Sun-Kissed (22 page)

He groaned. And thrust into her, deep and hard.

She jerked with the pleasure of it. “God, that feels so
good
,” she said incredulously.

She honestly hadn’t remembered before that afternoon that a man’s penis could feel that good inside her. Maybe because things had gotten so bad with Clark that sex had been this burden she tried to force herself through there at the end, but somehow, her associations with a man’s penis had been ones of invasion, laboring, a little icky.

And the invasion was there, yes. Hell, yes, she was invaded. But, oh, God, all she wanted to do was get him to invade her
deeper.

“Yeah,” Mack said gutturally. “You’re telling me. Oh, shit.” He pulled out a little and thrust again, and then again. “Oh, yeah, do that, I like that,” he urged as her fingers dug harder into his butt. “And you know how you squeezed on me earli—oh,
yeah.
God, Anne.”

You’re so damn easy
, she thought on a wave of delighted tenderness, and squeezed again. Color flushed his cheekbones so deeply she could tell even in the moonlight. Or maybe she just knew that color was there from the heat of his skin.

“Anne,” he begged. “Don’t stop. Whatever you’re doing, don’t stop.”

“I’m just lying here,” she teased, stroking his butt. “Being me.”

“Yeah. Don’t stop that. Not ever.” He thrust into her again. “Oh, God, not ever. Anne—”

She squeezed as hard as her inner muscles could, tightening her fingers on his ass.

He groaned and bent down suddenly, capturing her mouth in an utterly invasive kiss as his thrusts sped up. She kissed him back, giving him the savageness he asked for, sucking and yielding and invading in return as she arched her hips up to each thrust and squeezed with hands and thighs and all those inner muscles that were delighted to learn they had a purpose.

And she got to watch him, eyes wide open, as he came, body wrenching with pleasure, his own eyes closing, his body at last slowing and then hanging heavily from the arms still bracing it above her. He breathed in slow and huge and let it out as he slumped.

She stroked his back now, watching him. This was a nice order to things—he made her vulnerable first, exposed her all to him, but in return, she took him completely and made him hers. She’d never seen Mack Corey utterly yielded to any force in the world at all. And now here he was, yielded to her.

It was a long time before he rolled to his side, then went into the bathroom for a moment. When he came out, she watched him walk across the room, all naked now but still moving with that power in him. If he had to conquer the world naked, then he’d conquer it naked. And make everyone else feel pitiful hiding in their armor of business suits.

He slid into bed with her and tucked himself immediately against her, one arm going over her waist.

“I see I won’t ever have to worry about lying there bored, wondering how much longer it’s going to take you to get this over with,” Anne couldn’t resist teasing, pretending to glance at an invisible watch.

“Hey.” He pretended to smack her on the bottom, then let his hand linger, a little rub of calluses over her roundness. “I’ll have to tell you about my spanking fantasies sometime.”

Her eyebrows shot up in indignation. He had better
not
have ever indulged in a spanking fantasy about her. “Only if I get to tell you about mine first,” she said, and smacked
his
bottom, with a bit more firmness than he had hers.

Mack laughed and pulled her in closer. “I’m crazy in love with you, Anne. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that?” He rubbed his head into the pillow, a man ready to sleep for the night.

“I guessed,” she said, and closed her fingers over his as they fell asleep.

Chapter 14

“Damn, I miss my girls.” Mack sighed. He was gazing across the ocean, body angled slightly north, and while a sense of global orientation wasn’t Anne’s strongest suit, she suspected that if you could draw a line from his gaze and curve it across the Atlantic, you’d hit the Eiffel Tower.

Mack turned away from his line on Paris, one hand in his pocket, and took her hand with his other one. Even though Anne knew he must genuinely miss his girls terribly, happiness underlay his every movement. As if joy buoyed him up.

She looked down at their hands together. Her. She was that joy.

“About the sand thing,” Mack said. “I could bring blankets.”

“Have you ever had your genes scanned to see if somewhere back there your ancestors got crossed with a rabbit?”

