“I thought so,” Connor grins and sets his mug on an end table by the door. “I just know what my wife loves. If Daisy was into it, you’d do it too.” I’ve never had sex with Lily like that—and honestly, I don’t want to put the idea in her head. It’s better if she doesn’t expect it.
We’ve taken small steps throughout the years, like public sex. Her therapist actually approved of it—though she scolded us for lying in the first place and not admitting that we’d been doing it long before.
We were in the wrong for the lies. I think we both recognized that.
Now we’re free of them again.
Ryke stretches his arm over his shoulder and lowers his voice. “Daisy would freak out if I fucked her while she was half asleep,” he tells us. “She’d think I was someone who broke into the house…” He can’t finish the rest, but his face twists. She’d think he was raping her.
I cringe. “She has some issues.”
Ryke glares at me.
I raise my hands. “I meant that in a nice way.” Though my sharp tone didn’t help.
“Did you have sex last night?” Connor asks again, reverting back to the original topic. Me. Lily. Her addiction. It’s an every-week conversation. It doesn’t aggravate me as much as it used to—not when they share too.
“Yeah,” I say. “We waited twenty-four hours after she was really bad.” She only came once and then she stopped herself, a level of control that I worried she’d never reach.
“You’re smiling,” Connor notes.
“Must have been good,” Ryke says, dropping his arm.
“It was.” But for a different reason than they might think. “Ready?” I ask Ryke, opening the door. He nods and as the February cold blows through, I pull my jacket hood over my head, snow lightly falling from the sky.
Ryke steps out of the doorway first, and a squishing noise freezes my bones. “Dickfuckers,” Ryke curses.
“I thought we were banning that curse word from everyone’s vocabulary?” Connor asks as he pushes the door further open so he can see what happened.
“Shit,” I say and then laugh. Literally. My older brother just stepped into a pile of crap in a brown paper bag.
Connor laughs as Ryke shakes his foot, like that’ll get it off. “There are just too many responses to this.”
“Shut the fuck up, Cobalt,” Ryke retorts.
“Please, this can’t be the first time you’ve been intimate with shit.” Connor rubs his lips to keep from smiling so much, but he can’t stop laughing. I hold onto the door frame, my side cramping while Ryke flashes his middle finger.
“Fuck off,” Ryke groans and lifts his foot up with disgust. “Fucking A. I’m going to kill them.” The sole of his shoe is most definitely covered in shit. And it must’ve been the teenagers down the street. They aren’t finished with their pranks.
Great.
My laughter fades as I remember what happened with the paintball guns and the note attached to the brick.
Ryke is about to scrape his shoe on the brick stairs, and Connor grabs his shoulder to stop him. “Just toss your shoe in a doggy bag.”
“Connor, I’m not—”
“Jokes aside, I’m serious,” he says. “Don’t smear it on the stairs.” He cautiously looks over his shoulder and then back to us. “Rose doesn’t need the stress before the trip.”
“I’ll clean the porch,” I offer, just praying that they really did use dog shit.
“I got it,” Ryke says, taking off his running shoe and disappearing inside for cleaning supplies.
I crane my neck and try to spot any sprinting teenager, but the long road is deserted this morning. Quiet and slick with a layer of snow and ice. I see my breath plume in the chilly air.
No one has brought up Hale Co.’s future since my dad was here. I try to mentally put it on the backburner so this trip won’t be brutal. I should do the same with the teenagers down the street, but doubt enters me.
“What if they don’t stop?” I ask Connor. What if it gets worse than this?
He’s silent, and I turn my head to catch his features. He’s staring through me, into me, seeing my fears because I spot them in his deep blue eyes, reflecting back at me.
“Then they don’t stop,” he says easily. Like it’s nothing.
It is something though. “We’re going to have children in this house soon.”
“They’re bored teenagers,” he reminds me. “The more attention we give them, the more likely they’ll return. We just have to be patient. I know it’s hard for you…but you have to ignore the impulse that says confront them.”
I nod, staring fixedly at the ground. He’s right.
It’s a waiting game.
