Between Here and the Horizon (27 page)

Sully: Macaroni and cheese? Steak?
 

 
He’d finished up with a winky face, which made me shake my head.
 

“What are you smiling at, Feelya?” Amie asked, looking up at me. Her face was so perfect. So sweet and innocent. Her hair was sticking up at the front, floating on a wave of static that prickled between us.
 

“Nothing at all, little monster. A friend I know just made a joke on my phone.”

“Was it a funny joke?”
 

“Not really. He was being cheeky.”

She leaned back, her head resting in the crook of my arm, giggling, teeth on show, and I just wanted to wrap my arms around her and squeeze her tight. She was the most adorable thing. She had the same chin, the same high forehead, and the same dimples as both her father and her uncle. The exact same hair color. The same smile, and the same mischievous glint in her eye. “What did he say?” she asked, still laughing.
 

“He’s sick at the moment, so I’ve been making his dinner for him and taking it over to his house on the other side of the island. He was just saying that he wanted steak with mac and cheese for dinner, which is really naughty because it’s not so easy to make.”

Her eyes widened.
 
“I love steaks with mac and cheese.”

“Mmm, I know. So do I.”

“Can we have it for dinner, too?”

“Oh boy.”
 

So that was it. A quick trip to the store later, and Amie and I were in the kitchen with the necessary ingredients, making the dinner Sully had requested: steak with mac and cheese à la Amie.
 

Later, when I took over his food, Sully lifted the lid off his dinner and arched an eyebrow so reminiscent of Ronan that it took my breath away.
 

“Why, may I ask, is the mac and cheese green? And why is the steak…in the shape of a rabbit?”

“It’s not a rabbit. It’s a Velociraptor. You can’t tell because it’s not cooked yet. I didn’t want it getting tough on the way over here.”
 

Sully frowned some more, staring down at the food. “I’m sensing you had help preparing this meal.”

“I did. My sous chef is excellent. Five years old. Loves the color green, and dinosaurs. She’s very sorry you’re sick, and she hopes you get better soon.”

Sully leaned against the counter and sighed heavily, crossing his arms over his chest. “Is this some cheap ploy to get me to fall in love with my niece and nephew via the medium of food? Because it’s not going to happen. I’m impervious to cuteness.”

“I’m sure you are. I am sure you are, buddy.”

Over the next week, that didn’t stop me from enlisting Amie’s help with the rest of Sully’s meals. Monster Brains (clam chowder, with biscuits), Putrid Pot Pie (turkey and sweet corn—Amie didn’t like the corn.) Seasick Stew, which, according to Amie was meant to look like vomit. Thankfully, it looked more like another chicken casserole, but Sully still laughed.
 

My two or three hour-long visits to his place in the evening were becoming less and less stressful and more enjoyable with each passing day. Miracle upon miracle, the edge wore off Sully. It was an interesting thing to watch. He flirted like a fiend, and he was still sharp as a whip with his comebacks, but the hostility was gone. He would text me once or twice a day, and surprisingly I would rarely want to kill him because of the contents.
Rarely
. There were still times when he sent something so barbaric and over-the-line that I considered telling him to go screw himself, but for the most part he was behaving himself.
 

On Friday, seven days after he came home from the medical center, I let myself into the lighthouse, and Sully handed me a mug of coffee. “Big and black, just how you like it,” he said, grinning.

“That doesn’t even make sense,” I told him, taking the coffee and drinking deep.

Sully smirked, shoving his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Doesn’t it? I’ll let you think about that for a while. What terrible creation have we brought over with us today, then?” he asked, waggling his eyebrows at the box I had set down on the coffee table.
 

“Why don’t you come see?” I picked it back up again and went into the kitchen, searching for plates. Sully hobbled after me, still bracing himself, doing his best to minimize the pain from his ribs, which was still constant and grating.
 

“Damn it, woman. I’ve already had my workout for the day. I don’t need to chase you around the entire house, y’know.”

“You call showering and getting dressed a workout?”

