After a few moments—a few hours?—I broke it off, pausing to pull myself back together.
My head was spinning with desire, my hands possessively sunk into her body, caging her to me. I released her, running a hand through my hair, suddenly nervous as Tess just stood there, regarding me as she gasped for breath, making those glorious breasts beg for my attention.
And then she attacked me.
Chapter Twelve
Tess
Chalk it up to a long-unplanned celibacy, or life with Gran. Call it overexposure to sunscreen and bug spray. We can call it whatever we want, but the plain simple truth was that I had a movie star kissing me like he’d never get enough of me and I wasn’t about to push him away just because it made no damned sense at all. I’d figure that out later. But for now, desire was ricocheting around inside my body and Ryan McDonnell was pressed up against me—all hard and firm and muscled—and I never wanted it to end.
Maybe this was nothing but pretend to Juliet, but it felt a hell of a lot like heaven to me.
Ryan’s hands were all over me, massaging my back, gripping my ass, fisting my hair. He trailed kisses over my jaw, nibbling at my neck and making me gasp and wrap myself around him, trying to get closer and needing friction, needing something I couldn’t even define.
I pressed myself hard into him, feeling his erection at my center and gasping without meaning to—it was heady knowing I’d caused that. And ‘that’ was impressive, I was pretty certain. Unless he had a flashlight in his pants, and I didn’t think he did.
After a few moments, I stepped back, trying to catch my breath.
Ryan did the same, rubbing a hand through his now very mussed hair, a slow sexy smile spreading over his lips. My heart leapt into my mouth as I looked at him, my brain attempting to process that I’d just been kissing Ryan McDonnell. Who was not, I reminded myself, Juliet’s boyfriend.
It was a lot to wrap my head around.
“That was better than a Sasquatch sighting,” he said, as I moved back to his side and took his hand, heading for the lighthouse out on the beach.
“Really?” I asked, feeling a little shy suddenly, even though my heart was bobbing around excitedly inside me. I kissed Ryan McDonnell. I was holding his hand. Was this actually my life?
“Way better.” He bumped my shoulder lightly as we walked. “I’d still like to see him though.”
The packed dirt trail beneath our feet turned to sand as we walked, holding hands, meandering.
The wide swath of beach that curved around the southern tip of Maryland’s peninsula jutted into the water where the Potomac met the Chesapeake. Ryan plopped down in the sand, grinning up at me as he took off his shoes and then nodded for me to do the same as he stood back up. I did, rolling my jeans up to my knees, and then we stepped together into the cool water lapping at the edge of the beach.
“Look at that,” he said, looking out to the east. “It just goes on forever, doesn’t it?”
I bit my lip, unsure whether he needed correcting. Today didn’t seem to be about teaching Ryan Maryland’s geography, but I couldn’t help it. “Well, it goes until it hits the eastern shore, so I guess it depends on your definition of forever.” I lifted a hand to turn his chin to point southward instead of east. “There, look that way. That pretty much goes on forever.”
“Geography was not my strong suit in school.”
“What was?” I wanted to know more about him. I knew what the magazines wrote, I knew him as the hero I’d seen in the theaters, but I didn’t know much about the real guy besides what he’d told me today.
He took my hand and threaded his fingers through mine, the warmth of his palm soaking into my skin and contrasting with the coolness of the water swirling around my ankles. “School was not my strong suit in school,” he said. There was a low sadness in his voice that made me look up into his face. Given what little he’d told me about his childhood and his father’s work, I had the sense he might have had other things to worry about besides homework and classes.
“Switching schools a lot is hard, I bet,” I offered. I was speaking from experience. I’d had to switch after my parents died.
I couldn’t see his eyes because we were both wearing sunglasses against the glare of the sun reflecting off the water all around us, but I could guess at the sad acceptance they might hold. He nodded and then moved closer to me, his body pulling me like a magnet. His arms slid around my waist, and he pulled me into him, one hand coming up to cradle the back of my neck and the other staying low, holding me near. “How is it that you fit me so perfectly?” he asked, in a low whisper that made it seem like a rhetorical question.
My mind had been working on a similar question as my hands slid up the firm broad planes of his back, my breasts tightening as they pressed against his hard chest. My head nestled beneath his chin, and in the circle of his arms I had a strange sensation of shelter, of a safety I really hadn’t sought, but was comforted to find. “I don’t know,” I answered.
We stood there for several minutes, our bodies pressed together, the sweet sting of salt on our lips, and then Ryan dipped his head and kissed me again. This kiss was slow and sweet, his lips soft and his tongue teasing, not demanding. Where he had taken before, back on the trail, now he asked permission,
