“I’m sorry.” Caleb starts a fire that lights up the entire room. The house is very cabin-esque constructed entirely of full, fat logs, large round river stones climb over the fireplace and mantle. The first thing my mother did when she moved next door was strip the place of any trace of Reese’s poor dead mother. It broke my heart to see Reese watch as my own mother dismantled her life one piece of furniture at a time. My mother was going through an art deco phase at the moment, so the entire place looks like it’s set in the future. Here it’s warm and cozy. A part of me never wants to leave.
“Don’t apologize,” I say as he sits so close our thighs touch. It feels surreal like this with him as if in my madness I’ve manufactured him out of sheer necessity. “Just pull me out of this, Caleb. I want the world to know what a snake both Keith and my father are for taking on something so disturbing. I’m fucking the guy in those videos for Pete’s sake!” I cover my eyes a moment as if it could somehow hide my shame. “The entire school knows, my friends, his perverted friends, and now my own parents are free to see what sexual shenanigans I’ve been up to for the last few years. I might vomit, literally.”
“Please try not to.” He gives a lazy smile before rolling my knuckles over his mouth. “Nobody is suing anybody yet. Let’s try to think this through before we move one inch.”
“In the meantime, my pink parts are on parade for all to see.” My face heats with embarrassment. I can’t remember the last time something made me blush, and, ironically, my discomfort has nothing to do with the thought of countless friends and family gawking at my privates (I seriously doubt my parents would venture there)—it has everything to do with Caleb seeing me exposed like that, seeing me act out my pleasure in ways that I’ve only ever wanted to do with him. I suppose if I told him I thought about him during all those dynamic erotic exposes, it might sicken him even further. Did you enjoyRough and Rowdy Anal?Guess what?It was you I pictured slamming up against me!
Nope. My love affair with Caleb has gone well off course before it could ever gain traction. In effect, Keith had cost me what I wanted the most, this gorgeous man warming the seat beside me.
“Let’s change the subject.” Now it’s my turn to swallow hard. “Since, I’m assuming”—I hold up a hand—“please don’t bother denying it, you’re either going to, or already have, viewed my work.” He huffs a dull laugh when I say the word work but doesn’t deny it. “I think you should tell me something about yourself.” My hand floats to his deliciously perfect cheek. This is no face of an angel. Caleb McCarthy is peppered with dark stubble, his bright eyes siren from under a forest of dark lashes, from under his narrowed menacing brows. His milky teeth graze over his dark, crimson lip, almost violet in color; Caleb is an entire palate of oozing testosterone. His devil’s grin is the icing on the very seductive cake. “You have sharp canines.” I run the pad of my finger over his tooth and prick myself with it. “You’re like a sexy vampire. I bet you hear that all the time.”
Sexy?He mouths as if he found the word cheesy, and it is.
“Okay, exceptionally handsome. Freakishly so.” My face heats again. My body only seems to react when I’m telling the truth. The lies are so much easier. That’s another thing I learned to do during my parents tumultuous divorce, spew disfigured truths from my mouth as if I believed them.It’s true in nature, my mother used to say as she coached me.Sometimes you need to say what’s going to prove a point. We need to win this thing. We’re not going down without a fight and sometimes, Kenny, you need to fight dirty. I frown at the memory. Dirty, dirty, dirty is what I’ve become.
“Freakishly handsome? Thank you, I think.” He pulls my hand toward him again and takes a grazing bite from the inside of my wrist. “Believe me, I have plans for your neck later.” His brows rise, but I don’t play along. I’ve already fed into his vampire lust, into mine, enough for the evening. The point of coming over wasn’t to fall into bed with him. It was to enjoy his company—to converse using my mother’s native language.
“I want you to bare yourself to me, Caleb. Your soul, not your body.” I glance down at his broad, thick chest. I’ve felt that skin over steel pressed against me before, and my body craves more of the same. No lie there. My breathing picks up in rhythm to his.
“Okay.” He closes his eyes as if I’ve just asked him to do something reprehensible like slaughter a kitten. Some people, most people, would rather slaughter a kitten than bare their soul. “Do you remember any of the stuff we used to talk about?”
Caleb and I were secret friends. We met by the swampy side of the lake and dipped our feet off the side of the canoe, sharing stories of our lives but mostly it was meaningless bullshit. We were just killing time before the good part started, the part where he stuck his tongue down my throat for hours, his hands groping under my swimsuit until he cried uncle and took off in fear of breaking the virginal law. I wasn’t quite at the age of consent, but my body didn’t care. Apparently Caleb takes jail time very seriously, and knowing my mother, myfather, he was wise to do so. He would have ended his career before it began. Much like I did.
