“Dylan— I— something’s happening again?—”
“I’ve got you,” he rasped, voice wrecked. One of his hands slipped between us, fingers sliding under the edge of my bikini to find my clit while he kept rocking against me. “Come for me, princess. Let me feel it.”
The combination—his fingers circling, the relentless drag and nudge of his cock through the fabric, the hot, filthy almost-sex of it—shattered me.
Pleasure crashed over me in long, rolling waves. I cried out, body bowing, thighs clamping around his hips as I pulsed and throbbed against him. He worked me through it, grinding slow and steady, letting me ride every aftershock against the hard length of him until I collapsed back onto the sand, trembling and breathless.
For a long moment he stayed exactly where he was, forehead pressed to mine, breathing like he’d run miles. His cock was still rock-hard against me, twitching with every aftershock that rippled through my body.
Then, very carefully, he pulled back.
He sat up, ran both hands through his wet hair, and looked at me like I was both salvation and damnation.
“That,” he said roughly, “was the closest I’ve ever come to losing every ounce of control I have left.”
I reached for him, but he caught my hand and brought it to his lips instead, kissing my knuckles, then the inside of my wrist where the pearl bracelet rested.
“I won’t take more from you tonight,” he said quietly. “Not when I can’t stay. Not when I’d have to look your father in the eye knowing what I did to his daughter on a beach in Cabo.”
He helped me fix my bikini top with gentle hands, then stood and pulled me up with him. We walked in silence to the edge of the resort path, the waves still singing behind us.
At the shadows of the flowering trees he stopped and kissed me one last time—slow, deep, final. His thumb brushed the pearl on my bracelet.
“Keep this,” he murmured against my mouth. “And remember that for one night, I was selfish enough to almost give you everything.”
Then he stepped back into the darkness.
I slipped back into my room on shaky legs, the taste of him still on my tongue, the ache between my thighs still pulsing with the memory of his hardness nudging and dragging and almost taking what I’d never given anyone.
I was still a virgin.
But I’d never felt more thoroughly claimed.
And as I lay in the dark listening to the ocean, I knew that no matter how far he ran back to San Diego, part of me would always be lying on that moonlit beach in Cabo, legs wrapped around him, aching for the moment the fabric between us finally disappeared.
CHAPTER 6
DESTINY
One Year Later…
I wore my mother’s diamond earrings and turquoise ring every day.
Every single day.
Not because anyone made me. Not because Edge watched for them, or Tarak needed proof I understood what those gifts meant. Not because Regan got soft around the eyes the first few times she saw the diamonds catching California sunlight.
I wore them because they became part of me.
Like my phone.
Like my car keys.
Like the little tube of lip balm I lost in every purse I owned and somehow always found again when I had already bought another one.
The earrings went in before class. The ring slid onto my finger before I left my room. If I forgot either one, I felt wrong all day, like I had walked out missing a piece of myself. The diamonds were small enough not to scream money, but real enough to throw sharp little sparks when I turned my head. Theturquoise ring was older, heavier, full of desert color and history. It looked out of place against my California life sometimes.
That was why I loved it.
