“Doesn’t matter—it’s not the point.”
“What exactly is the point? You want me to find a girl in the crowd for Aiden and slip this to her so they can get in a quickie?”
“Um,ew?” she said, scrunching up her nose before shaking her head. “Wouldn’t matter anyway. Anonymous sex isn’t really his style.”
I held up the key between two fingers. “Focus, Addison.”
“Right.” She stopped walking and turned to face me, hands on her hips. “It’s for you to sneak away with your husband…Obviously. I don’t care what you two do in there as long as there’s no bloodshed. Just make the escape look good—like you can’t keep your hands off each other. We want the entire town talking about it, so good old Dickie won’t have a choice but to believe it.”
Well, that was just fantastic. I needed to have a pretend quickie with my pretend husband who wasactuallymy husband and whom I’dactuallyhad amazing and not at all pretend sex with and was now avoiding. That clusterfuck explanation pretty much summed up exactly how difficult this was going to be.
I glanced behind Addison, my gaze immediately connecting with Ford’s. Even with all the commotion going on around his booth, his eyes were trained on me, and a shiver slid down my spine at his pointed attention. He was enclosed in the tank, shirtless and sitting on the levered stool, as people tried to hit the target. His hair wasn’t wet, but that didn’t mean anything with how hot it was outside; he could’ve easily dried off, thanks to the sun. And even though the festival was winding down, the kid currently tossing balls at the target looked determined as hell, so I wasn’t so sure Ford wouldn’t be dunked at least once more.
Worse, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to handle a shirtless, dripping wet Ford. Especially when he was looking at me likethat. Like he was replaying every second of our night together. Like he was remembering exactly how it had felt to be inside me. Like he wished we didn’t have these layers of clothes between us.
His gaze did unspeakable things to me, and I wasn’t so sure I was strong enough to resist them. Thank God we were in public.
CHAPTERNINETEEN
FORD
My wife had been avoidingme like the plague, and I was tired of it.
She’d given me every excuse in the book to escape being near me. It had made sense at first—I had no doubt she was sore when mine was the first cock she’d taken in three years. But the longer it went on, the more ridiculous each excuse got until it was clear exactly what she was doing.
Now, she stood off to the side next to my sister, wearing one of those flirty fucking dresses. The kind that drove me damn near feral with my need to have her. Worse, it was the same one she’d been wearing the first night I’d fucked her. The hem kissed her thick thighs, the neckline dipping low enough to give me a glimpse of those gorgeous, full tits, and I wasdone.
I was done playing this bullshit game, and I was done waiting. Quinn wanted me just as much as I wanted her—I’d woken up so many times to her, still sleeping but grinding herself all over my dick, my name a whimpered plea on her lips—and I wanted to know why she was punishing us both by not giving in to what we both clearly wanted.
And if I had to fuck the answers out of her, so be it.
I had five minutes left of this dunk tank fundraiser—a last-minute idea I’d pitched to the Blueberry Fest coordinator with a promise to fix her front porch steps if she’d let me slip in for free—and then I was going to grab Quinn, drag her back home, and we were going to work this out, one way or another.
“Come on, Bobby.” Aiden clapped from the sidelines as one of the kids on our team wound up, ready to throw his attempt to dunk me. “You’re our last hope. Send him down!”
“You should be the one in here, you asshole,” I said for his ears only.
“Your idea, your ass in the tank. Those are the rules.”
“You and your fucking rules,” I grumbled under my breath.
I wasn’t sure how much we’d raised so far, but there had been a steady line of people attempting to dunk me. Luckily, I’d only been taken down a handful of times, and it was hot enough out that I dried off quickly. While I didn’t want to do this every day, it was fun watching the kids on the team practice their throws and cheer one another on, even if it was at my expense.
Scary as it was, I was a stand-in father figure for some of these kids, especially the ones like Bobby, who lived with just his widowed grandmother. When the resort first sponsored the team and I started coaching it with Aiden, I hadn’t realized just how…fulfilling that would be.
I also hadn’t realized just how many memories it would dredge up.
As a kid, I’d had a father, but I hadn’t had apresentfather—still didn’t, actually. No one to cheer for me at games or play catch in the backyard. Brady had been that person for me and the rest of our siblings, because our dad was usually passed out on the couch by noon. Hell, Brady wasstillthat person, because our dad didn’t care enough about us to step foot outside Cottage Thirteen even to say thank you for the shit we dropped off at his door to make sure he was taken care of. He’d sequestered himself there ten years ago after Mom had died at sea in a storm, and we hadn’t seen heads or tails of him since.
So yeah…now that I was able to be that someone for a kid who needed it? It was rewarding in a way I hadn’t anticipated.
Which was why, when Bobby’s ball connected with the target and sent me down, I wasn’t even mad. I dropped into the water and surfaced to the cheers of the crowd. I shook the hair out of my face and watched as Aiden—that traitor—lifted Bobby onto his shoulder. The kid raised his arms above him in a victory V, his grin aimed my way while his grandma laughed from the sidelines.
But that wasn’t the smile that had me snared. That achievement belonged to my wife.
Quinn, now standing alone, looked on, just the subtlest curve to her lips as she watched this all unfold, and I couldn’t wait another second. Couldn’t be smart or methodical about this. Couldn’t plan out the best way to approach it.
I wasdone. And whether she wanted to or not, we were working this shit out right now.
