In The Arms of a Donovan: A Sexy BBW Billionaire Family Series Romance (The Donovans Book 13) (8 page)

It just…was. The lack of words to describe it was telling, but Amber didn’t want to think about it any longer. She didn’t want to give more credence to this experience than it was, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t help wanting this Donovan man again and again.

Thank goodness he was down with obliging her, over and over.

#

The next three days went by way too quickly.

Brandon thought about all the fun he and Amber had managed to have between their meetings and professional commitments. They’d gone scuba diving in Puerto Rico and thoroughly enjoyed the aqua park and an adrenaline coastal tour in Haiti. They’d laughed and sampled the local cuisine during the day and made love at night. Amber had only returned to her cabin to get clothes on a daily basis, but each night she’d shared Brandon’s bed. He wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Should he be nervous? Excited? Confused?

None of the above. Brandon was, as always, simply going with the flow. He hadn’t planned for anything like this to happen so there wasn’t any use in mapping where it would go from here. Right?

Closing his tablet because he wasn’t concentrating on any of the reports he’d pulled up, he sat back on the couch in the sitting area of his cabin and stared straight ahead to where the television was. In three days he had not checked any of his email messages. He hadn’t wanted any bad news. It was selfish, Brandon wholeheartedly admitted, but he’d wanted the time with Amber. He’d wanted to be uninterrupted for as long as he possibly could. They would disembark in Ft. Lauderdale tomorrow and then Brandon would fly back to Houston. When would he see Amber again?

The knock at his door interrupted those thoughts. Dropping the tablet on the chair Brandon got up and opened the door, smiling as he saw her standing there, wearing a black and white polka dot bathing suit with red straps at her neck and a see-through jacket. The jacket hid nothing and as he looked down to see her toes smiling up at him through the red flip flops she wore, Brandon couldn’t help but grin.

“You ready?” Amber asked with that smile that he’d grown much too used to seeing.

“Ah, just about,” he said, looking down to see that he did at least have on his swim trunks.

He still needed shoes and Brandon quickly turned around and walked towards where he’d left them yesterday when they’d come from the pool.

“This evening swim was your idea, remember,” she told him as she came into the cabin. “I was down for going to the movie night. But noooooo, you didn’t want to see
The Notebook
. Chicken,” she called him when he’d looked over to her.

“I’m not a chicken. I just don’t get why some guy and girl are kissing in the rain when there are ample houses and cars, etc. It’s just silly,” he told her.

“
The Notebook
is
not
silly!” she defended adamantly.

They’d had this argument just a couple of hours ago when they’d gone to dinner and then did some last minute shopping on the ship. He’d made the mistake of asking what she wanted to do tonight and then had shot down her suggestion. Brandon didn’t think he’d ever make that mistake again, because she clearly had not liked it.

“Okay, that’s fair. I cannot say it’s a bad or silly movie because I haven’t seen it,” he told her.

“Or because you don’t have any taste in movies,” she said with a shrug. “Either or.”

Brandon shook his head, unable to find a real reason to be angry with her.

“If you want to see the movie, we can go,” he finally conceded, wondering where that concession had actually come from.

“Nope,” she answered immediately. “I’m all dressed up for swimming now.”

He almost chuckled at her comment, but she’d lifted her arms and did a slow turn that gave him an unfettered view of every curve he’d become acquainted with over the last few days. His body, as it had been doing since meeting her, responded immediately.

“Do that again,” he told her.

She was about to until she looked down, probably saw his burgeoning arousal and refused.

“Nope,” she told him. “Get your room key and let’s go.”

Brandon smiled as he followed her out the door, realizing again that he really enjoyed being with her.

Tonight, they returned to the Solarium Pool which was located at the front of the ship. They’d discovered this pool for those sixteen and older on day number 4 of their cruise. Amber had been elated that there would be no more games of “It” to be played, at least that’s what she’d thought. However, it had seemed that adults liked to play the game as well and Brandon couldn’t resist starting the game for old times’ sake. She’d laughed a lot that day, swatting him playfully in the water. This go round, they both seemed in a less playful mood as they arrived, dropping the towels they’d picked up on the way in onto two cushioned lounge chairs.

There was a retractable roof in this area and since it was later in the evening, it had been closed. This made the space more humid, but Brandon didn’t mind as he stepped into the water behind Amber. She moved in front of him, spanning her arms out as she walked to deeper parts of the water. At five feet nine inches tall she rarely went past the five feet mark in the pool unless she was coerced by him and what she called his ‘water antics’. Tonight, she went a little further and Brandon, standing at six feet five inches tall, followed.

“It’s quiet out here tonight,” she said as she turned when the water was just covering her breasts.

“It is,” Brandon said moving closer, wrapping his arm around her waist and holding her against him. “I like it that way.”

Her hands went to his shoulders, her legs brushing over his as she leaned into him. “You sure about that? I know how you love playing in the pool.”

Brandon grinned. “It’s an old habit. My brother and I loved torturing my sister in the water. Especially when she got to the age where she didn’t want her hair or make-up messed up.”

“So cruel,” she said with a shake of her head.

They stayed close together, standing in the water, her back now against the side of the pool as they’d moved to an end where no one else was swimming. There were only about five or six other people in this area tonight, which made it sort of semi-private.

“This time tomorrow I’ll be back in Chicago,” she said after a few moments of silence between them. “Where will you be?”

She’d wrapped her legs around his, holding him close. Brandon liked that feeling, the one where he couldn’t get away from her.

“In Houston,” he answered.

She nodded.

“The honeymoon’s over,” she added jokingly, tilting her head to the side so her hair—she’d worn it curly today—moved with her.

