by L. P. Maxa
“I said no, Beau. I don’t want to spend the rest of our lives together dwelling on the past.” She reached out and placed a sweet, chaste kiss on my lips. “I want a future.”
“I want your heart, Sweets. Is it mine?” I’d told her last night that I didn’t just want her body. And as sexy as she looked sprawled out underneath me, I’d walk away if her heart wasn’t mine.
She took a deep breath, holding it in while her eyes searched mine. “It’s yours. Every part of me belongs to you. It’s always belonged to only you.”
My heart swelled in my chest. I didn’t deserve her forgiveness; we both knew it. But I wouldn’t waste this second chance. I would cherish her for the rest of my life. “You have no idea how happy that makes me, Hales.”
She wrapped her arms around my neck. “Show me.”
I dipped down, capturing her lips, invading her mouth with my tongue. I wanted to devour her. I wanted to use my body to erase any and all lingering hurt I’d caused. I wanted to replace all her sadness with pleasure. I wanted to love her until she forgot that I’d ever left.
I pinned her arms above her head, intertwining her fingers with mine. My hard length was pressed against her core, and she was arching against me, impatient. I moved against her, amping up her desire, her need. Before long she was moaning, a sweet begging sound filling the tree house. “Please, Beau. I need more.”
“I got you, baby. I know what you need.” I slipped my hand into her white panties, moving through her slick folds with ease. I pressed my thumb against her clit and used two fingers to pump into her entrance. She threw her head back, her lower lip between her teeth.
“Beau. Please…I…”
I nuzzled her neck, nipping and sucking my way to her ear. “Tell me you’re mine.”
“I’m yours. I’ve only ever been yours.”
I bit down lightly on her earlobe. “Grab the condom from my pocket.” I’d had to borrow one from Crue. I hadn’t been lying when I said I hadn’t sown any wild oats, not a one. The last girl I’d touched had been Halen.
“Don’t need it. On the—fuck—on the pill now.” Her neck was still arched, her thighs shaking around my wrist. She was dripping wet, her desire so damn apparent. She could barely form her sentence and it stroked the hell out of my ego.
Halen reached down between us, unbuttoned my pants, and palmed my throbbing cock. It twitched in excitement. I hissed out a breath when she started to tug lightly on the head, pulling me toward her.
“Look at me, Sweets.”
I waited until her eyes were on mine, and then I entered her in one smooth motion. I stilled, trying to slow my pounding heart, trying to gain some composure. She felt so fucking perfect wrapped around me. So tight. So warm. I pulled out slightly then surged back in. It had been too long; she felt too good. I’d never last. I used my thumb to press on her swollen clit.
“Fuck, baby, fuck, I missed this.” I nipped at her neck, encouraging her to be loud, letting her cries of pleasure fill the air around us. “Nothing has ever felt as good as your pussy wrapped around my dick.”
She dug her nails into my bare back, my words spurring her on. “Don’t stop.”
“You’ll be lucky if I ever let you out of this tree house, Sweets. I never want to leave your body.” She started to laugh, but I slammed into her again, hard. Her laughter turned into a long, loud moan. “That’s it, baby, come for me. Let me hear you scream my name.”
“Beau. Don’t stop, just like that.”
She was panting, meeting my every thrust. “Come for me, baby.” I had every muscle tightened, and I was doing everything I could to hold on, to wait for her to finish first.
“Beau.” She tensed under me, crying out my name as she milked my dick. She pulled me right over the edge with her, and I couldn’t hold out any longer. She felt so fucking good. I spilled inside her, my own moan just as loud as my name had been on her lips.
When we came down, I didn’t leave her body. I rolled us over so that she was on top. I pushed her wild hair away from her beautiful, flushed face. “You okay?”
She smiled, her eyes still hooded. “More than okay.”
“I love you, Halen. I love you so damn much.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Halen
I’d fallen asleep a few minutes after Beau had declared his love for me. Again. I laid my head on his chest and drifted off to the sound of his heartbeat. But I’d woken up a few minutes ago when I’d heard the click of his camera. “You ready for round two?”