He gave a shout of laughter. “It’s just the build-up,” he said plaintively. “I’ve been thinking about this for over a decade, and it’s only been a week. You’ve got to let me work some things out.”

“Maybe you should pace yourself.” Anne’s mouth twitched. “Considering you’re not eighteen.”

“Nah,” Mack said instantly, shaking his head. “
Never
put off until tomorrow the hot sex you could be having today. You just never know what might happen.” And his hand squeezed a little on hers, because under the humor they both knew that the world was like that. You really did never know.

She squeezed his back.
I’m right here, right now. That’s the best I can do.

Mack threw a stick for Lex, who bounded after it into the low morning surf. “With blankets, there’d be no reason for you to even touch the sand, let alone get it in the places you keep insisting it would get.”

Yes, he was nothing if not persistent. “There are other houses on this beach, Mack.”

“It would be the middle of the night! Most of these guys are old. At least, oh, forty. They’d probably be asleep.”

“The neighbor two doors down has teenagers.”

“Teenagers.” He waved his hand. “They’ve probably got their headphones on, studying all night.”

Yes, his concept of adolescent behavior might have been slightly warped by his daughters. Of course,
he’d
warped
them
, if they were so determined to impress their father that they studied all night when everyone else was playing video games. Still…warped or not, they seemed to be pretty happy, healthy, beautiful adults.

Her son, too. Who’d, ah, spent a lot of nights studying to be the best. Possibly, yes, to impress her.

“Mack. I am not getting my photo in the tabloids naked on the beach with you. No.”

Lex came bounding back, shaking water, and Mack tugged on the stick with him, letting the dog play with it the way he liked to, then threw it out again. “I could buy a private island,” he suggested.

Anne burst out laughing. “You could,” she agreed. So could she, actually. She’d never redecorated a whole island. “But think of the upkeep.”

Mack tugged her in to face him, using his hold on her hand like his personal leash, which he had a tendency to do. “I love it when you laugh like that. I don’t know how to explain how much. It just—fills me up.” And he made a gesture up his torso that started as a fist at belly level and spread, fingers stretching out as they rose through his chest.

Yes. You make me feel like a bottle of champagne, too
. “I made you something,” she said softly.

Some of the parts she’d had to have overnighted, some of them she’d gotten by pulling apart her own jewelry. But she’d finished it yesterday. She hadn’t quite found the moment she was brave enough to offer it. It was a vulnerable gift.

Now, though. Now here on the beach with him, she could maybe put herself that far out there.

Especially—his face just brightened up so much. “Did you really?” And then, after a second, with a little blue sparkle of humor to ease her. “Handcuffs? A leash?”

She laughed and, on the laugh, could pull the little wrapped package out of her pocket. Her ribbon had gotten a little mussed from being carried in her various pockets since yesterday, and she adjusted it compulsively so that the wrapping would look perfect before she handed it to him. The presentation of a gift, after all, really mattered.

When she looked up from it, to hand it to him, so much tenderness and understanding filled his eyes that it still, after a week, nearly bowled her over. She’d seen that expression on his face before, she realized. Many, many times in all their friendship. But now he let the tenderness in it out in the open.

He touched her face as he took the package, feathering his fingertips along her hairline. Then he very carefully did not rip the package, respecting every fold.

By the time he had gotten to the box at the center, she had taken a step back. Regretting a little that she’d trained him so long ago not to rip open her presents as if the wrapping didn’t matter.

Because she felt vulnerable again.

In the box lay a dark brown leather bracelet. Very masculine, she’d made it herself. Woven in its leather cords were five charms. First, on one side, an old porcelain bead with a flower pattern on it that came from a necklace Julie had once worn, that Mack had given her when they were in college. Cade had chosen it before she left, when Anne had explained to her what she wanted to do. It wasn’t an expensive necklace, but apparently it was one that had held a lot of sentimental value for Julie, the very first present Mack had ever given her, picked up spontaneously on one of their early dates, and one the girls remembered her wearing a lot.