“Yeah,” Brandon said, unable to muster up enough joy about that to chuckle as she was doing.

In the next moments she lowered her head to his chest, then lifted up again. “It’s been really nice, Brandon. I’m glad I met you.”

He was glad he’d met her too. Very glad. He also wasn’t looking forward to tomorrow, when they would go their separate ways.

“I’m glad I met you,” he told her. “Very glad.”

She dropped her hands to the water and then lifted them again, letting droplets from her fingers fall over his shoulders and down his arms.

“I can visit you in Chicago,” he said because the thought of never seeing her again wasn’t sitting well with him.

In fact, it felt like someone had dropped a weight on his chest and dared him to keep moving.

“That would be nice,” she told him. “If you can manage. I know you’ll probably have lots of work to catch up on. Me, I’ll have a few weeks off after this.”

“You’re officially turning over the reins to another spokesperson?”

“No. Not just yet,” she said with a shake of her head. “I’ll meet with the board in a few weeks and we’ll discuss what, if any, events are scheduled in the U.S. The Foundation has headquarters in New York, so I may have to go there to do some things. I still have three months left on my spokesperson contract.”

“And then what will you do?”

“Maybe more modeling or I was thinking of taking some of my earnings to start developing my own facial care products. I’m not really sure at the moment. I just want to go home, back to the familiar for a while.”

Brandon nodded. His familiar wasn’t something to look forward to, but it was something that needed to be done. These last few days it had been so easy to forget all that mess, to just push it aside and enjoy the luxuries on this ship, the great ports they’d stopped at, and her. He really enjoyed just being with her.

“You’ll do well with whatever you choose,” he said because it sounded like the right thing.

He should be encouraging her future goals, caring for her happiness which meant returning to Chicago, even if deep down he wished she’d get an apartment in Houston and decide to maybe work from there. It was silly, Brandon thought. It had to be. Sure, as he’d told her in the beginning, there was no timeline, no set schedule that they should follow regarding their relationship—the temporary one. But now, what about tomorrow and the next day, and the next? He wondered what the protocol was for that.

“We should make our last night count,” she said cupping his face in her hands. “You know, something that we’ll remember when it’s over.”

He leaned into her hand, loving the warmth that spread through his body at her touch. “Is that what you want?” he asked her. “For it to be over tomorrow when we walk off this ship?”

She stared at him for what seemed like endless moments, until finally she shook her head. “I want the here and now,” she told him. “I want what we can have right at this moment, because that’s all that’s promised to us.”

He didn’t like those words and yet, he respected them. There was truth to them, even if he wanted to alter that truth. Only Brandon didn’t know how. Relationships weren’t his thing. No matter how many unions he’d watched within his family and how many nights he’d wondered if he would have something even remotely similar, he’d never actually thought it would happen. Now, he didn’t know how to feel about her, or about them. So he did what he knew, and what he was absolutely certain he needed to do.

He kissed her.

A slow and drugging kiss that had her sighing and wrapping her arms around his neck. He pressed into her, loving the feel of her in his arms, the taste of her in his mouth. His hands spanned her back beneath the water as she tilted her head so that the kiss could go deeper. Brandon loved kissing her, since the first peck in another pool, he’d loved the feel of her lips on his. He couldn’t pull away. His hands slipped to her bottom then, kneading the plump globes he’d become used to touching. She flattened her hands at the back of his head, holding him steady there.

Brandon’s body had already been warm with the nearness of her, now he grew hard with need.  Damn, he wished they were back in his cabin, that instead of their semi-private circumstances, they could be completely alone. Even with that in mind, Brandon could not pull away from her. What he did do was slip his fingers beneath the rim of her bathing suit, feeling her smoot silky wet skin beneath his touch. One hand came around her thigh, still under her bathing suit, until he touched the plump folds of her vagina. She gasped, her eyes fluttering open as she looked at him.

Their lips were inches apart, their hearts beating a rapid and almost synchronized rhythm. “Let’s have the here and now,” he whispered. “I promise you it’ll be good.”

She blinked as he moved his fingers between her slit, touching the already tight bud of her clitoris.

“I don’t need promises, Brandon, so please don’t make them. This way I won’t have to be disappointed when you break them.”

Brandon went completely still. He didn’t know what to say to that. In the end, he didn’t have to say anything. Amber kissed him again, thrusting herself against his hand. There was a moment when Brandon still did not respond. There were words he knew that should come, something that should make sense of this scenario, but for the life of him he couldn’t figure it out. Instead, he moved. He circled a finger around her clit as his tongue delved deep into her mouth. He let her hold him even closer to her as another finger dipped into her moist center. Her nails dug into his back and Brandon kept his eyes closed and his thoughts in check. He pumped two fingers in and out of her now, moving quickly to match the beating of their hearts. She nipped his lips with her teeth, kept her legs wrapped tightly around his waist and with her inner muscles sucked his fingers deeper inside until she couldn’t hold out any longer, until all she could whisper was his name.

He held her tightly as her body trembled and then relaxed in his arms. Reluctantly pulling his hand out of her he wrapped his other arm around her and simply stood there in the water, now as if no one else was there with them. She’d lowered her head to his chest so that he couldn’t see her face. They did not move or speak for what seemed like an eternity. Then, Amber moved first. She took him by the hand and led them out of the pool. They collected their things and walked back to his room, where after drying off and stripping out of their swim clothes they lay in the bed naked and cuddling throughout the night.

#

In the morning, just as sounds of the ship coming into dock awakened Brandon, he rolled over and reached for her. His eyes opened quickly at the feeling of nothingness there. Amber was gone.