He sat the camera to the side. “Almost.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “But right now I’m just enjoying the feel of you here in my arms. The way you smell, the sound of you breathing.” He sucked my index finger into his mouth. “The way you taste.”
I tapped the fingers of my free hand on his chest, mimicking the sound of his heart. “I missed this sound.” I didn’t want to dwell on the past, on the fact that I had to miss him at all. “Hey, earlier at dinner you said we needed to talk. About telling our parents the truth?” For a moment I’d thought he’d changed his mind about me, about us. But then I’d looked at him, saw the love in his eyes. The lust. And I’d known that I had nothing to fear. Not anymore, not when it came to him.
He rolled to the side, taking me with him. “I’ve been thinking a lot since I’ve been home, about all the lies we’ve told. We kept our relationship secret. We kept the pregnancy and the miscarriage…” He kissed the side of my head, like he wanted to take the hurt of the memory away. “I feel like those lies are weighing me down.”
“Are you saying you want to tell them everything?” My mouth went dry at the thought. Telling my parents about what we’d gone through was something I’d never wanted to do. But I couldn’t deny that Beau had a point—that the lies were like a thorn in our sides.
“Yes.” He propped himself up on his elbow, looking down at me. “But they are our truths to tell, Hales. And if you don’t want to tell them, then we won’t.”
I buried my head into his chest. “Can I think about it? Do I have to decide right now?” We were starting over, Beau and I. Deep down I knew that we needed to come clean. We needed to get everything out there so that we could begin again with no fear.
He smoothed my hair back. “Of course not. Take all the time you need.”
I lay there for a few minutes, being in the moment. Letting him hold me. Reveling in the fact that he was here and I was in his arms. But my brain wouldn’t shut off. It was going a mile a minute at the thought of coming clean to our parents. “What brought this on? Wanting to tell them. Do you think we need to? In order to have a future?”
He was quiet for a few seconds, his voice soft when he finally answered, “We’ll have a future regardless if we tell them or not. I love you, Sweets, and I’m never letting you go. I won’t leave, not ever again.” He kissed my bare shoulder. “I think that this family has a lot of secrets. And I think secrets have a way of festering.”
“This family? You mean like Crue and Avory?” I guess those two lying to our parents was similar to what Beau and I had done. But that meant I also knew they had their reasons. “I’m not going to tattle on my sister. I won’t do that to them.”
Beau snorted. “I’m not saying we need to narc on anyone, Sweets.” He sighed. “I just think that secrets cause problems. Maybe if our parents had known what we were going through, how we felt for each other…”
“Then you’d have never left.” Was that the truth? Would he have stayed if we could have gone through our loss openly, and as a family?
“Maybe.” He fell back and laid flat against the mattress, bringing me with him. “There is no real way to know that.”
“What other secrets, Beau? What aren’t you telling me?” I’d known Beau my whole life; I knew that there had to be more to it. It couldn’t just be our lives that had caused him to feel this way. We’d shouldered those things for so long. Maybe he was holding onto new ones, secrets for other people. Maybe it was actually the combined weigh
t that was hurting him.
“Cash and Crue, they’re still lying and switching places. Evie is partying nonstop in Dallas, taking Adderall to keep up with her new rock-star life. And we both know that there is something up with Jett and Marley. Those two sneak out all the time, but they never leave the compound?” He shook his head. “They’re doing something they don’t want us to know about.”
“And Landry too.”
He pulled back, searching my eyes. “What do you mean? What about Landry?”
“The new guy she’s seeing? It’s weird that she won’t tell us who he is, right? She’s never had a problem sharing before.”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
So I was right. It wasn’t just our past that was making him have panic attacks at the dinner table. Since he’d been home, the family had piled all their troubles at his feet. “Maybe you’ve been gone too long, you know? Maybe you’ve forgotten what it’s like here, life on the compound. Us against the world.”
