by Katy Regnery
She stared at him, beyond surprised that her decisions—meant to keep them both from any pain—had caused so much. “I didn’t mean for—”
“What? For one of us to develop actual feelin’s?” he said, his green eyes roiling with emotion. “I get it. You don’t believe in love. You don’t want it. Yer not interested. Fine.” He paused only for a moment before continuing that thought. “But I’m not as cold as you, Tate. I fell for you that weekend. I know you told me not to, but I couldn’t bloody help it. Stupid Fin. Stupid me.” He huffed loudly, banging his hands on the steering wheel. “Anyway, I’m leavin’ for Ireland next week. And you’re…you’re…impossible. So let’s just stay out of each other’s way this weekend, right? We’ll just…leave each other alone.”
But Tate had meant what she said before: she didn’t want Fin to leave her alone. Not to mention, slicing through all of this emotional vomit was an all-consuming need to have her original question answered.
“Were you with anyone? At the other weddings?”
“Fuck,” he muttered, staring at the highway. Finally, he turned to her and spat, “No!”
Tate learned that important lesson the moment he said, No.
It isn’t just bad things that can sucker-punch you.
Good things can knock the wind out of you too.
Maybe she didn’t even know the right answer to the question until he gave it. She didn’t know why it mattered so much. But it did. And the word no, small though it was, was suddenly her favorite word in all the world.
Reaching for his forearm, she rested her fingers tentatively on his brown, wiry hairs for a moment, then curled her fingers, holding onto him, her breathing becoming increasingly jagged and shallow.
“Jaysus, Tate,” he whispered, a note of pleading entering his tone. “What do you want from me?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I only know that it makes me…happy…that you weren’t with anyone.”
He didn’t look especially pleased by this admission, but he didn’t pull his arm away from her either, so it was hard to tell.
“Were you?” he asked, looking deeply into her eyes. “With anyone?”
She shook her head, her voice a whisper. “No.”
“I don’t know what this is,” he admitted softly.
“Me neither,” she said. “Feels like unchartered waters.”
He tilted his head to the side. “Why did you come back?”
And that part of her brain that had laughed at her two weeks ago when she’d RSVP’d and quickly bought her airline ticket from Marathon to Manchester snickered at her knowingly. It was, um, closure, wasn’t it, dummy? Except it wasn’t. It never had been. It was as simple as this: she wanted—no, she needed—to see Finian again, and at the time, she hadn’t known how to admit that to herself. But why? The why behind that question still scared the shit out of her.
As though he sensed it was too difficult for her to face the truth of that question, he asked another instead: “Did you think about me?”
She clenched her jaw. Unable to hold the intense eye contact between them, she looked down at her fingers on his arm and nodded.
“You did?”
“Yes.” She licked her lips and nodded again, gathering her courage to look up at him. When she did, he reached for her face, tenderly cupping her cheek with his hand.
“I’m leavin’ in a few days,” he said, scanning her eyes.
“I know,” she said. “Me too.”
“I like you.”
“I know.”
“No, Tate,” he said. “That’s not good enough.” He searched her eyes, then repeated, “I like you.”
Her breathing was so quick and shallow, she was getting dizzy. To steady herself, she reached up and covered his hand with hers.
“Close your eyes,” he said gently.
Gratefully, she closed them, whimpering softly when his lips—as warm and soft and possessive as she remembered them—landed on hers. He kissed her slowly, his lips brushing and nipping like they had all the time in the world instead of just the opposite. Or maybe as though he was savoring the renewed contact as much as she, like his lips had been doing nothing for four months but waiting—not talking, not laughing, not singing, not eating—just waiting for the chance to be pressed against hers again.
When he drew away, she kept her eyes closed, but every sense was heightened when he leaned close to her ear and whispered, “Mo cailleach, I like you so much.”
And Tate, whose lips were no longer her own, took a deep, tremulous breath and formed them to whisper, “I like you too.”
