Legal Heirs - Box Set Edition: Books 5-8 (Surrendering Charlotte Chronicles) (30 page)

“Hadley,” he whispered, and his voice was a groan of longing.

She wanted to say his name but his mouth was so hot and delicious against hers, his tongue exploring and causing an exquisite tension to build so that her body screamed for release.
Let him pull me to the ground right here and now,
she thought and hoped
, let him do all the things my body has been craving, let him be the first, let me feel the extraordinary pleasure of him inside me.
Holden, Holden, Holden
, her mind reeled with the feel and smell and taste of him, he was branded onto her heart, she knew that for sure.

“Love,” she said, when he finally moved his mouth from her lips to her hair. “Love,” she said, finishing the sentence she had started. “I’m never falling in love.”

“Then you shouldn’t be playing doctor with a cabana boy from the Beach Club,” he said, inhaling the intoxicating scent of her hair before he stepped back and looked into her eyes. His hands had rested for a brief moment on her sweet little ass and just as he had thought, it was a shockingly perfect fit. He wondered what else might be such a luxuriously exquisite fit, and he turned his back to her so that she wouldn’t see his throbbing erection.

“You’re a complete snob, you don’t know anything about him except that he has to work for a living,” she said bluntly, still reeling from the kiss they’d shared. Her mind was filled with him, overflowing with need that her body echoed, but who was he to have any say in what she did or who she did it with. “You’re such a hypocrite, you and Atticus sleep with girls and toss them aside like used Kleenex. What I do with my body is none of your damned concern,” she spat out, and started to walk away from him.

He caught her arm and pulled her hard against him,
let her feel me
, he decided,
let me be the one to show her how love works between a man and a woman
. His hands tangled in her hair as he stared down at her beautiful face all lit up in the moonlight. “What do I know about,
Angus
? Nothing, but even in the dark I could see that you didn’t want his hands on you. So maybe I’m just concerned for a girl who’s so eager to give herself to a man she barely knows and doesn’t really like. Did you intend to use protection or was this just a spontaneous moment when you were overcome by passion? Did you believe the towel boy really meant enough to you that you wanted to have sex with him? Because truthfully Hadley, you don’t seem like a one night stand kind of girl.”

“I… don’t know, I don’t know… anyway, like I said, it’s none of your business. Who are you, my keeper? I thought… I mean… isn’t that my brother’s job,” she said, and her voice sounded soft like a caress.

“I’m your brother’s brother,” he said, and his lips brushed hers once again, “but I’m not
your
brother, Hadley, far from it.” He kissed her then and she felt her strength to fight him melt away,
what was this delicious and unexpected power he had to reduce her to a weak, mindless creature,
she wondered.

“I need, I want…” she whispered and his lips moved to her neck and then down to graze her breasts, sending shock waves straight to her sex that took her breath away.

“You need me,” he said. “You want me, and believe me, I am
not
supposed to want you the way I do. But I do, Hadley, so I’ll risk everything.” He took her hand and led her from the pavilion across the starlit lawn to the house that belonged to him and his sister.

She followed willingly, eagerly, and they stopped here and there along the way simply to embrace and feel the wild beating of their hearts, one against the other. The night seemed magical and they wouldn’t have been surprised to look up at the sheltering sky to see their names spelled out in the stars. It was a miraculous thing, the way it felt for them to be together. It didn’t matter how they had arrived at that place in time, or how they had come to know each other. It didn’t matter at all that they had a brother in common, or that his father had lived his life haunted by one woman, and that woman, the elusive love of his father’s life, was her mother.

He led her up the wide front steps of the low-country mansion, and he gave a dismissive nod to Cruz De Leon, his body guard, who paced the porch quietly in the dark, ever watchful.

“Scary man,” she said as they climbed the curving staircase to his bedroom.

“He’s harmless, I’m not,” he said as soon as the door to his bedroom closed and he pressed her back against it with his lips hot and insistent against her neck. Her hands slid under his t-shirt as if it was something she’d done a million times, but this was her first time to touch a man with such passion raging in every cell of her body. Her heart was in her throat as she realized that what she had planned as a night of going through the motions of sex, would now be something mind blowing and satisfying. It was going to be something unforgettable, something that mattered; something she desperately wanted.