He let out a soft sigh. “I think that being gone, and then coming home, gave me a different perspective. I think that for the first time, I can see this place clearly. It is us against the world, Sweets. But maybe that’s not such a good thing after all. Cash and Crue are going to get caught, and they could get into a lot of trouble. And not only with our parents. Evie? She basically has a speed addiction, whether it comes from a prescription pad or a drug dealer on the corner. She needs help.”
“We keep each other’s secrets, Beau.” Was he suggesting that we tell on everyone? We’ve never done that, not even when we were little kids. We never tattled. “You and Landry were the ones that taught us this. You told us all that you didn’t rat out family. That we could always take care of things ourselves.” And we had. Always. Crue had accidentally set fire to a broom in the large shed outside the pool house. We’d been playing Wizard of Oz. Beau had put it out and then we all had helped repaint. Landry had wrecked her car, and she had been out past curfew when she called Beau. I’d snuck out and gone with him. She told the parents she left it at a party because she was blocked in. The three of us had pulled our money together and got her car fixed and back to the compound before the parents could suspect a thing. “We stick together.”
He looked down at me, his eyes sad. “I think that somewhere along the way, we’ve crossed the line. We aren’t kids anymore, and the secrets we’re all keeping? They could ruin lives.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Beau
Halen and I had stayed on the floor of the tree house until the sun had started to come up. We talked and laughed and made love, over and over. My heart was full, and I couldn’t stop smiling.
“Why are you grinning like that? You look like one of the seven dwarfs.” Jett tossed a strawberry at me, hitting me square in the forehead.
“Jett. Don’t throw food.” My Aunt Dilly sent him a motherly glare from the other end of the long table.
I looked across from me, winking at Halen. She knew why I was grinning; she’d put this smile on my face. Like last night, sitting across from her at the large family table was torture. I wanted to hold her hand. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to eat food off her plate. I wanted to be a normal couple.
“You’re pregnant?”
I whipped my head to the right, breaking eye contact with Halen and turning toward the whisper-yell. Pregnant?
“For fuck’s sake, Avory. Keep your voice down, please.” Landry was all but pleading with Halen’s younger sister, a look of pure desperation in Landry’s eyes.
“What the hell is going on down there?” Halen whispered across Cash, drawing Landry’s attention.
Halen glanced at me and then turned her attention back to Landry. Halen had heard Avory, as did all the other cousins at our end of the table. I wanted to get Halen out of there. I wanted to tell my sister to keep her mouth shut. This wasn’t the way that Halen needed to find out. “Landry, don’t—”
“Hales, I was going to tell you, I swear, but—”
I looked over at Halen and watched as all the blood drained from her face. I was too late.
“You were going to tell her what?” Crue was sitting across from Landry, next to me. “What are you guys talking about? Why does everyone keep looking at Halen like she’d going to shatter or something?”
“Crue. Shut the fuck up.” Cash heaved a sigh and then wrapped his arm around Halen’s shoulders. “Are you okay?”
I should be the one holding her. I should be the one comforting her, not him. She was mine.
Landry reached across Cash and grabbed Halen’s hand. “I only found out a couple nights ago. No one knows. I’m not ready to tell my parents. I haven’t even seen a doctor or told the father. I am so sorry, Hales. I know this hurts. I know this brings up some stuff for you guys. But please, please, try to calm down. I can’t tell them yet. I can’t.” She wiped at a tear that had fallen slowly down her face.
“Sweets.” I swallowed past the lump in my throat at seeing my sister so scared and my girl so broken. “We just need to make it through breakfast, okay? We make it through breakfast and then we can leave. We’ll take my bike. We can cry and we can remember and I can hold you all fucking day. Okay?”
She nodded. I knew she was trying really hard not to let her tears flow like Landry’s were on the verge of doing.
“Why the hell is everyone acting like Halen is going to lose it? She’s not the one that’s pregnant.” Evie was looking around the table like we’d all lost our minds. I guess the twins never told her about what happened two years ago.
“Someone’s pregnant? What the hell is going on?” We all went silent at the sound of Uncle Dash’s booming voice, our heads slowly turning in his direction. All parental eyes were on us now.