“I do. And wiping my own ass. Do you have any idea how painful it is to twist and wipe right now?” He demonstrated for good measure, twisting his torso, and then yelped when his ribcage pinched.
 

“Serves you right.”

“Just open the damn food, Lang,” he grumbled, holding his hand to his chest, as if that would stop the pain.
 

I opened up the Tupperware and showed him what Amie and I had made just before I left the house.
 
“This is her favorite meal,” I told him. “She said she wanted to make it for you so that you’d finally get better. I explained that broken ribs took a little longer to mend than a week, but she seemed fairly convinced this was going to do the trick.”
 

Sully considered the meal: pancakes, drowning in maple syrup. Chicken and apple sausages. Eggs, over easy, still hot from the frying pan. He sighed, leaning back against the kitchen counter. “Our mom used to make this for me and Ronan nearly every day whenever we were on vacation,” he said quietly. “She called it the sunshine scramble.”

I bit my lip, not sure if I should say anything. What the hell, though. It couldn’t hurt to tell him the truth. “Amie calls it that, too. Ronan used to make it for her.”

Sully stared at the food some more, shifting and twitching like he was extremely uncomfortable.
 

“Well. Fuck.” He ran his hand back through his hair, and left it there at the base of his neck, his lips pressed into a tight white line.
 

“Let’s just eat, Sully. It doesn’t have to be a thing.”

“No. You’re right. It doesn’t.” He still looked like he’d had the wind knocked out of him, though. We sat and ate in silence. When we were done, Sully did something that surprised the hell out of me. He stood up, and then he reached out and took me by the hand, making me stand up, too. I thought he was going to escort me out of the house or something—he’d been broody and silent ever since I’d shown him the food—but instead he raised his right hand and he brushed my hair back behind my ear, giving me a complicated smile.
 

“I’ve never kissed a girl for the first time without being drunk, y’know?” he said.
 

“What? You’re not about to, either.” I tried to step back, embarrassed, too shocked to even believe for a second that he was being serious. He slipped an arm around my waist and stopped me, though.
 

“God, Lang. Not much in my life is easy. Just getting out of bed at the moment is a goddamn uphill struggle. Breathing is far more taxing than it should be most days. Don’t go making this difficult, too.” He smiled his reckless smile, dimples locked and loaded, ready to kill, and my chest squeezed tightly. He was being perfectly serious, and I had no idea how to react. I just kind of froze, alarmed and unarmed, caught completely off guard.
 

“I—”

“You don’t want me to kiss you?”

Slowly, I nodded my head. “I do. At least, I think I—”

“No more thinking.” He rushed me, bending down to meet me, his mouth crashing into mine, stealing what little breath I had right away. If I’d wanted to react in some way, to fend him off or object, I’d never have had the time. He drew me into him, holding me carefully against his body, his chest pressing up against mine, the buckle of his belt flush with my stomach. His hands were firm and persuasive; it seemed as though he wanted to touch me everywhere, to feel the texture of my skin beneath his fingertips, to revel in the sensation of our bodies aligned so perfectly against one another. The kiss was the kind of kiss that made people wolf whistle in the street. It was spectacular—a ground shaking kiss that would send your head spinning and your knees collapsing out from underneath you. I didn’t know what to do. I had two options: I could shove him away and slap his face hard enough to knock him into next week, or I could go with it and kiss him back.
 

I wanted to do both, he had no right to be planting kisses on me out of the blue, slingshotting my sanity into outer space, but then again it really was perfection.
 

I kissed him back.
 

Winding my arms around his neck, I popped up onto my tiptoes in order to claim his mouth just as feverishly as he was claiming mine. His tongue flicked quickly at mine, and then Sully was cupping my face in his hand, rubbing the pad of his thumb against the swollen flesh of my lips. He drew back, smiling in the most unimaginably nefarious way, like he was plotting my ruin inside that wicked head of his.
 

“Your mouth…” he whispered, laughing softly under his breath. “You have no idea how much time I’ve spent fantasizing about your mouth, Lang.”

