Bungalow Nights(29)

He ran his hand along her sleek spine under her shirt, then slipped his palm beneath the denim of her white jeans so he could knead one curved cheek. “Let’s get these clothes off you, sweetheart.”

She glanced up, her mouth still on the bare skin of his chest. She’d unknotted his tie and unbuttoned his shirt; her pubic bone was pressed deliciously tight to his erection, but it wasn’t enough.

With his free hand, he began to draw up the hem of her long shirt. “Please,” he said, feeling more than a little desperate.

Instead of cooperating, she rolled away. Her hands went to his belt. “I want to see you naked first.”

Who was he to complain? He let her fumble for a couple of moments, then decided that was too much torture and made quick work of it himself. As he tossed his shirt aside, getting completely naked, she grabbed at his tie, eyeing it, then eyeing him.

Uh-oh.

That wasn’t a game he’d taught her, nor one he’d played before. Vance called him stuffy and he supposed, with the exception of that mad night of passion with a near-stranger six years before, that he was pretty conservative when it came to sexual matters.

Okay, he wasn’t kinky.

But hell, maybe he could be. Baxter swallowed. “You want me to tie you up?”

She shook her head.

He swallowed again. “You want to tie me up?” That would be more of a challenge.

But that wasn’t it, either. She kneed her way over to him and pressed the silk fabric against his eyes. “Please, Baxter.” Tilting her head, she put her mouth to his as she made a knot at the back of his head. “Let’s do it in the dark.”

And like on that first night, he couldn’t refuse her anything.

He didn’t need his eyes to undress her. He didn’t need his eyes to touch her silky skin, to palm her full breasts, to urge her over him so he could tongue her nipples. They hardened, and he grunted at the goodness of that. She writhed against him, her denim pants abrading his shaft and he grunted again, rolling her over before any damage was done.

Finding the button and zipper of her jeans was easy. Feeling her wriggle out of them while he thrust his tongue into her mouth over and over was a kind of painful bliss.

Then there she was, flush against him. Bare.

Full frontal nudity.

He didn’t need to see anything to feel the ripe softness of her between her legs, that sweet, wet, swollen flesh that was because of his kiss, his touch. Him.

Any man could put a condom on with his eyes closed. But then Addy “helped” him, and his fingers fumbled when he felt her hot breath on the flesh of his belly. She laughed, he cursed, they both went searching for the errant rubber.

Of course she found it first. She could see.

So he groaned again as she rolled it over his length. He lifted into her touch, his hips ready to plunge, to take, to have her. Have Addy.

But once sheathed, he pressed her to the mattress again. Used his mouth to Braille his way from her lips to her nipples to the soft center of her. Holding her legs wide, he kissed her there, too, tongued her, loving the bite of her fingernails in his scalp. As she began to quake in climax, he slid up and inside her, letting her muscles clench him in rhythmic bliss before surging himself, thrusting, until he came.

Breathing hard, he pulled away and flopped to his back beside her. After a second or two, he dozed.

When he came awake, it was night.

No, no. It was his tie, still blindfolding him. He left it there another moment, trying to think. Now that he wasn’t under the influence of driving lust, he wondered what the silk fabric’s purpose had been.

She wanted to keep him in the dark? If that was the case, it had worked. He was as confused about them as ever and concerned about why his intentions were so easily derailed. Days ago all he’d wanted was to apologize.

Not for making love to her six years ago, but for the reckless things he’d said afterward.

I think I’m in love with you.

I’ll call you tomorrow.

He’d said that, though that very tomorrow he’d had plans to head off to business school across the country. As for Addy, after taking a post–high school gap year, she’d been signed up to begin college classes in a month’s time. Neither of their future plans had stopped him from saying more, however.

And we’ll find a way to be together. We have to be together.