{ 14 }
LILY CALLOWAY
The swell of the ocean sways the yacht unstably, and I clamp onto the dresser in our cabin, steadying myself. Puerto Vallarta, Mexico has been nice to me up until now. No sunburns on day one, no seasickness, and very little judgment from my parents.
Though I took a tiny peek at the tabloids.
They weren’t kind.
The last poll was a blow to my confidence. Is Lily Calloway fit to be a mother? The gossip site accompanied this headline with a picture of me bending down on the yacht deck. I dropped my sunglasses earlier, and a stealthy cameraman on a tugboat caught me at the worst angle. Ryke was behind me. Lo was in front of me.
It looked bad. And the poll results aren’t much better:
Yes: 36%
No: 64%
It’s hard to stay positive when the world doesn’t even have faith in you.
Good things have an expiration date.
Now the ocean has decided to rebel against gravity. The boat teeters and I throw my gangly arms around the dresser, hugging an inanimate object for dear life.
I. Will. Not. Fall.
I shut my eyes tightly. What if we’re sinking? I forgot to read about emergency exits and life jackets and things that Rose would’ve most definitely prepared for.
Maybe I do deserve that sixty-four percent skepticism.
I already suck at being a mom, and the baby isn’t even out of my body yet.
A hand brushes my back. “Lil, the boat isn’t rocking that badly,” Lo coaxes.
My eyes snap open. Oh. We’re seemingly level. “It’s an illusion,” I tell him. “A trick. Next thing you know a boggart will come out of these drawers.” Boggarts are kind of cool in the Harry Potter world. It’s definitely an excuse to use a Patronus spell.
Lo is trying hard not to smile, but his cheeks dimple. “There’s a problem, Lil. Neither of us are wizards.”
I frown in distress. “But we have some sort of superpower,” I say. “They just haven’t kicked in yet.” He opens his mouth, but I really can’t handle any cynics right now. I want to believe we’re magical. “Shhh, it’s going to happen this weekend. I can feel it.” And then the boat wobbles, and I cling harder to the dresser. “I forgot to read about emergency exits,” I tell him. “If the boat sinks—”
“I have you, love.” He slices through my panic, swooping his arm around my hips in the coziest Loren Hale embrace. He leans my back against the hardness of his chest, and my pulse begins to slow, my head whirling.
My fingers slip off the dresser in a single breath, and then he spins me around, confidence in his hypnotic amber eyes. His gaze relaxes any alarm, and my bones melt to a content stasis. He cups my face, and my body responds by curving into him.
I skim his features with meticulousness, etching the sharp lines of his jaw, those cheekbones. And the way his chest falls in a heavy, languid rhythm. My soul swells at the look behind his eyes, at the resolute, unbending expression he carries.
Loren Hale is ice.
Resilient isn’t a word attached to him. Beneath fire, he loses. Ryke is the one who outlasts him. He’s stone.
But there is something within Lo, right now, that defies this. I reach out, my fingertips grazing his smooth skin along his cheek, brushing his parted lips.
A feeling swirls inside of me—one where you know someone all your life, but in a singular moment they look strangely different. Like you’re unearthing a fragment of them that has never surfaced or been touched before.
I see it—a piece of him uncloaked and unburied that has been hiding all this time. Strength that he never realized he had. My hand is magnetically drawn to his features, drifting to his neck.
He smiles through his eyes. “You don’t look unsteady anymore.”
Softly, I say, “You’re a man.”
His lips rise. “You’re just now realizing this, Lily?” He licks his bottom one. It blazes my skin.
“It’s just…you seem older,” I breathe. Stronger. Able to withstand things that the world throws at him.
“Time will do that,” he murmurs, his mouth so very close to mine. Kiss me.
“No,” I whisper. “It’s not time. It’s something else.” I inhale like our bodies have bound together, melded to him with no plan to separate.
His eyes glow with realization, sensing what I mean. He’s not frightened of me or my addiction or his own. He has rebuilt every ounce of self-worth that his father took from him.