His laugh, so soft and surprised, made a hundred butterflies take flight in her stomach, and she opened her eyes as though he’d commanded it.
“That’s my girl.”
“Your girl?” she asked, still feeling dazed by her admission. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d allowed herself to “like” a man she was also kissing, let alone admit it to him.
He laughed again. “Okay, fine. Have it your way. You’re not my girl.”
Her gaze slid down to his lips. Full and delicious, she wanted them on hers again, and she wanted them there for the foreseeable future, even if that future was only a handful of days.
“Mo cailleach, you’re an infuriatin’, complicated woman. Who told you that likin’ someone was all bad?”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“What? Infuriatin’? Frustratin’. Difficult. Aggrava—”
“I know what infuriating means,” she said. She gave him a look as she wound her fingers through his and lowered their hands to the vinyl seat between them. “Mo kay-leech. What’s that mean?”
He winced, then licked his lips. “You won’t like it.”
Her heart started beating faster. Did it mean something sappy and sentimental that would have her throwing up in her mouth? She braced herself, fighting her facial muscles against an imminent grimace. “Does it mean ‘love’ or ‘sweetheart’ or something else like that?”
“Eh, no. It’s hard to translate. I mean…well, literally, it means…‘hag,’ but I’m not callin’ you a hag, now! It’s a queer word that has secondary meanin’s about a woman bein’ a sorceress or a…”
Her mind acknowledged that he was still talking, but she had stopped listening, her lips tilting up into a smile, a laugh starting in her belly, bubbling up through her chest, passing her heart en route to her throat, which opened with unexpected joy as the sound burst forth into unruly giggles.
“You’ve been c-calling me a—a—a—hag?”
Unable to stop laughing, she stared at him, utterly besotted and totally unable to look away. And if Tate had been a woman who didn’t believe in love a scant few months ago, she couldn’t be certain that she didn’t believe in it now. If he’d been calling her “sweetheart” or “honey” or “love” in Irish, it would have been hard for her to accept, but this man, who somehow read her perfectly without even knowing the complicated, hidden, secret language of her frightened heart, had been—affectionately—calling her a hag. It was perfect. It was beyond perfect.
It was, though there was no way Tate would have acknowledged it even if she’d realized it for herself, the moment she fell in love with him.
He stared back at her like she was completely nuts. “Uh, yeah? You like that, uh, that nickname, huh? But like I said, it doesn’t mean the same thing in—”
“Fin.”
“Yeah?”
“Shut up,” she said, clenching the muscles that were demanding his cock, hard and throbbing, deep inside of her.
“Yeah.”
“I need to be in your bed…now.”
“Now now?”
“Now now.”
“Right,” he said, putting both hands on the steering wheel, shifting the car into drive and iron-footing the gas as he merged back onto the quiet highway with a squeal of tires. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Tate, because you know I like you, but I think you may be a bit daft.”
She nodded, crossing her legs tight in an effort to assuage the ache between her thighs. “I think you might be right.”
CHAPTER 7
It was the light through the cottage window that woke Finian, bright in its morning glory, shining down on the angelic head of the woman he’d fucked senselessly for about six straight hours last night.
He’d had her on top and astride, in the shower, and on the edge of the bed. He’d held her in his arms as she sat impaled on his lap, and he’d smacked her naughty fanny as he drilled her from behind. From the moment they’d arrived back at Summerhaven, they’d made up for four months of lost time, and by midnight, they were both aching and exhausted.
And happy.
So fucking happy it should have scared him to death, but it didn’t. A man who’s been lost in the desert doesn’t worry he’s drinking too much when someone finally offers him water. He just drinks his fucking fill and then he drinks a little more.
Turning onto his side, he felt his cock twitch then jump, his balls tightening as he stared at her. Tugging on the white sheet just a little, he bared her breasts, watching in fascination as her nipples puckered into tight points. She had several hickeys on the otherwise pristine flesh of both breasts—places where he’d sucked too hard—and the marks on her skin made him even harder.