Talking to Cade had been—strange, as a conversation. Awkward, for Anne, to reveal something so intimate as what she was trying to do and what that meant about her and Cade’s father, but then Cade had looked so
happy
that it had almost made Anne cry. Not only was she laughing more easily these days, but the damn tears seemed to be more ready to flow, too. That was what she got for letting Mack melt her.

Only how she was supposed to have kept him back, she didn’t quite know. It wasn’t as if she could have poured burning oil down on him from her ramparts. He might have gotten hurt.

Mack drew the leather bracelet out of the box and touched the flowered porcelain bead with his thumb, rolling it carefully.

Then two Murano glass beads, gold leaf within them adding its shine to the rich, vivid red of one and blue of the other. Jaime and Cade, their colors brilliant, just as Mack had said. His thumb rubbed slowly over those, savoring them.

Then an irregular, octahedral shape, pointy and obstreperous and refusing to harmonize, a beautiful old cream color. She’d had a bone carver who’d moved to the US from New Zealand make it, a man whose work she had featured once on her show. One side of the shape, the largest plane, was delicately carved with a stylized grinning face, just suggestive of a tiki carving. Or an old wise man who liked to mock the young ones.

And then…then…this was the one that had been so hard. That made her breath hurt in her chest, to affirm this about herself, that made her throat strangle and her nose sting, and then, then, when she finally got the courage to thread it onto the leather cord, made all the hairs on the nape of her neck shiver and release their shivering in one great rush down her back and through her body as she braided the strands together below it, weaving it securely in.

To even look through the glass beads and pick that one out as
her
: a beautiful glass, infused with light, little threads of gold in it, just this hint of gold, so that it seemed to glow. She’d tried her best to get exactly what he had described, for her. It had felt like wrenching her heart open, to agree that she was that beautiful.

The last bead on the bracelet, it framed his life with her and Julie.

“Anne.” His thumb pressed down hard on it, and then his other hand jerked up toward his face, and she looked up to see that his eyes had turned red, that he was pressing his fingers across them and one of those fingers left a wet smear. “Goddammit, when did I turn into such a watering pot?” he swore, under his breath. And again: “Anne.” Just her name.

And then: “
Shit
.” He had to shove another tear off his face. “Shit, you’ve got me all—oh, shit.” He buried his face in his hands, the bracelet held tight in his fingers.

Anne didn’t know what to do—she never entirely knew what to do when emotions got too much for him—and so she rested her hand on his waist, so he would know she was there, waiting.

He dropped one hand from his face and wrapped it around her waist, pulling her in hard against him. His other hand, still holding her gift, came up to cup her head, bracelet and all, so that he could press her in still tighter.

He didn’t say anything for the longest time, just squeezed. Once in a while, it felt as if he was about to release her, and then his arms would tighten hard again and squeeze some more, rocking her.

And it was the stupidest thing. But while she was there, being squeezed so tightly, a little tear snuck out of her own eyes and trailed down her cheek.

Damn it, that man melted her.

“You spoiled my idea,” Mack said finally, his voice all rough. “Jaime won’t let me buy diamonds, and I know you would rather have something that an independent artist made anyway, so I was going to go shopping. Talk to some of the artists you’ve featured, try to figure out the best stones and design and all that. Put myself on there, all big and bossy and dominating so you couldn’t pretend I wasn’t there, and stones for Kurt and Kai, and, I thought…” His voice grew a little…
shy.
“Would you like my daughters, too? I thought you, you…might. Like them on there. Or…or maybe your own, that you lost. Or Kurt and Kai’s. I wasn’t sure. So I was still thinking about it.”

One of her hands was against his chest, and from her position with her head pressed against him it was nearly all she could see—her bare wrist. Where a bracelet like that would go. Where five tiny stars could be woven between the larger, living stones, his honoring of both her loss and grief and the love she had still been given in her life despite it. “I can add your mother in,” she whispered suddenly, softly. Maggie Corey had died before Anne ever met Mack, and he hadn’t thought to mention her when he spoke of the bracelet, too focused on the present, but of course, his mother should be there.

His arms flexed on her, in agreement or thanks.

“I would like your daughters on mine, very much,” she said.