Island Idyll (3 page)

She wrapped her fingers around the metal and raised a disbelieving eyebrow.

“You’re welcome to compare,” he offered generously and shifted his leg, inviting her to move her hand from the boom and settle it on his cock.

Sienna’s grip on the bar tightened. Her mouth turned dry. Ben was the only man she’d desired in eight years. Eight long years. She still desired him. That was a hard, unrelenting fact she couldn’t deny.

Yet sitting this close to Josh, with the salty, ocean air filling her nose and nothing but crystal water stretched out around them, her belly flipped from one side to the other. Hunger and lust coursed through her veins like an incoming tide. She wanted him. Wanted him with a fierceness that shook her.

Not Ben.
Josh
.

When once she’d lusted after him with all the innocence of a teenager, now very womanly needs tugged at her breasts and pulled at her pussy. Josh’s talk about the size of his erection was not helping matters at all. She resisted the urge to pump her hand up and down the boom, doing to it exactly what she wished to do to Josh.

That, and so very much more.

She sniffed. “You realize of course that I would have welcomed the chance to compare when we were at school.”

His smile softened. “I’m willing to bet you didn’t even know what an erection was when we were at school.”

Touché. Still, instead of blushing, she met his gaze head-on. No time like right now to do something about all those desires raging through her bloodstream. “I would’ve been open to your teaching me.”

“Ah see, Si. If the teenage Josh had let you anywhere near his erection, it would have been game over before you’d even touched him once.” His eyelids drooped sexily. “Before you’d touched
me
once,” he corrected, his voice a whole heck of a lot deeper.

Dear God. Was that simply desire in her veins? Felt more like a raging inferno.

She folded her arms across her breasts, staring at him mulishly as her past and present merged in her mind. “Here’s what I don’t get.”

He looked at her expectantly.

“You knew I had the biggest crush on you for like, oh,
five years
. Heck, I even asked you to the Year Twelve Formal. You turned me down flat.”
Ouch.
That had hurt. Big-time.

He merely nodded in agreement.

With a huff, she went on. “You never once, in all that time, acknowledged any kind of returned attraction.”

Another nod.

Damn it. Did he have to agree so easily? Could he not maybe lie, and say something like he’d just kept his attraction to her under wraps?

She gave him the evil eye. “Yet here you are, telling me I was your wet dream every night of your high school life. Telling me that seeing me now makes you hard all over again. I don’t get it. What did I do so wrong back then that you refused to show me any interest?”

For a second, the laughter and happiness leeched from Josh’s face. His eyes…died. Emptied of emotion. And his lips thinned, fine lines fanning out from the sides of his mouth. “Si…”

He shook his head, blinked, and a mask dropped over his face, hiding any sign of the misery she’d just seen.

“Si,” he said again. “You were everything good and pure in school. Everything each poor male sap in our year dreamed about. You could have clicked your fingers and had anyone you wanted fall at your knees. You were a…princess.”

Er, not quite the way she remembered it.

She’d been a little overweight even then. Not a nerd exactly, but strait-laced and studious enough that she’d never been any guy’s first choice. Those privileges had always gone to Ky and Mack. She was the plain Jane, happy to hear about her friends’ conquests and determined to do her parents proud.

“You were…” He hesitated, as though searching for the right word. “Perfect. Utterly perfect. The last thing you needed was me fouling up your reputation.”

Do not gape at him again!
“What the…? What reputation? And how on earth could you have fouled it up?”

“It’s never good for the class angel to hang out with the class failure.”

“Failure? What the hell, Josh? Are you and I talking about the same school?” No, Josh may not have passed with the Dux of Year Twelve Award, but as far as Sienna knew, he’d always gotten along just fine academically. And just fine with the girls too.

Damn it, even now a sliver of jealousy crept under her ribs.

“You were good, Si. I wasn’t. I refused to let my…ways blacken yours.”

His ways? Blacken hers? “Seriously, Josh, you’re talking rubbish.” Hurt and anger assailed her. She could see only one reason he’d spout such crap. “If you didn’t like me then, that’s okay. You don’t have to like everyone. I can even appreciate that having a classmate fawning all over you might make you feel awkward. But don’t go feeding me some bullshit about you not being good enough, just to make me feel better.”

