Crush on You (20 page)

The idea of holding back, going slow, torturing her with bliss was at the forefront of his mind, but when she lifted her knees to slide her satiny inner thighs around his hips, impulse took over and he thrust to the hilt. Rocked back. Thrust again.

This wasn’t going to last as long as he’d dreamed. But he wasn’t going down alone, he promised himself. The tension in her body beneath his told him she was getting close, too.

He focused on her face, determined to see and hear her break. Their gazes met, held, and he slid one hand between their bodies to fondle her clitoris in time with each stroke into her clasping, hot hold.

Her muscles gripped him tighter. Her body shook with the most subtle of tremors.

Almost there . . . almost there, he chanted to himself, determined that Mr. Not Nice Guy would bear witness to her sexual explosion. One of her small hands lifted from the mattress. It cupped his ass.

Pleasure shot like a starburst from the touch. His rhythm hitched, then restarted with a frenzy, feeling the frantic onset of orgasm just in the offing.

Hold on . . . hold on . . .

Hold . . .

Her fingers squeezed, and she was going over, her inner muscles clutching his cock, the goodness of it launching his own orgasm.

As the bliss hit, Penn’s eyes squeezed closed and his ears rang with only the sounds of his own loud groans of release.

He collapsed to the pillow beside her. Minutes passed before he had the strength to open his eyes.

Only to find the Nun of Napa staring back at him, all signs of stupendous orgasm already absent from her face. “Wow,” she remarked, “You’re, um, loud.”

A screamer, she meant. Oh, hell, the screamer was him.

Insistent raps pulled Alessandra out of the depths of sleep. “Allie,” her sister Stevie’s voice called from the other side of her bedroom door. “Are you decent?”

Hmm, she mused as drowsy memories of the night before flooded her mind. Was what she’d done last night with Penn “decent”? But before she could answer, her sisters came barreling through the now-open doorway.

“Hey,” she protested, yanking the covers to the neckline of her old cotton nightgown with one hand while the other swept the empty space beside hers, assuring herself he was gone.

“Hey, what?” Giuliana asked, crossing to the windows to pull up the shade.

Alessandra squinted as pale morning light brightened the room. That’s when she saw it, Penn’s T-shirt bunched on the floor on the far side of the bed. If her sisters realized what had happened last night, how would she explain it to them?

They’d want answers besides “I was horny and couldn’t help myself.”

Like always with him, it had felt beyond her control from his first touch. They kept colliding like magnets, opposites attracting, the small-town girl body-slamming with the big-city bad boy. Inevitable and hard to regret, though now that she was awake there was a vague disquiet hanging over her head.

“Coffee?” Stevie asked, then lifted Alessandra’s limp hand and wrapped her fingers around a cardboard cup.

“You brought me coffee,” she exclaimed, bringing it to her mouth. Her first sip brought more clarity to her brain and she looked at her sisters with suspicion. “You brought me coffee . . . why?”

Stevie shrugged. “I have some clients to pick up out this way. But since the tasting rooms don’t open until 10:30 at the earliest, I thought I’d kill some time with you.”

Alessandra switched her gaze to her oldest sister. Giuliana shrugged, too. “Um, I work here, remember?” Her job was at the winery offices, where she’d taken over the administrative tasks that had been their father’s, though she lived in town instead of at their family home.

“Your room is just down the hall,” Alessandra felt compelled to mention.

Stevie snorted. “Rapunzel’s afraid of what—who—might come crawling through her window.”

Alessandra blinked. “Huh?”

The middle Baci sister was looking in Giuliana’s direction, while Giuliana herself was playing with the comb and brush set on the dresser, as if she wasn’t the subject of the conversation. “Allie,” Stevie said, “haven’t you ever wondered what wore that path between our house and the Bennetts’?”

“I know what wore that path,” Alessandra retorted. “Liam and Jules . . . oh.”
Oh
.

At only fourteen when her oldest sister swore eternal enmity on Liam Bennett, Alessandra had never known what had seeded such passion. And now she realized that it was . . . passion. That meant Giuliana herself had only been eighteen, but you didn’t need to tell Alessandra about her sister’s ability to hold a grudge—or about the intensity of first love.

“Oh,” she said again.

“You can’t trust them,” Giuliana pronounced.

Bennetts? Men in general?

“We have to remember that, Allie,” she continued. “That’s why I came this morning. To warn you not to get your hopes up.”

“About Penn?” Alessandra scooted higher on the pillows. “Don’t worry, I have no expectations whatsoever about him.” She tried pushing away the hovering uneasiness. No way could he claim a heart as hard and small as hers.

Frowning, Stevie wandered toward the window. “He’s not going to call his friend from
Wedding Fever
?”

“Of course he’s going to call—” Alessandra broke off, realizing she’d been having a different discussion. She waved her hand to erase the past few sentences. “Let’s start over. I’m certain Penn can get Tanti Baci on that show. He’d already contacted his friend when he told us about it last night.”

Giuliana didn’t look placated. “Still . . .”

“Hey.” Stevie’s attention was riveted by the view outside. “Come look at this.”

Eager to move on to something new, Alessandra climbed from the covers. Her foot brushed cotton as she crossed the floor, and she took the opportunity to swipe up Penn’s shirt and hold it to her chest. Inside out, the telling logo was hidden, but she could still smell him on it.

