Sun-Kissed (20 page)

He gave her an incredulous look. “Jesus, Anne. You carried me for years after Julie died. Months after Jaime. Hell, part of you is still carrying me
right now.
You still don’t quite understand how our architecture works, do you?”

“I’ve never been that good at couples.”

His grin broke out. “You’re such a damn liar. You’ve had my back for twenty years. You’re just not good at admitting you need me at yours. You’re kind of like a unilateral couple, that’s your problem. We need to fix that.”

They reached her boardwalk. Mack put her down only because her feet kept bumping into the railing.

Walking up the ramp with him just behind her was…erotic. Each footstep against the boards this thump of his approach. Each step she took an expression of her willingness for him to follow.

By the time she got to the end of it, the muscles of her bottom itched so much for touch that she wanted to knead her buns herself. She stopped suddenly on purpose, just so he would run into her and she could feel that jolt of contact through her body.

“I don’t know whether it’s the boxing or the yoga, but you have a really great ass, Anne,” Mack murmured to the top of her head. “You know, in one of my fantasies, I smash you up against the shower wall, and I run my hands all over that butt, and oh, my God, the expression on your face when I do it—I think that one usually starts with me surprising you in the shower—but then, of course, I make you
like
it, until you’re all moaning and slippery and—”

She licked her lips, heat curling and pooling into places she’d never even understood it could. Her
throat
felt flushed, as if she wanted to tilt her head back and bare it. And her
elbows
tickled, as if she needed to clamp them to her sides. She turned toward him, there in her fairytale garden.

He rested his hands on her hips and snugged them in close to him. “You know how I told you half my fantasies about you involve winning, breaking through, making you like it?”

She gave him a wry, challenging smile to cover how hard that made her heart beat.

“Half of them don’t involve any of that at all.”

A little jolt of confusion, her world scrambling to get ready for its next re-ordering.

“Some of them
you
come on to
me.
Because, you know, you can’t resist me anymore. Or because you want to wield your power over
me,
break
me.
And God almighty, do I like it when you conquer me. And some of them are so gentle, I fall to sleep dreaming in the middle of them.” He lifted that strong, tender hand to her hair as he seemed to like to do. Every time he traced the edge of her hair, the shape of her head, it felt as if he was trying to trace the shape of
her.
Of who she was. Carefully. As if that shape of her was a miracle. “I never had one that took place in a hammock before today,” he murmured.

She glanced toward the nearest hammock in her yard.

Out under the stars like that, in the cool of a September evening by the sea? It sounded…beautiful.

“I’m not even sure it’s possible to have sex in a hammock,” Mack added.

Oh. Yeah, probably not.

He ran his hand up her back, that deep frisson of pleasure. “I bet you can make love in one, though. You can make love anywhere.”

“In a crowded train?” Anne challenged immediately. She couldn’t help herself. She
had
to challenge. When she felt vulnerable, it was so hard not to fight everyone back from her walls.

“Sure.” He pulled her toward the hammock. “I’d put my hand on your knee, if we were sitting.” He touched her knee. “Block the rest of the crowd from you if we’re standing.” He braced one arm against the tree behind her, holding her in against it with his body, as if it was a pole on a subway and a crowd was pressing into them. His scent touched her subtly: sun and sea and grilling. “Maybe touch your face while we ratchet along the tracks.” He lifted his other hand in that gentle,
you-are-so-special-to-me
caress against the edge of her hair.

This whole new definition of
making love
snuck into her heart and filled it up. Oh. Was that her
heart
again? That thing that had been shattered and its hole filled with liquid? It felt different now. It felt beating, warm. Swollen, so that the wrong rough touch could pop it. “In the middle of a restaurant?” she tried, just to hear what he would say.

“Oh, that’s easy. I’d look at you, across the table.” He held her eyes, with a little smile. “I’d touch your hand.” His fingers brushed across the back of her palm, and she felt…romantic. Courted. Loved. “I’d ask you what you think of the wine.” He touched his thumb to her lower lip. “Because I’d want to know if your mouth was happy with me.”