He leans close. Kiss me. But his lips breeze past my cheek and stop at the hollow of my ear. “You remember how it all began?” His hands descend to my hips, diving towards my thighs. My fingers scrape along his toned shoulders, a sound tickling my throat.
I gather my breath to ask, “Me and you?” How we began. He guides me somewhere, my feet dazedly following his lead. And the backs of my legs hit the edge of the bed. A nautical comforter with tiny anchors printed across.
“You and me,” he confirms.
I wrack my brain for the time, place and date, my brows scrunching. “We were five…or six, right?” I should know the moment, but there are just so many that belong to Loren Hale. Picking out the first one would take decades.
“No, not as friends, Lil.” He lifts underneath my arms and sets me perfectly on the bed. He leans my back against the soft mattress, and he hovers over me, his legs tangling with mine. Those amber eyes puncture straight through my skin. And into my heart. “You remember how we began? Us.”
Us…
The memory strikes me powerfully, and tears suddenly begin to brim. We were on my parent’s yacht. This yacht. This room. Almost four years ago. We were both twenty and broken and struggling to find a semblance of peace. And then he uttered the words that changed everything.
Let me try to be enough for you.
“You remember,” Lo breathes, his thumb brushing a stray tear.
“It was here.” My voice is a whisper.
He nods. “It was here.” His hypnotic expression pulls me into him, my pelvis bucking against his. He never breaks his soul-bearing gaze from mine. “Back then,” he says, “I was so addicted to you.” He truly smiles, a very, very rare one. “I still am.”
I am crying, flooded with emotions that cannot fit within my body. They explode outside of me—and I don’t care to wipe them away. I just float through this bliss and let Loren Hale take me.
His fingers dip beneath my stretchy sweat shorts, and he tugs at the elastic, lowering them to my calves and burning my core with the slow, slow movement. “Back then, I asked you to be my girlfriend.”
My heart hammers in my ears. To think of a time where we weren’t even together, when I was no one’s girlfriend—it’s an ancient, dark era.
“And then I fucked you,” he states matter-of-factly.
He spreads my legs open and stands at the foot of the bed. Then he pulls me so my bottom is half on the mattress, half-off, and his semi-hard cock, through his jeans, puts pressure on a pulsing place of mine. My legs in his possession. I wonder if he can feel how wet I am—or if he can feel my heat drumming against him, craving him.
“I…I remember,” I stammer, losing control of my vocabulary.
He pauses for a brief second, his eyes traversing across my body in hot waves. “This is going to be a million times better than that.”
“Whaa…” I can’t even finish my statement. The declaration arches my back, and I try to grind against him. Closer. But he has my legs hostage, my cheeks salty and tear-streaked. I am a mess, and the way Lo is staring at me, I might actually be a sexy mess too.
He suddenly drops to his knees. Oh my God. And then he lifts my legs over his shoulders. Yesyesyes.
I have no strength to prop my body, but I tilt my head at the right angle, gaining a visual. His eyes lock to mine as he places a tender kiss on the inside of my thigh. My mouth is permanently ajar, and a breathy sound emerges.
“Lo,” I cry.
The feather light kisses continue, nearing the aching spot. He has to be only an inch away when he draws back. No!
He takes his sweet time lowering my panties to my ankles, shifting my legs again, and then he fishes them off my feet and tosses them aside. He hikes my legs back over his shoulders, and the image makes me squirm. I need him.
I want him.
Right inside.
“Lo.”
“I’m going to make you come,” he says with that Loren Hale sharp tone, deathly and alluring, “so slowly.” Yes. I cry in want, so ready, and his lips skim my leg, his breath warm and his teasing toxic. In the best possible way.
His hands rub against the soft flesh of my thighs. I reach out, placing my palms on top of them, hoping to guide them between my legs, but instead, they rise up to my ribs. Underneath my cotton shirt, up to my breasts.
Oh my God. He squeezes, his thumbs flicking my tender nipples. “I need you,” I tell him, tears creasing my eyes again. Only these are from pleasure that he stretches out in infinite frequencies.
Kiss me right there. But he waits longer. He says, “I have a present for you.”
