by Noelle Adams
She released a soft, pretty moan that shot right to his groin. He’d been hard before, but now he was aching with it.
He was about to say something when she grabbed his head and pulled him back into a kiss. He kept caressing her breast as he kissed her hungrily. He wanted her so much that his other hand strayed down to her thigh and slowly caressed its way up.
She jerked when he reached her underwear, and she wrapped her fingers around his wrist to move his hand.
He smothered a groan.
“Sorry,” she murmured, still kissing him all over his mouth and face. “I don’t want to have sex with you.”
Of course she didn’t. Her whole existence seemed intent on torturing him. “But you want to kiss me?”
“Yes. But we can stop if you can’t control yourself.”
The words felt like a challenge. At least Cade took them that way. He wasn’t in the habit of getting this far with women without going all the way, but he was certainly able to rein in his sexual needs, and he didn’t like the implication that he wasn’t. “I can control myself as long as you can.”
She smiled against his lips. “Can you? I love this feeling.”
“What feeling?”
“This feeling of being on the edge—of wanting something but holding it off.”
Cade had never liked that feeling. If he wanted something, then he just took it. “Why do you like that feeling?”
“Because the desire is so much better than the fulfillment.”
He wanted to think about those words, figure out what she might mean, but he was far too distracted by the sensations in his body and his deep need to feel, touch, kiss Holly some more.
They kissed for a long time, until Cade was so overwhelmed with physical need that he finally had to pull away.
Holly was deeply flushed and smiling, as if she’d greatly enjoyed herself.
Cade felt like his body was about to explode.
“You need to learn to enjoy yourself without always trying to get somewhere,” she said, reaching over to stroke back a piece of hair that had fallen over his forehead.
He had no idea what she meant, and he was too aroused to fully think it through. “I enjoy myself just fine.”
She shook her head and leaned over to give him one more soft kiss before she stood up. “I don’t really think you do. I think you’re always trying to get somewhere—even if it’s not somewhere you really want to be.”
He blinked. “Believe me, sex with you is definitely where I want to be.”
“I told you I don’t do that.”
“Never?” She was around twenty-four, but given her lifestyle, it was entirely possible she was still a virgin.
“Not intercourse. Not anymore. I don’t like it. But the preliminaries, I like them fine.”
“Why don’t you like intercourse?” Some women had physical problems with it. Maybe that was why she was so set against it.
She shook her head and looked away. “It… doesn’t feel good. It feels intrusive. I don’t want someone in my body that way.” Then she looked back at him, and her expression changed. “I don’t want to be a tease though. So if that’s a problem for you, we can stop doing the preliminaries.”
Never would he have agreed to a relationship when intercourse was off the table, but if he said that to Holly, she would likely be through with him.
This was his only advantage if he wanted to get the full story.
Plus he wanted to keep seeing, touching, kissing Holly—in any way he could.
“It’s not a problem for me.”
She almost looked amused. “We’ll see. I’ll see you this evening, if you decide to show up.”
She was still smiling, but Cade wondered if he’d somehow disappointed her. He watched as she walked away, the sight of her slim, strong legs and curved hips even more sensual torture.
After a few minutes, he managed to get up himself and walk back to the beach house. He was still aroused when he got there, so he quickly took care of it with his hand.
He couldn’t help but wonder afterward if Holly had known he’d do that. It was an obvious thing to do, but it proved that he was always trying to “get somewhere.”
With his body back under control, he could think more clearly, and he realized he’d let himself fall far too far with Holly. He was supposed to be finding a story here—not losing himself with a pretty, mysterious girl. He hadn’t been this wrapped up in a story since the very first crime he’d chased, and even then it wasn’t all about one person the way it was now.
If he was smart, he’d stop this thing with Holly before it got any further. After all, he had his career to think about.
But he knew, even as the idea crossed his mind, that it wasn’t going to happen.
He figured he wasn’t all that unusual. Surely most men, if given the choice between being smart and having sex, would choose sex.
The next morning, he managed to get up early enough to walk with Holly on the beach.
She smiled when she saw him, which seemed to indicate she was happy to see him. Other than that, he really had no idea how she was feeling toward him and what she had in mind in spending time with him.
Maybe it was exactly as she said. She enjoyed each moment that was offered, without thinking too much about where it might lead.
He wondered what it would be like to live that way. He tried to imagine but couldn’t even come close.
Holly was quiet as they walked the stretch of her beach to the far edge of her property, only commenting briefly on a couple of interesting shells and the fact that he’d gotten too much sun the day before. When they reached what must be her property line, she stood there for a while, staring off into the distance.
Since she wasn’t in the conversational mood, he pulled out his little notebook and wrote down a few lines that had occurred to him as they walked—lines he might be able to use in the book.
When he glanced up, he saw that Holly was leaning over, trying to see what he wrote.
