Yours to Keep (12 page)

She was starting to wish Sean had excuses to do a
lot
of things to her. Especially things he couldn’t do in front of Gram.

They were only halfway through the month and she’d spent so much time wondering what sex with Sean would be like, she was afraid some day soon he was going to touch her and she’d burst into spontaneous orgasm. The trip from the bathroom to the couch every night was the worst, requiring her full concentration. She didn’t trust her body not to hang a right and climb into bed with him.

“What are you thinking about now?” Sean whispered against her ear and she cursed under her breath. She really had to stop thinking about sex near him.

“I’m thinking about all those cakes and pies waiting at your aunt’s house,” she lied.

He chuckled, the sound almost masked by the fireworks. “I had no idea desserts had that effect on you. I’ll have to remember that.”

Rather than deal with the implied promise in those words and the husky, bedroom voice it was implied in, she turned her face away and ignored him. But she couldn’t ignore the aching need he’d brought back to the surface.
I’ll have to remember that.

When the last loud and colorful bursts of the grand finale lit up the sky over the lake, the Kowalski family clapped and cheered, then started gathering their things. In just the short time they’d been on the quilts, it looked like the family had taken up residence, with drink bottles and snack wrappers and toys spread all over the place. Sean pushed himself to his feet and then held out his hands to her.

She hesitated to touch him, which was dumb. He was a gentleman, so of course he’d help her up. The fact she was still all shivery and freaked out on the inside from the kiss earlier was her problem, not his.

Once on her feet, she withdrew her hands as quickly as she could, then looked down at her grandmother’s hat and bag. “Gram wanted me to bring you over after the fireworks. To introduce you to Mr. Walker, I guess.”

“Does it bother you?”

“Introducing you?”

He shook his head and pulled her off the quilt because Terry was trying to fold them up. “That she watched the fireworks with him.”

The mature thing to do would be to scoff at the suggestion she was bothered by her grandmother having a friend, but she couldn’t quite pull it off. Not with him watching her so intently. “I don’t know. I didn’t see it coming, that’s for sure. Where did Mitch go?”

“Blonde. Over by the grandstand.”

She turned to look and saw Mitch talking to a pretty blonde woman in a skimpy yellow sundress. She had the kind of primped and polished look that implied she’d shown up alone solely for the purpose of finding a man to take her home. “He doesn’t waste any time.”

Sean snorted and she couldn’t tell if the look he gave his brother was annoyance with the ladies’ man routine or annoyance he wasn’t free to find his own sure thing in a skimpy sundress.

Before she could figure it out, Gram showed up with Russell Walker in tow and behind him a couple who looked younger than what her parents would have been, but not by much.

“Emma,” Gram said, “this is Russell’s daughter, Dani, and her husband Roger. This is my granddaughter, Emma, and her fiancé Sean.”

Emma smiled and shook hands, and then kept smiling as the introductions continued around her. Inside, though, her brain was going numb. Performance exhaustion, she told herself. It was tiring, all this pretending, and she wanted to go home and make Sean crash on the couch so she could curl up in her bed and sleep. But at least this night was almost over.

“If you’re not doing anything,” Mary said to Russell and the others, “you should come back with us and have dessert.”

Or maybe not.

Sean was going to kill his cousins. Slowly. Painfully. And he’d kick the crap out of both of them first.

They’d all gone back to his aunt and uncle’s after the fireworks, as expected. What wasn’t expected was Cat introducing Russell and his daughter Dani and her husband Roger to the Kowalskis, who then invited them along for post-fireworks decaf and dessert.

After the pies and cakes were demolished, Mike and Lisa had taken their boys home and the two babies, Lily and Brianna, were asleep, so the older generation decided on some card game nobody under forty knew how to play. So the under-forty crowd had retreated to the rec room in the basement, except Mitch, who’d said his goodbyes before he left the fireworks with the gorgeous blonde in the barely there sundress.

Joe had a perfect game to pass the time, he’d said. Kevin had smirked and agreed. And there were four couples, so it was perfect. Sean should have known better.

The reason having four couples was perfect, he found out too late, was because the game was a kind of demented adult version of
The Newlywed Game.
And now Joe and Kevin were laughing their asses off on the inside because Dani and Roger’s presence meant Sean and Emma had to keep up the pretense or Dani would tell her dad, who would in turn rat them out to Cat.

“What’s the first place you had sex?” Roger read from a card.

Dani hit the timer and six of them bent over their notepads, furiously scribbling down answers. Sean looked down at his blank page and decided to keep it simple. Hopefully Emma would do the same.

When the timer dinged, he tossed his pencil down. Joe and Keri scored the first point by both writing
in the backseat of Joe’s 1979 Ford Granada.
For Kevin and Beth it was the hotel where Joe and Keri’s wedding reception was held and Dani and Roger both wrote Dani’s dorm room.

Emma grimaced at Sean and then held up her notepad. “On a quilt, under the flowering dogwood.”

The other women made sweet
awww
noises, but Joe and Kevin were already snickering. That wasn’t keeping it simple. Under a flowering dogwood?

“We need your answer,” Roger said.

Sean held up his paper. “In a bed.”

