In Too Deep (36 page)

After that one awkward moment at
the charity auction, the rest of the evening passed in a blur. West
whispered in her ear that he’d made other plans and at eleven they
sneaked out a side entrance. Once on the beach she kicked off her
heels while he hauled Ben’s dinghy to the water’s edge.

“
Such a way with words, Pipe. How
could a man resist you shagging him senseless?”

Piper adjusted the flowing skirt
of her dress, piling it on top of her thighs so it wouldn’t trail
in the murky seawater puddle below. West’s gaze tracked up her bare
leg. Apparently he wasn’t opposed to unconsciousness via multiple
orgasms tonight. Her nipples puckered against the dress’s silky
lining.

She hunched under West’s dinner
jacket, which he’d draped over her shoulders after she mentioned
the chill out on the water. The scent of his jacket, all spicy
cologne with heady undertones of hot male, tempted her to bury her
nose in the collar. Pride kept her from snuffling it like a
bloodhound.

“
You did. For quite a while.”
Piper linked her fingers and cupped them around a knee.

West continued to row, strong
strokes that pulled his white shirt tight across his chest and
biceps. Piper tried not to gawp. Tried and failed.

“
I wanted to be the good guy.” He
paused, the oars trailing in the water as the dinghy bobbed along.
“I didn’t want you to get hurt when you—never mind. I just don’t
want you hurt.”

“
Right.” Cuz his Piper-immunity
was up to date. He could worry about protecting her tender romantic
feelings, since
he didn’t share them
. How
selfless.

“
We both know this is temporary,”
he said.

This. Whatever the hell
this
was.

Was
this
her curling toes
when he kissed her hard and fast before releasing her with a grin
that promised more later, much more? Was
this
the ache in
her belly when she dared to contemplate life without Ryan Westlake
in it again?

They drew alongside The Mollymawk
and Piper took a deep breath. She could continue to snip at West,
or somehow let go and just embrace the now.

“
Yeah, I know the score.” She
placed a hand on his knee. “And I don’t want to ruin tonight. It’s
been perfect so far.”

He squeezed her fingers, his eyes
as dark and unreadable as the fathoms below. “I wanted it to
be.”

He helped her onboard.

West guided her to the main
stateroom, his hand splayed on her lower back. He brushed his hands
down her forearms under his dinner jacket and gave her a teasing
kiss, pulling back before she could twine her arms around
him.

“
Close your eyes and relax. I
won’t be long.”

Piper obeyed and leaned against
the wall.

The stateroom door whispered open
and shut. Wood creaked as he moved inside the room. West had gone
to some effort. Would he go the red roses and champagne route? Or
the beer and satellite TV, casual and chummily-relaxed route? The
door opened and she caught the flicker of candlelight before
squinching her left eye shut again. Not TV and beer.

He stood in front of her, and even
without the sense of sight every single atom and molecule in her
body leaped to attention. She’d know him blind, deaf, or in a
straitjacket. West was part of her DNA. It took extraordinary
willpower to keep her arms tucked under his jacket, when she wanted
to rip off his fancy shirt so she could taste him from stomach to
sternum.

A finger traced a lingering path
down her cheekbone and along her bottom lip. It dropped off her
chin, continuing south until it rested against the wildly bumping
pulse at the base of her throat.

“
Cheater.” He threaded his fingers
through her hair.

Cheater, liar, fornicator—he could
call her anything as long as her punishment involved some part of
his body touching hers.

“
You can look now.”

Her lids flickered open. Blue eyes
darkened by the languid pools of his pupils gazed back only inches
away. Piper closed the distance and pressed her mouth to his,
sighing as the power of it dragged her under. West broke the kiss
after a few seconds, sensuously nibbling her lower lip as he pulled
back.

“
Come with me.” He extended his
hand, and without hesitation, she took it.

Kissing West made her so ditsy
that if he suggested a dip in Halfmoon Bay as foreplay, she’d be
out of her dress and in the harbor’s freezing water in no
time.

West opened the stateroom door and
led her inside. Tea-light candles dotted around the room spilled
golden patches of light across the cherry wood flooring. Lush green
stalks topped with distinctive violet blue flowers were scattered
over the wood.

“
Periwinkles?”

West let go of her hand and shoved
his fingers into his hair, rumpling the smooth strands into
bed-head sexy.

His shoulders drooped and he
huffed out a sheepish sigh. “I know, they’re weeds. I planned to
steal a few roses from Mrs. Taylor’s garden, but she’d figure out
who snatched them and hunt me down.”

He’d gotten her flowers. Not just
filched some roses or had a bouquet delivered with an easy mouse
click.

No. West had gone into the hills
above Oban and picked her wild flowers.

“
West, they’re
beautiful.”

“
You’re beautiful.”

Piper looked up at the sound of
his gravelly voice. Her bare toes curled on the wooden floor. She
could say nothing to that, her vocal chords frozen solid. He’d
never once told her she was beautiful. In the last week he’d shown
her with his hands, with his mouth, and with his body, but he’d
never spoken the words out loud.

West closed the gap between them.
“I lied, that night.”

That night. The heat of it still
stung like a fresh burn, branded in her memory. The night of her
school ball when West told her they were done. That everything that
happened between them was a mistake.

Piper bit down on the inside of
her cheek. She would not—
would not
—be one of those women who
sniveled and flapped their hands to fend off girly
tears.

“
I spent half the evening with my
hands stuffed in the pockets of my rented suit, trying to keep my
hands off you—or to stop from embarrassing myself—since I just
about came in my boxers when I saw you in that dress.”

The prickly stiffness in her spine
eased. She’d wondered why West kept his hands hidden, miserably
assuming he didn’t want to be at her graduating ball. He’d been so
quiet that afternoon when the four of them boarded the ferry to the
mainland—Ben who gallantly escorted Erin to their ball, and her and
West.

