Piper started to say the whole West isn’t my man thing and then stopped.
The idea of Bree—who, okay, wasn’t a total bitch—cozied up with West, made her want to snarl. And the desire to snarl meant one thing.
Crap. West was so her man.
If only for another two weeks.
Mrs. Taylor grabbed West’s hand and towed him to the front of the stage.
“Now then, who here doesn’t recognize this fine specimen of a man?” Mrs. Taylor said into the microphone, and without a bat of her lavender eyelids, she smacked West on the ass.
West jumped, his charming smile slipping as a chorus of wolf-whistles and hoots of laughter echoed around the hall. His wild gaze scanned the crowd, searching her out. Piper raised her wineglass at him in a sympathetic toast.
“That’s right, ladies, this is Ryan Westlake. Ryan’s our local hotelier, so he has a steady job and he’s quite the catch of the day—” Mrs. Taylor paused to glare at Ford, Joe, and Noah, the worst of the hecklers now they’d been auctioned off. “Doesn’t he scrub up well? Six feet of pure feminine fantasy up for auction tonight. Who’ll give me fifty dollars?”
Bree’s paddle jumped into the air.
Shaye giggled. “Feminine fantasy? OMG.”
Piper’s gaze swept back to West, all six feet of him. His black wool dinner jacket outlined broad shoulders and skimmed down in a pleasing “v” to his hips. With his jaw clean shaven and his blue eyes sparking fire now the hecklers had pissed him off—well, hello sailor.
Piper squirmed on her seat.
If she’d pegged the man as dangerously good-looking in blue jeans and a tee shirt, then wearing a formal suit with an honest-to-goodness bow tie?
Lethal, baby. Lethal.
And it appeared she wasn’t the only one to notice.
Fifty dollars leaped to seventy by a redheaded loopie on the other side of the hall, topped by Bree again at a hundred, then another blonde at the front table. The bids came thick and fast: one-twenty, one-fifty, two hundred, two-fifty—
“C’mon Piper, bid!” Shaye hissed in her ear. “I’ll give you a hundred. Call it an early birthday present.”
“That redhead’s already thinking dirty thoughts about stripping West out of that tux—look at the way she’s leering at his butt,” said Erin. “I’ll spot you another hundred.”
“And a hundred from me. Stick your paddle up, woman,” said Tarryn.
Shaye grabbed Piper’s arm and forced it up, yelling, “Three hundred.”
Bree swiveled in her chair and gave Piper a thumbs up sign—she’d stopped raising her paddle back in the mid-hundreds.
The redhead wasn’t keen to let it go. “Three-fifty.”
The other blonde shook her head and laid her paddle on the table.
The crowded gave a collective “Oooooh.”
“We’ll see about that.” Kezia yanked Piper’s paddle hand off her knee and into the sky. “Five hundred,” she hollered.
West’s eyes bugged open.
Mrs. Taylor chortled into the microphone. “Dear oh dear...seems our Piper’s staking a claim, ladies, unless anyone wants to pip her at the post?”
There were no takers.
“Sold,” crowed Mrs. Taylor with a wink in Piper’s direction.
Good Lord. The girls had bought her a date with West for a whopping amount of cash. Warmed by their show of solidarity and the thought of West wining and dining her in his James Bond attire—and didn’t that amp her temperature up—Piper accepted congratulatory hugs from around the table.
West exited the stage as Ben reluctantly shuffled forward.
“Our last auction is a teensy bit different,” Mrs. Taylor said in the microphone, while Ben scowled at West who’d joined the other men in front. “Seems our Ben has a secret admirer who’s given me a private bid—a very large bid, in order to secure a special evening alone with this hunk.” Mrs. Taylor paused, her gaze slicing through the crowd to ensure she had their undivided attention.
She did. And still she eked out every moment of drama until the crowd leaned forward in anticipation.
“The private bid is for two thousand dollars. Anyone care to make a better offer?”
Stunned silence reigned for two seconds before voices exploded in chaos.
Two-freaking-thousand?
Piper’s throat glued shut, thick with emotion. Only one person could’ve afforded a bid like that. While Shaye and the girls squealed with excitement, Piper turned to the woman beside her.