He did that already, whenever they were out to dinner. Nodded at the waiter to make sure she was served a taste, too, if the waiter was still clueless enough not to offer it automatically. Looked across the table, caught her eyes, maybe just raised his eyebrows to see what she thought. And she would tilt her head, considering, or just give a flicker of a smile and nod. Sometimes he would talk about it more, after the waiter left.
What do you think of the oak? Too much? Are you picking out that hint of blackberry and chocolate he was talking about? Because I’m picking up more on just, you know, wine.

He’d been doing that for a decade.

“In a—in a hammock?” Her voice shushed itself out, yielding itself to softer, more delicate actions.

He pulled her down with him into the hammock, tucking her body up against his, back to his chest, just the way they had slept that afternoon when all the lingering wedding guests were around. “I guess we still need to figure out what works.” He lifted a hand to her temple and drew his fingers slowly, slowly down the line of her body, around the curve of her ear, down her throat, over her shoulder, down her arm, slipping onto her thigh, following it to her knee before he ran out of arm reach. Pleasure ran through her in the path of his hand, this exquisite sense of being precious to someone.

“What do you think? Does that work, Anne?”

She might have made a sound. Her head bent forward into the canvas.

“What about this, sweetheart?” His blunt fingers rested at the base of her skull and then oh-so-gently caressed down the back of her neck, lingering at the nape. “Does that feel like making love, to you?”

She couldn’t answer. How was she supposed to answer? He stole all words. And in their place he left the essence of—her. And, in his hands,
her
was a very precious thing.

His hand slipped over her collarbone, found the hollow of her throat, traced over the upper swell of her breasts. So strange to realize that this blunt, tough businessman, with his square hands and his impossibly intense need to dominate the world, had this much tenderness in him. She’d known he had that much
love
—she’d seen it, with Julie, with his children—but it had never even occurred to her that he could be capable of such a delicate touch.

It turned her delicate, too. It made her feel like a snowflake resting on a human palm, struggling not to lose her shape.

And then the shape of her was gone. She was only water. And that, it turned out, was the essence of who she was. The rest of it—the snowflakes, the ice—were just ways she manifested herself, sometimes, to a cold world.

“What about this?” he whispered.

She twisted around to bury herself in him. “Mack.” Her voice felt strangled and desperate. She kissed
his
collarbone, the hollow of his strong throat.

Pleasure rumbled through him. Why did pleasure always strengthen him while it weakened her?

He arched his throat to her willingly, showing how much he liked it, and so she kissed her way to his jaw. His afternoon shadow made her lips prickle, and she drew back a little to lick them.

He drew a breath. She had risen a little above him, and now he looked up at her face, his gaze focusing on her lips. Funny, even with the night and moonlight to hide lines, he still didn’t look like the man she had met twenty years ago, when she bought the house next door. He’d already had a few lines at the corners of his eyes and a fair amount of gray hair back then, even though he’d only been thirty-three. But he’d been smoother, everywhere, more arrogance than substance. Now that arrogance had proven itself. It was arrogance like a rock, grown rugged with experience.

His voice had changed, too. That smooth, powerful voice he had had, that could control the meetings of the mighty—Julie’s death had roughed it up. Anne’s own throat tightened still in sympathy at the thought of the grief that had strained his throat so badly. Then more recently, Jaime. And her. His voice grown so raw and strained with fury during her trial that she’d half expected him to lose it entirely in some height of rage.

But it had kept going, that voice. That man. Roughed up, but determined.

“Kiss me,” that voice whispered now.

She smiled, her hand tracing oh-so-gently over the face that bad-tempered time was starting to batter. What was he always telling her? “Mack. Shhh.”

She kissed him.

The sweetest, truest kiss. It started out so gentle, but it grew, and then it grew, until it felt as endless as the waves of the sea. It even fell into the waves’ rhythm—kiss and breath, kiss and breath, lips and tongue sliding against each other, in and out as if they were the edge of sea and land.

