence of that. There was no forever. She could deal with breakups. But she didn’t think she could deal with losing any more family. It was time to set some boundaries in place. With Jay and with his two friends.
Mari rose from Jay’s lap. “I’m gonna get head back to my airBnB, I’ll meet you guys back here in a half an hour and we can go to the snorkeling spot together, okay?”
She skittered away from the table, avoiding Jay’s eyes and heading toward his bedroom where her clothes from last night waited.
She should have known that she wouldn’t have been able to even close the door without his hand stopping it. He shouldered his way into his own room and latched the door. Suddenly she was exactly where she’d been trying to avoid being. Alone with Jay.
“So,” he said, his hands in the pockets of his swim trunks and his back casually leaned against the bedroom door. He watched her as she wandered the room, gathering her clothing up. “You’re not running away from me, per se. But you’re doing something. I can’t quite tell. An evasive dance of some kind? You’re bent on keeping some sort of distance?”
“What are you talking about?” she asked automatically, and then winced. She knew exactly what he was talking about. She was just buying time in the worst way possible. “Sorry. I know what you’re talking about. And yes, that’s what I’m doing. Is that a problem?”
She stripped his shirt off over her head and stepped into her underwear and then her bra. Jay said absolutely nothing and Mari got a jolt of feminine pride when she realized that was due to his brain being scrambled by her state of undress. He looked at her like he wanted to lap her up like an ice cream cone.
He shook his head once and then cleared his throat. “Of course it’s alright, Mari. I’m not trying to pressure you or push you.”
Mari tossed her hands in the air and rolled her eyes. “Of course you’re not. You never do. You never push or pull. All you do is lure!”
“Is that a problem?” he repeated her words, calmly enough that it had Mari’s eyes narrowing with temper.
Mari slid her dress from last night over her head and wiggled into it. “Yes, it’s a problem! Half of me wants to get the hell away from here, just be all safe and on my own. And the other half just keeps getting lured back into your handsome, sweet as hell web. I can’t do both! I’m trying to straddle this line here and it’s exhausting. So yeah, I’m not running away from you. Because I don’t even think that’s possible. But if you think I’m gonna wake up spooning you and then play footsie all morning, you’re nuts. I don’t have a death wish, Jay!”
She knew she was raging, only partly making sense, and revealing way too much all at the same time. But she was all out of sorts, struggling to zip up her dress and she couldn’t get the sight of his naked, ravaged chest out of her mind. She’d absolutely torn him to shreds.
Jay crossed the room, zipped her dress for her and then roughly took her by the shoulders, sat her down on the bed. He crouched in front of her.
“Let me get this straight. You want me to stop ‘luring’ you?” He made air quotes.
“Yes!” Mari nodded resolutely. Then her face blurred, confused and crumpling. “Wait. No. I don’t know.”
; “Okay.” He rose and paced away from her a second. “Let’s try something new. I’m just going to tell you exactly what I want.”
Mari’s stomach flipped. “Okay.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and looked down at her from a few feet away. “I want to go with you to your AirBnB right now. I wanna get your things and bring you back here. I want you to sleep in my bed for the rest of vacation.”
She blinked. God, that sounded good. Mari swallowed hard, the word vacation echoing in her head. “And then what?” she challenged him.
His eyes shuttered. He knew what she was saying. She was asking him what happened after vacation was over. He knew a trap when he saw one. She was daring him to make the decision for her. And Jay knew, without a doubt, that she’d scratch and claw at any answer he gave her.
So he shrugged. “You tell me.”
Mari opened her mouth, fire in her eyes, and Jay immediately lifted a hand, stopped her from talking. “At the end of the vacation, you tell me what happens next, okay?”
Mari clapped her mouth shut, her eyes narrowing as if she were trying to figure out the angle on his secretly sneaky plan.
Jay took a deep breath and let a small smile flirt over his face. “I’m not trying to trick you or lure you or trap you, Mari. I’m trying to make you feel good. Let me make you feel good for the next four days on vacation and then we’ll talk about the rest of it all. The real life stuff. Let’s just be together for four days, okay?”
The wind went out of Mari’s sails. She had no idea what he meant. She could see it being one of two things. Either he was saying that he only wanted to be with her for the next four days. Vacation fuck buddies. Or he was saying that he wanted to take these four days to help them figure out how to be together on the other side, back home. Mari wasn’t sure which one terrified her more. But unfortunately, she knew which one she wanted.
She flopped back onto the bed and eyed the perfectly white ceiling of the hotel room for a minute. She was stuck in a cloud of confusion. She was rattled over losing Linc, losing the life she’d thought she was going to have. The life she’d been comfortable with. She was freaked out about getting closer to Jay, only to lose him as well, which she viewed as an inevitability at this point, things like this just didn’t last in her life. She’d had too much ripped away from her to see it any differently. But also, the biggest feeling she had, so big it almost suffocated her, was her desire for Jay. Her need to be close and closer. Now that she’d allowed herself to touch him again, it was all she wanted to do.
“Fine,” she heard herself mutter, unable to be completely happy about surrendering this part of herself to him. “We can just be happy for the next four days. Together.”
His smile could have powered an entire city.
***
The day passed quickly for all of them. Jay had gathered Mari’s things immediately after she’d agreed to it and moved her into his room. But they hadn’t spent any time at the hotel since then. The four of them had snorkeled for hours, out on the beach with a picnic lunch. Afterwards they’d hiked back the long way to the hotel and gone straight into a happy hour by the pool. Even Jay had had two drinks. His ease and joy at an all-time high as he sipped whatever fruity crap Mari had ordered for him. He’d watched her float on a raft on the pool, splashing with Marcus and kicking her feet.
