Sea of Love: A Bayberry Island Novel (7 page)

“Oh, fuck it,” he whispered.

“God, yes!”

Ash lowered his mouth onto hers. He shoved his fingers into her wet hair, angled her face exactly how he wanted, then kissed her with such perfection that her mind went blank. Rowan felt everything suddenly stop—her blood, her breath, her rational thought, her awareness of anything but
him
. His kiss was tender but without a trace of hesitation. This was a man who knew what he was doing, knew what he wanted. And it was clear that Ashton Louis Wallace III wanted her.

Rowan raised her hands to touch him. He felt so damn good beneath her fingers. His back, upper arms, and shoulders were built from hard muscle and smooth skin. His neck was strong. She figured it was her turn to be bold, so she yanked on his hair and took the kiss where she needed it to go.

Total pleasure. Her entire being was nothing but a nerve ending designed to receive pleasure. She felt out of control, wrapping a leg around his and then slipping her hands down his muscular back to his ass. This was already so outrageous that Rowan figured it didn’t matter what she did next—so she grabbed his booty, pulled him tighter to her, and arched her back.

Two thoughts penetrated the lustful fog in her brain. The first was that this was prime man beneath her hands and on top of her body. The second was that her dry spell was about to end, and probably with a lot more than a trickle.

“Are you sure?” He asked this question in between her increasingly demanding kisses.

“I’m sure.” Rowan pushed up into him again, feeling his long and hard arousal poke against her sweet spot. At least it used to be her sweet spot. For too long it had been just another spot.

Thunder pounded. Lightning cracked and flashed. Rowan groaned with disappointment when Ash removed his lips from hers, but sighed with relief when he ripped what remained of her sopping-wet shirt from her body, then unhooked the front closure of her bra faster than she ever could. Immediately, his hands were on her breasts, teasing her nipples, pulling and flicking at them until she cried out. The way he handled her was so . . .
carnal
.

Ash stopped. He raised his face just as another strobe of light filled the apartment. That’s when she saw the single-minded glint in his eyes. Ash was a man on a mission. He lowered his mouth to her nipples, left then the right, back and forth he went, tugging and sucking until Rowan began squirming beneath him.

“Too much?” he asked, his voice husky in the darkness.

Lightning illuminated the room again, and Rowan shook her head. She had to shout over the thunder. “Take my pants off! Please!”

He pushed up to his knees, and Rowan lifted her hips off the floor to assist him. It was then that a series of lightning hits created several seconds of on-again-off-again illumination, allowing Rowan to get her first good look at Ash’s naked body as he threw her soaking-wet jeans across the room.

Damn
. Pure male perfection. Big across the chest and shoulders, defined arms, flat and hard abs rippling as he moved, and . . . She stopped breathing. Her eyes went big. Rowan slammed her palms onto the old wood floor and tossed her head back, thanking the storm gods for washing this truly gifted man upon the shores of Bayberry Island.

Pants gone. Arms wrapped tight around her back. Ash’s mouth went back where it belonged, on hers, as he lifted her off the floor.

“Spread your legs.”

That would work for her.

“Wider. Open your legs wider.”

Rowan flipped her legs up and over Ash’s thighs as he sat back on his heels. He pulled her to his chest. Mouth rough on hers. Hands on her ass, then moving across her hips, along her back. Oh God. She could feel his big cock pressing into her belly. All she had to do was lift up and forward just the tiniest bit and they’d be in business.

She heard herself whimper. Rowan clutched at his wet skin, slapped her hands onto his back, and opened her mouth so that he could have her. In that moment, she knew she would give Ash anything and everything he wanted.

She was drowning in the lust, lost in it, and so incredibly hungry for relief. “Please,” she whispered as he kissed her. “God, please.”

Ash slid one hand from her hip to inside her open legs. A vague sensation of embarrassment went through her. It had been so long since she cared about how her body would look and feel to a man. Had she shaved her legs that morning? Her underarms? The tip of his finger brushed against her swollen clitoris and her brain exploded.

“Please. Please.” She knew she sounded like a desperate woman, but she didn’t give a damn what she sounded like. The same went for the shaving. Who cared? His finger slid down into the opening of her sex, and she cried out from the shock of it.

“Rowan. God. You’re so wet. So incredibly beautiful.” Ash spread her open with his fingers, teasing and pushing and teasing some more. He dragged his lips from hers and began kissing her cheeks, hair, and throat. “Are you sure? We can stop. Tell me what to do.”

His words sounded as desperate as her own, which surprised her. This was a huge deal for Rowan. Maybe it was for him, too. Of course, she had no way of knowing because Ashton Louis Wallace III was a stranger. She knew almost nothing about him, except that he possessed a gorgeous face, perfect body, and black credit card.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. She shouldn’t be doing this. She
knew
this wasn’t a smart move. On every level. First, she didn’t have a condom. Of course she didn’t! This wasn’t exactly planned.

And what about afterward? How ridiculous would she feel? True, she was sex starved, but she’d been sex starved before and it had never left her lost to herself like this, helpless, feeling as if she were being swept up and
claimed.
But that was exactly how she felt at that moment.

Lightning split the air. Thunder rolled through them. Rowan knew it was far too late to stop, even if she wanted to. Whatever this was, it would have to be. It had a weight to it. A force. It felt like fate.

