All in the Game

by Barbara Boswell

  “I drove the boat over. I simply told the crew I was taking it to the resort. Nobody tried to stop me.” His eyes gleamed. “It helped that Clark Garrett is already here and everyone probably assumed he’d asked me to bring something over. But nobody bothered to ask.”

  Shannen felt an absurd attack of shyness, definitely a first for her. Shy she’d never been. But standing here with Ty, who was looking so virile and gorgeous and oh, so dear, evoked feelings so powerful that she could do nothing but gaze at him.

  “Now we get to the ‘why I’m here’ part.” Ty handed her the bag of food. “I came for dinner. We can eat out on the balcony, like last night.”

  “Ty…” She was warm all over. From blushing from head to toe? “Last night—”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not expecting tonight to end like last night’s little al fresco picnic. Though I’m certainly not objecting if it should.”

  Ty put his hands on her waist and carefully moved her aside so he could enter the room. “I respect the limits you’ve set, Shannen.” He shut the door, closing them both in the room. “Stupid and unnecessary though they may be.”

  His arms encircled her, and he smoothed his hands over the length of her back. Just when she thought he would move his hands lower, just as she anticipated him doing so, he released her.

  “You’re as safe as you want to be with me, Shannen. Always.” He kissed the top of her head. “Now let’s eat.”

  Shannen watched him walk toward the balcony. She gulped for air as a sharp stab of desire pierced her to the core. It would be so easy to suspend her new rule, to lie down on the bed with Ty and make love with him. He was here, she was in love with him, and he wanted her.

  After all, they had known each other for nine years. Never mind that she’d had no contact with him from age seventeen to twenty-six and that technically they weren’t strangers. Especially not after last night.

  She walked to the balcony and stood nervously on the threshold. “I’m in my nightshirt,” she murmured, glancing down at the blue-and-white shapeless bag she wore. Wishing it were an eye-popping little number from Victoria’s Secret.

  “I ought to get dressed.”

  “Don’t bother on my account.” Ty grinned wickedly, then added, “Why not just stay comfortable in that? Keep in mind I’ve seen you in far less every day on the island. Those skimpy little tops and shorts you wore, that sexy bikini of yours… My brain short-circuited every time I looked at you—which was all the time. It was all I could do to remember to keep my camera rolling.”

  “Cortnee’s bikini was much scantier than mine,” Shannen protested weakly.

  “I never noticed. You were the only one who interested me, Shannen. You still are. Now come out here and eat.”

  Trembling, Shannen went to him.

  Two hours later, they were still out on the balcony, the food completely consumed, the second bottle of wine down to the last drop.

  A light breeze from the sea broke the tropical night heat, a full moon lit a pathway in the ocean, but Shannen was oblivious to their physical surroundings. She could’ve been in a dank cave and she wouldn’t have minded, as long as Ty was with her.

  They talked and laughed, conversing as comfortably as old friends one minute, then switching to the intoxicating seductive manner of new lovers. Shannen felt an ease she’d never felt with anyone but Lauren, combined with an excitement she’d never experienced with any man. And a desire for him stronger than anything she’d ever known.

  It was an irresistible blend, and she wondered if Ty felt the same way.

  She should ask him, Shannen decided giddily. Why not? She trusted him enough to ask the question and to hear the answer.

  “Ty?” She stood up, and the balcony suddenly took a precarious lurch. She grabbed onto the back of a chair for support.

  Ty quickly supplied support of his own. “Uh-oh.” He wrapped his arms around her waist, bringing her back against his chest. “Maybe we shouldn’t have knocked off that second bottle of wine.”

  “I’m fine. Just a little light-headed.” She looked up at the stars, which seemed to have turned into fireworks, exploding before her eyes. “Maybe very light-headed.”

  “Into bed you go, Ms. Cullen.” Ty scooped her up and carried her inside.

  “Ty, I have something to tell you.” Shannen linked her arms around his neck and snuggled against him. “I’ll suspend the hiatus for this one night.”