Piper pulled West’s jacket closer
around her shoulders. “I hadn’t worn a dress in years. I felt like
I was in drag.”

He shook his head. “You were
stunning. And clichéd as it sounds, you took my breath
away.”

“
I had hardly any boobs to speak
of and I wobbled like a baby giraffe in my new black pumps.” Pulse
thrumming thickly, Piper looked down at the floor. “You were right,
I wasn’t much of a woman. I couldn’t believe you wanted me—a tomboy
playing dress-up.”

“
I wanted you long before then.”
His fingers caressed her chin, tilting it so she met his eyes.
“And, God, I’m so, so sorry for what I said. You were every bit a
woman—a gorgeous, dazzling woman—and I didn’t deserve you. You
should’ve kneed me in the nuts for what I said.”

She stilled his fingers sliding
along her jaw with a trembling hand. “So why did you say those
things?”

His gaze darkened and shuttered.
“Because I knew you well enough to slash at your Achilles’ heel.
You’d hate me afterwards, and hating me was the only way you’d
leave Oban to follow your dream of becoming a cop.”

Piper sucked in a breath to
disagree, but he was right. At eighteen she’d wanted to be a cop,
but her head had been stuffed with romantic daydreams of West and
living happily-ever-after on Oban. She wouldn’t have left him and
when their teenage affair petered out. She would’ve stayed,
pining.

“
I hated you for a long time.” Her
voice emerged as a hoarse whisper.

Yeah, she’d hated him. Hated him
in the way consuming love can flip one-eighty degrees. But, oh, how
she wished she could let go of that hate, after it’d gotten its
poisonous claws into her. How she yearned for icy indifference to
replace the heart that bled every time her mother or sister
mentioned West’s name.

“
Well, I deserved it. I was an
immature little shit.”

“
Yes. Yes, you were.”

He eased his jacket off her
shoulders, tossing it over a nearby chair. He pulled her into his
arms. “Well, tonight I want to give you a different memory of an
after-ball event.”

“
Event, huh? Well, that’s raised
my expectations.” Piper rose on the balls of her feet to rub her
lips along his jaw.

The stubble along his chin
prickled against her sensitized skin. Delicious prickles
accompanied by little darts of pain. Because tonight would only be
another static snapshot to paste in her mental scrapbook. Nothing
lasting, nothing ongoing. Just a pretty memory to overwrite the
ugliness of the past.

Well, beggars couldn’t be choosers
and all that crap. When she boarded the ferry for the last time
she’d cram this pretty memory into the ragged hole left in her
chest.

West slid a hand up her back,
tugging experimentally on her dress’s zipper. “You weren’t kidding
about your mum’s attachment to this dress, were you?”

She rotated her shoulders and he
obliged by sliding the pull-tag down a few inches. “It’s vintage.
So we’d better get it off, stat.”

Pressing a kiss onto the base of
her neck, he murmured, “We’re not rushing anything tonight, baby.
No matter how much you beg.”

He showed her how torturously slow
he could move by stripping the dress off her bit by bit, kissing
and tasting each inch of exposed skin until she stood naked in
front of him, bar her panties. West swept her up into his arms, his
sheer upper body strength making her feel small and delicate
cradled against his chest. Not often a five-foot-ten woman had a
man go all
An Officer and a Gentleman
on her. At least, not
this woman.

And it wasn’t every day she got
the butterfly-dancing sensation in her belly of stepping off a
precipice into something from which she had no hope of
escaping.

***

West laid Piper on the bed and
stood upright again. Candlelight traced swirling patterns over her
creamy, naked body—naked except for her skimpy red panties. With
fingers that weren’t quite under control he struggled to get his
miniscule shirt buttons undone.

Piper crawled over to the edge of
the mattress. Coordination would come a lot easier if he could stop
watching the sweet sway of her breasts.

“
I want to do that for you.” She
hooked a finger in the waistband of his pants and reeled him
in.

Brushing his hands away, Piper
undid two more buttons, pausing to run the tip of her tongue over
his nipple.

“
God, I love how you taste,” she
murmured as she made quick work of the other buttons and pushed his
shirt open.

Her gaze tracked from his chest to
the bulge in his pants.

“
And I can’t wait to get my
hands—and mouth—on you.” She raked fingernails gently over his abs
and he couldn’t repress a sharp shiver of pleasure when her fingers
once again slipped under the waistband of his pants. One finger
found him beneath his boxers and stroked around his head with a
touch that had his cock jumping.

Yeah, but then they’d both go up
in flames. They generated some amazing frickin’ heat between
them—one shared look and minutes later he’d be buried inside her,
her moans in his ear as he drove them over the edge.

But tonight was different. Tonight
was all about her.

West peeled her hands out of his
boxers. “You’re gonna have to wait for that, baby.”

With a smoky laugh, Piper eased
back on her haunches. “I’m very impatient.”

“
Always in such a rush.” West
stripped the shirt off his shoulders, letting it fall to the floor.
“When getting there is half the fun.”

“
That wasn’t your philosophy two
days ago when you did me on your desk during a coffee break.” Piper
lay back on the bed and ran her big toe down his straining
erection, her smile feral.

He caught her foot and walked
forward until her knee bent. Then he traced moist kisses from her
ankle to the join of her inner thigh.

“
Behave.” He closed his teeth on
the muscle that trembled under her skin.

Fingernails dug into his shoulder.
“I’ll be good. Get naked though, okay?”

“
Not just yet.” West blew across
the damp trail on her leg and outlined the “v” of her sex with one
finger, before pulling back, satisfied with her moan of
protest.