Bliss Brothers (Complete Series), page 22
“What hurts?” I don’t have a free hand to brush her hair out of her face, but maybe she hit her head on the buoy on the way down. I didn’t see it, but it’s possible—
“My legs.” She tosses her head back, exposing the line of her throat. This is not the time to notice the way her slick body feels in my arm or the way I’d like to run my fingertips down that throat, but the animal in the back of my mind doesn’t care about this at all. Everything she does, every movement, is like a bright burst of sunshine burning into my corneas, serious situation and all. Even the air tastes different, fresher, and I have more room for it in my lungs.
That’s a good thing, since Claire is still gritting her teeth. She kicks more slowly, moving her legs back and forth against the tension of the water. “My calves—they’re in knots.”
All of her is in knots. That’s what it feels like.
“Relax,” I murmur into her ear. “You don’t have to struggle right now. I’ve got you.”
Claire makes a strangled noise that’s almost unrecognizable until my brain recognizes it for what it is: a sob.
I do my best to gather her closer in, which is not easy when I’m also pinned to the buoy. “Don’t worry,” I say into her wet hair. “We’ve got a doctor on staff. We can take you into the urgent care if you need painkillers—”
“It’s not that,” she says miserably. “It’s—that—that—” She takes a deep breath, her chin quivering. “I mean, it hurts like a bitch, but nobody’s ever said something like that to me before.” Claire swallows hard and holds her breath until a second sob forces her to breathe.
“You know,” I tell her, “crying isn’t the most embarrassing thing in the world. At least you’re already wet.”
“What are you supposed to do when you’re already dry?” she says, her voice rising with every word, and by the end it’s so high that it’s funny, and the question is so ridiculous, that it turns into a laugh. Her muscles contract and relax under my arm with her laughter, and it’s so insanely intimate that it makes me feel…high. Who knew all it took was a quick swim out to the buoy and my arm around a woman I care about? That sets me off, too, and then we’re both laughing. Claire slings an arm around my neck to help keep her head out of the water, and I grab the buoy tighter until I can catch my breath.
“Are you—do you think you can head in?” We shouldn’t stay out here indefinitely, not least because my right arm will give out and then we’ll both sink straight to the bottom. We’ll both sink because there’s no way in hell I’m letting go of her.
Claire reluctantly pushes away from me, putting an arm’s length between us but keeping her fingertips on my shoulder. She gives a few test kicks, and her face tightens in pain.
“No. Nope. I can’t head in.” Her classic blush deepens the pink of her cheeks in. “Kicking at all is a no-go.” Her eyes skim over mine, and then she turns her head back toward the shore. “It’s a long way in,” she says softly, her chin dropping an inch, and….
She meant it. She meant what she said—that nobody had ever really been there for her. I don’t know how that is, with a mom who sent her to etiquette camps, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is getting her back to solid ground.
“No big.” I let go of the buoy and sweep her in front of me. Nothing has ever felt so good in my life than her arms sliding naturally around my neck. She hangs on tight as I kick toward the shore.
“Hey, Beau?” We’re halfway back.
“Yeah?”
“I don’t actually hate you. I…kind of like you.”
“You already said that, didn’t you?” I grin down at her to the best of my abilities.
“When would I have said that?”
“When you cried. Right in front of me. Like you like me.”
She doesn’t say anything else. She just smiles.
14
Claire
Things do not get better when we reach the beach.
In one way, they do. As we get to the shallow water, it becomes abundantly clear that I’m not going to be walking on my own two feet. The minute my toes touch the ground my calves protest heartily, to the point that I pull them up roughly from the bottom and throw my weight around Beau’s neck. He pretends to choke, his body dipping down toward the water, then laughs.
“That bad, huh?”
“It’s really bad.” I try to smile, but I’m sure it comes off as more of a grimace. In the end, he takes me in his arms like a true damsel in distress and carries me up the sand, his feet sinking in with every step.
“Man,” he says, sounding only mildly out of breath. It’s like this is nothing for him. Those virgin mimosas are making a lot more sense. “It didn’t seem nearly this far when we were walking toward the water.”
At the beach chairs he deposits me gently onto mine, then wraps my towel around my shoulders. I pull it tighter, my teeth chattering from the breeze against the evaporating water on my skin and residual adrenaline from falling off a buoy like a total idiot. Which is probably why I don’t feel any shame about watching Beau towel off.
He meets my eyes as he does his hair, the blue a different shade than before.
“Your eyes look different.” The heat from the day is already seeping beneath the towel, and my shivering stops.
Or maybe it’s the heat from his eyes.
“Yeah.” He peers behind me, then looks out over the water. “Time to go.”
“What?” Beau bends down and scoops my book from the sand, then extends his arms.
“Hop in, princess.”
“I don’t need a doctor,” I protest. “It’s just cramps. I’m sure they’ll go away…” I don’t know what kind of time frame it takes for knots in a person’s calves to go away. “…soon.”
“You don’t want to be sitting here for much longer.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, you know. Thunder. Lightning.”
“It’s a gorgeous—” Beau points one finger, and I follow the line of his arm out to the lake.
