Caught in the Glow (The Glower Chronicles Book 1) (14 page)

My legs flexed against his as I sank deeper into his lap, where the hardness that pressed against me told me just how much he wanted this too. He brought one hand behind me, holding me even more firmly against him while his other hand continued to flick and fondle in its delicate torture. I arched into him and we both gasped.

“I love the sounds you make,” he whispered, his fingers tracing down my thigh and back up again, and without intending to I cast my gaze toward the terrace wall. Toward the spot where I’d seen him in an embrace not unlike this with the blonde who’d been here my first day.

“Avery?” Colin said, and I realized I’d tensed against him. I let out a breath and jerked my gaze away, back to the desire in his bright eyes. When I leaned in to kiss him, he caught my cheek, holding me a few inches distant.

“What is it?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing that matters.”

“It matters,” he said firmly. “I don’t want— If we’re moving too fast, if you’re not sure—”

“No,” I said, with a rasp of a laugh that must have convinced him, because his grip loosened enough that I could lean my head against his, forehead to temple. “It’s not that. It’s nothing like that.”
I’m more sure I want you than I’ve been of anything else my entire life.
If I said the thought that had actually crossed my mind, would that kill
his
wanting? Transform me into the sort of uptight, jealous girl he’d want to run from, not to?

I couldn’t screw this up. He needed
me
, at least for now.

“Avery,” he said again. I could feel his heart thumping against my hands where they’d fallen to his chest. “Please. You can tell me.”

I swallowed. “I just... I know it’s not a fair thing to think, okay? And it’s not as if I’m totally inexperienced. But I—I’ve never almost had sex in a recording studio, or had sex in a pool, or— It’s new, and I
like
it, but you, and however many other girls there’ve been… It seems like this must be the same old thing for you.”

Colin’s hand stilled where he’d been stroking my hair. I closed my eyes, abruptly afraid that he was going to push me off him.

Instead he pulled me to him, wrapping his arms around me and conforming my body to his in an embrace that felt oddly chaste given what we’d just been doing—and yet at the same time more intimate than any we’d shared before.

“It’s different,” he said quietly by my ear. “It’s new for me because I’ve never been with you.”

Those words weren’t enough to erase my unease completely. But they were something, and it wasn’t as if I actually wanted to stop. I shifted back to find his lips with mine, but he cupped my face first, kissing my forehead, the tip of my nose, one cheek and then the other, before he finally met my mouth with his. I kissed him hard, my arms tight around him, but nothing I did could hold back the sensation of falling.

Just let this not be the last time,
I thought.
Let it not end here. That’s all I ask.

For several minutes, we just kissed—harder, softer, tongues teasing in and out as the heat built back up between us—until I was pressing into him again, those two layers of fabric the worst impediment I could imagine. Colin’s hand edged along my bathing suit bottom between us, his thumb dipping lower and lower until it pressed against the most sensitive point of my core. I cried out, my hips canting against his, and he groaned. He circled that point with steady strokes, radiating pleasure through me until I was throbbing with it. My head spun.

“Please,” I whimpered, not caring how I sounded.

Colin groaned again and kissed me as he slid the bottoms down, over the curve of my thighs. The water tickling between my legs sent a fresh pulse of pleasure through me. He set his hand there, the heel of his hand taking up that gentle circling, his fingers stroking lower.

“We’re not actually going to have sex in the pool,” he murmured. “Chlorine and condoms—bad mix. But I’ll be damned if I’m stopping now. I’m going to make you feel better than any guy has in your life.”

He already had, but I wasn’t going to say that. I was hardly capable of speech. I moaned and swayed against him as he glided his fingers across my opening.

“Do you want to feel me inside you?” Colin said, and a laugh broke from my throat so tight it was almost a sob.

“Yes,” I said. “God, yes.”

He penetrated me as I gasped out the second assent, one of those skilled fingers sliding in and up until it found a tender spot inside that brought a fresh moan to my lips. I rocked against his hand, any shred of self-control I’d possessed disintegrating. He ran his fingertip over that spot again and again, the heel of his hand never ceasing its work without. I clutched his shoulders, his back, unable to do more than whimper a plea for release as tremors rippled from my core.

