‘I’m…’ He stopped. He wasn’t sorry. He probably should be but he wasn’t. Not in this moment, anyway. Unless she was about to knee him in the balls for kissing her, in which case he’d no doubt be very sorry. ‘Are you okay?’
Twenty
Panting, Sweeney stared into the eyes of the man she had known the longest in her life. Even longer than her father.Fin.Who had just kissed her to within an inch of her life.
She was decidedlynotokay.
This wascrazy. Reallyfreakinggood but still crazy. And, just… too much. The surge of heat, the visceral urge to grind that had swept from her centre to her toes and all the way back up again as his knee had brushed against her so intimately, had been too much. She’d grabbed his wrist because she’d felt like she was falling—down the freaking rabbit hole probably—that’s how disorientating this all was.
Wanting to roll on top of her guy BFF and grind herself to climax. In public.
But, dear god, the way his facial hair had scraped against her skin and the faint taste of beer on his breath and the low timbre of his groans and, even now, the ragged chug of his breathing, the unsteady rise and fall of his chest as he looked at her in concern clearly wondering if he’d screwed up, his mouth wet and crushed from kissing.
From kissingher.
How could she resist the temptation of that mouth? She couldn’t. Without any kind of cogent analysis, she lifted her head off the ground, threaded her fingers through the thick fall of his hair and pulled him down.
He didn’t resist, his lips meeting hers with the same fervour and passion as before, his rough, low groan strumming along the muscles deep and low and curling her toes.
Yes.God yes.
Her pulse tripped and her belly squeezed as she wound both her arms around his neck, pulling him closer, needing to be as close as possible in this crazy crumbling world. Revelling in the scratch of his whiskers and losing her breath to the deep, hot lash of his tongue, meeting each lash with a stroke of her own as his palm sat hot and heavy on the flare of her ribs just below her breast.
And that knee between her legs, driving her slowly mad. Not moving, not a millimetre, but justthere. Heavy. Solid. Present. Building a buzz directly below, heat sparking and simmering, rippling out, quivering through nerve endings from her inner thighs to her belly and circling around the bottom of her spine.
It was good.Sogood she had to move if he didn’t, rolling her hips involuntarily to ease the heat but only cranking it further. He groaned at the move and she lost her mind a little more and did it again, and god knew where it would have led had not a burst of nearby laughter popped their bubble, sending them both crashing to the ground.
Or sitting bolt upright anyway.
Disorientated, Sweeney blinked into the night. When had it gone completely dark? Hyper-aware of Fin’s presence beside her, she looked around for the source of the interruption, trying to identify that as she also tried to identify basic data like where they were and what time it was. Whatdayit was.
Hell, what hernamewas…
No, wait. The lake. They were at the lake. And she couldn’t see anybody. A car door slammed somewhere in the parking area then an engine started up.
‘I think it might have been those kids on the jetty.’
Fin’s voice was husky in the night as Sweeney’s gaze flicked to the wooden structure she’d jumped off about a thousand times. A series of solar lights attached to the sidings—that hadn’t been there when they’d been kids—illuminated its length, casting a low glow across the boards and the surrounding water.
There were no teenagers there anymore so maybe Fin was right. Maybe the laughter had come from them.
‘Sweeney.’
She shut her eyes, not wanting to hear whatever Fin had to say next. She was still trying to compute what happened, still trying to figure out a way it made sense. And with her body still in a physical uproar, that wasn’t possible.
Opening her eyes again, they fell on a white, round object floating on the lake surface near the jetty. It took a beat for her to recognise what it was.Oh, crap.‘Fin.’ She nudged his arm with her shoulder as she pointed. ‘The ball.’
The beach was on averyslight gradient. It must have rolled down after she’d taken her hands off it, made its way to the shoreline, and the ripple of water had picked it up.
Pushing to his feet in a way Sweeney wasn’t quite sure she could replicate just yet without falling over, he jogged to the water’s edge. Maybe he was keen to have something to do other than talk, too. Absently she watched as he kicked off his shoes. He was going in?
Yup. He was going in the lake.
He must really be desperate to avoid talking—it had to be freezing in there. The ball hadn’t drifted that far out and the lake was reasonably shallow for the first five metres or so before rapidly falling away, so he shouldn’t get too wet. But still…
She got to her feet as his jeans joined his shoes. His long, lean Irish-winter legs were pale in the night and she copped a flash of his underwear-encased butt before his shirt fell to conceal it again. He strode into the lake then and Sweeney had to tell herself it was a ball, not a drowning child because, frankly, she was a little turned on right now and it had nothing to do with what had just happened on the sand.
She sighed.Her hero.