Damn it, she shouldn’t have come out here with him. Shouldn’t have forced him to take her sailing. She’d been a burden to him back then apparently, and she’d just made herself a burden all over again. Her and her big mouth. Next time she’d just keep it shut. Every single insecurity she’d ever experienced at school came flooding back.

Cold shivers spread up her arms even though the sun beat down on her shoulders. The sail billowed in the wind, making Josh tug a little harder on the tiller.

“Know why I declined your invitation to the formal?” he finally asked.

She refused to answer. She’d already said too much about their high school years and her ridiculous infatuation with him.

“Because I had no way of paying for the tickets. Besides, if I’d missed work, even one night, my asshole boss would’ve fired my sorry ass.”

She blinked. “You worked in high school?”

He shrugged. “Didn’t have a choice.”

“When?”

“Every night. Five to ten, at the fish and chips shop down the road.”

She stared at him, stunned. How could she not have known?

“And every weekend. Stacking shelves at Coles.”

“Two jobs?”

Another shrug. “Family had to eat.”

“And you had to pay for the food?”

“Me and Jarrod.”

His older brother. “Wh-what about your parents?”

“Ah, yeah. My parents. Let’s see. My old man, well, I have no idea why he never gave us money. Probably because he spent seven of the twelve years I was in school in prison.”

She knew her mouth hung open, but somehow she couldn’t close it.

“And my mother? Yeah, she was good for work for a while. Until she discovered the attraction of the bottom of a gin bottle.”

Her heart constricted. Dear God, what a childhood. How could she have been so blissfully unaware of the hardships in his life?

She ached for the teenage boy he’d once been. Or maybe she ached for the boy he was never allowed to be. “So you and Jarrod were forced to work?”

He angled the cat to the right, a little too far and too fast, and it tilted precariously. Sienna slid a little closer to Josh, so their legs pressed together. The muscles in his thigh were hard as rock and tense as elastic about to snap.

He righted the cat, muttered an apology and turned the Hobie again, catching the wind. The cat sailed through the water, picking up speed.

Sienna did not move her thigh. Not even an inch. She liked the way it felt resting against his. Liked the way the hair on his legs abraded her skin. Liked the way a tic pulsed in his cheek as he looked at her leg, then his, then up at the sail.

“Josh?”

“Yeah?”

“Why was your dad in prison?”

Big sigh. “Fraud.”

“Is he out yet?”

“I’d assume so, since he was given a nine-year sentence almost twenty years ago.”

“You don’t know for sure?”

Josh shook his head. “Never been interested enough to find out.”

“But surely he came back to live with you when he got out?”

His face was once again a blank mask. “He might have. We weren’t there.”

“Where were you?”

“Jarrod and I moved up north. To the Sunshine Coast.”

“And your mother?”

“She moved on with her bottle of gin. To this day I have no idea where they went.”

“She deserted you?”

“Pretty much.”

“How old were you when she left?”

He bit his lip. “Sixteen.”

“Sixteen?” That would have made Jarrod seventeen. “You lived without either parent for the last two years of high school?”

His arm tensed around the tiller, his biceps bulging under his skin. “It was easier alone.”

“You never said anything,” she whispered, dismayed by his revelations.

“We couldn’t. Jazz and I knew if we mentioned our situation to anyone, and DOCS got wind of it, they’d step in. We managed just fine with an alcoholic mother. We managed even better without her.”

God, he was so removed, so cold. Discussing the Department of Community Services and his past as though he had no connection to it whatsoever. Did he need to distance himself? To help him forget the pain and the hardships?

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, knowing the words were completely inadequate, yet helpless to come up with anything better.

“Don’t be.” Again, his biceps bulged. “It was years ago. A lifetime ago.”

“Still, I wish I’d known…”

“Why, so you could step in and cure my ailments? My woes?”

“I…” She let her words die on her lips. That was exactly what she’d have wanted to do. She’d have tried to help improve his circumstances somehow. And in doing so, she’d have inadvertently revealed the Lyes’ living conditions, and DOCS would have stepped in. Exactly what Jarrod and Josh hadn’t wanted. “It would have helped me understand you a little better.”