“Come for me, Avery,” Colin said, low and ragged. He eased a second finger in to join the first. “Let me see you let go. Please.”

The hunger in his voice tipped me over the edge. I cried out, my hips clenching as a final wave of bliss surged through me, trembling from my core down to my toes and up through my chest to tingle across my scalp. Stars danced behind my eyes.

As the ripples carried through me with the final thrusts of Colin’s fingers, I melted against him, boneless in his embrace. The water lapped at my shoulders. He kissed me roughly as he withdrew his hand, gathering me against him. I leaned into him, my breaths shuddering through me, as those same fingers traced spirals over my spine.

“Good?” he said, and I found I had regained myself enough to chuckle.

“The best,” I said, and his arms tightened around me. As I came back to myself, it occurred to me that he couldn’t say the same.

I wasn’t accepting that.

I tugged my bathing suit bottom back up, mostly because that was easier than squirming the rest of the way out of it, and settled over Colin again. Holding his gaze, I lay my fingers against his breastbone and trailed them down over the dark curls on his chest and stomach to the hard length of him still encased in his swim trunks.

“Your turn,” I murmured.

As I closed my hand around him, his head tilted back with a choked sound, his eyelids fluttering to half-mast. I kissed his throat as I stroked him through the fabric of his trunks. Then, impatient with the obstruction, I yanked them down his hips to free him. His breaths turned shallow as I explored the silky hardness in my grasp, my thumb flicking over the tip and back again. He twitched beneath me at the gesture and arched his hips into my touch. Then he pulled my head back to his, kissing me with an edge of teeth against my lips, devouring my mouth.

I wrapped my fingers around him, finding a rhythm, shivering as I imagined that hardness inside me. “Tell me what you need,” I said, grazing my lips along his jaw.

“Just like that,” Colin muttered. “So good, Avery. God.”

At another twitch, I firmed my grip, and the guttural sound that escaped him told me I’d taken the right tack. “Don’t stop,” he said in a strangled voice. “Almost. Ah. Faster. Yes.”

As I sped up my rhythm, a moan broke from his lips and his hips spasmed beneath me. The flesh in my grasp quivered and pulsed. I kept going, slowing, gentling, but not letting him go, as the haze of his release dissipated into the water.

Colin closed his hand over mine, drawing it back to his face. He kissed my palm and adjusted me against him so our bodies connected perfectly. As if we’d never been meant to fit anywhere else. It was dizzying and lovely, and I never wanted to let him go.

I closed my eyes with my head bent next to his and squeezed away my tears.

12.

I
’d done a decent job of keeping my worries at bay the next morning, coasting on the good vibes from yesterday’s encounter and the knowledge that Colin was heading back to the studio without a fuss. But I couldn’t help noticing the way his gaze skimmed the sidewalk outside the condo building as he pulled the Audi out of the parking garage onto the road. The way his brow knit as if he were puzzled to find it bare.

My gut twisted. I could only think of one person he might have been expecting to see there: our red-headed friend. He’d seemed warm enough with me this morning, smiling so wide it sent a flutter through my chest when we’d met in the kitchen, stealing a couple kisses as we both ran around getting ready to leave, resting his hand on my back as the elevator had carried us down. Was he already thinking ahead to his next fling?

“Looking for someone?” I made myself ask, keeping my tone casual.

“Traffic seems lighter than usual,” he said, which wasn’t really an answer. Then he drove around the corner and left the building and the Glower’s recent haunt behind.

When we pulled into the studio parking lot, Colin glanced up at the building with a clenching of his jaw. We had more immediate problems.

I took his hand as he raised it from the gearshift. “Take it easy, all right?” I said. “Whatever you record today is going to be great, because you’re great at what you do, and if it isn’t quite great enough, you can fiddle with it later all you want.”

His lips curled up, and he lifted his other hand to brush his thumb over my cheek. “Orders received, boss,” he said teasingly.