  Laughing softly, Ty put her on the bed. “You’re going to sleep, Shannen. And I’m heading back to camp.” He started to tuck the sheet around her. “Good night, baby.”

  Shannen’s fingers fastened around his wrists. “I decided I don’t mind if you call me ‘baby’ every now and then. But only when we’re alone.”

  “Duly noted,” agreed Ty. He attempted to disentangle his wrists from her grip, but she held on fast.

  “Don’t you want me, Ty?” The thought suddenly struck her, and she lacked the control to keep from blurting it out. At this moment she also lacked the inhibition to be horrified by it.

  “You know I do, Shannen.”

  He leaned down to kiss her hungrily, letting her know how much he wanted her. His hands cupped her face, holding her mouth firmly under his as he slanted his lips over hers, drinking deeply from the moist warmth within. His tongue moved provocatively against hers in an erotic, arousing simulation.

  Pure liquid pleasure flooded her. She was aware only of Ty and the thrilling mastery of his lips and his hands. Lost in the head-spinning world of sensation, Shannen was completely unprepared for him to lift his mouth from hers.

  She watched in confusion as he slowly straightened.

  “I didn’t come here to get you drunk and take you to bed, Shannen.” His voice was husky, his smile roguishly sexy. “I don’t need to get you drunk to get you into bed. But I do want you to be sure that we know each other well enough, so making love is officially on hiatus until then.”

  Shannen felt a fierce yearning swelling inside her, so intense she could hardly breathe.

  “We know each other well enough, Ty,” she whimpered urgently.

  Ty walked to the door as if she hadn’t spoken at all. He opened it and paused in the doorway. “When you’re stone-cold sober and say those words, we’ll make love, Shannen. But you’re not, so we won’t. Good night, my love.”

  Sunlight poured into the room through the open curtains, making it literally bright as day.

  Automatically, Shannen put her hands over her eyes to block out the light. Closing the drapes after Ty had put her to bed last night hadn’t even crossed her mind.

  She heard a hoarse moan from the other side of the bed.

  “What time is it?” Lauren asked groggily, putting a pillow over her face to shut out the sunlight.

  Shannen sat up and looked at the clock. “Five to six. That’s a.m.,” she added gingerly.

  “Is that all?” Lauren wailed. “No wonder I feel so wrecked! I have to get some more sleep.” She flopped over onto her stomach and buried her face in the pillow.

  “I didn’t hear you come in last night, Lauren,” Shannen said. Or if she had, she didn’t remember it.

  Shannen vividly recalled her last memory of the night. It was of Ty kissing her senseless and then leaving her, her blood roaring in her ears, her body taut and wet.

  His words sounded in her head as a narrative for the visual pictures playing in her mind. I don’t need to get you drunk to get you into bed. No, she’d proved that beyond all doubt.

  When you’re stone-cold sober and say those words, we’ll make love, Shannen. But you’re not, so we won’t. He had been noble again. Shannen clenched her teeth in frustration.

  Noble and outrageously confident. Of course, why shouldn’t he be, when she’d practically pleaded with him to go to bed with her? When she’d rescinded her ban on sex less than three hours after making it!

  “Ohhhh!” Shannen groaned.

  “My thoughts exactly,” Lauren replied through grit
ted teeth.

  “I don’t think we’re the type for living luxurious lives of leisure, Lauren.” Shannen closed her book. “Having all this time on my hands with nothing to do is driving me crazy. At least when we were back on the island, we were always foraging for food. It kept us busy.”

  “We’re doing something, we’re reading,” said Lauren, not looking up from her book. The cover was a frightening pair of eyes staring demonically at the silhouette of a cowering victim. Knives and droplets of bright blood completed the picture.

  The sisters had gone to the gift shop earlier to buy paperbacks to read. Lauren remembered the thousand dollars they’d gained by not eating in the reward contest, money Shannen had completely forgotten about.

  Shannen chose a historical romance and expected Lauren to select one in a similar vein. Those were their favorites, but Lauren had bluntly declared she wanted a page-turning thriller, grisly and gory, with a high body count. She’d read every book jacket until finally finding the most horrific. Shannen hated having it in the room with them; it seemed to emit bad vibes.

