“What’s the plan for tomorrow?”
“The ceremony starts at sunset,” Marissa said lazily. “It’s pretty simple. The hotel takes care of everything. We show up, get married, and then do this again.”
Alana thought about the freight train of planning on two continents going into Freddie’s impending nuptials, about her role in all of that.
“What’s the plan for tomorrow?”
“We’re going rock climbing,” Adam said. “We’ll be back in the afternoon. Plenty of time to get ready.”
Garrett, sitting next to Alana, nudged her with his elbow. “You going to miss me while I’m gone?”
“I’ll try to keep myself busy,” she said mildly.
Across the fire, Lucas’s face grew more and more expressionless.
• • •
“OH EIGHT HUNDRED
in the lobby,” Nate said. “We’ll pick up the gear on the way out of town.”
Lucas gave him a nod, then slid his key card into the lock on his own door. First order of business was a shower. Six hours on the beach and Lucas had sand in places his doctor hadn’t seen. He didn’t relish waking up in a gritty bed. It was late. Alana had left the beach party half an hour earlier, laughing off an invitation to walk her to her room. Just in case.
Just in case Garrett wanted to get laid. A quiet word from Nate ended the pursuit, for now. He knew how guys like that thought; he’d been one, a lifetime ago. A woman was an easy mark at a wedding. A beach wedding at sunset with a romantic story like Adam and Marissa’s? Candy from a baby.
Garrett didn’t know Alana. She was many things, but an easy mark wasn’t one of them. Complicated, stubborn, single-minded, capable.
His.
Except she wasn’t, or so his mind said. His body, as he stripped and got into the shower, said something entirely different. His body said he’d spent all day watching the woman in his bed laugh and talk with everyone but him. He leaned his head against the tiled wall and let water course over his back. The strength of the emotion, jealousy and anger and a blood-hot lust, washed through him with an intensity that left him breathless. This wasn’t like him. Feeling this much. Caring so intensely, about anyone, anything.
You used to care like this.
And now I remember why I stopped. It fucking hurts. Not the pain. The longing.
He twisted the dial to cold, because a case of blue balls was better than taking a step down the slippery slope, but all he got for his trouble was wave after wave of goose bumps. He thought about Alana, about the way her hair looked slicked back from her face after she got out of the ocean, the way it dried in tangled sections around her face, the pink on her cheekbones and her lips from sun and salt spray and laughter.
He thought about her two floors up, alone in a room with a big bed.
Don’t go there. Don’t think that. She’s sleeping.
She’s leaving. This is the perfect time for you to just let it go.
Funny how the brain churned until it found a rational explanation. She was leaving. They’d go back to Walkers Ford, and she’d pack up her sedan and leave town forever. So why not take one more night?
Because you’re angry and hurt, and it’s been a long goddamn time since you felt anything, let alone anything that powerful. You’re out of practice.
One more night . . .
He was out the door, in the quiet hallway, before he registered intention, let alone movement. Disdaining the elevator, he took the stairs two floors up and crossed the hall to her room. He and Nate by unspoken agreement took the rooms with the parking lot views so Darla Collins and Alana would wake up to the sound of waves lapping against the beach.
Remember that nice guy when you feel like a raging caveman.
Silence reigned behind her door. He rapped quietly, using only the knuckle of his index finger, not all four fingers like he did when he meant business. If she was asleep, she’d sleep through the knock. After a few moments he heard the gentle swish of fabric against skin, then a hesitation he hoped was her looking through the peephole, not deciding whether or not to let him in.
The safety chain rattled, then the dead bolt clicked open, followed by the door opening. She wore a thin cotton nightgown that hung low on her breasts and skimmed the tops of her thighs. Her pale blond hair held the faint dampness of a shower. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, but the moonlight caught the blue of her irises and her pink lips nonetheless.
He looked at her, letting anger and confusion and desire infuse his face, giving her fair warning to shut the door. Instead she stepped back, wordlessly inviting him in.
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m a nice guy,” he said. “I’m not.”
She didn’t move, didn’t close the door or answer him with anything other than the slight tilt of her head that sent her hair gliding against her cheekbone.