As he leaned in to kiss me, the producer stepped past the main doors and turned our way. I stiffened, instinctively pulling back. My heart was suddenly racing. If people found out just how close Colin and I had gotten, if news traveled back to the wrong person at the label or at the Society, it was possible that alone would get me pulled off this job.

Colin frowned. He followed my gaze and dropped his hand from my face. “Right. Time to get to work!” he said with a cheer that sounded forced.

“Colin,” I said, and didn’t know how to continue.

“I get it,” he said. “Professional appearances and all that.” He shoved open the car door and stood up with a jerk.

Despite that, the day seemed to go well enough. Colin put his smile back on as he greeted the producer. In the live room, he bantered with the rest of the band and the sound engineer, gamely moved from one verse to the next even though I could tell he wasn’t totally pleased with the vocals, and even diffused a fight that started brewing between Marcy and Joel. Still, the whole time I never quite relaxed. Maybe because I wasn’t convinced
he’d
actually relaxed. He was putting on a good front, sure, there was something just a touch off in his behavior—a distant flavor to his calm that felt somehow false, as if he were maintaining it only by keeping part of his mind distracted. Distracted with what, I had no clue.

That uncertainty sat heavy inside me, distracting
me
enough that I momentarily forgot the one rule Sterling had drilled into me the other day.
Don’t let him out of your sight.
When we were heading out in the late afternoon, Colin paused with his hand on the outer door and asked if I could grab the bag of picks he thought he’d left behind, and I went automatically. It was a little favor, one small thing I could offer him unreservedly.

I’d spent a couple minutes poking around the iso rooms when Joel asked me what I was looking for and then commented, “I don’t think he brought his own today. He borrowed one of Kevin’s picks.”

My stomach plummeted. With a hasty, “Thanks!” I bolted for the door.

I should have realized. I should have known Colin wouldn’t have asked me to leave him on his own, even for a minute, over something that small. Not unless he had an ulterior motive.

I burst past the outer door and halted as my breath caught up with me. The stutter of my pulse settled, leaving only a dull hum of unease. Colin was still in sight, standing a few paces from the door and talking with a woman who was definitely not a groupie, at least not one like any I’d seen before. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, with chocolate-brown hair in a blunt bob that cut across her cheeks and a loose plaid shirt tucked into skinny jeans that ended in a pair of worn work boots.

And her tan skin sparkled in the sunlight with an effervescence no cosmetics could have produced.

“It’s been a while since I saw an up-and-comer who impressed me,” she was saying, her thumbs hooked casually in her belt loops. “We like to add a little fresh blood to the mix when we can. We jam together once or twice a week, usually.”

“What’s going on?” I asked, ambling over to rejoin Colin. I wanted to grasp his hand, to tug his attention to me, but he had both slung in his pockets out of reach. His eyes stayed on the Glower.

“Natalie saw me play at the Catacomber a few weeks back,” he said. “She wanted to invite me to come play with her and a few indie folks she knows.”

“Nothing official,” “Natalie” put in. “Just a little friendly sharing of ideas and inspiration. We all vibe off each other and come away with something better.”

She smiled then, thin and bright, and my gut pinched. It was the same one—the same Glower as before, the redhead, the strawberry blonde—just another new look. I couldn’t have proven it, but I felt it right through to my bones.

Had she been able to sense she needed to change her strategy from a distance? Or had she gotten close enough to him to use her Glower sensitivity sometime before today without me noticing? She’d obviously known to take a different approach before she’d arrived here this afternoon.

If she’d shown up ready to fawn over him with sexual overtures, I could have hoped simply walking over would have blocked her gambit. But I’d been encouraging Colin to find a new family for himself in the community just last night. How could I shut her overture down in a way he’d accept? How could I
keep
it shut down? I could offer him my body, my heart, everything I had in me, but I couldn’t be more than one person—a person who wasn’t even part of the music scene anymore.

Joel and Kevin wandered out, glancing at us curiously as they headed to the parking lot. “In fact,” the Glower went on, tapping her hip, “we’re getting together tonight, if you want to stop by and test the waters.” She tugged out a business card and handed it to Colin. “That’s the space we use. Just buzz up.”