“I remember that we kept our lives on the surface.” It’s my turn to raise my brows because he knows it’s true. We were strangers for two summers fighting off feelings that I haven’t known ever since. “I want to know you, the real you. You’re going to know me, Caleb. You’re going to see me, unfairly so. If I had sex with you right now, you wouldn’t see me that way, doing those things, my body gaping and sloppy. If I knew I was being filmed, I might have made an effort.” Somewhat of a lie. “So just to even the playing field. Tell me something about yourself. Tell me your deepest, darkest secret.”
His eyes widen for a moment as if he has one but doesn’t plan on shedding any light on it—not tonight anyway.
His mouth twists and turns as if I’ve robbed him of a goodnight’s sleep. Caleb presses in with those ethereal, heavenly eyes and nods.
“I have a very dark and ugly secret, Kennedy, that I will share with you.” His lids grow heavy and thick as if his lust for me were putting him in a trance. “But first you have to kiss me.”
“I was wondering when we would get to the good part.” Lie. I knew it was coming. As much as I wanted to ignore him, punish him for leaving me, for letting me drift into Keith’s unwelcome, deceitful, filthy arms, I couldn’t. As much as I want to resist Caleb McCarthy, he always leads me to the flame. But if this relationship goes in the direction that just about every other relationship I’ve ever had in my life—the two of us are about to get severely burned.
His mouth falls to mine, soft at first as he backs away. He blinks at me with that barely-there smile on his face, the look that says come and get it, prove to me you want this. I came back for you—you dirty little bitch, show me you care.
Okay, so that last part was strictly out of my rotten imagination, but sometimes those little lies that prickle at our subconscious are the only things we choose to believe.
I launch at him with my lips, clamping my mouth over his like a seal. Our tongues find one another as I crawl onto his lap and place his roving hands over my thighs. Now it’s me who’s in control. My tongue wild as a serpent in his mouth, his groping hands begging for more even though the show ends at my panty line tonight. There will be no fornicating, no free love. I am not about to sell the farm when my body is the only weapon I have to war with. No, definitely not tonight.
Caleb kisses me back, long, strong, thrusting, smooth, and caressing kisses that make me take pause—reconsider the game as I sigh into his mouth like a schoolgirl. I don’t think Keith has ever kissed me like this. I don’t think Keith has ever incited a riot in my body, making my aching bones beg for more. I haven’t been kissed like this since all those Caleb-soaked summers so long ago. This tastes like heaven, like the future, like the only thing in the world I ever want to do.
My heart drums over his, explosive like the shattering of glass, letting me know this is the truth.
Caleb
There wasa reason that I used to look forward to summer, to spending three solid months up at the lake with my uncle, and that reason is sitting just an inch shy of my hard-on. Kennedy Westfield’s—Slade’skisses taste like honey. It’s a bad cliché, I know, but it’s the only thing I can think of to describe her sweet, very sweet, lips, the way her tongue dances over mine, the intense salivating of her mouth. Fine wine and honey. There, that’s only slightly better.
She pulls back abruptly, her mouth a ruby red, her lips still pouting as if she were sucking down a bottle of whiskey.
“I’m sorry.” Her fingers pat over her lips. Her gaze darts around the cabin as if she’s just coming to. “I have to go.” It comes from her amused rather than disheartened. She attempts to climb off my lap, and I gently secure her waist with my hands.
“Don’t be sorry. Please, stay.” I glance down at our conjoined hips. “I promise, you have the best seat in the house.”
An impish grin crops up on her lips. “I don’t doubt it. I also don’t doubt a lot of other truths about where you might like tonight to lead.” She carefully pries my hands off her waist until I’m holding them up in surrender. “I’m sorry. My head’s just all over the place.”
A glimmer of tears glosses her eyes, and I feel like crap for even thinking about making her mine, fully mine in the biblical sense. For ages now I’ve felt as if Kennedy belonged to me, not in some materialistic sense, but in the soul mate, grafted over my heart, idealistic sense. Kennedy is a special woman, one who challenges the entire world and demands it pay attention to her. Of course, now, thanks to her lowlife of an ex, the world will be forced to pay attention to her in much more intimate ways. Damn pervert. My fist has an early morning meeting scheduled with his throat. I plan on jamming my hand down it for even thinking what he did was all right—or in any wayjust.
“Don’t apologize.” I carefully place her on the sofa next to me. My dick is starting to tick to life, and any admission of empathy will be slighted by the hard-on ready to bloom in my jeans. “I should have been more sensitive. I’m the one who’s sorry.” I bear into her clear gray eyes a moment. “I’m sorry your world is crumbling around you. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to help you fix this.” It sounds robotic without meaning to, but I do mean it.