He stepped through the door, took the handle from her, and closed it. When the latch snicked into the lock she reached out and fisted her hand in his shirt, pulling him in for a kiss.
He pinned her to the wall with mouth and chest and hips, and cupped the clean line of her jaw with both hands as he ravaged her mouth. She made a whimpering little noise but rather than squirming to get away she tried to climb him, looping one leg around his and keeping him close. He slid one arm under her hips and lifted her; when she locked her ankles around his waist he stepped away from the wall, crossed through the sitting area and bore her onto the bed.
She gasped when he scored her throat with nipping, hot kisses. “Lucas!”
“All day I’ve watched other men try to get into your pants,” he growled, hardly conscious of what he was saying.
“Garrett’s already been up here,” she gasped.
That explained the careful use of the peephole. He shoved her thin nightgown up to her waist, then bent his head and nuzzled it the rest of the way up past her breasts. He closed one hand over her breast and brushed the nipple with his thumb.
Each rhythmic stroke of his thumb tightened her body ever so slightly. Her eyelids drooped. “Were you wearing that when you opened the door?”
“I didn’t open the door,” she whispered.
He shut her up in the manner used by lust-crazed men everywhere, with a deep kiss. In the part of his brain still capable of observing, he knew he was being rougher, more passionate than he’d been before. He worked his thigh between hers, pressed against the cotton covering her mound. That wasn’t enough, so he rolled half on top of her and he used his greater weight to keep her pinned as he kissed her.
Her fingers laced through his hair, holding his mouth to hers as the kiss turned edgy, lips and teeth and tongue demanding what he hadn’t put into words. Completing the movement, he shifted between her legs, raked the edge of his teeth down her throat, and took advantage of the way she bucked to tongue each nipple. When he’d kissed his way down her sternum, her hands shifted to his shoulders, pushing him lower.
He settled between her thighs. She was slick and hot, the lap of waves on the beach an erratic counterpoint to the steady swipe of his tongue. Her hip bones held the sun’s heat, the ocean’s salt filling his senses as he ruthlessly worked her to the edge, then flung her over.
“Mine,” he murmured into her hip bone. Then he sat back, worked his shorts low on his hips, pulled a condom from his pocket and rolled it on, then sank inside her.
He expected to finish fast and furious, but the sound she made, the way she tightened around him, inside and out, sounded extremely promising. So he gritted his teeth and held back, keeping his pace slow and steady and relentless. His reward was her heels in the backs of his thighs and her hands flattening against the small of his back. She gave a devastating little shimmy as she adjusted their alignment to just right. He braced one elbow above her shoulder to hold her in place and clamped his hand on her hip, just to be sure she wasn’t going anywhere.
“Oh, God,” she sobbed.
Her release happened all at once, shuddering out in her breathless sobs, her fingernails digging into the base of his spine, but it was the rhythmic pulsing around his cock that did him in. He buried himself deep inside her, his vision closing to blackness as he came.
Time passed in a heaving, heart-pounding blur before he registered her palms patting his shoulder blades. “Hey,” she said. “Are you still in there?”
He cleared his throat, then braced his weight on his elbows. “Yeah. Are you all right?”
“That didn’t actually hurt,” she said.
“Give it time. You’re riding an endorphin rush right now.”
He pushed back to his knees, disconnecting their bodies as he did. In the bathroom he ditched the condom, then forced himself to look in the mirror. His face was as flushed as Alana’s, and he spent too much time outside to blame it on a California sunburn. That was emotion, anger and frustration and passion, hot and demanding, staining his cheekbones. The arrangement of eyes, nose, and mouth staring back looked familiar, that odd sense of déjà vu he got when a face triggered something deep in his brain.
He used to look like this all the time. A younger, less-worldly version of himself shifted between skin and bone, striving to surface in his eyes.
“Go away,” he said to the image. “Nothing to see here you haven’t seen before.”