“Ah, princess, I never wanted your pity.”

She began to object then stopped. He was right again. That’s what she would have given him. He hadn’t wanted it then, and she was pretty darn sure he didn’t want it now. “So, let me get this straight. Your dad was in prison, and your mother was an alcoholic.”

Josh nodded.

“You and Jarrod worked every single day to put food on your table and…pay your way through school?”

“Someone had to pay.”

“And with all of this shit going on in your life you still managed to pass every exam you ever wrote and get through your HSC?”

Determination glinted in his eyes. “A kid is nothing without a school education.”

“So you did all of that, all of it, just the two of you?”

“In a nutshell.”

She bristled. “Yet you have the audacity to label yourself the class failure?”

“Compared to you, that’s exactly what I was.”

“Damn it, Josh, you’re not a freaking failure.” She poked a finger into his arm. “You’re a bloody idiot. I was a pampered kid who got whatever I wanted from a family who loved me. I never had to work a day in my life until I finished my uni degree.”
Princess
was a pretty apt description, actually. “You had to support yourself and your family, and you still made it through high school. You’re not a failure. You’re a freaking legend.”

“A legend?” He snorted. “Yeah, right.”

She sniffed in indignation. “A real-life hero.”

“Heroes aren’t real,” he pointed out. “They’re made-up fantasies.”

She looked at him sideways. “You were my fantasy for five years.”

“That’s the problem with fantasies. They’re never as good in the flesh.”

She gasped. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I never kid about fantasies.”

“Damn it, Josh. Your flesh looks good enough to lick.”

He said nothing, merely raised an eyebrow in her direction.

Don’t blush. Do not blush.
“Know what I used to call you back in school?”

“Josh?” he hazarded.

“Nice try.” She rolled her eyes. “But wrong. I called you Josh Lie-With-Me.”

The eyebrow lifted higher.

“Because all I freaking wanted to do was lie with you. Even for just five minutes.”

He threw his head back and laughed out loud, the first genuine emotion he’d shown since he’d begun telling her his sorry story. “See, princess. That’s why you and I could never have worked. You and your angelic ways. You had a crush on me for five years, and all you wanted to do was lie with me?”

“No, you moronic halfwit. I had a crush on you for five years, and all I wanted to do, even if it only lasted five minutes, was fuck your brains out.”

It was Josh’s turn to gape at Sienna.

“
Lie
was a euphemism,” she finished with a grumpy frown.

Jesus fucking Christ. The girl who’d usurped his childhood dreams had just confessed she’d wanted him as much as he’d wanted her. The angelic princess, who was so far out of his league it was laughable, had been as hot for him as he’d been for her.

Just as well he’d stayed away from her in school. Preserved her pristine purity.

No girl as perfect as Sienna deserved to be tainted by his kind.

“If it makes you feel any better,” she said, her lips swollen in a pout, “I still want to fuck your brains out.”

For once in his life, Josh was speechless. He had no witty retort, no quick comeback. He was quite simply stunned all the way down to his toes. And his dick, which throbbed beneath his shorts.

Not a day had passed at school when he’d escaped an embarrassing erection, brought upon merely by seeing Sienna.

Over a decade later, and he was still plagued with the same affliction. Only this time, the adult woman beckoned even more wantonly than the child, making his cock stand even straighter than it had back then. And thicker. So much thicker.

His gaze dropped to her chest. Again. Beneath the lifejacket that hung open over her shoulders, was the tiny little black shirt he’d first seen lying in a pile on the beach. His childhood fantasy was also the perfect mermaid who’d frolicked so freely in the waves.

The way her breasts spilled over the top of the shirt had him stiffening even more. And the fact that her nipples were two taut peaks, staring at him, calling to him, only made matters worse.

The kid he’d been would never, ever have thought to take advantage of the kid she’d been. He’d never felt good enough for her.

The adult he’d become felt no such compunction. The kid had been so way beneath Sienna she’d have balked at his living conditions. The adult had a thriving business, a place in the Sunshine Coast society, and enough money saved in the bank that he need never work another day in his life.