His cousins’ snickers became full belly laughs, while Dani and Roger just looked a little confused.

“Oh,” Emma said. “You meant sex with
each other?
”

It was a nice save, but Sean had a gut feeling it was only going to go downhill from there. And since he and Emma would be lucky if they got out of there with their secret intact, never mind having a snowball’s chance in hell of winning, he might as well have some fun with it.

Then came Dani’s turn to read a question. “Who’s in charge in the bedroom?”

Much to the group’s amusement, none of them got a match and Sean didn’t think they would either as he held up his. “I am, since I carry the big stick.”

Emma read hers with a remarkably straight face. “Sean, because he has a magic penis.”

“Wow. Um…so Sean and Emma have a point,” Dani said as the men nearly pissed themselves laughing.

No way in hell was he leaving that unpunished and he winked at Emma when Kevin read the next question. “Where’s the kinkiest place you’ve had sex?”

The fact that Joe and Keri had done the dirty deed on the back of his ATV led to a few questions about the logistics of that, but then it was Emma’s turn. “In bed, because Sean has no imagination.”

Roger threw an embarrassed wince his way, but his cousins weren’t shy about laughing their asses off.

Sean just shrugged and held up his notepad. “In the car in the mall parking lot. Emma’s lying because she doesn’t want anybody to know being watched turns her on.”

Her jaw dropped, but she recovered quickly and gave him a sweet smile that didn’t jive with the
you are so going to get it
look in her eyes.

Beth asked the next question. “Women, where does your man secretly dream of having sex?”

Keri knew Joe wanted to have sex in the reportedly very haunted Stanley Hotel, from King’s
The Shining.
Dani claimed Roger wanted to do the deed on a Caribbean beach, but he said that was her fantasy and that his was to have sex in an igloo. No amount of heckling could get him to say why. And when it came to Kevin, even Sean knew he dreamed of getting laid on the pitcher’s mound at Fenway Park.

Then, God help him, it was Emma’s turn to show her answer. “In a Burger King bathroom.”

The room fell silent until Dani said, “Ew. Really?”

“No, not really,” Sean growled.

“Really,” Emma said over him. “He knows that’s the only way he can slip me a Whopper.”

As the room erupted in laughter, Sean knew humor was the only way they’d get through the evening with their secret intact, but he didn’t find that one very funny, himself.

It was the final answer that really did him in, though. The question:
if your sex had a motto, what would it be?

Joe and Keri’s was, not surprisingly,
don’t wake the baby.
Kevin and Beth both wrote
better than chocolate cake,
whatever that was supposed to mean. Dani wrote
gets better with time, like fine wine
and Roger wrote
like cheese, the older you get, the better it is,
which led to a pow-wow about whether or not to give them a point. They probably would have gotten it if they weren’t tied with Keri and Joe, who took competitive to a cutthroat level.

When they all looked at Sean, he groaned and turned his paper around. They’d lost any chance of winning way back, but he was already dreading what the smart-ass he wasn’t really engaged to had written down. “She’s the boss.”

The look Emma gave him as she slowly turned the notepad around gave him advance warning she was about to lay down the royal flush in this little game they’d been playing.

“Size really
doesn’t
matter,” she said in what sounded to him like a really loud voice.

Before he could say anything—and he had no idea what was going to come out of his mouth, but he had to say
something
—Cat appeared at the top of the stairs.

“I hate to break up the party,” she said, “but it’s getting late, so we’re calling it a night.”

Maybe Cat was, but Sean was just getting started.

If Gram wasn’t in the truck, Emma would have given Sean a ride home he’d never forget. As it was, she pushed it a little, enjoying his sucked-in breaths and the way his foot kept reaching for a brake pedal he didn’t have.

Because it was so late, Gram went right to bed and Sean followed her up the stairs. By the time Emma was done locking up, she heard snoring coming from her grandmother’s room as she paused on her way by.

Sean wasn’t snoring, but he was already in bed. He was on his back with his hands tucked under his head, scowling at the ceiling. Rather than give him time to grumble at her for driving like a girl, she went straight into the bathroom to clean up and get ready for bed.

In her hurry, though, she’d forgotten to grab her pajamas, which was a dilemma. She could either go out and get them and return to the bathroom to change, or she could go out there and put them on. If Sean didn’t like it, he didn’t have to watch.

After leaving the bathroom, she turned off the overhead light in the bedroom, but it didn’t do much good. The night was clear, the moon was bright and she knew she was all too visible when she undid her jeans and shimmied them down over her hips.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Changing into my pajamas.”

“You always do that in the bathroom.” His voice was low and rough, but she noticed he didn’t look away.

“I forgot them and there’s no point in going back in there.” She kicked off the jeans and was going to pull on the shorts before changing shirts, but then she remembered his stupid answers to the stupid questions in that game and changed her mind.

“The point is that you don’t do it in front of me.”

“Oh, did you forget? Being watched turns me on.” And she pulled her T-shirt over her head.

She had to bite down on a surprised yelp once she was free of it because suddenly Sean was standing in front of her, wearing nothing but blue boxer briefs and a scowl. “You said I had no imagination.”