He straightened his clothes and flicked off the light as he left the bathroom. Alana had turned off the lamp on the nightstand. They’d pushed the sheet and covers down to the foot of the king-size bed. She lay curled up on her side with one arm bent under her head, facing the wide-open windows and doors overlooking the ocean. Moonlight striped a path across the carpet, bathing the curve of her waist and hip in colorless light. She’d pushed her nightgown down to a more modest position, but he could see the shadowy curves of bottom and cleft.
He should go, but all he wanted to do was fit himself to her like a puzzle piece.
Then she turned to look at him, a small smile on her face. “Do you hear that?”
He cocked his head slightly. “No.”
“Come here.”
It was all the invitation he needed. He stretched out behind her, then took a moment to fit his knees to the backs of hers, wrap his arm around her waist and align his chest with her back. She wriggled in his arms, then worked her bare feet between his shins.
“I still don’t hear anything.”
“I would swear I can hear the sound of starlight on the waves,” she said drowsily.
He lifted his head and stared down at her. “How hard did you hit your head on the wall?”
A little laugh. “Not that hard. My ears are ringing a little. That was quite intense.”
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
“Why?” she asked.
“I overreacted. We’re not dating. This isn’t a relationship. I don’t have any right to be jealous.”
After a moment’s pause, she said, “You don’t have any
reason
to be jealous. He’s twenty-one years old. Not to disparage the Marine Corps’ ability to transform young men into warriors, but he’s still twenty-one.”
“I used to be twenty-one,” Lucas said. “I know what he’s thinking.”
She reached down and wove her fingers through his. “I can’t really imagine you that young. If I hadn’t seen pictures in the basement, I’d believe you sprang out of the prairie in uniform at thirty.”
The words hit a little too close to home. “Nate’s not twenty-one,” he said.
She peered over her shoulder at him. “Nate’s married.”
“He’s not wearing a ring.”
“I know.” Her brow wrinkled. “I’m sure he’s still married. I’m behind on my gossip, but someone would have remembered to tell me if Nate Martin had gotten divorced. My mother certainly would have remembered. A divorced Nate Martin would be the most eligible bachelor east of the Mississippi. She’d shove David in front of a bus to free me up for Nate, who remembers me puking up sangria wine coolers behind the Powers’ boathouse on Nantucket when we were seventeen, and would no sooner marry me than he’d marry one of the guys downstairs.”
Something inside him eased a little at this matter-of-fact recitation. “Your mother’s the matchmaking type?”
“In rather medieval form, she sees me and Freddie as chattel to be bartered off to the highest bidder. Mother still lives in a world where marriages are alliances. A hundred years of marrying for love hasn’t proved any more effective than marrying someone suitable, so why risk getting hurt? Settle for compatibility on as many levels as possible, and turn a blind eye to any indiscretions.”
“What kind of alliance does she see in Freddie marrying Toby Robinson?”
Alana laughed. “Not much of one. Freddie said she’s holding on to wedding invitations like they’re political favors. Toby tours eight months a year, and he flatly refuses to be paraded around like he won Best in Show at Westminster, so Mother’s not getting much ground out of bringing him to events.” She sighed. “That’s my next big challenge when I get home. Once they set the date, whatever time I have after the next big global conference will get sucked up into Freddie’s wedding.”
“Won’t that be Freddie’s big thing?”
“I’m her maid of honor, for one thing. Freddie’s front-facing, as my IT guy would say. She’ll pick and choose from whatever I come up with for caterers, dress, decorations, but I’ll do the research. That’s my job. Freddie doesn’t have the patience for research, and I don’t have the aptitude for implementing. She’s easy enough to work with. It’s Mother who second-guesses things, or asks for just a few more options.”
She turned to face him. The moonlight gilded her high cheekbone and ear in silver light. “And then I think about how Adam and Marissa have one parent between them at their wedding, and I feel ashamed for resenting my own mother’s involvement.”
“I should go,” he said.
“Stay,” she whispered. She reached up to stroke his cheekbone, her fingers seemingly fascinated by the line where skin gave over to scruff. “You don’t have to go home tonight. Stay with me.”
He shouldn’t. He knew he shouldn’t, but rather than getting up, he reached for the alarm clock and set it for seven. Plenty of time to go back to his room, shower, and get ready for a bachelor party of rock climbing.