Crue and Cash exchanged a look, but neither of them said a word. Avory had her eyes trained on her lap, refusing to meet her father’s scrutiny. Evie was basically vibrating in her seat. Marley and Jett looked uncomfortable, and Emmie seemed confused. We all had secrets from our parents, every single one of us.
Aunt Lexi shook her head, her eyes on fire with pissed-off-mom glare. “Look. You guys have been whispering for days, stopping conversations as soon as a parent walks into the room. Start talking. NOW.”
Still, no one said a word. We were in a stalemate. And all I wanted to do was yank Halen into my arms from across the table. We’d lost a child, and nothing would ever erase that hurt. Nothing. Her finding out about Landry like this, it was cruel. When I saw a tear finally escape, something inside me snapped. “Fuck it.” I got up and walked around the table, gathering Halen in my arms. She sagged against me, the pain of our loss made new again.
“Does someone want to tell me what the hell is going on?” My dad stood up from his spot at the table, meeting my eyes over the top of Halen’s head.
She pulled away and looked over at my sister. Landry gave a slight shake of her head, begging us to keep her secret. “Me.” The gorgeous girl in my arms squared her shoulders. “Well, I was pregnant.”
“We.” I stood tall, keeping my arm around Halen. “We were pregnant.” She’d made the choice to help my sister. She’d made the choice to share our truth. And I’d be damned if I let her do it alone.
“What?” My Aunt Lexi got to her feet beside my Uncle Dash. “You two? You, uh, what?”
“Hales, you don’t have—”
“This is a fresh start, right?” Halen cut off Landry then took a deep breath and peered into my eyes. “It’s you and me, and nothing else matters?” I nodded and she turned back to her parents and our aunts and uncles. “Then I want it all gone. All the secrets, all the blame.”
I kissed the side of her head. “I’m right here with you, Sweets. For the rest of forever.”
We both turned and faced our parents, head on. “Right after I turned seventeen, I found out I was pregnant. I knew that Beau would freak out, but I was happy. We were so careful, we never meant for it to happen, but it did. And I refused to think of it as anything but a
blessing.” Her voice cracked, causing a tear to slide down my cheek. “I’ll never forget the expression on Beau’s face at that first doctor’s appointment. It was like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. In awe of this life we created.” The smile left her voice. “A couple days before we were planning on telling you guys, I had a miscarriage.”
“Halen, sweetheart.” Her mom looked devastated. She leaned her head against Uncle Dash.
“Beau never left my side. He was there, sleeping next to me and holding me while I cried.” Halen closed her eyes, tears raining down her cheeks now. “He left home because he thought it was what was best for me. He wanted me to live every moment, be young and crazy for as long as I could.” She grinned up at me and my heart stuttered in my chest; she was so damn gorgeous. So kind and so strong. “But the thing he forgot to factor in was that life is nothing without each other.”
“For how long?” Halen’s mother was still studying us, sadness dimming her green eyes. Eyes that were so similar to her daughter’s. “How long were you and Beau together without us knowing?”
“Since I was sixteen.” Halen’s voice was clear, steady. She was ready to tell the truth, ready to start over fresh with no lies between any of us. Just like Crue and Avory would be one day.
Uncle Dash’s gaze was hard, unforgiving. “You snuck around behind our backs for over a year?”
“We did. And that was wrong.” I stood tall next to Halen with her hand in mine. “We were afraid of what you guys would say, what you would think. I was afraid you’d hate me, that you’d make me leave. That I was too old. Not good enough.” I let out a quiet chuckle. “Take your pick.”
“But you did leave.” My mom looked like she wanted to cry now. “You left for two years, when Hales needed you most. You didn’t come home, not once.” Her accusations were like a dagger to my chest.
Uncle Dash addressed his daughter. “Is that why you were so depressed? Why you wouldn’t come out of your room? Why you cried every night?”
His questions hammered the knife in deeper, making it almost hard to breathe. But Halen squeezed my hand, letting me know she was still right there beside me. “When Beau left, he broke my heart.”