He leaned forward, running his tongue around one tan areola, his breath whispering over the dark bud that beckoned his lips. She moaned softly as he sucked the sweet nub of warm flesh into his mouth, his tongue bathing her skin as her hands found his head, her fingers threading into his hair and pulling.
Maneuvering between her legs, he licked a path to her other breast as he reached beneath her, clutching the twin globes of her ass as he sucked the left nipple into the wet heat of his mouth. She whimpered his name softly, and he pulled her forward, lining up his cock at the entrance of her pussy.
“Open yer eyes, mo cailleach.”
The fluttered open slowly, her eyebrows knitting together in dreamy desire as she stared up at him.
“Do you want me?” he asked.
She arched her back, welcoming the tip of his erection into her hot, soaked sex.
“Say it,” he insisted.
“I want you,” she said, her voice sleepy and low, her eyes closing as he held her tightly and slid forward slowly, inch by perfect inch, until he was balls deep inside of her, the walls of her pussy clenching tightly around his cock.
He didn’t know what was happening between them. He didn’t necessarily understand why this woman, who tried to appear as though she needed no one, had so captured his attention and his heart, but it was one of those things he could neither explain nor completely understand. He only knew that being with her—being intimate with her—was a high he’d never known, and being apart from her for four months had been a low he’d just as soon never revisit again.
“Tate,” he murmured, withdrawing his cock to the tip, then surging forward again, “you feel…fuck, but you feel so good.”
“Mm-hm,” she hummed. “Harder, Fin. Faster. I need…please, I need…”
“You need to come, lass,” he said, panting, feeling his own orgasm imminent.
Digging his fingers into her ass, he pulled her impossibly closer, keeping his thrusts short and fast as she whimpered and moaned beneath him. He held her body with one arm as he licked his fingers, then slid them between the delicate folds of her slickened skin to find and tease her clit.
She threw her forearm over her closed eyes, her whole body going rigid for just a second before she cried out his name and the walls of her sex rippled in waves—clench, release, clench, release, clench release clenchreleaseclenchreleaseclenchrelease…
“FUCK!” he growled, his massaged cock swelling thick within her, tight to the point of pain, and then—cresting, cresting, sucking his breath from his lungs—letting go. He groaned in satisfaction, his breath catching as he came inside of her in sweet, hot, glorious pulses of pleasure.
Panting and sweating, he rolled to his back, taking her with him. She sprawled over his chest, her face against his neck, her lips resting on his throat.
“I missed you,” he said softly, as the world stopped spinning and he opened his eyes slowly. “Fuck, but I missed you, woman.”
He felt her inhalation of breath, and the way she held it before finally letting it go.
“I know,” she said softly, her voice like gravel.
It bruised his heart a little that she didn’t return the sentiment, but instead of swallowing that small pain, he decided to face it.
“That’s not good enough,” he said, repeating the same words he’d used in the car last night when she’d had trouble telling him that she liked him.
Disengaging their bodies, Tate rolled to her side, presenting him with her back, and though it took Fin and a moment to realize it, a soft, shuttering breath clued him in to the fact that she was crying.
Tate.
Was crying.
Shite.
He reached for her and pulled her back against his chest gently but firmly, sliding one arm under her head and draping the other over her waist and flattening it beneath her breasts.
“Shhh. Shhh, now, sweet girl. I don’t mean to push you so hard,” he murmured, holding her tightly and letting her cry. As much as he could, he wanted to absorb the pain she held inside, to reverse her belief that love was impossible, and that caring for someone meant heartache. “What happened to you, lass? What hurts so much, mo cailleach?”
“H-Hag,” she mewled softly, accompanied by a little chortle crossed with a sniffle.
