Something cracked. Broke wide open inside him. He went off like a volcano.
When he came to his senses, he was collapsed over her. Drenched, heart thudding.
As soon as his brain switched back online, so did the fear. Her face was turned away from his. Eyes closed. Just the beautiful, sharp jut of her perfect cheekbone. The sensual curve of her smooth cheek, her jaw. The glow of pink, the damp sheen.
She still held him, hugging him close. She hadn’t let go, or shoved him away. He could still feel the muscles of her pussy quivering around him. Her thighs shook, still twined around his. Her heart thudded against his. Her chest, bucking for air.
Duh. Of course it was. He was huge, and he was crushing her. For fuck’s sake.
He rolled to the side, pressing the small of her back. Holding her against him to keep his penis inside. He wanted to stay inside her forever.
Demi rolled away onto her back, detaching from him. Stretching with a luxurious sigh. Back arched, tits out. Damn, she was so beautiful, it hurt his eyes.
But she wasn’t looking at him.
Eric sat up, holding the extremely full condom on with his fingertips. Looking around the room for a solution to his dilemma.
“Bathroom,” Demi said lazily. “Waste basket under the sink.”
He went to take care of it and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, wincing away from his own reflection. That look in his eyes. He didn’t want Demi to see it. The pain, the fear. Unquenchable hunger. She unleashed something dangerous in him.
He still remembered how it felt to be with her years ago. Crazy magic. Anything had been possible. He could even beat Shaw’s Crossing if he had Demi. He was kissed by fate. She was the smartest, sexiest, most special woman alive and he could do anything, be anyone, with her at his side. He wasn’t nailed down by the bad shit in his past or marked by the Prophet’s Curse. Demi could lift the spell. He’d been convinced.
He’d been so fucking wrong. And in the end, it was Demi who had paid the price.
He walked into the room and waited. Demi was stretching in the rumpled bed. She looked over and gazed up at him, perplexed. “Everything okay, Eric?”
“Yeah. Uh…how about you?” Damn. If he had to ask.
“I’m fine.” Her voice was husky, relaxed and low. “Never better.”
She lifted up the quilt, beckoning him in. God, yeah. He slid in between the sheets and groaned with pleasure as the heavenly warmth of her closed around him. Every part of him that touched her reacting wildly to the silken texture of her hair, her soft skin.
His dick sprang to attention. Demi glanced down with a swift smile. He shifted it so that it lay flat, not prodding her belly as he pulled her closer.
She murmured in appreciation, squeezing him. “That was prompt.”
“You inspire me. Hotter than hell.”
“Glad to hear it,” she said.
He searched for words. “I’m sorry that I, ah…lost it, back then. I don’t usually—”
“Stop it right there,” she said. “I don’t want to know your sexual habits.”
“Okay.” Eric hooked his leg around hers and slid his hand up over her hip. His hands shook with his intense awareness of her. The shockingly smooth texture of her skin.
“We could take another run at it,” he said. “Unless you’d rather sleep. Or talk.”
Her green eyes were full of laughter. And he was trying so hard to play it cool.
“Eric,” she said. “Please. I didn’t drag your poor tired ass all the way over this lake in Otis’s old fishing boat in the pitch darkness to sleep. Or talk.”
Eric dug his fingers into her hair and lifted a lock to his face, inhaling its warm, sweet smell. “Does that mean we don’t get to talk?”
She looked wary. “Talk isn’t in the scope of this encounter, Eric.”
“Not on the menu, huh?”
“Nope,” she said crisply. “Sure isn’t.”
Eric stroked her back, memorizing the curve of her waist. He was trying to fix every detail into his sense memory. “Being a hard-ass again?”
“Just looking out for myself. Orgasms are fine. Bring ’em on. Talking, not so much. You’re leaving this place and never coming back, and I don’t blame you. What is there to talk about?”
He grunted under his breath. “Whoa. That’s harsh.”
“I suppose so. But it’s the only way this can work for me.”