He pulled off the shirt as she lifted it to expose his smoothly muscled chest and hard rippled stomach. His hands made short work of the tiny buttons on her shirt, unzipped her shorts and slid down to the silky wet crotch of her panties. “Fuck, you are so hot!” he whispered against her lips as her arms circled his neck and she clung to him with moans of shocked pleasure at the unfamiliar feel of a man’s touch. He picked her up quickly and laid her gently on the tall bed, her hands shook wildly as she fumbled at the top button of his jeans. He finished the job for her, stepping out of his jeans and kicking them aside before lying down beside her. He gathered her against him with a tenderness that surprised them both, and she turned her face up to his and they lay that way, unmoving, gazing into each other’s eyes with so much more than lust, and desire, and heat.

“Holden?” his father’s voice called through the closed door, followed by light knocking. “Holden, we need to talk, son.”

Holden closed his eyes and cursed, partly because the last thing he wanted at that moment was to have a heart to heart with his dad. But mainly because he wanted to savor the memory of Hadley’s beautifully expectant face before they made love.

“Hang on, I’ll be right out,” he called over his shoulder to his father, and he kissed Hadley again, long and deep, then covered her with the duvet before he stood and pulled on his jeans. “I’ll be right back, don’t move,” he said and flashed his killer smile, and still his eyes were warm and held the promise of something more, something wonderful to come.

“Dad, what’s up?” Holden said, stepping outside onto the stair landing as he zipped and buttoned his jeans and stood, bare-chested, hands on his hips, eye to eye with his father.

“What are you doing, Holden? That’s Atticus little sister in there, isn’t it?
Charlotte’s daughter!
You don’t need that kind of complication in your life.” Bly said, rubbing the tense spot between his eyes, as he paced the floor.

“Dad, I’m nineteen years old, my life doesn’t have complications yet,” Holden said, he was in a rush to get back to Hadley, his cock ached with the need to fill her, to make her his own. To make love for the first time in his life, not just fuck. He wanted to hold her afterward all through the night, she wasn’t like any other girl; he would never just get up and walk away from Hadley.

“She’s not one of those girls you can sleep with and toss aside, Holden. Believe me, I know. Things are good between you and Atticus, do you really want to mess that up? You know how he is about her, he’s protective as hell. Your young and she’s younger, there’s every indication she’s going to be a major film star. Can you handle that? Can you handle every man in America lusting after her? If you can, then fine, spend the rest of the summer with her, have fun for a couple of months then move on, but I don’t believe that’s how it will be,” Bly said, he looked at his son with a combination of dread and pity. Charlotte wouldn’t be his, she never had been completely, and yet she had inadvertently ensnared his heart so long ago that he couldn’t recall his life without the ache of loving and not having her. She had chosen Finn after all, and still he couldn’t let her go, he held onto hope like a drowning man holds onto a life-raft. He’d bought the properties on either side of her ancestral home on the Gulf of Mexico, and he spent his summers there staring across the broad expanse of lawn. It gave him some small version of happiness, just knowing that she was near.

“Dad, I… don’t want her to be a one night stand,” Holden said quietly, the words taking shape on his tongue just as his heart and mind realized it was true.

“That’s exactly what I mean, Holden, if you fall in love with her… there’s no guarantee she’ll love you back. Even if she does, it doesn’t mean it will be forever, take her home, please. If you feel the same way in a year or two, well then, you two can try again.”

“Why are all women compared to the one who broke your heart?” Holden was shouting suddenly, sick as he was of a life spent existing on the outskirts of his father’s love for a woman who didn’t love him back. “You once told me you couldn’t love my mother because you were happier in your selfish misery over Charlotte than loving any other woman who wasn’t her. That’s fucked up, will you ever realize that? Live a cold life with your memories if you want, but don’t put your neurotic bullshit on me. We’re nothing alike, can’t you see that?
I am not like you!
”

Bly stepped back from his son, sadness and resignation written across his face, then he turned and went into his own room and the door closed behind him with a solid thud.

The door to Holden’s bedroom opened and Hadley was dressed and slipped passed him before he could stop her.

“Don’t go, please, I’m sorry you had to hear that,” he said, moving quickly down the stairs and reaching for her.