“Is that a thunderstorm?” My brain must still be struggling after the fall and the cramps, because it’s obviously a thunderstorm—a dark line of clouds, out on the horizon. “It’s too fast for a thunderstorm.”
“Cold front out over the lake,” Beau says like he’s suddenly a professional meteorologist. Then he beckons me again. “Hop up.”
“I can’t.”
“You’re right.” He slips his hands under my toweled body, then lifts me into his arms again. “You ready to run?”
“No.” He laughs, the sound free and joyful, and I get to wrap my arms around his neck again. “Are you sure you can carry me all the way to the hotel?”
“Oh, it’s going to be farther than that. I’m taking you to my house.”
* * *
The first peal of thunder sounds as Beau crosses the line between the resort and the club—a spot in the road marked with a guardhouse and a gate standing open. He nods to whoever is inside the guardhouse and keeps going. It’s an uphill climb to the club side, and he’s finally breathing hard.
The storm came fast.
One minute, it was clear and sunny, and the next….
It gets darker every second.
“I can walk,” I tell him. “I’m sure I can walk.”
“I’m sure you can. But you’ll be hobbling around until you can massage out those knots, and I’m not going to let you hobble around in the rain.”
“I don’t want you to have a heart attack from carrying me.”
“I just told you—I’m not drunk, and I’m definitely not a fifty-year-old man.”
“Younger men can have heart attacks.”
“I’m in good shape.” Beau laughs like he wants to prove it. “You would not believe how much time I spend at the gym.”
“No—I’d believe it.” He put me down on a bench on the way out of the resort to shrug his button-down over his shoulders and put on the deck shoes he wore down to the beach. “I’ve seen your abs.”
“Yeah, you have.”
He takes a right on the first road of houses, and I readjust my grip to try to take more of my weight. I have no idea if it makes any difference.
The sizzling crackle of lightning makes him pick up the pace, and my pulse throbs tight in my veins. I’m not scared of lightning, I’m not scared of storms, but Beau seems tall and I have the irrational fear that, among all these old trees and tall houses, he’ll be the one that’s struck and we’ll both die in a freak accident before we can even….
I hear the rain behind us before the next roll of thunder comes and twist to look back behind Beau. It’s coming in a silvery sheet, hard on our heels, and even though we’re both still wet from the lake, he lets out a whoop and breaks into a dead sprint.
At the next sidewalk, he takes a hard right up a narrow brickwork path and takes the stairs onto a wide front porch two at a time. His feet connect with the porch floor just as the rain chases him up to the last step. “We win!” Beau punches a fist into the air, dropping my feet to the floor. “Oh, shit—sorry!” He picks me back up, a grin on his face that makes me completely forget the pain shooting through my calves.
“You win,” I tell him, my arms locked around his neck, and for the first time I realize just how close our faces are to each other, and how kissable his lips look.
I don’t know which one of us moves first. All I know is that his lips are on mine, warm and alive and sexy and wonderful, and I have never been kissed like this in all my life.
* * *
Somehow, he carries me inside with his mouth still on mine, tongue dancing at the entrance to my lips.
Somehow, he kicks the door shut behind us.
Somehow, he takes us both upstairs.
I’m a bundle of raw nerves and aching calves. The storm is louder up here, the thunder booming on top of the house. Beau lays me down on a blue comforter the color of his own eyes and that’s the last thing I see because I have to close mine.
I have to close mine because his hands are working at my clothes, tugging down the bottoms of my wet bikini and lifting me gently so he can pull the top over my head.
Another flash of lighting bursts behind my eyelids and I open them again. Beau stands at the foot of the bed, looking down at me, his eyes dark and questioning. He’s hard. Hard enough to make his swim trunks look painfully tight, his thickness pushing the fabric out toward me. He balls up his fists next to his hips. “Do you want this?”
I hear in those words everything he means and I know, without a shred of doubt, that if I so much as shook my head no he would dress me himself and take me back downstairs.
But I do. I do, I do.
The words stick in my throat, so I nod.
Beau gives me a moment to take it back, and then he shoves his trunks to the floor.
Thunder booms like the world is adding special effects. Beau doesn’t need any.
He’s muscled from head to toe, but still lean—not so big he starts to look like a caricature of a man. Every inch of him is toned. The time he spends in the gym is not a joke.
And his cock—
I went home with enough frat boys to know that what I’m looking at is not your run-of-the-mill penis.
It’s got to be eight inches, thick and perfect, and I don’t know how he made it to the house because it did not get like this in the last four seconds. The skin is stretched tight and a droplet of precum glistens at the tip.
“Not bad, right?” His voice draws my eyes back to his face.
I shake my head. It’s not bad at all.
He steps to the edge of the bed, curves his hand around the back of my neck, and kisses me again. He tastes like rainwater and swimming and sunscreen and a hint of orange juice, a taste that’s all Beau, and the sound I make in response can’t be categorized. I’m so lost in it that my back hits the bed before I realize that he’s put any pressure on me at all.