Orgasms, I think. The gift is the best orgasm of my life. “I’ve been good,” I remind him. In my recent hiccups, I came back strong and never drowned in the compulsive deep end of sex.
His smile pulls his lips. “You’ve been great.”
My mind dizzies. “Great is better than good.” The spot clenches, my head tilting back. I’m going to come before he even gives me anything. “Lo!” I grip his forearms for support, my feet curving and my legs squirming on his shoulders.
He clutches my waist now, holding me steady. “Relax for me, Lil,” he says in a sweetly edged voice. “No clenching.”
I want to see how hard he is. I want him inside of me. Nothing else computes in my brain.
His head dips out of sight, and I feel his tongue, my legs twitching in response. He tightens his hold on one of them, still firmly in his care.
Oxygen whooshes from my lungs as he sucks and licks, caressing the most sensitive of nerves with his mouth. My eyes roll back, and no sound leaves as I come. Higher than high.
I don’t even sense my body descending; I stay suspended in this climax. More. The response is normal for me.
I always want more.
And Lo knows this silent plea.
He gives me oral almost every day, but I recognize the difference the moment something hard presses against my other entrance. Oh my God. Please, yes.
My eyes burn with tears. “Lo,” I cry. Pleasepleaseplease let this be true and not in my mind. I constrict in excitement and impulse, and then I wince at the pressure. Oh God.
His lips leave me, and I groan into the comforter.
“Relax, love,” he reminds me.
We’ve had anal sex enough that I should know not to tighten so much, but my body responded on its own. Lo massages my thigh again, stirring my arousal. My mind is a mixer right now, blended with lust and longings.
Our doctor advised against anal sex while I’m pregnant, a restriction that’s left me more than bummed. Which is why I ask, “Are you using your fingers?”
“No,” he says. And his eyes carry the answer.
My eyes widen, my jaw unhinging. Sex toys. Oh my God. I tingle all over, imagining something long and hard inside of m
e, even though it’s most likely just a small plug. “Are we allowed?” I whisper.
“I asked your Ob/Gyn. She said yes.”
“Don’t move,” I blurt out. “Or I mean, move but…don’t take it out, okay?” Fear surfaces—fear of this ending too soon.
“Shhh, Lil,” he says. “Breathe slowly.”
I can feel my ribcage jutting out with these sporadic inhales. I lie back more and shut my eyes. He’s going to fill me both places, at the same time. It’s a craving that I’ve wanted satiated for a while.
I try to relax my muscles, and his kisses begin again, soft and sweet, building up my need. I throb for a harder, deeper entry. And then he pushes on the toy, the pressure and sensations blind me. Yes. “Lo,” I plead.
He rises to his feet, and seconds pass as he steps out of his jeans and black boxer-briefs. He’s harder than I even pictured, erect and as wanting as me. He pauses while I stare fixatedly at his long cock. Inside now, I mentally command. Inside now.
“Lil,” he chokes, his arousal sweeping over his features.
I am full behind. I can’t even imagine being full in the front too. I just haven’t had it in so so long. Years. “Harder,” I murmur. He hasn’t even pushed into me yet.
He’s too far away to hold. He’s standing with my legs wrapped around his waist, my bottom off the mattress, while I’m lying. So I clutch the comforter in one hand and my breast with the other.
“Harder,” I plead, his cock right there. I’m too exhausted from climaxing once already to thrust forward into him. He has most of the control, and that thought bridges me to a hotter, sweltering place. “Lo.”
And then he pounds right into me, filling me hard. I am a goner. My body quakes, and he thrusts in melodic, deep rhythms that bring me to a new planet. A high-pitched gasp escapes my lips every time he slams in.
He rests one knee on the edge of the bed, and then another, climbing onto it and pulling my body up towards the pillow. His forearm sets beside my head, and he kisses the outside of my lips. Then he says, “Open.”
I understand his request. I open my eyes, and he stares right into me as he thrusts. I can’t corral the noises I make. I’m happy he’s closer, nearer, so I can clutch onto his back and hold him to me.
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