Faking Forever (First Wives #4)(67)

The muttered words that he couldn’t decipher kept him going. He listened to the rate of her breath, the way she held it and pressed her hips forward.

Almost there . . . she was almost there.

Shannon cried out. The taste of her fueled every cell in his body.

She squirmed, pulling at his hair. “I can’t take it anymore . . .”

This was where he would have made her climax again, taking her . . .

“Good Lord,” she sighed, her body lax on the bed.

He looked up at the perfection of her body, past her thin stomach, over peaks of her nipples, and watched her smiling.

“You’re not even undressed,” she pointed out.

No. And he wasn’t going to get that way either.

“That was beautiful.” He dropped a kiss on the inside of her thigh. Told his body to behave and go back into the cave.

“You didn’t . . . I mean—”

He crawled beside her on the bed and lay on his side. Somewhere he’d managed to kick off his shoes, and his shirt was open. “Next time, I will.”

Shannon placed a lazy hand on his waist and traced the side of his rib cage. “Let me take care of you.”

He stopped her hand, cursed his resolve to let her be the one who left satisfied while he was kept wanting.

“Stopping now will probably rank up there as the most unselfish thing I’ve ever done in my life. Hopefully it will erase some of the asshole you thought I was.”

Her smile and chuckle ended with a shiver.

Victor reached over and pulled up the edge of the blanket and covered his view.

A damn shame that was.

“Can I tell you something?” she asked.

“As long as you don’t say you faked that.”

Her hand paused the soft petting thing she was doing. Shannon pinned him with a hard stare.

“You don’t really think—”

He placed a finger over her lips. “No. I don’t. Your cry made me feel like a god, so please don’t crush me now.”

There was her smile again. She relaxed and started moving her fingers. “I was going to say . . . I haven’t done this in a very long time. I thought maybe my body forgot how.”

“How to have an orgasm?”

She nodded.

“Not even with yourself?”

“Well . . .”

Victor wanted to swallow her coy smile. He propped his head on his arm. “I have something to tell you.”

“Oh?”

“Promise you won’t hold it against me?”

She sat up, her hair falling over her shoulder. “That sounds like it’s something I might hold against you.”

He closed his eyes, shrugged his shoulders. “If you don’t want to know—”

She pushed on his chest. “Victor.”

“Promise.”

“Fine.”

Fine for a woman was never fine, but he was taking all kinds of risks with her. “My room in Tulum was directly across from yours.”

He opened one eye, then the other, and saw her processing the information.

“The moon was very bright, and it seemed the stories of the sea and mermaids coming to life—”

“You watched us.” Her jaw dropped, but the amusement in her eyes let him know she wasn’t upset.

“I watched you. I’m pretty sure Avery was there, but I wasn’t interested in her.”

“You’re a voyeur.”

He touched the tip of her nose. “And you’re an exhibitionist.”

Shannon leaned back. “I guess that makes us even, then.”

“I think it’s a perfect combination.”

She sank into the crook of his shoulder, her nose to his chest. “How did we end up here?”

He shook his head, closed his eyes. “I don’t know. But I don’t want it to end.”





Chapter Twenty-Five

Shannon walked the vast loft space with her mental checklist of what she wanted. Gary, the real estate agent she’d chosen for her new adventure, was highly regarded in his field, stood a half a foot shorter than she did, and used words like darling or sweetheart when he addressed her.

“I know you don’t want a dark space, but try and look past the brick walls and just take in all that natural light, darling.” Gary crossed to one of three arched windows that ran the length of the fifteen-foot ceilings. “You can cover the walls, or maybe just two of them.”

Shannon attempted to ignore the dust that had accumulated in the space since the previous tenants had been evicted.

Gary opened a set of blinds that hid some of the light and pushed open the double windows to let the air in. “And smell that fresh salt air. Isn’t it perfect? The view is to die for.”

Shannon walked to the window and smiled. This wasn’t anywhere near where she’d set roots down before. Santa Monica was a completely new and unexpected shift in her world. Just like Victor. Yet the more she considered the idea of jumping with both feet into a new direction with her photography, the clearer the thoughts became.

“All of this can go.” Gary waved his hands in the air regarding the partition walls put up by the previous tenant. “There is nineteen hundred square feet down here, and if you’ll follow me, I’ll show you the best part.”