Second Chance Love (Heaven Hill Book 6) (12 page)

Roni wanted him to take it off, but to do that, he would have to loosen his hold on her and she didn’t want him to. He held her tightly against his body, his thigh holding her up, almost to the point that her feet weren’t touching the bottom of this shallow end of the pool. Her upper torso was out of the water, and a slight wind blew, causing goosebumps on her skin. Letting go of his neck, she made her own decision. Reaching behind her, she unclasped the hooks of the material and pulled it off her chest before throwing it towards the shoreline and putting her arms back around him, this time at his waist.

Pulling his lips from hers was one of the hardest things he’d ever done, but she’d made it easier on him, removing the bra. Now the only thing that kept them from being completely intimate was the cotton material of her underwear.

“Are you sure about this?” he breathed heavily against her the skin of her chest. “You have to be sure. I don’t want to wake up with regrets tomorrow.”

She nodded. “I’m sure.”

It was the green light he needed, and he swore to himself that he would never look back.

Chapter Fourteen

R
oni dug her fingers into his hair when she felt his big hands cup her ass and lift, bringing her legs around his waist. In the water, in this position, she was weightless. It pushed her further up the rock so that his mouth was even with her chest. It seemed like forever that he stared at her before he glanced up, gave her a grin, and dove headfirst into his mission of blowing her mind.

There was one thing he hadn’t been as a teenager, and that was smooth. He’d learned over the years what women liked and what they didn’t. He hoped that Roni was similar to most women he’d encountered since their split. Using the flat of his tongue, he licked a path to where her nipples jutted at him, capturing one in his mouth, worrying the nub with his teeth. He felt the pull of her fingers against his scalp, and then he felt her press harder.

“Don’t stop, Rooster,” she moaned.

Those words affected him like no others could. He hadn’t heard them from her in years, and to know she was with him in this feeling did it for him. He couldn’t keep his hands off her as he ran them up to her ribcage, spanning her waist there. She was little, had always been smaller than him, but now it felt like he could span her waist with both hands. For a while, they’d gone to the same gym, but when he’d started showing up at the same time as her, she stopped coming. He wondered how she managed to stay in shape. Running his right hand up further, he cupped the underside of the breast he didn’t have in his mouth, swiping a thumb over her nipple. The way it tightened against his touch made him want to yell out to the world that he’d done this to her. All their other experiences had been quick and forbidden. That had been part of the allure of it back when they’d been teenagers, but now they were adults and he could enjoy her, no matter how long that took.

Roni threw her head back, tilting it against the rock so that she could arch her back, thrust her body towards Rooster. There was a part of her that told her they needed to stop, because she wasn’t on anything and she was pretty damn sure that he had no place to hide a condom in the water. The other, louder, part of her didn’t want him to stop, consequences be damned. She’d already been there once though, and she wasn’t sure that she could handle it again. Her conscience told her to enjoy this for as long as she could before she had to put a stop to it. She felt his left hand leave her body and then felt him positioning himself at her core.

“Wait, wait, Rooster,” she heaved, breath coming as fast as if she’d run a marathon. “I’m not protected.”

He struggled to know what the hell that meant. His brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders, and it took him a moment before realization dawned on him. He hadn’t even thought about it. “Fuck,” he breathed out, resting his head against her chest. “Fuck,” he growled again. “I didn’t even think about it,” he admitted.

“We don’t need any surprises.” She ran her hands along his shoulders. “We’re too old to be letting ourselves get carried away.”

She was right and he knew it, but damn if it didn’t suck. “Doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun.” He grinned up at her before his mouth went back to her breast.

When she felt him at her core again, rubbing back and forth against her, she grasped his shoulders. “We didn’t even make out like this as teenagers,” she forced the words between gritted teeth. This felt better than sex ever had, maybe it was the buildup of tension between the two of them, and maybe it was the fact that she’d loved him for half her life. She wasn’t sure, but everything he did to her felt better than it ever had. Roni caught his rhythm, thrusting against him. Her fingers bit into the skin of his back, holding on tightly as he hit every nerve that would set her off like the fourth of July.

“Why does this feel so good?” she breathed out, rolling her head back, and bringing his lips to her neck.