They’d eaten dinner beside the pool and an hour after that had retired to the shade and air conditioning of their hotel room. They all looked a little sun woozy and no one had complained when Eli had turned on some action movie on the big screen in the living room.
When Mari fell asleep, her back to Jay’s side on one wing of the sectional couch, he’d decided they were done with the movie. He nodded to his friends and carried her back to his room. Their room.
The thought put a flip in his stomach. He didn’t know what this girl was thinking. All he knew was that she was tangled up in a million ways. She kept expecting the rug to get pulled out from under her. And Jay had to admit, she had good reason to. First she’d lost her parents, and then she’d lost Jay, and now she was reeling from losing the douche in a suit. Jay was beyond overjoyed that douche wasn’t in her life anymore. But he was pained for her at how much of a tailspin she was in over it. She didn’t allow herself to get comfortable in any life anymore. And that’s all Jay desperately wanted. Was for her to get comfortable with him.
So he pulled back the covers and laid her on the bed, slipping her clothes gently off of her. She shivered once in the air conditioning so he grabbed a t-shirt from his bag and slid it onto her, tucking her under the covers. He watched her sleeping form as he brushed his teeth.
She looked so gorgeous, so unbelievably, perfectly out of place in his bed. Her black hair against his pillow, her mauve lips, parted with sleep. His bed was always so lonely, and yet here she was. It was like strolling through a lawn of grass and stumbling upon a humongous winking ruby. Unexpected and painfully beautiful.
When he pulled back the covers and slid in next to her, he didn’t go to the empty side of the bed, instead he just crowded into her occupied side, wanting any excuse to be touching her, ankle to neck.
Mari sighed and turned over so that they were face to face. She absently threw a leg over his hip and settled her forehead into his neck. The move aligned them in a very sensitive area but Jay held perfectly still. The only thing that moved was the breath in his chest. She’d snuggled up to him so naturally, without any hesitation, and the ease of it had been like ice in his heart.
Part of him was reasonably certain that she thought he was Linc.
“Jay,” she whispered, and his heart started beating again.
“Yeah?”
She looked up at him with sleepy eyes. “You’re so warm, it’s like there’s a sun inside you.”
He wasn’t sure if she was still dreaming, but he smiled at her words.
“I watched you today,” she whispered. “While you were swimming. And you’re so beautiful. Like a god or something. All those muscles and gold skin. All the women were watching you. And you’re mine.”
Jay’s breath caught as a certain part of himself started waking up. Was she doing this on purpose? He wasn’t sure.
“During the hurricane, I couldn’t believe that you were the one there with me. One of the most gorgeous men I’d ever seen and I got to be trapped in a hurricane with you.”
Jay huffed out a little edgy laugh as one of her hands dipped just under the waist of his boxer briefs. She drew a line on his skin. Her touch burned him, made him raw in every way.
“You didn’t care that I was good looking. You treated me like I was a serial killer.”
She didn’t laugh, but she did open her mouth against his neck, she did taste him. Jay felt paralyzed. He didn’t want to do anything that might break this spell. “I didn’t trust you because you were a stranger, but also because I wanted you so badly. Right from the beginning. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t know how you were doing it to me. I’d never felt like that about anyone before. Like I wanted to swallow every last drop of you.”
Jay let out a ragged breath, swallowed hard. “I felt the same way. You were like a…” he searched for the right words with a brain that was heavy and slow with desire for her. “A piece of exotic fruit that I’d never tasted before. I wanted you to let me take a bite so badly.”
“I did,” she whispered, her hand dipping all the way into his boxers, circling him. “I gave you a taste. First I gave you just a little. And then I gave you everything.”
It was the memory of that night on the roof, the improbable hail stones all around them, that had Jay thrusting forward into her hand.
Her leg was still thrown over his hip and she drew him closer to her core with a muscular flex of her foot.
“I need you,” she whispered, her lips almost against his lips.
Jay flicked his briefs down a few inches and popped free. He batted her hand away from him and grabbed her behind, sliding her towar
d him. He rolled so that she straddled him and Mari took him inside in one fluid, breathtaking motion.
They both held perfectly still, struck with the glory of it. And then when she fell forward onto her hands, when her hair curtained around them, did they start to move.
Jay let out a low, long groan at the perfect, sliding feel of her. Mari’s breath was choppy and bursting over his face before she let out a needy whimper. It was a sound he’d never heard her make before and it broke him. He tangled his hands in her hair and swallowed down her breath with his mouth on hers. He pushed up into her from below and was undone when she made the sound again, directly into his mouth.
Jay’s hands gripped at her, too tight and everywhere. There was nothing soft about the way he held her and Mari couldn’t get enough of it. She felt like he was holding her together. That without the rough grasp of his hands, she might just fly to pieces. Their pace was slow and intense, each stroke affecting them, changing them. And when they exploded against one another, Mari first, and then Jay, they were holding on so tight it was like they were all the other had left in the entire world.
When their breaths became even again, they lay in the same position, still connected even as their heart rates slowed and matched one another.
Jay wondered if she’d fallen asleep in that position and found he wouldn’t have minded at all. But then she spoke.
“Did you have any girlfriends?” Mari asked suddenly, into the darkness. Jay knew exactly what she was asking. If he’d been with anyone since her.
He cleared his throat. “I’ve been with women. But no one more than once. Definitely no girlfriends.”
She was quiet, tracing a pattern over his damp skin. She seemed different in the dark for some reason. Less combative, more willing to do this the way he’d hoped they would. With open hearts and real steps forward. He didn’t want to break the spell.
“Wasn’t that lonely?” she finally asked.
“Yes.”
She didn’t say more. But he had to ask.
“Were you with anyone besides Linc?” He thought he deserved a medal of honor for not sneering the douche’s name.
Bachelors In Love Page 44