  Or maybe that was Lauren emitting those vibes, because she’d been uncharacteristically difficult since they’d been awakened too early by the morning sun.

  Lauren refused to walk on the beach or go to the pool. She wouldn’t leave their room for breakfast, lunch or dinner, either. Shannen brought her food from the coffee shop, staying within the daily allowance, and the sisters ate together on the balcony.

  Worst of all, Lauren completely clammed up when Shannen asked why she didn’t want to leave the room except to buy her gruesome tome of terror. When Shannen casually mentioned Jed’s name, Lauren exploded, insisting she never wanted to hear it again. Or the names of any of the other Victorious contestants. In fact, she never wanted to talk about the game and the time they’d spent on the island for as long as they lived.

  Which ruled out speculating on who would get voted off the island today and who would be the Final Two. Shannen pictured Ty filming it all and silently speculated with herself.

  Then she went back to her book, reading until she was stiff from sitting. She stood up and leaned against the balcony railing, gazing at the white sand on the beach and the vast expanse of ocean. The water looked aqua in the sunset. At noon it had been a deeper blue.

  Shannen tried to guess which direction the Victorious island was. And she thought of Ty again. She’d relived last night in her head over and over, remembering how much she enjoyed being with him. The talking, the laughing, the kissing…

  She swallowed hard. She missed him, she wanted to be with him. It was too much to hope that he would come back to the hotel again tonight after the day’s filming was through. He simply couldn’t keep taking the crew boat to go where he pleased; she knew that, too.

  Resignedly she sat back down and picked up her book. The heroine was at that stage of holding off the advances of the hero, whom she claimed to loathe but subconsciously lusted for.

  “Stop giving the poor guy such a hard time, Jacinda,” Shannen muttered to the girl in the book. “You know you’re going to surrender in the end.” She gave up and laid it aside. “How’s your book, Lauren?”

  “Excellent! Another clueless jerk just got offed,” exclaimed Lauren ruthlessly.

  Now Lauren was rooting for the killer. Shannen walked inside the room to check the clock. How could it only be a few minutes past seven o’clock? This day had gone on for years! And the evening loomed endlessly ahead.

  When a knock sounded an hour later, Shannen made a quick stop at the mirror before answering the door. She pulled her hair out of the ponytail and fluffed it with her fingers. Her striped tank top and navy shorts were a definite improvement over the shapeless nightshirt she’d worn last night.

  She admitted to herself that though she’d tried all day to pretend otherwise, she was expecting Ty. After all, he’d shown up unannounced twice before. Still, just in case, she warned herself to be braced for disappointment as she peered through the peephole.

  And was not disappointed. She flung open the door.

  “Surprise,” said Ty. “Or not.”

  “You’re three for three!” Shannen exclaimed, throwing her arms around him and hugging him tight.

  Conveniently he had no food or wine tonight and his arms were free to pick her up. She wrapped her legs around his waist and their lips met in passionate fusion.

  This was no tentative, preliminary kiss. His tongue entered her mouth and probed intimately, and she responded with an urgency and need that matched his. Instantaneously they were swept into fiery passion, their emotional connection so strong and so natural there could be no denying it.

  However, they were not alone.

  “To think I thought today couldn’t get any worse.” Lauren’s voice, sardonic and cross, made her presence known. “Ha! The laugh is on me, because it just did. I landed the dreaded role of unwanted third wheel.”

  Shannen stiffened and Ty tensed. Their private little interlude had come to an abrupt end. She wriggled to be free, and he let her go, though he held her tightly against him, turning the release into a long, slow body caress. Both reluctantly stepped apart.

  “Hello, Lauren,” he said with commendable geniality. “How are you?”

  “Not overjoyed to be playing chaperon,” she replied baldly. “If you two want to be alone, you’ll have to go somewhere else. I’m not being driven out of my room.” She purposefully stretched across the bed on her stomach, her book in front of her face.

  “Let’s take a walk, Shannen,” suggested Ty. “Unless you’d rather stay here?”