“Anne,” he managed so much later she had no idea how many waves had hit that beach, “I think this hammock is driving me crazy.”

He’d been in her bedroom before, but he’d fought his way in. If she pointed to it now, she would be well and truly raising the portcullis. Saying,
You are trusted here.

And even though it was Mack—even though he was the one person in whose safe she would keep the key to her castle—it was still so hard to do. She wouldn’t ever have thought to keep that key in his
hands.
They were too warm for the key to her castle. To her heart.

She took a deep breath, and then another.

And then she found his hand and squeezed it tight and lifted their joined hands together to indicate her bedroom.

Chapter 13

But they didn’t quite make it. Nerves and awkwardness built in her again as they climbed the outside stairs to the upper porch, until she flinched a little when Mack, below her on the stairs, let his hand glide down her spine and brush over her bottom.

He caught her back to him suddenly as they stepped onto the porch. “Dance with me?”

The light she’d left on because she hated coming home to a dark house spilled gently over them, and the moonlight gilded the sea below. “Really?” If Prince Charming had just taken her hand at the ball, she would have been less surprised. Because, after all, who wanted to lower herself to some prince? No matter how handsome and charming he was, his asking her to dance would have been less perfect.

Mack found her remote on the old farmhouse craft table just inside the glass doors and turned on her music system. Anne started to smile, even as her eyes felt all shimmering like the sea.

It made her smile even more that he didn’t choose a slow dance. No, this was real dance music. Not too fast, but a song to which he could spin her out and bring her back in.

“I would love to,” she said.

“I’ve always loved to dance with you,” he said as he brought her into him with a firm arm.

Her heart brightened. All this time, she’d assumed he danced so willingly with her for her sake and not his. As one of his easy gestures to make her happy.

“It always seemed like a special gift. That you would let me control you. That you’d trust me, when I did this.” A swirl into a dip, easy and strong. His eyes held hers, serious but alight. Moonlight-on-deep-ocean happy.

“Well.” Her breath caught in her throat and then released in slow pleasure as he righted her smoothly and spun her away. “You wouldn’t let me fall.”

“No, I wouldn’t, Anne. Not if there was anything in this world I could do to help it.” He wound her into him backwards, so that their arms crossed over her middle and her back was to his chest. His mouth brushed her temple.

A little smile ran through her, a curl of sweetness. “And you can do most things in this world,” she allowed.

“I’ve never been able to do enough.” He kissed her nape and lifted their arms, twisting her back around to face him. “The world’s gotten through me three times now. It got to you.”

“Fuck it,” she said, and tried to make a fist to punch it in the nose, but of course her fingers were curled around his.

“God, I love how strong you are.” He bent her back again, a long, slow tango dip. “You have no idea how erotic and gorgeous you are, when you’re being strong.” He kissed her throat, arched for him by the dip, and lingered there a moment, as if the position took no strength to hold at all. She gripped his shoulder, pulling herself up into him a little, giving him more access to her throat.

“What—what about when I’m being weak?” she gasped, because she felt all pliant right now.

“Then I want to be your strength.” He pulled her upright and into him, this constant, flowing flex of power controlling her body. “And suck away your tears. And know that you’ll be strong again one day. You’ve been my strength.”

He spun her out and wound her in with a tug of his hand, until she was wrapped up tight against his body again, back to chest.

“We all have bad dreams in the night sometimes, Anne,” he murmured to her ear. “I’d love to be here when you wake from yours.”

Her hands shifted to clasp both of his to her, holding herself in tight in his arms. “Me, too.” She realized it so suddenly. “Me, too. I want to be here for yours.”

She never, ever wanted him to wake in the night alone when the experiences of his life tore at him again.

God. She could
be
there for him the next time something hurt him. Not waiting anxiously for her walk on the beach to see if he was getting through okay. She could be there in the dark. She could reach out and touch his face, his hand. She only had to let down her walls.

Only.

But they were
her
walls. She could do this. She could let him in. She
could.