He closed the notebook and put it back in his pocket.
“What are you writing?” she asked, frowning at him.
“Just a couple of notes to myself.”
“About what?”
“Just thoughts. My thoughts. They’re private. You should understand the desire for privacy.”
Her face was thoughtful for a moment. Then she nodded. “I get it. Letting someone see your thoughts would be like opening up your brain to them. That’s how I feel about letting someone into my house.”
He smiled at her, surprised that they seemed to understand each other in this, despite their vastly different experiences. “So what were you looking at just now?” he asked at last. He wasn’t used to women—to anyone—being as quiet as she was, as if she felt absolutely no compunction to make conversation, unless she genuinely felt like talking.
“The grizzled man.” The way she said the words made it sound like she was capitalizing the initial letters, like it was his name or title.
“Who?”
“On the pier. Out there.” She pointed much farther down the beach and slightly out into the bay.
Cade followed the line of her finger and saw, when he squinted, a man standing on the pier. He guessed the man had long gray hair—although it might be a trick of the sun—and he thought he was leaning against the railing. “Why are you looking at him?”
“Because he’s always there.”
“What do you mean?”
“He goes out every morning.”
“Well, he probably likes to fish. If he’s retired, it’s not that unusual.”
“He doesn’t fish.”
“It looks like—”
“I know it looks like he’s fishing, but he’s not. He carries the rod, but he never actually casts it into the water.”
Cade drew his eyebrows together and squinted some more at the man. “Seriously?”
“Yes. Seriously. Every day he goes out there and just stares. He never fishes. I just
love him.”
He turned to see her expression and saw her gazing out at the man with something that looked like awe. “Why do you love him?”
She turned to smile at him. “How can you not love him? It’s like he’s always living on the cusp, that edge between intention and action. He’s always about to fish but never actually does.”
Kind of like her and sex, he realized, somewhat dryly. “What makes you think that’s actually why he does it? He might just have a nagging wife, and he wants to get away from her, so he uses the excuse of fishing to get a break from her.”
Holly laughed, but she’d turned back to gaze at the man with that deep affection again. “That’s not why he does it. Do you have binoculars?”
“Yeah, I’ve got a—” He broke off the words, remembering he’d been using them to spy on Holly. That felt kind of cheap and dirty now.
“Bring them tomorrow morning, and you can see him more close-up. He’s beautiful. I love him.”
He studied her face and saw that she meant it. Her affection for the grizzled man was real, even though she’d never met him, never said a word to him.
He was suddenly intensely jealous, wishing she would look that way at him.
But he’d done nothing to deserve her admiration or fondness. He’d never lived his life on the cusp. If there was action to take, he always took it. And he rarely enjoyed the moment before it happened.
“Why are you sad?” she asked, taking him by surprise. She’d turned her head to look at him while he’d been thinking, so he hadn’t noticed.
“I’m not sad.”
“You looked sad just now.”
“I’m not really. I was just thinking about…” He wondered what he could possibly say and ended up saying the truth. “I was just thinking about of what that might be like, living that way. Like the grizzled man.”
“You could try it,” she said with a smile.
“Go out in the morning with a fishing rod but never fish?”
“Or something else. Your own thing. You could think of something.”
“Maybe.”
He gave her that reply because he wanted her to think he was taking it seriously, but he didn’t really mean it. It was a nice, romanticized notion—living on the cusp, relishing the moments before action, not always trying to get somewhere—but it would drive him crazy in the end.
Even as a boy, he was always planning, writing lists and crossing items off, getting angry when what he wanted to do couldn’t be done the way he intended.
People were different.
Some girls lived alone, never jumping fully into life. Some men got up every morning and walked onto a pier but never fished.
And other men had to complete every action they ever started.
That was him. It was who he’d always been.
He never left a meal half-eaten. He never left an unfinished book.
Nine
A week later, Holly woke up thinking about Cade again. She had every day for the past two weeks.
She didn’t think it was strange or particularly unexpected. He was the only new thing in her life for a really long time, and he was the only man she’d ever really connected with.
She knew it didn’t mean anything more than they’d have a few good weeks together, but he still filled up most of her thoughts.
Every day, they walked on the beach together in the morning and swam together in the evenings. She’d become tempted to see him in between times, but she’d held back since she wanted to make sure she kept their relationship in perspective.
It was Tuesday, when she always went into town, so she’d told Cade she wouldn’t see him until the evening. He’d wanted to go to town with her, but she’d told him no. That would be serious, and it might give other people the idea that they could suddenly start talking to her too.
She didn’t want to talk to anyone else, so she was going into town on her own, like normal.
She didn’t know what Cade was going to do.
She had no idea what he did when he wasn’t with her. Aside from the mornings and evenings they spent together, the rest of his days were a mystery to her. So was his background and his job and everything else about him except for their interaction together.