Kezia tucked a curl behind her ear and sighed. “Your brother’s a good man.”
“He won’t accept your money, Kez,” Piper whispered. “He’s too damn proud.”
“He won’t know where it’s from unless the secret bidder comes forward to claim her prize and I’ve no intention of doing that.”
“So why are you doing this for him—for us? Why now?”
“Because he helped me out tonight and I owe him. I owe him and I don’t like that debt hanging over me.”
Piper’s eyes narrowed. “Really.”
“I’ll tell you about it tomorrow. Let’s not ruin the rest of the evening.”
“He’ll figure out it’s you. Ben might look like a big, mute lug, but he’s no dummy.”
“I know, but he has no choice but to accept it—time’s run out, hasn’t it?” Kezia said gently.
Yep. Time had run out for Ben.
And for her.
Thanks to the generous contributions tonight, Ben’s debt would soon be paid, but the hourglass had flipped—and the days she could legitimately stay in Oban were trickling away. Ben’s cast was due to come off next week and she’d received three when-are-you-getting-your-butt-back e-mails from members of her squad.
Piper’s skin prickled. West watched her from the front of the stage, his gaze speculative, his mouth drawn in a terse line. Had he come to the same conclusion?
She didn’t want to leave. She had to leave.
The words hammered through her brain with the same painful throb as her heartbeat.
Piper looked away first, for once not caring at the show of weakness.
West hadn’t given any indication he wanted her to stay. They’d kept their conversations light, distracting each other with smoking-hot sex to avoid the one bald fact carved in granite.
She was leaving.
Time had nearly run out for them.
Chapter Seventeen
“If I fall out and wreck Mum’s dress, you do realize she’ll skin you alive?” Piper dropped her hand over the side of the dinghy and let the cool water bubble over her fingertips.
“So don’t lean out so far, and you won’t fall, dummy.” West didn’t break the rhythm of his strokes as he rowed them out to The Mollymawk.
“Dummy?” Piper kicked West’s shin, conveniently bare since his suit pants were rolled up to his knees. “This was your idea, numbskull. I would’ve shagged you senseless back at your place, without coming all the way out here.”
West laughed, the sound spilling out over the night’s stillness. She grinned back at him, loving the way his teasing and the whispery breeze ruffling her hair soothed her earlier nerves.
After that one awkward moment at the charity auction, the rest of the evening passed in a blur. West whispered in her ear that he’d made other plans and at eleven they sneaked out a side entrance. Once on the beach she kicked off her heels while he hauled Ben’s dinghy to the water’s edge.
“Such a way with words, Pipe. How could a man resist you shagging him senseless?”
Piper adjusted the flowing skirt of her dress, piling it on top of her thighs so it wouldn’t trail in the murky seawater puddle below. West’s gaze tracked up her bare leg. Apparently he wasn’t opposed to unconsciousness via multiple orgasms tonight. Her nipples puckered against the dress’s silky lining.
She hunched under West’s dinner jacket, which he’d draped over her shoulders after she mentioned the chill out on the water. The scent of his jacket, all spic
y cologne with heady undertones of hot male, tempted her to bury her nose in the collar. Pride kept her from snuffling it like a bloodhound.
“You did. For quite a while.” Piper linked her fingers and cupped them around a knee.
West continued to row, strong strokes that pulled his white shirt tight across his chest and biceps. Piper tried not to gawp. Tried and failed.
“I wanted to be the good guy.” He paused, the oars trailing in the water as the dinghy bobbed along. “I didn’t want you to get hurt when you—never mind. I just don’t want you hurt.”
“Right.” Cuz his Piper-immunity was up to date. He could worry about protecting her tender romantic feelings, since he didn’t share them. How selfless.
“We both know this is temporary,” he said.
This. Whatever the hell this was.
Was this her curling toes when he kissed her hard and fast before releasing her with a grin that promised more later, much more? Was this the ache in her belly when she dared to contemplate life without Ryan Westlake in it again?
