I jerked awake, thoughts of my sister lingering in my spirit. Sunlight slanted in through the windows. Disoriented, I started to panic, before I settled into the comfort surrounding me.
This couldn’t be real. Wrapped up in the strong comfort of a strange man’s arms, his big body so warm and secure, legs tangled with mine.
A man like Ash Evans, nonetheless.
He hugged me closer, as if from within the confines of his sleep he felt me stir. His mouth was gentle where he pressed it to the back of my head. His nose was in my hair as he mumbled a contented sigh.
Memories from last night came tumbling in.
“I should go.”
His hand cupped my face. He guided me to standing from where I’d knelt before him.
He tilted his head and his mouth lifted in a satisfied smirk. Full of dark promises. “Darlin’, you think that was it? I’m just gettin’ warmed up. You should most definitely stay.”
I trembled. Body. Mind. Soul.
Stay.
The night passed in a blissful blur. His touch and his tongue and his body pressed to mine. Time and again. Pushing boundaries without ever breaking through. My body spent and wrung out, he carried me to his bed. Big hands so tender as he worked his tee shirt over my head before pulling the covers over us and whispering, “Sleep.”
I could almost feel the blush light on my face. How was it possible to feel both embarrassed and bold?
Naïve and beautiful?
Careful not to wake him, I unwound myself from his hold and slid from his bed. My feet landed on the warmth of the worn wood below me, at this place he’d entrusted to my hands. It looked so much different in the light of the day.
So much like him.
I glanced down at his hard, hard beauty, that broken, perfect statue cut of precious stone that rolled to lay on his stomach. His bare back was exposed, pure muscle and strength, wide, wide shoulders and narrow waist, the sheet just barely coming up to cover his perfect round ass.
Redness flushed and my teeth clamped down on my lip.
So maybe I was a voyeur. Stealing the private minutes.
When he wasn’t standing over me in that magnetic, imposing way, but instead lost to his own dreams. And I wondered…wondered if those dreams traveled any further than his love of being on a stage. If he wanted more or something different or if he would forever be satisfied with the same.
Needing to clear my head, I looked around the room at our clothes strewn about the floor, down to my bare legs that peeked out from beneath the huge tee shirt I was swimming in.
So that didn’t help.
I blew out a breath, cast one last glance back at the boy, and tiptoed out of his room and downstairs.
After last night, coffee was a necessity.
Yes, yes. Coffee.
Suddenly full of purpose, I swung open the kitchen doors.
Then I shrieked and skidded to a stop. I slammed my hand over my mouth to muffle the horrible sound from leaking out. Or maybe to cover up my embarrassment while I wished my hand was about a hundred times bigger to cover up so much more.
Zee flipped around from where he was standing in front of the coffee maker.
“What in the world, Willow?” He gasped out a breath. “You scared the shit out of me. What the hell are you screaming for? It’s just me.”
I attempted to steady myself, my trembling hands yanking the hem of Ash’s shirt down a bit more. “Scared you? I think it’s the other way around. I didn’t…”
His brow lifted. “Tell me you didn’t forget I live here. Am I really that indistinguishable up against the rest of the guys? Now, that’s just sad.”
Not even close. He was gorgeous. Incredibly. But it was his spirit that seemed quiet. A fly on the wall who absorbed it all.
I frowned, hoping I hadn’t offended him. “Of course not. I guess you’re not around a lot when I’m here…and I…”
And I was totally distracted. Still floating through that dream of last night. Wondering when I was going to come back down. When that bubble was going to burst.
Redness flashed, and I started to back away. “I should…” Self-consciously, I waved a hand toward the door behind me.
God. This couldn’t get any more awkward. Was this what they called the walk of shame? Because I was feeling it, all over, lighting up my skin and crawling through my nerves.
Zee laughed. “Don’t worry, Willow. You aren’t the first girl to come roaming into this kitchen first thing in the morning. Maybe the first one to come in screaming. But definitely not the first.”
I flinched.
Okay.
That hurt.
It shouldn’t have. But it did. Another reminder that I needed to watch myself. Watch where I was stepping and what I was getting into. Because it already felt like maybe I was getting in too deep.
Summer had always told me to be careful. That I had a special kind of heart. The kind that was easily crushed.
Zee’s smile was kind. Soft in his easy, understanding way. “Hey, I didn’t mean anything by that. What you do with Ash is your business.”
I wrung my hands out in front of me. “But we’re not…we didn’t…”
The doors swung open from behind. The presence that gusted in with it swallowed all the air.
I shook.
Oh God.
This boy affected me. Too much.
From behind, he wrapped both arms around my waist.
Fire, flames, and light.
A shudder ripped through me from head to toe.
He chuckled like he knew he wielded all the power. “What do you mean, we’re not?”
I could feel the satisfied grin he tossed at Zee from over my shoulder. As if it were plain as day when what we were doing was the most confusing thing. Then, he set to leaving a dizzying trail of kisses along the slope of my neck.
Spellbound.
That could have been the only reason I melted against his hold in the middle of his kitchen in front of his friend.