But the next morning, as he packed his belongings in his car, Baxter had recalled the BSLS. This was not the time for a girlfriend. This was not the time to be dating, even. And for pity’s sake, he was much too young to be thinking about love. So he hadn’t picked up the phone, he hadn’t written her, he hadn’t left her any message...and then had agonized over not doing so during the entire three-thousand-mile trip.

Beyond that, too. For six years. Yet still he’d not made amends.

He fingered the soft swathe of material covering his eyes. She should have choked him with the damn thing while he was sleeping.

Great. So his little getting-to-know-you time had turned into a disaster. They’d gotten as close as two bodies could be, but the blindfold had kept her hidden from him.

It had allowed her an opportunity to escape him, he thought.

And, he realized when he stripped the tie away, she’d done exactly that.

He was once again alone.





CHAPTER NINE



IT WAS FOUR DAYS FOLLOWING their visit to the ranch before Vance suggested that he and Layla make another attempt at witnessing the green flash. Before that, an unusual July fog had rolled in, obscuring the view and wrapping the beach house in a gray blanket. Outside, the visibility was down to a mere dozen feet and it might have made the interior of No. 9 feel too couple-cozy except that Layla spent most of the days with her uncle Phil at the food truck—apparently gray skies didn’t stifle cupcake cravings in Southern California. In the evenings, Addy was in the mix for dinner and a baseball game on TV or dinner and a girl-movie on TV, depending upon how the postmeal coin toss went.

To be honest, Vance had been grateful for a reprieve from Layla’s exclusive company. After their time at the ranch and then their stop at the tavern...well, he felt a new strain to the relationship. She knew things about him now he hadn’t intended to tell her. There’d been something in that kiss in front of his brother and his ex that went beyond role-playing.

A little distance seemed a fine way to smooth out the new edge, and he suspected she’d been keeping herself busy for the exact same reason.

But he’d made promises, so the Helmet List could not be ignored. With the sun once again visible in the sky, they were going to watch it set.

As they left No. 9, Vance had a new appreciation of Crescent Cove’s clear air and the boundless vista of open ocean. Instead of doing their sunset-viewing from a spot on the sand, he proposed they climb to the top of the cliff directly south of the beach house. There were several footpaths snaking up its rock-and-shrub surface, and he trekked along one of the easier routes behind her, telling himself he was watching her butt to make sure she didn’t fall.

Yeah, right.

Because even with Layla out of the house during the day and Addy in the house at night, his awareness of Colonel Parker’s lovely daughter hadn’t been deactivated.

She was beautiful, of course, in nothing more elaborate than a simple pair of cropped sweatpants and matching long-sleeved T-shirt, but he also couldn’t put from his mind how she’d gone to bat for him when his mother had made her appearance. And then again with Fitz and Blythe at the tavern. That first meet with his ex could have been hellishly awkward, but Layla had smiled them all through it. And instead of focusing on the blonde who’d dumped him, Vance instead had been hyperaware of the sexy, sunny brunette who’d been sitting across from him.

Which went a long way toward explaining the incendiary quality of that kiss in the tavern, though didn’t for a second lessen the simmering sexual tension. At that thought, he looked at her, only to catch her glancing over her shoulder at him. They both quickly diverted their attention.

He sighed. Yes, there was definitely a new strain to things between them.

Upon reaching the cliff’s summit, he led the way toward a level spot that, while well away from the edge, was at the farthest end of the promontory jutting into the ocean. Water surrounded them on three sides, and when he settled beside Layla on one of the blankets he’d spread, she gave him another quick glance.

“From here, it’s like we’re the only people in the world,” she said, draping a smaller throw over her lower legs.

“I could sign up for that,” Vance said. “You’ll do all the cooking and cleaning, of course, and I’ll do...whatever manly things need to be done.”

“I wonder why I’m highly suspicious of this proposed division of labor,” Layla replied, a thread of welcome humor in her voice. “Oh, maybe it’s because you can’t come up with any of your own duties besides ‘manly things.’”