And in a flash, he felt it. Like a movement caught out of the corner of his eye. Feelings she wouldn’t dare let him see.
The stakes were high for her, too. She didn’t dare let down her guard.
He slid his arm around her waist, clamping her body against his and rolled over onto his back so she was sprawled over him, laughing. “Huh? What the hell?”
“How about a compromise?” he offered.
“You being here at all is already a compromise. Don’t push your luck, buddy.”
“One question apiece. Only one. Then it’s back to the orgasms.”
She gave him a baleful look but her body settled down on top of his. The warm, sexy weight of her and the kiss of her pussy against his belly made him throb and burn.
“One question?” she said suspiciously. “No funny stuff.”
“No funny stuff.”
Demi sighed. She crossed her arms over his chest, sliding her fingers into his chest hair and resting her chin on her forearms. “Go for it, then. You first.”
Eric’s mind went stupidly blank, dazzled by the challenge in her bright green eyes.
She waited, eyebrows tilting up, faintly amused. “So?”
“Give me a second,” he protested. “I don’t want to waste my question. It’s like a genie’s wish. You have to think about it. Make it count.”
He realized that this was the first genuine smile he’d seen on her face since he’d arrived. He’d seen her only at Otis’s funeral and graveside, and then at the reception with her glaring dad looming over her. Then their brief meeting at the café. Then the bar fight, then the fraught conversation in the car. All those grim situations had precluded smiling.
“I figured you had some big question burning in your mind,” she said. “But no, you don’t. Here you are, fishing and stammering.”
He seized on the first thing that came to him. “Why did you come back to Shaw’s Crossing? I thought you hated it here. And your dad…well, never mind. I just thought you’d be far away from here by now. In New York, Paris, Hong Kong.”
Demi’s smile faded. “That was the plan,” she admitted. “I had every intention of leaving. Then my dad caught me in his trap. But I already told you about that.”
“I’m sorry about that,” he offered.
Demi waved that away. “You had nothing to do with it. That’s between me and Dad. You were just a pretext.”
“That’s generous of you.”
“Moving on,” she said briskly. “Anyhow. When Mom died, she left me the restaurant property, and Ricky, who rented it and ran the diner, wanted to retire. If my dad could have stopped me, he would have, but Ricky offered to sell me all the equipment dirt cheap. I had to buy some equipment and do some renovation, but it was minimal. I figured, this was my last, best chance to get back to something vaguely resembling my original plan, before Dad laid down the law about Shaw Paper Products.”
“Culinary school, right?”
“Yes. You don’t have to feel guilty about that. Even without you as leverage, Dad would have found some way to scuttle that. But when this chance came around, it was different. I was older, stronger. I knew for a fact how much I hated working at Shaw’s Paper Products, in any capacity. And the property was legally mine, thanks to Mom. He couldn’t stop me anymore. So I went for it.”
“Oath-breaker,” he murmured.
She laughed under her breath. “It was too late for him to punish you for my sins,” she said. “Besides, that was a dirty trick on his part. A promise that was immorally extracted. So in the end, I didn’t really
feel that guilty about breaking it.”
“I’m glad you feel that way. So you like running a restaurant?”
“That’s technically another question, but I’ll let it pass. Yes, I do like it. It’s a crap-ton of work, but it’s all mine, and there’s lots of scope for creativity. I make yummy, good quality food. And I don’t compromise.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’d call that your defining personality trait.”
She frowned. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It’s a compliment,” he assured her quickly.
“It’s been seven years since you saw me.” Her voice had gone as sharp as crystal. “What the hell would you know about my defining personality traits?”
“You show them whenever you open your mouth. You don’t hide anything. That’s another defining personality trait. It’s all out there. What you see is what you get.”
Demi’s brows came together, suspicious. “Should I be offended?”
“If you want, I guess, but that would be a big waste of our precious time.”
She let out a short bark of laughter. “Okay, I’ll skip it. So, moving right along. Time for my question.”