“I told you that it didn’t mean—”
“Shut up, Fin,” she said with another sniffle, followed by a deep, jagged breath that filled her lungs, but not without effort. “I like it.”
She turned in his arms, facing him with glistening eyes and damp cheeks, and he very sternly told himself that this was not a good time to be distracted by the rasp of her still-erect nipples against his chest.
He stared into her eyes, forcing his concentration to zero in on her heart and her head and, just for now, not on her body.
She took another ragged breath and let it go, exhaling against his chest in a puff of warm wind.
“Talk to me,” he said. “Let me in just a little.”
Her eyes were bleak as she looked at him, a tear slipping from her lashes and sliding down her cheek.
“Please, Tate,” he coaxed.
“Stop looking at me,” she said softly.
He nodded, rolling to his back. She rested her cheek over his heart, and he stroked her back, waiting for her to talk, trying to be patient.
Finally, when she was ready, she cleared her throat. “I don’t do this. I don’t get emotional. I don’t get attached. I don’t let people in. Never.”
“I know,” he said. “But it’s okay. You’re safe with me.”
“Am I?”
And he didn’t have to think. He spoke from the heart. “You are.”
“I think I only let myself fall for you because everything was temporary.”
He knew this. He knew it, and yet he hated to hear it. Her reminder that everything they shared was temporary, in fact, almost ruined the thrill of her inadvertently admitting that she’d fallen for him. Almost.
“Doesn’t have to be,” he said, purposely keeping his voice light. “We’re adults who earn money. I heard about this new invention called an airplane. We don’t have to say good-bye forever.”
Her lips pressed against his chest for a moment. “Yes, we do. I live in Florida. You live in Ireland. Temporary is why this works.”
Fin didn’t agree with her. When they’d first met in November, he’d been of the same mind, but as days apart turned into agonizing weeks turned into almost unbearable months, he’d realized that they’d forged a deeper connection in their few days together. And now that they’d reconnected? The idea of losing her again felt…well, terrible. Not that he knew what to do about it. For n
ow, he simply decided not to fight with her.
“We don’t have to decide all of that right this minute,” he said. “Tell me about you.”
“Me.” She exhaled loudly, like she couldn’t stand the story she was about to tell. “Poor little Tate.”
“How’s that?”
Her index finger moved absentmindedly over his right pec as she spoke, drawing small circles, one after the other. “When I was eight, we lived in Boston. Me and my parents. One night—a completely boring night in March—my parents hired a sitter and went out to dinner. A date night. Nothing extraordinary. Nothing crazy. Dinner and a movie. Except it was sleeting when they got out of the movie. On the way home, a drunk driver slammed into their car. If the roads hadn’t been so slippery, he might have been able to stop, but between his poor reflexes and the weather, he couldn’t.”
Fin closed his eyes and clenched his jaw. He knew the rest of the story without asking, and it explained so much about her—why she was so closed to love, why she was so certain it would hurt her.
“They were probably killed instantly,” she murmured, then added in a barely audible whisper: “Probably.”
Fin gulped, his fingers stilling on her back as he processed the terrible thing that had happened to her at such a young age.
“I was sent to live with my Uncle Pete, my mom’s older brother, who lived—well, lives—in the Florida Keys. He was forty. A bachelor. I barely knew him. He never wanted kids, never wanted to be a father.”
“What happened then?” asked Fin, wondering if this “Uncle Pete” had mistreated her in any way, everything inside of him ready to buy a plane ticket to Florida and beat the shite out of the old bastard with his bare hands if that was the case.
“He learned how,” she said softly, her voice uncharacteristically vulnerable. “He…became my everything. Mother. Father. Uncle. Family. Friend.” She paused for a second, and Fin relaxed, his hand moving gently on her back again. “We were an odd couple, Uncle Pete and me, but he loved me. Loves me. And I…well, you know.”
He did know. She loved him, this uncle who’d taken in a shattered child and given her a safe harbor in the middle of a deadly storm.