Zee laughed quietly. He had to be accustomed to humoring his over-the-top friend. “Looks like that’s my cue to leave you two to whatever it is you are, or aren’t, doing.”
Goose bumps blazed.
“Thanks, man,” Ash mumbled.
“No problem. Coffee’s done.”
Zee grabbed his cup and started across the kitchen. I got an almost sympathetic smile as he approached. The one he leveled on Ash was hard—almost a warning—as he disappeared out the swinging door.
“What was that?” I asked. It came out breathier than I intended with those lips against my skin.
“It means he likes you.” Ash kept kissing along my neck, nose going deeper into what had to be a rat’s nest of hair. “Basically, he told me he’d be all too happy to kick my ass if I hurt you, all without saying a word.”
He swung me around, and my heart stuttered before it took off at a sprint. The longer pieces of his hair fell forward across his forehead, his face defined angles, his jaw wide, and his nose sharp. A perfect, broken statue. My glorious avenger lit up in the light.
A secret part of me thrilled. That part that was going to get itself trampled to pieces by being so foolish to do what I was doing now. Because I’d told him no lie.
I only shared my body with a man if I loved him. And bit by bit Ash kept taking pieces of me for himself. My heart and my spirit and my body.
If I wasn’t careful, it was all going to belong to him.
He would wreck me.
Something severe flashed through his expression. Pained and promised. Delivered rough as he took a menacing step toward me. Stealing air and sanity. “But there’s no risk in that, seein’ as how we’re just pretending. Right, darlin’?”
I got the unnerved feeling he might be saying it for his own benefit. That maybe there was a chance this felt different for him, too.
“You can’t hurt what you don’t hold,” I told him. Maybe my own warning to take a step back.
He gripped my
hips in both his hands. I yelped, then gave, welcomed the hard heat as his body connected with mine. His voice was both raw and smooth. “Even if I wanted to hold you…keep you…it’s all wrong, baby. It’s all wrong because I’m wrong. I’m ugly in all those places people can’t see. That’s a place I can’t let you go. Won’t let you go. You deserve so much better than what’s waiting there.”
He said it as if he were trying to convince himself. But there was something about him offering that truth. Confirming the reality of that spot inside him I’d only ever glimpsed. This beautiful, broken boy hadn’t just been cut down on the outside. He had some of those scars littering the inside, too.
“I never asked to go there.”
Defense.
That was all I had.
He smiled, and it was both sad and arrogant. It should have been impossible. But not for him.
“No need to say it.” His thumb brushed the hollow beneath my eye. “It was written all over you last night. These eyes, Willow.”
I watched the heavy bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed. “It’s like they have their own soul. Like they know things they shouldn’t. Hold all the secrets they were never told. And I want to give you everything they’re begging for. Anything. But there are some things I just don’t have to give.”
Emotion welled. Tight and hot. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that when we’re done? I want to have given you something rather than have taken from you. I want you to be ready to face this world, take it in the palm of your hands, and demand all you deserve. I want to spend every day we’ve got showing you how goddamned beautiful you are. It means I don’t want to hurt you. Not ever. Need to know you can handle that.”
“You make me feel like I can.”
It was both my greatest truth and my biggest lie.
He edged closer. “What’s your greatest fear?”
I didn’t need to search all that deep, and my mouth was whispering the secrets I held. “Being alone.” I squeezed my eyes with a sharp shake of my head before clarifying. “Not of being alone physically. But of being lonely.”
I wound my arms up in the space between us before touching my chest. “Of having all this love in here and having no one to give it to.”
Guarded, I eyed him, his gaze so intense.
“It seems everyone I love the most gets ripped away. One by one. And I’m terrified that one day, I’m going to turn around and the only person standing there is going to be me.”
“That guy’s out there,” he promised again. Emphatic. “I bet he’s riding out there on one of those dandelions your mom issued into the heavens when you were just a little girl. Out there floating in the air…waiting on you to catch up to him.”
What if I want him to be you?
That greedy, vacant voice screamed through me, howling with the all-consuming loneliness that only this man had had the power to touch when he was touching me last night.
Bates had never come close.
I shushed it and stared up at this striking man, the words merely a breath. “What’s your greatest fear?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Falling in love. Being responsible for it. For the happiness of another, knowing one day I’m liable to let them down.”
The look on his face nearly obliterated my heart. It was there for the briefest flash of a second. Gone before it could be discerned.
The cruelest kind of grief.
A fake grin cracked his face. “Tried it once…didn’t end all that well. And I’m not sure I’d make it through something so horrible again. I’ve wrecked a lot of shit in my life, Peaches. I don’t intend to repeat it.”
I nodded slow, trying to process this man. His big, bleeding heart and his callused soul.
He edged forward, forcing me to back up until the sharp edge of the counter was pressed into my back. “We good then? We agree I’m gonna spend the next couple months blowing your mind…everything but sex, Peaches. Because like I told you last night, I can’t go messing you up like that. Know what that means to you. But I’m going to teach you to demand what you want. What you need. Then when we’re finished, you’re going to walk out my door ready to find that guy who’s going to blow me out of the water.”