Eric braced himself. This could go any goddamn direction at all.
“Okay, this one’s risky,” she said. “But here goes. Why were you so twitchy and angry that last night when you came to my folks’ house? That fight we had…it came out of nowhere. I will never understand why we crashed and burned so hard.”
That took him by surprise, and his mind locked up. “Ahhhh…” He shook his head. “I, ah…I guess must have been pissed off about being fired.”
She drew in a startled breath and sat up on her elbow. “You never told me you were fired.”
“I didn’t want you to know,” he said. “It was embarrassing. It happened right before I came to your house. First the construction job, then the care home. Suddenly I was unemployed, and I knew I’d have to leave Shaw’s Crossing to get more work. I bought that bottle of tequila and the limes with my last twenty bucks. I was flat broke. But I wanted to just forget it all and lose myself in a hot Demi fantasy, at least for one night. I figured I’d tell you the truth in the morning. But I never had a chance. We fought, you threw me out, and then all hell broke loose.”
“Flat broke?” Her voice was sharp. “You weren’t broke. You’d been working like a bastard all summer. Saving every penny for months, ever since you got back from Afghanistan. Saving up for your app launch, as I recall.”
Here was a dilemma. A truthful answer could torpedo this whole night. But Demi would smell a lie from a mile away. And he sucked at lying anyhow.
“I’d just spent all my money,” he admitted. “That very day.”
She looked confused. “On what?”
He hesitated for several seconds before answering. “A ring.”
He could feel the tension rise up, like a force field leaping to life. She pulled away from him. “Excuse me?”
“Yeah. You heard me. I blew every last cent I had on a ring.” He rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. “I put it on layaway. Didn’t have quite enough to buy it outright, but I found the perfect one at Steigler’s Fine Jewelry. Then right after I spent all that money, I got fired from the construction job. Then the care home. A one-two punch.”
“Oh my God,” she whispered.
“I didn’t mean to give you the ring right away. I knew it was too soon. That it would freak you out. I just wanted to be ready whenever the perfect moment presented itself. I had no doubts. I was one-hundred-fucking-percent convinced about you. I thought, with a girl like you, I should really go for it. You know. The grand gesture.”
Demi sat up, turning her back to him.
Fuck. He shouldn’t have told her. He’d miscalculated. Too heavy, too much. The night was already top-loaded with trauma. Put the fucking cherry on top, why didn’t he.
But he’d gone too far to turn back. “I got the idea from Otis.”
That brought her head around, eyes wide. “You talked about us to Otis?”
“He knew about us being involved, yeah, but that’s not what I meant. I’m talking about when he adopted me and Mace and Anton. He said that we’d be on our own soon, so it wasn’t like we needed raising, but he didn’t want us to carry the Prophet’s name around our whole lives, not after everything that happened. He thought we deserved for someone to make a grand gesture. It was up to him to show us how it was done. So he gave us his name.”
Demi wiped her eyes. “You should have said that in his eulogy.”
He shook his head. “It’s nobody’s else’s business. Besides, everybody in this town urged him not to take us in. It would have come across like a big scolding fuck-you.”
“So? They deserved it. Why not make them all suffer?”
“No point. Anyhow, back to us. You deserved a grand gesture, too. I just wish I’d been able to follow through on it before everything blew up in my face.”
Demi rolled off his body, and stared up at the ceiling. The silence was absolute.
“It really messed me up, you know,” she said finally.
He braced himself. “Yeah? How so?”
“It was so confusing, comparing every man I was ever with to you. It wasn’t fair to any of them. And we only had that brief moment. Like a flash of lightning.”
He seized her hand, pressing his lips against her knuckles. “I’ll shut up now.”
She smiled, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. “You better,” she said. “I asked you an innocent question, and you just took it and ran me right over a damn cliff with it.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I guess you’d call that one of my defining personality traits.”
“Smart-ass,” she muttered.
“That’s another one.”