His lips leave mine, kissing a trail down the side of my neck, down between my breasts, and over my stomach. I feel no compulsion to snap my legs shut in anticipation. No. I open them wider, drawing a low murmur of approval from Beau. He settles his lips whisper-soft over my clit, a brief tease that sends a bolt of lightning back up to my nipples. They draw themselves into hard peaks.
Beau doesn’t linger between my legs, as much as I want him to.
He kisses lower.
Over the curve of my hips.
Down to my knees.
And then, so carefully it makes me want to weep, he takes one ankle in his hand and stretches my leg out, fingers rubbing gentle circles over the knots in my legs.
He’s about to burst, and this naked, glorious man is massaging the knots in my calves. He kisses them away, working diligently. I feel the first one release, then another, and the sheer intensity of his attention makes me wet. His fingers on my skin make me wetter.
The pain flees from my lower legs until there’s no reason to focus on the tension there. All I can focus on is Beau’s lips, kissing back up my legs. He lets his breath heat my clit, and keeps moving up until those lips, oh, God, those lips, are back on mine. His tongue demands entrance and I let him in, but now it’s urgent, and getting harder every moment to wait. I lock my knees around his waist and buck up into him. Beau laughs into my mouth.
“Please, kiss me more.” My question sinks into the sound of another roll of thunder.
“I will,” he promises. “But Claire?”
“Yeah?”
“I need to fuck you first.”
“I need that.” I look right into his eyes when I say it. There’s nowhere else in the world I’d rather look. “I need that.”
He strokes a thumb over my cheek and dips his head to take my bottom lip between his teeth, all the while working his hips into position. I feel his crown against my entrance, thick and hard and unrelenting.
Beau holds perfectly still, one inch in.
“Oh—”
He pulls back to look down at me and that grin, multiplied by the storm outside and his hands on me and the lingering memory of his lips on mine, becomes a tease and a dare all at once.
I wiggle my hips from side to side, testing, and he comes in for another kiss that sucks the breath out of me. He won’t move, he won’t—
I have to buck, and buck hard, to get another inch of him, and my calves protest at the work.
The reward is worth it.
“Yes,” Beau hisses, and then every muscled inch of him is dedicated to the task of taking me completely with a single powerful, stretching stroke.
I see the entire universe.
Then he pulls back out.
“Are you ready?” His voice is thunder. I’m thunder. Everything is thunder and lightning and heat.
“Please,” I whisper, and he takes me all over again.
15
Claire
The biggest event I’ve planned for the Bliss Resort starts in three hours, and I’m naked.
I completed planning for the event yesterday. It was, by far, the most difficult time I’ve ever spent in any office, anywhere. All day I tried to keep the tension at bay by pressing my thighs together under the table.
All day, it failed.
The floodgates have been opened, and I can no longer resist Beau Bliss.
Except in the office—that’s when we have to resist each other. I never thought I’d find shorts and a button-down sexy, and to be honest, I still don’t care much for the outfit either way. But when it’s crumpled at the foot of the bed, like it is right now….
Nope. The clothes still don’t matter. What matters is the stark naked Beau Bliss sprawled between my legs on the bed, his arms hooked under my legs, holding them wide open and apart no matter how much my thighs quake and strain to close.
It’s too much pleasure. Too much. His tongue tasting every one of my folds, licking away the juices that collect there…his teeth, raking softly over the sensitive nub of my clit…his lips, forming a vacuum that his tongue descends into, teasing and torturing until I come once, hard, into his mouth.
He raises his head to look at me when the aftershocks have subsided, but doesn’t let go of my legs. “Again.”
“No,” I gasp. “I can’t—”
He ignores the argument and dips his head back down. I let my head fall back to the pillow and give into him. Give in to the lines his tongue traces in my most private spot. Give in to the commanding arms that keep me vulnerable in the most delicious way. Give in to the way he coaxes another shuddering orgasm from my body, then sits up, wiping his mouth with his eyes alight.
“You look so good like that,” he murmurs.
Now I do fold my legs together, turning onto my side. “Don’t even think about it.”
“Think about what?” The mattress dips as Beau moves behind me on the bed, curling his body around mine in a way that feels so natural I can’t believe I ever dismissed him. He puts an arm around my waist and I let it happen. I relax into him, his chest against my back, and float in a sea of endorphins. Who needs actual swimming when you can have this? Not me.
“What was that?”
“What?”
“You mumbled something about swimming.”
I flutter my eyelids open, but it’s a lost cause. “I have to get ready for the beach party.”
“The beach party isn’t for three hours. Just stop by the salon on your way and tell them I sent you.”
I laugh, relishing the sensation of rocking back against his body. “What would they think of that?”
“Nothing. They’re makeup artists and hairstylists. People on the resort want last-minute…oh.”
“Oh is right. I can’t go in there telling them that Beau Bliss sent me. They’ll think…they’ll think all sorts of things.”
He brushes my hair away from the back of my neck and bends to kiss me there. “So?”
A whisper of cold stirs at the pit of my gut. “So, that would be terrible for my reputation. And yours.”
“I’d say mine is what it is. You can’t date a man you’re only working with for a few more days?”