She twisted away from his grasp, but she leaned forward and her hand stroked the strong line of his jaw. “I’m going now, you’re… remarkable, Holden, and even more than that. If I let myself, I could…. I doesn’t matter, your father’s right, the things you make me feel, the way my body wants you… we’re just starting out in life. I could get used your touch and… if you’re the first man who ever makes love to me, that would probably be the worst thing that could happen. I don’t think I would get over you. Let’s be friends, Holden, I’ll be leaving for New York soon, stay on your own beach, let’s avoid each other okay?”

“Your first?” he whispered, although she didn’t hear his words as she ran, barefooted across the dewy grass, her long glossy hair flying out behind her when she left him.

*

“Look at her flirting with that muscle-bound, empty-headed, pool attendant. There’s no way she fucked him last night, I think
you
should be Hadley’s first, break through that sickening virgin status of hers. Why are you even thinking twice about it, Holden? Please don’t make me lose faith in your powers of persuasion, dear brother. It’s common knowledge that you and Atticus consider fucking a competitive sport, now you’re going to let Atti’s little sister slip through your fingers? Why, because of some misplaced loyalty to our bastard brother?” Mia was fuming as she and Holden sat at a table overlooking the pool at the Beach Club. She’d overheard Skylar telling Ava about Hadley’s plans to have sex with the weird, but somewhat gorgeous guy at the Beach Club the night before. Why should she let an opportunity pass to get Holden to deflower Hadley, and at the same time, fuck with her half-brother’s brain, when the opportunity so readily presented itself? Atticus would totally loose it if he thought his own brother had fucked little Miss Sweet and Innocent, his precious sister. Holden left a trail of well-fucked women wherever he went anyway, so why not add her Royal Highness high-and-mighty-film-star to that sordid list?

“Shut the fuck up, Mia. Our bastard brother? Put that angry shit to bed. Atticus is the best brother we could hope for,
fuck
, why do you hate him so much? He loves you, you’re as much his sister as Hadley is, and you still give him shit all the time. Now this? You want me to sleep with Hadley out of some sort of malicious grudge toward the Hale’s?” Holden said, he looked down from the dining terrace and watched Hadley talking to the Scottish thug and anger rose in him, hot and startling in its ferocity. He hadn’t slept at all the night before after she left him alone in his room. She was all he could think about, her newly awakening sexuality offered up to him, then taken away after she’d listened to his father’s words of warning. He didn’t care if she broke his heart, it didn’t matter if she left him a shattered and ruined man. All that mattered was that he wanted her more than he thought possible, and he was certain it wasn’t just a teenaged, fly-by-night, sort of love. Yes, there was the physical attraction and need, he’d been forced to take three cold showers throughout the night to quench his tempestuous desire for Hadley. And even though he’d given in and taken things in hand, so to speak, each and every time he remembered the unimaginable sweetness of her body under his hands, his cock was hard and needful again.

“Hey stud!” Vivi Kipling said, leaning over Holden and kissing him a little too fervently. “What’s so interesting at the pool that you can’t drag your smoldering glare away? Looks like you’ve got a death wish for that blonde beach-bum. Has he got his hot little Scottish eye on you, Mia, and your brother wants to save your virtue?”

“Not likely, my virtue is as gone with the wind as Holden’s,” Mia said, wondering if Holden would reprimand her for flaunting the fact that she slept around as much as he did. He either didn’t hear or didn’t care, and it only solidified her resolve to see him fuck Hadley then toss her annoying ass aside. Hadley had been the first person to befriend Mia when she and Holden arrived at Country Day Prep their senior year. Mia had tried to like her, but the fact that she meant the world to that interloper Atticus was enough to fuck up the situation from the start.
Atticus
, he was the reason her family life was a fucking joke, Atticus and his sainted mother, Charlotte. If not for the two of them, her own parents would be happily married. Plus, she wouldn’t have been sent off to an uptight, all-fucking-girls boarding school on the other side of the world, and her twin brother would be the heir to her father’s fortune. But, oh no, Atticus was getting the lion’s share of their inheritance, and he would have control over her trust fund someday. Ugh, it made her sick. If there was any way to hurt Atticus, it was through Hadley. If she could get Holden to seduce Hadley, then arrange for Atticus to stumble on the pair of them, well that would be without compare, the best thing in the world.