Laughter broke the tension, but his big-ass emotional revelation had killed that conversation stone dead. The moments that followed were so quiet, the sound of his stomach grumbling made them both laugh, grateful for the distraction.
“Whoa. That was loud,” she commented. “Hungry?”
“I’m okay,” he said. “I had way too much to think about. Food didn’t make the cut.”
“I’ve got food here,” she informed him. “Leftovers from the reception. Awesome food, in great abundance. I just stacked up trays and put them in a bag, and it’s all down in the fridge, so it would be quick and easy. If you want to eat something.”
“What about your rigorous, focused all-sex agenda? No sleep, no talk?”
“Food’s fine.” There was a smile in her voice. “I advise that you fortify yourself. You have seven years of scorching sexual fantasies to live up to, so fuel up, buddy.”
He realized, surprised, that he was grinning. “Lay it on me.”
13
It was distracting, having Eric Trask lounging in the kitchen half dressed.
Demi had found a pair of striped cotton men’s pajamas in the drawer and divided it between them. She took the buttoned top, which hung down to the tops of her thighs, and he took the loose drawstring pants. They hung low on his hips, showing off the deep, enticing vee of his abs muscles, his taut six-pack, his cut pecs. His tight, flat dark nipples were taut from the chill. But pajama pants were better that than having him walk around naked with that thick, gorgeous dick bobbing and bouncing.
It wouldn’t stay down. It tented out the pants. That level of relentless sexual enthusiasm boded well for the rest of the night.
Damn, girl. Concentrate. Forks…napkins…plates.
The kitchen was chilly, but she felt hot, like she’d just stepped out of a sauna. She could have taken a dip in the frigid lake water right now and liked it. Not that she was going to waste one single second of this night swimming.
The trays were out, the covers off. She laid out honey-glazed ham, peppery roast beef, grilled veggies, a red potato dill salad, an assortment of cheeses, puff pastries filled with spiced sausage, big juicy fruit chunks and grapes, freshly baked
rolls, fat gleaming Greek olives, smoky cheese-and-artichoke fritters.
She handed him a paper plate. “There you go. Knock yourself out.”
Eric went for it without hesitation. As she took the first bite, she realized that she was ravenous, too. Eric was well into his second plate of food before it occurred to her to pull the beer out of the fridge.
Eric popped the tops of the bottles for her with a spoon and took a deep swallow. “Ahhh. That’s good.”
“Local beer,” she told him. “Artisanal brewer. Right here in Shaw’s Crossing.”
“Nice to see somebody around this place actually getting it right.”
“I’m getting it right,” she informed him. “Very right.”
He stopped chewing. “Of course you are. I didn’t mean you. The food’s amazing, by the way.”
“Don’t sweat it,” she murmured, trying not to smile. “But thanks.”
The food tasted even better here in her chilly kitchen in the middle of the night than it had yesterday. Mind-blowing sex was hungry work. And she anticipated more of the same, with the stunning, half-naked man smoldering at her across the kitchen table.
She finished first and left him to it, taking her beer into the living room to check on the fire. She opened the glass door of the stove and loaded the largest log onto the glowing coals, enjoying the heat against her flushed face and the boneless relaxation in her body.
She felt a dizzy glow of anticipation for the pleasure still to come. And she could feel the weight of his eyes on her from the kitchen as he finished his beer.
When she stood up, she looked over her shoulder. Their eyes met. The air charged.
Demi shook her hair back and loosened the button that held the loose pajama top closed. She let it fall open, just slightly, so it showed a long, shadowy glimpse of her bare body. The little swatch of dark hair on her mound, trimmed up just how she liked it.
She drained her beer, and set the bottle down on the coffee table. Then faced him, trailing her fingertips slowly down the narrow band of exposed skin. Over her heart, over her belly. Then lower.
She stared him directly in the eyes as she put her hand between her legs. Pulling her vulva up, making her clit pop out between her fingers. Petting it with her other hand. Slowly, with a murmuring sigh of pleasure.
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