“You have? Why?” That was an incredibly naïve question. I knew why he’d been daydreaming about my mouth all too well. Sully looked like he was glad I’d asked, though.
 

“Well,” he said, taking a step forward. We were flush up against each other, so I had no choice but to take a small step back at the same time. “Your lips are rather ridiculous. They look so plump and bitable, for fuck’s sake. I’ve imagined trapping them between my teeth more times that I can remember. It’s made staying mad at you really fucking difficult. And just so you know, Lang, every time you lick your lips, every time that tongue of yours darts out of your perfectly formed mouth, I love to imagine what it would feel like to have that tongue of yours licking at the head of my dick. It drives me crazy.”

I couldn’t believe he just came out and said that so easily. Will and I never spoke about sex. We tried talking dirty to each other a couple of times, but he said it made him feel shitty. Disgusting, even. He felt like he was taking advantage of me.
 

Will was the most vanilla guy, in and out of the bedroom, and I already knew deep in my bones that Sully was the polar opposite. He was mint and strawberry, chocolate and pistachio all rolled into one. Where Will was cool as ice, Sully was blazing fire. Where Will was reserved, always too worried about what the neighbors might think, Sully was fiercely determined to lay claim to whatever he wanted, and screw anybody else of what they thought.
 

He tangled his fingers up in my hair, twisting it into a messy knot at the nape of my neck, then gently pulling on it, tilting my head back.
 

“And this?” he said, slowly tracing the index finger of his free hand down the line of my throat. “Your neck, Lang. Fuck. You have the sexiest neck.”

“Necks aren’t sexy,” I countered, trying to ignore the erratic tattoo of my heart as it stumbled all over itself in my chest. Fear was bubbling up inside me. The way Sully was handling me was more than sexual; it was vital. My body was humming at his touch, filled with electricity, and every time he grazed his mouth against mine I felt myself soaring higher and higher away from reality.
 

I wanted him. He wanted me, too—that was very obvious, given the rock hard erection I could feel pressing into my lower stomach. But this was such a terrible idea. A terrible, terrible idea.
 

Sully was Connor and Amie’s uncle. He was crazy, as far as I could tell, and he wanted nothing to do with his brother’s kids. I shouldn’t want
him
. I
couldn’t
. Pulling myself away, I gasped in a deep breath, already hating myself. I was balancing on a knife edge. The right look from Sully, the right word, and I would be falling back into his arms. Sure enough, when I looked up at him, the dark, brooding expression on his face was like tinder to a flame; I took three giant steps away from him, until my back hit the wall behind me.
 

“Whew. That was pretty stupid,” I said, laughing nervously. “Being locked up in this lighthouse must really be killing you, Sully. If you’re willing to make out with me to stem the boredom, then we should probably think about getting you out of the house as soon as possible.”

He was walking toward me, chin dipped down, staring at me from under those dark brows of his—Sexy. So goddamn sexy—and I couldn’t help it. Adrenalin fired through me like a bullet leaving a gun, tearing everything apart in its wake. “I’m not bored,” he said slowly, his voice low. “I haven’t been bored for a single second in your company, Lang. From day one, you’ve intrigued me.”

“Harassed you. I’ve
harassed
you. You said it yourself.” I was looking over his shoulder, trying to figure out how to slip by him, across the room and out the front door, but it was as if Sully could sense my thoughts. He sidestepped, shaking his head, tutting. “How long do you have left on the island, Lang?” he asked.
 

“Three and a half months.” I should have stammered. My speech always let me down when I was nervous, and right now I was terrified. I should have been tripping up over my own tongue at every turn, and yet I somehow got the words out in one go.

“Three and a half months. Right. So, do you think we should really be wasting any more of the little time we could be spending together?”

Shock.
 

I was in shock.
 

Sully looked serious. The intensity pouring off him had me reaching for the wall behind me, trying to make sure I didn’t slide down it and collapse into a pool onto the floor. “You know us spending time together in
that
way isn’t a smart move. On my part, or on yours. You’re right. Three and a half months is such a short amount of time—”

“It’s enough time to get to know each other.”