Web held himself still, suspended above her for a moment, then gave a loud groan and rolled away.
She was up on her elbow in an instant. “Web? It doesn’t matter. I want to. Most of my friends—”
“I don’t give a damn about most of your friends,” he growled, throwing an arm over his eyes. “You’re seventeen, the kid sister of a man who’s become my good friend. I can’t do it.”
“Don’t you want to?”
He lifted his arm and stared at her, then grabbed her hand and drew it down to cover the faded fly of his jeans. The fabric was strained. He pressed her hand against his fullness, then groaned again and rolled abruptly to his side away from her.
Her question had been answered quite eloquently. Marni felt the knot of frustration in her belly, but she’d also felt his. “Can I … can I do something?” she whispered, wanting to satisfy him almost as much as she wanted to be satisfied herself.
“Oh, you can do something,” was his muffled reply, “but it’d only shock you and I don’t think you’re ready for that.”
She leaned over him. “I’m ready, Web. I want to do it.”
Glaring, he rolled back to face her, but his glare faded when he saw the sincerity of her expression. His eyes grew soft, his features compassionate. He raised a hand to gently stroke the side of her face. “If you really want to do something,” he murmured, “you can help me clean up here, then race me to the top of this hill and down. By the time we’re back at the bottom, we should both be in control. Either that,” he added with a wry smile, “or too tired to do anything about it.”
It was his smile and the ensuing swelling of her heart that first told Marni she was in love. Over the next week she pined, because Web made sure that they weren’t alone again. He looked at her though, and she could see that he wasn’t immune to her. He went out of his way not to touch her and, much as she craved those knowing hands on her again, she didn’t push him for fear she’d come across as being exactly what she was—a seventeen-year-old girl with hots that were nearly out of control. She knew that in time she could get through to Web. He felt something for her, something strong. But time was her enemy. The summer was half over, and though she wanted it to last forever, it wouldn’t.
She was right on the button when it came to Web and his feelings for her. He wasn’t immune, not by a long shot. He told himself it was crazy, that he’d never before craved untried flesh, but there was something more that attracted him to her, something that the women he’d had, the women he continued to have, didn’t possess.
So when a group of Ethan’s friends and their dates gathered for a party at someone’s boat house, Web quite helplessly dragged Marni to a hidden spot and kissed her willing lips until they were swollen.
“What was that for?” she asked. Her arms were around his neck, and she was on tiptoe, her back pressed to the weathered board of the house.
“Are you protesting?” he teased, knowing she’d returned the kiss with a fever.
“No way. Just curious. You’ve gone out of your way to avoid me.” She didn’t quite pout, but her accusation was clear.
He insinuated his body more snugly against hers. “I’ve tried. Again … still. It’s not working.” He framed her face with his hands, burying his fingers in her hair. “I want you, Marni. I lie in bed at night remembering that day on the mountain and how good you felt under me, and I tell myself that it’s nonsense, but the chemistry’s there, damn it.”
“I know,” she agreed in an awed whisper.
“So what are we going to do about it?”
She shrugged, then drew her hands from his shoulders to lightly caress the strong cords of his neck. “You can make love to me if you want.”
“Is it what you want?” His soberness compelled her to meet his gaze.
She blinked, her only show of timidity. “I’ve wanted it for days now. I feel so … empty when I think of you. I get this ache … way down low …”
“Your parents would kill you. And me.”
“There are different kinds of killing. Right now I’m dying because I want you, and I’m afraid you still think of me as a little kid who’s playing with fire. I may only be seventeen, but I’ve been with enough men to know when I find one who’s different.”
He could have substituted his own age for hers and repeated the statement. He didn’t understand it, but it was the truth, and it went beyond raw chemistry. Marni had a kind of depth he’d never found in a woman before. He’d watched her participate in conversations with Ethan and his friends, holding her own both intellectually and emotionally. She was sophisticated beyond her years, perhaps not physically, but he felt that urgency in her now.
“I’m serious about your parents,” he finally said. “They dislike me as it is. If I up and seduce their little girl—”
“You’re not seducing me. It’s a mutual thing.” Made bold by the emotions she felt when she was in this man’s arms, she slid her hand between their bodies and gently caressed the hard evidence of his sex. “I’ve never done this to another man, never touched another man this way,” she whispered. “And I’m not afraid, because when I do this to you—” she rotated her palm and felt him shudder and arch into it “—I feel it inside me, too. Please, Web. Make love to me.”
Her nearness, the untutored but instinctively perfect motion of her hand, was making it hard for him to breathe. “Can you get out later?” he managed in a choked whisper.
“Tonight? I think so.”
He set her back, leaving his fingers digging into her shoulders. “Think about it until then, and if you still feel the same way, come to me. I’ll be on the beach behind the Wayward Pines at two o’clock You know the one.”
She nodded, unable to say a word as the weight of what she was about to agree to settled on her shoulders. He left her then to return to the group. She went straight home and sat in the darkness of her room, giving herself every reason why she should undress and go to sleep for the night but knowing that she’d never sleep, that her body tingled all over, that her craving was becoming obsessive, and that she loved Web.