“And having no imagination is
so
much worse than your best friend’s family thinking you’re an exhibitionist.”

“And we’re not ever going to talk about the other thing you said. Ever.”

He was crowding her personal space, so she put her hands on his chest to push him back, but he caught her wrists. Standing there with her palms pressed against his naked skin, she could feel his heartbeat beating at a quickened pace that matched her own and she knew she had two choices. Walk away or end up in bed with him.

She leaned her body a little closer and splayed her fingers across his chest. “Which thing aren’t we talking about? The fast-food joint bathroom or—”

“Don’t push me too far, Emma. It’s been a long time for me.”

“How long?”

“Too damn long.” He lifted her hands from his chest, but didn’t let go of her wrists. “And I never even got to scope out the dating situation here before you showed up at my door with this half-ass scheme.”

“And since we…you haven’t…”

“The last thing I need is to get caught cheating on a woman I can’t tell anybody I’m not really in a relationship with.” His gaze dropped from her face to her lacy white bra and he sighed. “You’re killing me.”

“Lying awake on the couch every night, wondering what it would be like to slide into bed with you has been killing me for two weeks.”

“Yeah.” He let go of her wrists and slid his hands up the back of her neck and into her hair. “I’ve thought about that, too. A lot. Pretty much constantly, actually.”

“We’re two single adults. There’s no reason we have to suffer.”

He was pulling her slowly closer, his fingertips still massaging the back of her skull and she was starting to lose patience with the talking. She wanted more doing.

Sean apparently hadn’t turned that page yet. “This won’t change anything, Emma, so I don’t want you getting any ideas. The day we drive Cat to the airport, I’m moving on. This isn’t…real.”

“The orgasms will be real, right?”

“Very real. And numerous.”

“I’ll take it.”

With a deep, guttural groan, Sean pulled her face to his and claimed her mouth. It was a hard and demanding kiss, the way he’d kissed her on the makeshift football field earlier, but there was nothing quick about it. His tongue flicked across hers as one hand tightened in her hair.

With the other hand, he pulled her hips hard against his and she felt hard evidence she’d been so very, very wrong to imply he wasn’t blessed below the waist.

Her hands slid from his chest to his shoulders and then to his back, holding him to her because she never wanted him to stop kissing her. Then she squeezed him, holding tight as he reached down the backs of her thighs and lifted her so she could wrap her legs around his waist.

A moment later he had her on the bed, his body covering hers and his erection nestled between her legs. She lifted her hips, urging him to get on with it, but he didn’t seem to be much in a hurry for a guy who said it had been a long time.

Then he lifted his head and looked down into her face. “Before we go any further, one more thing.”

She groaned. “Seriously?”

“One wisecrack about a magic penis,” he warned, “and I don’t care if I have to dump ice cubes down my pants, I’ll walk away. Bowlegged, probably, but I’ll walk.”

She laughed and slid her hands under her back to undo her bra. “I’ll try to contain myself.”

Sean slid the straps free of her arms and flung the bra aside before lowering his mouth to her breasts. When he drew her nipple into his mouth and sucked gently, she moaned and ground her hips against his.

He gave the same attention to her other breast, then lifted his head so he could see her face. He was panting a little—they both were—and he gave her a sheepish grin.

“As much as I’d love to wow you with my stamina and imagination, maybe we could do that tomorrow night.”

She wrapped her legs around his calves, running her foot up his leg. “Tomorrow night? You’re not getting any ideas, are you?”

“I have ideas about what I’d like to do to you tomorrow night. Right now there’s a little…urgency, if you know what I mean.”

“I know exactly what you mean.” She tugged down on her panties and Sean moved so he could pull them all the way off before reaching into her nightstand drawer and pulling out a condom.

“Hey. You put condoms in my nightstand?”

“I’m an optimist.” Then he stood and dropped his boxer briefs and Emma got optimistic, too.

When he lowered himself over her again, Emma wrapped her legs around his hips, urging him forward. He resisted, lowering his head to give her another blistering kiss before settling between her thighs.

And, holy hell, he was everything she’d thought he’d be during the last two weeks’ worth of restless nights. He filled her with excruciatingly slow strokes until her nails dug into his back and she was whimpering, begging for more in barely coherent, fractured sentences.

When he hooked his arm under her right knee and then drove even more deeply into her, she sucked in a hard breath and moaned his name.

“Shh,” he whispered, and then he did it again.

There was no way she could be quiet. Not when she wanted to yell at him to do it faster and harder, so she twisted her body around and he caught the hint pretty quickly. Then she was on her knees, her weight resting on her forearms as she buried her face in his pillow.

Sean’s fingers bit into her hips as he drove into her, each stroke a little harder than the one before. She moaned into the pillow, clutching the pillowcase in her fists as the very real orgasm shook her body.

Sean groaned, his hand squeezing her hips as he shuddered and drove into her a few final times. Then he collapsed on top of her, stretching her body out flat against the mattress.

Turning her head so she wouldn’t suffocate in the pillow, Emma sucked in air and basked in the heat of his heavy, trembling body. He kissed the back of her neck and started to lift himself, but then he collapsed again.