They drew alongside The Mollymawk and Piper took a deep breath. She could continue to snip at West, or somehow let go and just embrace the now.
“Yeah, I know the score.” She placed a hand on his knee. “And I don’t want to ruin tonight. It’s been perfect so far.”
He squeezed her fingers, his eyes as dark and unreadable as the fathoms below. “I wanted it to be.”
He helped her onboard.
West guided her to the main stateroom, his hand splayed on her lower back. He brushed his hands down her forearms under his dinner jacket and gave her a teasing kiss, pulling back before she could twine her arms around him.
“Close your eyes and relax. I won’t be long.”
Piper obeyed and leaned against the wall.
The stateroom door whispered open and shut. Wood creaked as he moved inside the room. West had gone to some effort. Would he go the red roses and champagne route? Or the beer and satellite TV, casual and chummily-relaxed route? The door opened and she caught the flicker of candlelight before squinching her left eye shut again. Not TV and beer.
He stood in front of her, and even without the sense of sight every single atom and molecule in her body leaped to attention. She’d know him blind, deaf, or in a straitjacket. West was part of her DNA. It took extraordinary willpower to keep her arms tucked under his jacket, when she wanted to rip off his fancy shirt so she could taste him from stomach to sternum.
A finger traced a lingering path down her cheekbone and along her bottom lip. It dropped off her chin, continuing south until it rested against the wildly bumping pulse at the base of her throat.
“Cheater.” He threaded his fingers through her hair.
Cheater, liar, fornicator—he could call her anything as long as her punishment involved some part of his body touching hers.
“You can look now.”
Her lids flickered open. Blue eyes darkened by the languid pools of his pupils gazed back only inches away. Piper closed the distance and pressed her mouth to his, sighing as the power of it dragged her under. West broke the kiss after a few seconds, sensuously nibbling her lower lip as he pulled back.
“Come with me.” He extended his hand, and without hesitation, she took it.
Kissing West made her so ditsy that if he suggested a dip in Halfmoon Bay as foreplay, she’d be out of her dress and in the harbor’s freezing water in no time.
West opened the stateroom door and led her inside. Tea-light candles dotted around the room spilled golden patches of light across the cherry wood flooring. Lush green stalks topped with distinctive violet blue flowers were scattered over the wood.
“Periwinkles?”
West let go of her hand and shoved his fingers into his hair, rumpling the smooth strands into bed-head sexy.
His shoulders drooped and he huffed out a sheepish sigh. “I know, they’re weeds. I planned to steal a few roses from Mrs. Taylor’s garden, but she’d figure out who snatched them and hunt me down.”
He’d gotten her flowers. Not just filched some roses or had a bouquet delivered with an easy mouse click.
No. West had gone into the hills above Oban and picked her wild flowers.
“West, they’re beautiful.”
“You’re beautiful.”
Piper looked up at the sound of his gravelly voice. Her bare toes curled on the wooden floor. She could say nothing to that, her vocal chords frozen solid. He’d never once told her she was beautiful. In the last week he’d shown her with his hands, with his mouth, and with his body, but he’d never spoken the words out loud.
West closed the gap between them. “I lied, that night.”
That night. The heat of it still stung like a fresh burn, branded in her memory. The night of her school ball when West told her they were done. That everything that happened between them was a mistake.
Piper bit down on the inside of her cheek. She would not—would not—be one of those women who sniveled and flapped their hands to fend off girly tears.
“I spent half the evening with my hands stuffed in the pockets of my rented suit, trying to keep my hands off you—or to stop from embarrassing myself—since I just about came in my boxers when I saw you in that dress.”
The prickly stiffness in her spine eased. She’d wondered why West kept his hands hidden, miserably assuming he didn’t want to be at her graduating ball. He’d been so quiet that afternoon when the four of them boarded the ferry to the mainland—Ben who gallantly escorted Erin to their ball, and her and West.
Piper pulled West’s jacket closer around her shoulders. “I hadn’t worn a dress in years. I felt like I was in drag.”
He shook his head. “You were stunning. And clichéd as it sounds, you took my breath away.”
