My breaths came so raggedly that they’d turned into inarticulate whimpers, and I knew the orgasms I gave myself weren’t going to compare to this. Nothing in my experience assured me of this—but I knew it was true. I writhed under him, so close, wanting him to move. “Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”
“No intention of that,” he murmured, pressing his forehead to my shoulder and pulling out, slamming back into me a second later. “Jesus Christ, girl. Goddamn.” He raised his head and swirled his tongue over the margin of my ear and I moaned, teetering on the verge and terrified to let go. “Fuck me, Pearl,” he said. “I’ve got you. Fuck. Me.”
Everything under my skin from my jaw to my toes clenched tight at once—muscles and veins and nerves and blood—and then released, pulsing, gushing like a dam breaking open, and I cried out for the second time, but for the most opposite reason possible.
That time he did too.
chapter
Eleven
Boyce
I pulled my bellyaching TA onto the road, the loaded boat trailer filling the rearview mirror. Using a classic sports car to tow a fishing boat—even a small one—wasn’t ideal, and I tapped the steering wheel in unspoken apology. The municipal harbor was only a quarter mile or so through town, and lately I hadn’t gotten much chance to take her out on the water anyhow, but the recent increase in business meant that renting a slip at the marina might be less of a fantasy than it was a few months ago.
“I guess I’ve never been in your car before,” Pearl said, clicking the seat belt over her lap. Her gaze roamed over the dash, the floorboards, and my hand on the knobbed gearshift between us. “It’s really… clean. Your place too. Very tidy.”
I chuckled. In terms of everyday living, we knew so little about each other. She wasn’t familiar with all my habits and quirks any more than I was familiar with hers. “Expected me to be a slob, huh? Surprised?”
She chewed the edge of her lip, trying to hide the familiar cheeky twist of her mouth. “A little.”
I’d run around picking up before she showed up, but it could have been worse. Was worse; she hadn’t seen Dad’s room. If not for Mr. Amos having me search his shit for legal paperwork, his decades’ worth of hoarded crap would have been at the curb a week ago. “How do you know I didn’t just clean up before you came over?”
“Why would you?”
“To impress you, of course.” I flashed a wink at her. “Did it work?”
“It’s just me, Boyce.” She dropped her gaze and smoothed her hand along her thigh. “You don’t have to do anything to impress me.”
My fingers tightened on the gearshift. “Because you already think I’m awesome, or because you never will?”
Her eyes flashed back to mine, startled. “You saved my life.” Her voice was soft but steady. She returned her gaze to her lap and then forward, and the setting sun made her dark eyes glow. “I’ve been impressed with you since I was five years old.”
I glanced at her profile and then stared out the windshield—as if I couldn’t drive this road blindfolded. I wrestled to swallow the lump that rose in my throat, ashamed of the way I hankered after those words. The way I needed them and hadn’t even known it until she’d said them.
When we got to the marina, she jumped out and helped remove the tie-downs and push the boat into the water, and I tried to return to the easy teasing she was used to. “At home with launching a boat, Pearl?”
She climbed into the boat, turned it on and reversed it off the trailer.
“Lord, girl—do you fish too? I might have to fall in love with you.” Well, hell—where the fuck had that come from? I should just bite my damned tongue off.
She hitched the boat to the dock cleat before she looked at me. “Be careful how you throw that proposition around, Boyce Wynn. A girl might take you seriously.”
I parked the car and trailer in the near-empty lot, grabbed the dad-in-a-box and cooler from the trunk, and jogged back over to the boat, waiting for her response to cut off my air, to give rise to the Mayday warnings my head sounded whenever I felt cornered or suffocated or obliged. But there were no orders to retreat, and the only distress signal in my head told me to make that girl fall so hard for me that she’d never wanna get back up.
When I hopped aboard, she was sitting in the passenger seat of my Gambler, texting. I didn’t ask who and she didn’t volunteer it. When she looked up, tucking the phone into the front pocket of her shorts, she stared and I threw her a questioning look.
“Your hair, with the sun behind it like that,” she said. “It looks like it’s on fire. Like those medieval paintings of saints and angels, with the rings of light around their heads?”
Damn if I wasn’t on fire right now, conjuring up the last time we were on that sandbar. The first time I claimed those plump lips. “I’m neither of those things, Pearl.”
“So you say.”
“So everybody says.”
She crossed her arms. “Well, everybody is wrong.”
I couldn’t help laughing at that. Angels and saints don’t fantasize about doing a girl like Pearl over a kitchen table, or most of the other ways I’d imagined taking her. “There’s my stubborn girl—so dead set on being right. So which am I? Angel or saint?”
She blinked and blushed dark pink, rising like dawn from chest to throat to cheeks. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen Pearl blush. I hadn’t even said anything that suggestive in view of the teasing, flirting nonsense she’d tolerated for years.
“I suppose you’d be my guardian angel, wouldn’t you?”
Her answer slammed into me. I hadn’t expected her to choose either.
Once we picked a spot to beach the boat, she grabbed the cooler while I pulled the box and a small shovel from the hatch. I went back for the blanket and stack of firewood I’d stored there last night. The sun was almost gone—just a sliver of it loitering on the horizon like it meant to cause trouble, lighting the sky a violent red-orange. It lit the very edges of Pearl’s dark hair as well—bits torn free of her ponytail during the trip over. On her, it was less halo and more like she’d dipped the ends of her hair in red dye.
We both stared at the box. I’d never known a moment of softness from my father. He hadn’t earned the right to my grief, not even a slice of what I’d felt when I lost Brent. Why, then, did the knowledge that he was right there, in that box, dead but not buried, make something in my chest ache like it might crack?
“Boyce.” Pearl’s voice was soft. Her touch was soft as she pressed the shovel into my hand. “Let’s choose a spot and get this over with. And then we’ll make a fire and have a beer. C’mon.” She picked up the box and waited until I stamped toward the marsh grass and started digging.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
“You sure that wasn’t illegal?” I asked, tossing the last log on the fire.