Impossible.
I didn’t say it.
I nodded instead.
A smirk sprang to lips. “Good. I think the next thing on the agenda is changing the order of business in my room, because waking up at the ass crack of dawn with the sun rising through the bare windows is not exactly my favorite kind of morning. Especially when I woke up to an empty bed when you were supposed to be in it.”
He feigned a pout.
A giggle slipped free. “What, you think just because you got me into your bed I’m all of a sudden going to start doing your bidding? You get no curtains until the walls are painted. It’s not like you don’t have six other rooms to pick from.”
He shifted faster than I could make sense of it. He pinned me against the counter. A predator caging me in. At the ready to pounce on his prey.
Was I a fool for wanting him to?
An arrogant smirk quirked on his flirty, flirty mouth, and he leaned in close. “Hmm…if I recall, it was you who was doing all the ‘bidding’ last night,” he rumbled.
“I think it was you who told me never to be afraid to ask for what I want.”
The truth of it was that I had been afraid to ask for it all.
“And what is it you want?” he coaxed.
“I want you.”
I gasped when he had me by the waist, hiking me up onto the counter, hands on my knees as he was pushing them apart.
I whimpered, shocked and so turned on I couldn’t see as I braced my hands flat on the counter behind me.
This. This was what I’d been waiting for. The feeling I’d been desperate for. What I knew had been missing.
His grin was devious, and his tongue darted out to wet his lips. A single finger teased through my wetness.
The entire world turned electric. Every atom, a synapsis of need.
“Still bare.”
I swallowed around the lump in my throat. “Yes.”
He groaned. Barely touching along my sensitive, swollen skin, still tingling from last night. My stomach tightened, and those places throbbed with a want I’d never known.
His words abraded across my skin, like the sandpaper I raked across wood. Exposing what was underneath. “What was your favorite part?”
He circled the tip of his finger around that spot I wanted him most.
Sparks.
“I—”
I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think.
He added a finger, teasing and exploring me from front to back, touching places I’d never been touched.
I gasped. “Ash…”
“I know, baby, I know,” he whispered. Before he even started testing me, he already knew the answer.
He pressed two fingers deep inside, and I felt sweaty and hot, flames licking and dancing and curling. Pleasure spread and gathered. Taking me whole. Higher and higher. I flew up to sitting, my bottom barely clinging to the edge of the counter.
I kissed him hard.
The seconds our lips met, he devoured me.
Mouth, tongue, body, soul.
He pulsed his fingers hard and deep, swirling his thumb in that magic way, knowing exactly what I needed. He sent me soaring again. Shooting me to that place he promised. Where the stars danced and bled. I stayed there for forever, for too short a time, before I came crashing back down.
And like he promised, he was there to catch me in his arms.
Without a thought, I slid from the counter and dropped to my knees. “This…this was my favorite.”
After what he had just done, it should have been a lie. But this…this was what had chased me in my dreams. Exploring and experiencing this magnificent man. A fantasy. My own flawless delusion.
He groaned from somewhere deep in this throat. His features twisted in a mess
of confusion and shock and lust.
“Touching you. Tasting you.”
And maybe it really was all the orgasms that made me crazy.
Because the shy, shrinking girl would have thought this was demeaning. Probably because Bates had told me I was horrible at it. He made me question every touch, every need and want I had. But sinking to my knees in front of Ash Evans made me feel as if I held all the power. Seeing the intimidating man stand above me, the bulge of his biceps and pecs, the flat, rippled planes of his ripped stomach, jaw clenched so tight.
The warrior.
But I could feel him shaking.
Brimming with need.
Something I’d created in him.
I peeled down his briefs. Exposing him the way he’d exposed me.
The man was huge. I had the wayward thought that Tamar had been right. It had to be just as big as his heart.
“What are you down there smirking about?” he asked with one of those grins. “I think you might have been hanging out with me too much. Seems I’m rubbing off on you.”
Boldly, I took him in my hand.
Because Ash Evans rubbing off on me was exactly the point.
twenty
Willow
Downstairs, the doorbell rang. Excitement shivered down my spine. I took one last glance at myself in the mirror, smoothed out the cute beige dress that I’d coupled with a pair of sandals. I gave myself a reassuring smile and turned away to grab my little bag and head downstairs.
A date.
Apparently Ash Evans was taking all this pretending seriously.
And God, I loved it. Chose to cherish every second of it until the moment it was gone.
I hit the landing of my small house and went straight for the door. I swung it open. Caught off guard, I stumbled backward, my insides feeling as if they might twist me in two, when I found who was waiting on the other side.
Bates.
Anger gathered like a storm.
“What are you doing here?”
“Aww, now is that any way to welcome the love of your life?” He said it with every ounce of the condescending sneer he’d always happily reserved for me.
Resentment rippled and roiled. “That’s because I don’t have any welcome left to give. You used it up. Which means you aren’t welcome here…so you need to go.”
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