“I had hardly any boobs to speak of and I wobbled like a baby giraffe in my new black pumps.” Pulse thrumming thickly, Piper looked down at the floor. “You were right, I wasn’t much of a woman. I couldn’t believe you wanted me—a tomboy playing dress-up.”
“I wanted you long before then.” His fingers caressed her chin, tilting it so she met his eyes. “And, God, I’m so, so sorry for what I said. You were every bit a woman—a gorgeous, dazzling woman—and I didn’t deserve you. You should’ve kneed me in the nuts for what I said.”
She stilled his fingers sliding along her jaw with a trembling hand. “So why did you say those things?”
His gaze darkened and shuttered. “Because I knew you well enough to slash at your Achilles’ heel. You’d hate me afterwards, and hating me was the only way you’d leave Oban to follow your dream of becoming a cop.”
Piper sucked in a breath to disagree, but he was right. At eighteen she’d wanted to be a cop, but her head had been stuffed with romantic daydreams of West and living happily-ever-after on Oban. She wouldn’t have left him and when their teenage affair petered out. She would’ve stayed, pining.
“I hated you for a long time.” Her voice emerged as a hoarse whisper.
Yeah, she’d hated him. Hated him in the way consuming love can flip one-eighty degrees. But, oh, how she wished she could let go of that hate, after it’d gotten its poisonous claws into her. How she yearned for icy indifference to replace the heart that bled every time her mother or sister mentioned West’s name.
“Well, I deserved it. I was an immature little shit.”
“Yes. Yes, you were.”
He eased his jacket off her shoulders, tossing it over a nearby chair. He pulled her into his arms. “Well, tonight I want to give you a different memory of an after-ball event.”
“Event, huh? Well, that’s raised my expectations.” Piper rose on the balls of her feet to rub her lips along his jaw.
The stubble along his chin prickled against her sensitized skin. Delicious prickles accompanied by little darts of pain. Because tonight would only be another static snapshot to paste in her mental scrapbook. Nothing lasting, nothing ongoing. Just a pretty memory to overwrite the ugliness of
the past.
Well, beggars couldn’t be choosers and all that crap. When she boarded the ferry for the last time she’d cram this pretty memory into the ragged hole left in her chest.
West slid a hand up her back, tugging experimentally on her dress’s zipper. “You weren’t kidding about your mum’s attachment to this dress, were you?”
She rotated her shoulders and he obliged by sliding the pull-tag down a few inches. “It’s vintage. So we’d better get it off, stat.”
Pressing a kiss onto the base of her neck, he murmured, “We’re not rushing anything tonight, baby. No matter how much you beg.”
He showed her how torturously slow he could move by stripping the dress off her bit by bit, kissing and tasting each inch of exposed skin until she stood naked in front of him, bar her panties. West swept her up into his arms, his sheer upper body strength making her feel small and delicate cradled against his chest. Not often a five-foot-ten woman had a man go all An Officer and a Gentleman on her. At least, not this woman.
And it wasn’t every day she got the butterfly-dancing sensation in her belly of stepping off a precipice into something from which she had no hope of escaping.
West laid Piper on the bed and stood upright again. Candlelight traced swirling patterns over her creamy, naked body—naked except for her skimpy red panties. With fingers that weren’t quite under control he struggled to get his miniscule shirt buttons undone.
Piper crawled over to the edge of the mattress. Coordination would come a lot easier if he could stop watching the sweet sway of her breasts.
“I want to do that for you.” She hooked a finger in the waistband of his pants and reeled him in.
Brushing his hands away, Piper undid two more buttons, pausing to run the tip of her tongue over his nipple.
“God, I love how you taste,” she murmured as she made quick work of the other buttons and pushed his shirt open.
Her gaze tracked from his chest to the bulge in his pants.
“And I can’t wait to get my hands—and mouth—on you.” She raked fingernails gently over his abs and he couldn’t repress a sharp shiver of pleasure when her fingers once again slipped under the waistband of his pants. One finger found him beneath his boxers and stroked around his head with a touch that had his cock jumping.
Second Chances Boxed Set: 7 Sweet & Sexy Romances in 1 Book Page 25