“Because it’s been so long,” he answered, giving his length a few strokes. He could tell by the way she was tightening against him that she was almost there, and he didn’t want to make her go alone.

It had, Roni realized. It had been about a year for her, but it had been so much longer since she actually felt something for the person she was having the physical intimacy with. Knowing that she felt something for him made this even better. Without warning, he nipped the side of neck before pulling her earlobe in his mouth, sucking hard on the skin there. It went straight to where her body was already tightening, and she felt herself let go, let her body fall into the abyss of feeling that apparently only Rooster could bring out of her. In a haze, she heard him groan, felt him tense, and then he collapsed against her body.

She realized with startling clarity that before this went any further she was going to have to tell her secret.

Four days later, she still had yet to tell Rooster anything. That night at their swimming hole, they’d cleaned up, put on fresh clothes, grabbed drive-through food, and went back to her apartment. He’d stayed until the next morning, and she’d tried to tell him a million times, but it hadn’t ever come out. The words couldn’t be formed by her mouth, pressed out by her throat. She couldn’t make herself do it. She sat in the office at Walker’s Wheels, contemplating what she was going to do. Their relationship couldn’t move forward, she didn’t trust it to move forward, unless she was honest with him.

On this particular day, Meredith sat in the office with her, waiting for Tyler to finish his shift. If anyone could help in figuring out who to talk to about things, Roni knew it was Meredith.

“I have a question that I think you can answer,” Roni started, not looking up from the invoices she was working on.

“Yes, Tyler is always as hot as he appears. He never has a bad hair day, and he wakes up looking like sex on a stick,” she joked. It was the running joke amongst the ladies about how hot Tyler Blackfoot was, and Meredith took it in the vein it was meant to be in.

“You are a very, very lucky woman, but that was not my question,” Roni laughed. This made her uncomfortable, but there were a million things in Meredith’s life that had made her uncomfortable and she’d managed to pull through all of them. If Meredith could do that, Roni could ask her opinion on this. “If I wanted to talk to someone or have someone with me when I told another person about a hard emotional issue…who would you recommend?”

Meredith scrunched her eyebrows together in question. “Are you okay?”

“I am,” Roni answered quickly, but she wasn’t as sure or as positive as she sounded. When she opened up these wounds, she wasn’t sure if she would be okay or not, and she wanted someone there in case she wasn’t. What if she told Rooster and he ran, ran away from her, not bothering to look back. Or worse, what if he hated her? “There’s just some things emotionally draining that I need to tell someone else, and I would like for a third party to be there in case things get out of hand.”

Reaching into her purse, Meredith pulled out a well-worn card and handed it to Roni.

“Doc Jones?” She read it out loud. “I think I’ve heard other members of the club talk about her.”

“Probably.” Meredith nodded. “She’s very good at what she does, and a lot of us have gone to see her. Sometimes I go see her even if I just need to talk a few things out and I need a neutral ear. It’s nice to have someone who’s not on a side to help you see what the correct path to take is or the right answer to choose. I trust her with everything, and you know I don’t trust much.”

That was high praise coming from Meredith and Roni knew it. “Then I will definitely check her out. Can I keep the card?”

“Sure, and if you need directions, just let me know. I’d be more than glad to help.”

Roni stuck the card in her purse and chewed on her bottom lip. The question now was how to get Rooster there with her without spilling the beans first.

Chapter Fifteen

R
ooster was beginning to get frustrated. He’d figured out without a whole lot of trouble which kids at the high school were the ones dealing the steroids, and he kind of had an idea as to who the kids were that were taking them. Drew and his best friend Dalton Morrison were knee-deep in this whole situation. He still hadn’t found out a way to tell Liam, he was still skirting the truth with Roni, and he was pissed about the whole situation. He was selfish because half of the reason he wasn’t confirming anything about Drew was because he didn’t want Liam to shoot the messenger. His biggest fear was that Liam and Roni would say he was lying and be done with him, even if they both suspected that Drew had a problem. In his experience, when telling people things they didn’t want to hear, it was easy as fuck to turn a blind eye and accuse the person bringing the truth to them. The hardest thing to do was to sit back and wait for it all to unfold, but that’s what he kept telling himself that he had to do. So every day, he would station himself outside the boys’ locker room. They were free in there, much freer than they were out in the hallways, and he could most of the time hear what was going on.