Her nipples tightened as she clutched it closer to her body. Memories of their encounter flowered in her head. His strong shoulders under her hands. The thrust of his hips. The hot suction of his mouth on her breast.

Stevie’s voice interrupted the replay. “I forget about this sometimes.”

Alessandra shook her head to clear her thoughts, then joined her sisters at the window. Beyond the glass, it was nothing special. At least not anything she couldn’t see any morning she chose. The sun was just cresting the eastern mountains. Their ragged outline was etched in gold and that same warm light infused the fog with tawny sparkles that looked like champagne bubbles rising from the rows of leafy grapevines. A view that had been in the family for over one hundred years.

Her arms tightened on Penn’s shirt. Thanks to him, they had a shot at keeping the legacy alive. What was there to worry about when she was better off this morning than any other morning since their father died? All because of one arrogant, sexy, confident, charming man.

No wonder she couldn’t think of him without a thrill goosing her stomach. Without a smile playing at her mouth. It shouldn’t be such a surprise that she had a little crush on the man.

Was that the source of her uneasiness? She’d never had a crush before. When other girls were swooning over a boy band or their best friend’s big brother, she’d been in love with Tommy . . . and Tommy had loved her back. With a crush, though, there was no requisite for reciprocal feelings.

And Penn was too cool to crush.

Stevie and Giuliana were staring at her. “What?” she said.

“Why are you mumbling about the crush?” Stevie asked. “We’re not even to harvest yet.”

“Uh . . . I know,” she answered, casting about for some way to put them off the scent. “I was, uh, just thinking about . . . thinking about when we were kids. When Papa would put grapes in our little play pool and let us stomp them.”

Giuliana laughed. “Mom used to scold about our stained feet, but she never insisted that we stop.”

Alessandra had forgotten that. The memory rose in her mind, the squishy, warm feel of ripe grapes between her toes, the pungent, sugary smell of the split fruit, the firm grasp of her mother’s hand as she kept her steady. Their handsome, dark-haired father had stood nearby, exhorting his girls to dance like gypsies in order to add magic to the flavor of the grapes.

The magic hadn’t been in the dance, but in that moment of togetherness. All the moments of togetherness their family and their family’s ancestors had experienced at Tanti Baci. She draped Penn’s shirt over her shoulder and wrapped an arm around each of her sisters. “I couldn’t bear to lose any of this,” she said. She couldn’t bear to lose one square foot of where all that had happened. Where her heart had once been so full.

If Penn’s plan worked, she wouldn’t have to.

At the thought, the sun breached the mountaintops and its bright rays burned away the last of the lingering fog. Her apprehension evaporated with it. The sun was out early today, and it would bring sweetness to the fruit just as her days ahead looked to be very sweet, too.

Maybe she was crushing a little on Penn, but she also believed in him—more than she’d believed in anything in a very long time. Her hold on her sisters tightened. “It’s going to be okay,” she said, vehement. “I think it’s going to turn out all right.”

The phone on her bedside pealed. All three sisters turned in its direction, but Alessandra reached it first. The voice on the other end made her jump, but what Penn said before he hung up had her leaping for the bedroom door.

She glanced over her shoulder at her sisters. “Something happened at the cottage.”

Both hands occupied with cardboard cups of steaming coffee, Gil used his elbow to push open the door to the Wagon Train, one of Clare’s small chain of boutiques located throughout the wine country. Instead of a bell, the opening notes of the
Star Trek
theme signaled his entry. Clare looked up from where she stood at the back of the shop, unpacking new inventory.

He stopped, taking in her slender form in denim overalls and a colorfully embroidered white top. She looked a little funky and a lot geeky, surrounded as she was by the collectibles that were sold in her stores named for Gene Roddenberry’s original pitch of the classic
Star Trek
series—“A Wagon Train to the Stars.” Action figures, chess sets, plates, playing cards, posters, glassware, all devoted to pop culture icons such as
Star Trek
,
Star Wars
, and
Batman
filled the shelves. New to the scene, but with its own entire corner, was memorabilia from the
Twilight
books and movies. It looked like that sparkly Edward was going to make Gil’s best friend a boatload of money in lunchboxes alone.

She smiled, clearly happy to see him, and he took that in, too, his heart aching because it might be the last sight he’d have of it for a while.

Last night he’d walked away from Clare, keeping his secrets as well as those of her fiancé.

This morning he was walking back to her, determined to tell the bride-to-be that the man she was planning to marry was cheating on her. His own confession would wait, he’d decided, until their world re-steadied after that explosion.

“What are you doing here?” she asked as he handed her a soy latte.

He ducked the question by taking a sip of his own cup of house blend, no sugar, because it was certain to be a dark and bitter day. “I didn’t expect your front door to be open.”

She shrugged. “I couldn’t sleep, so I came in early and did all my backroom chores. Shelves need stocking next, which I won’t complain about, considering the slow economy.”

Money concerns had hit the wine country just like everywhere else, but Clare’s business was surviving better than many. Tourists from the Silicon Valley—a staple of the wine country clientele—loved their geek-souvenirs, and if they could afford a weekend away to taste wines and buy bottles that started at twenty dollars a pop and skyrocketed from there, they had the ready cash for their Barbie and Ken
Star Trek
gift set, official Yoda light saber, or sparkly Edward thermos—though what women saw in a guy who drank blood, he just didn’t get.