  “A walk sounds good.” Shannen grabbed his hand and fairly dragged him from the room. “We’ve been cooped up in there most of the day,” she confided as they strolled along the long corridor. “Lauren’s…in kind of a mood.”

  “Tactfully stated.” Ty grinned. “Want to know who was voted off the island?”

  “That’s how you got the boat again. You offered to bring the loser over!”

  “I didn’t offer, I said I was going to do it. Rico is checking into his room right now.”

  “Rico!” exclaimed Shannen. “How did that happen?”

  “Whoever caught the first fish would win the immunity contest. Konrad had a tug on his pole and immediately handed it to Cortnee. Sure enough, there was a fish on the line, which made her the first to catch one.”

  “So she won immunity. That is, Konrad gave it to her,” Shannen amended, surprised. “That’s unexpected, isn’t it?”

  “Nobody saw it coming. Cortnee and Konrad cut their little deal out of camera range. They both voted Rico off, but he took it like a good sport.”

  “And Konrad and Cortnee are the two finalists.” Shannen didn’t care. She and Ty were together, headed toward the beach on a beautiful tropical night. Whoever won the Victorious game, she felt like the truly victorious one.

  They held hands and walked along the beach together.

  “I’m guessing that things didn’t go well for Lauren and Jed?” Ty asked. “She didn’t look or sound like someone who’d spent the day in romantic paradise.”

  Shannen appreciated the opening. She guessed that Ty couldn’t care less about the alleged Lauren-Jed relationship, but he knew she did. And he was willing and ready to let her confide in him.

  They walked and talked for a long time. After exhausting the topic of Lauren and Jed, they moved on to others. Sometimes they paused to discreetly steal a kiss; they were never not touching, either holding hands or wrapping their arms around each other’s waists. It was a blissful idyll that neither wanted to end.

  But after running into some of the Victorious contestants well past midnight, Shannen and Ty recognized it was time to call it a night. They declined the invitation to “join the gang,” and Ty walked Shannen back to her room.

  “This is kind of like an old-fashioned courtship,” he said dryly. “Leaving you at your door with a chaste good-night kiss, my whole body aching with frustration.”


  “Who said the good-night kiss has to be chaste?” teased Shannen, and initiated a kiss that was anything but.

  “Now I’m not only aching with frustration, I’m burning up with it.” Ty held her tight, waiting, hoping for the tension to drain from his body. “Shannen, I wanted to tell you—I’m thinking of using the name Howe again.”

  His tone was deliberately casual, but she was too attuned to him not to know his family name was something he could never be casual about.

  “I think it’s a good idea, Ty. You’re not the one who disgraced it. I think you’re going to be the one to make it a name to be proud of again.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence. I hope so. But it won’t be as a cameraman, Shannen.” He leaned back and gazed down into her warm blue eyes. “If I resumed my law career, I’d take clients who needed me as an advocate but couldn’t afford to pay exorbitant attorney fees. I don’t want to practice law to become rich and famous.”

  “Good!” Shannen said succinctly. “There are already too many lawyers like that.”

  “Anyway, if I opened a law office, it could be anywhere I wanted to live. That’s an option a network cameraman doesn’t have.”

  Shannen nodded, shaky with excitement. Was he trying to say something she hadn’t dared dream of?

  If so, he never got the chance. Unexpectedly Lauren opened the door. Shannen and Ty, partially leaning against it, were thrown off balance and nearly fell into the room.

  “Shannen, I feel like Gramma flashing the front light on and off when we stayed out on the porch too long back in high school,” scolded Lauren. “She wanted to go to bed and couldn’t, as long as we were out there. Well, I can really relate to that now. Say good-night already and come inside.”

  Shannen grimaced. “You even sound just like Gramma, Lauren.”

  “Good night already,” Ty quoted lightly and touched Shannen’s cheek with his fingertips. “Tomorrow, sweetheart.”

  The ten contestants who’d been previously ousted filed into the tribal council area, which was lit by hundreds of candles and tall flaming torches placed strategically to ensure the best camera lighting.