More and more, she found herself wanting to know more about him, to fill in some of those blanks, but she never asked him for details. Because then he’d be able to ask her. And no matter how much she was enjoying his company, there were some things she would never tell him.
She took her early morning walk and greeted the fox, the deer, and the birds. Then she took a long shower and put on a clean dress. She checked her purse and realized that she was running low on cash, so she pulled off a loose panel on the wall next to the kitchen cabinets—the hiding place she and her mother had always used—and took out a couple hundred dollars from the stash there.
The pile of bills was getting low. In a few more months, she would have to get some more—and face the ghost she tried never to think about.
She felt strangely lonely as she waited for nine o’clock when the library would open. She never felt lonely, so it was an unfamiliar experience.
Maybe she was spending too much time with Cade, getting too used to him. She shouldn’t be feeling this way.
She managed to talk herself out of the loneliness by the time she left home. She rode into town and to the library, where she found a new book—a gardening book on native plants of the Eastern Shore—to read for an hour or so. Then she went to the grocery store and ended up at the drugstore as usual.
As she was waiting at the grill for Roy to fix her cheeseburger, an elderly woman came in to order an ice cream. Holly moved out of the way. Most people just ignored her, but occasionally someone new would get close to her and try to say something.
The woman evidently knew Roy because she asked him how he was doing. Then she asked him about someone named Lola, who Holly eventually realized must be his sister.
She was just starting to put the pieces together when the woman said, “And I heard your nephew is back in town.”
“He is,” Roy said. “He’s been in town for a couple of weeks.”
“He lives in New York now, doesn’t he?”
Holly couldn’t help but take note of this fact and add it to what she knew about Cade.
“Yep. I keep waiting for him to get tired of the big city, but not yet.”
The woman paid for her ice cream and then asked, “Is he still doing that writing?”
“Yep. He’s still a writer. Got a new book out. Best seller and everything.”
Holly was absolutely stunned by this conversation, and she could barely react when Roy gestured toward her to indicate her burger was done. She finally managed to take the bag and pay, but she couldn’t think of anything but what she’d just heard.
Cade was a writer. One who sold very well.
No wonder he could afford to take off a month from work and hang out on the beach with her.
Her mind was reeling as she rode back home, and by the time she’d arrived, she’d decided he probably wrote action-adventure novels—like the one he’d been reading on the first day she’d seen him on the beach.
That kind of book would fit him very well. She never read books like that.
Maybe he hadn’t told her because he was famous and needed to protect his privacy. That would make sense. She could understand that.
It felt strange though—to know he was a writer.
She was a reader, and to her, writers had always held a surreal quality, somehow existing outside the pages they filled.
She’d never imagined she’d meet one in real life.
She felt nervous and uncertain that evening when she walked down to the beach for her swim.
She assumed Cade would be waiting. He had been for the past few days. But she didn’t know what she was going to say to him, now that he felt bigger than he’d been to her before.
He was waiting at the end of boardwalk, as he usually
was, wearing his swim shorts, an old gray T-shirt, and a relaxed smile. She felt ridiculously jittery as she walked to the end of the walkway and down the two stairs.
He appeared for a minute like he was going to reach and kiss her, but he stopped himself, scanning her face.
Something in her expression must have given him pause.
“Is everything all right?” he asked.
“Why wouldn’t it be?” That was one of those stall questions, the kind she didn’t like. She could tell him what she’d overheard in the drugstore this morning, but something held her back. Cade obviously wanted it to be kept secret, and it would be intrusive to press him on it.
She might want to intrude on him, but if she did, then nothing would keep him from intruding on her.
“I don’t know. You look… tense or something.”
“I’m not tense.”
“Well, something is going on with you. Do you not feel like swimming?”
He was such a difficult combination of intelligence, charm, and reserve—always pushing forward and holding back at the same time. It made her want to know him better, and now she had a clue as what defined him. He was a big-time writer—not just the attractive man she knew as Cade.
“Of course I feel like swimming.”
He was still watching her although he pretended to relax and smile. “All right then. Let’s do it.”
She wanted to say something—do something—to take the silent questioning off his face, so she leaned forward and kissed him. He responded immediately, as he always did, and soon he’d taken control of the kiss.
She both liked and hated when he took control. It both thrilled and terrified her.
She pulled away before her head was spinning too much. Satisfied that she’d distracted him, she pulled her dress off over her head. She saw his eyes lower, crawling over her body.
She loved how he looked at her—like he could swallow her whole—but that too made her nervous.
She’d been with a number of guys as a teenager. Plenty of them. And most of them had liked how she looked. She’d shown some of them her body and allowed them to touch her, but after the few uncomfortable attempts, she hadn’t given herself wholly to them, and none of them had gotten as close to her as Cade had.