Ash’s fingers suddenly stilled, and Rowan realized she’d gotten so absorbed in her own internal battle that she hadn’t noticed that he’d produced a condom as if from thin air. She also realized she hadn’t answered his question.

“Don’t you dare stop,” she said. “Take me. Make love to me.
Do
it.”

Ash didn’t need to be asked twice. He resumed the beautiful torment with his fingers, and Rowan could hear the extent of her own arousal. He hadn’t been joking—she was as soaking wet as her clothes had been. He found her nipples again with his mouth, and Rowan felt it building—rushing, driving, hot—so intense it was almost painful. Ash gently closed his teeth on a nipple and the lid blew off of Rowan’s being.

She heard the strangest sound, something so raw and fierce that it didn’t even occur to her that she was responsible. Orgasmic waves hit her over and over, leaving her fingers numb, her breath ragged. Lightning ripped the darkness apart and Ash looked up at her. Their eyes remained locked as more lightning flashed, and Rowan’s gaze was glued to Ash’s as he lifted her and slowly, so slowly, guided her limp body onto his rock-hard cock.

It was too much. Too much pleasure and release. Rowan felt the tears roll down her cheeks as she called out again, squeezing and pulling on him as he moved her up and down.

Ash might have been speaking to her. She couldn’t tell for sure. The thunder was too loud. She was washed away in a sea of sensation. But her eyes held his in the on-and-off light, and she saw the tension drain from his expression. She wasn’t sure if it was a trick of the light, but she swore a shadow of emotion fell over his face.

She had no time to dwell on it. Ash somehow rolled off his knees, laid her on her back, and put them right back to where the whole thing began—Rowan trapped beneath him, Ash’s hands in her hair, both of them on the edge of doing something they could never take back.

But this time, Ash was buried deep inside her, controlling the movement of both their bodies with his physical strength and the force of his will.

Rowan closed her eyes. Nothing existed but the fierce heat of their need. She allowed him to carry her away and pull her under.

*   *   *

Mona Flynn blew out the match and dropped it, half incinerated and still smoking, into the Mother’s Day clamshell ashtray Rowan had made for her in second grade. Yet another clap of lightning was followed by yet another growl of thunder. The flash momentarily illuminated the faces of the eight Mermaid Society members assembled in her small living room.

“This is a pretty bad one,” said Abigail Foster, stating the obvious, as usual.

Izzy McCracken put her flip-flopped feet up on the center coffee table. “Good thing the council decided to take down the giant starfish. With all this wind, we could have had another decapitation.”

Polly Estherhausen groaned. “You aren’t talking about that man from Arkansas, are you? Because
he wasn’t decapitated.
We’ve been over this a hundred times.”

“Well, he did have to have several stitches.”

“A couple stitches do not a severed head make.”

Abigail Foster pulled off her wet wig and threw it to the center of the table with a flourish. It landed with the thud of a lifeless animal and smelled almost as musty. “Can we stop arguing about whether or not that tourist’s head was cut off? It was twenty years ago, people! It’s time to move on.”

“I could not agree more.” Izzy crossed her arms under her shells and pouted like a grumpy toddler.

“Pass the merlot,” Polly said.

“Let’s move along, shall we?” Mona was just as wet and irritable as everyone else in the room, yet she couldn’t let it show. As president, it was her responsibility to keep them on point. The official festival kickoff was now a little more than twelve hours away, and the Mermaid Society had actual business to attend to. She grabbed her indexed three-ring binder and placed it with a solid thud on top of her knees.

“Day one—the parade. We must be at the judging stand by one p.m. and not a minute later. I’ve received confirmation that all the floats were garaged before the storm, so the order is as we originally planned.”

“Thank God.” Abigail rolled her eyes. “It was like pulling teeth trying to get even two dozen entries this year. Enthusiasm is way down.”

“It’s all this resort bullshit.” Layla O’Brien’s eyes widened and she slapped a hand over her mouth, but the words were already out. She stared at Mona.

“Oh Jesus.” Polly poured herself a giant glass of wine.

“I only meant—”

“It’s all right.” Mona closed the binder with a sigh, taking a moment to gather her patience. She couldn’t blame people for thinking her position was nothing but stubborn folly. For more than a year now she’d been called a control freak. A bitch. An idiot. And because she’d only married into the Flynn family and wasn’t born and raised on island, some of the people she’d counted as friends for nearly forty years had taken to calling her an interloper, an outsider, and a party crasher. Or worse.

Mona took it in stride. She knew that by refusing to negotiate with the developers, she had become the defender of all that was good and honorable. It wasn’t always fun and games standing by one’s principles. Which was all right by her. Not everyone had the distinction of being born a leader.

Take Frasier, her beaten-down and passionless estranged husband, for example. He was proof that just because a man happened to be mayor didn’t mean he possessed the gift of discernment, or a backbone. Simply put, the smell of money had made him lose his mind. It poisoned their thirty-eight-year marriage in the process, leading to their separation. So the mayor of Bayberry Island now hid out in a studio apartment over the boogie board shop on Main Street, while Mona took up residence in the rental home they owned on Idlewilde Lane. Love wasn’t the issue. Mona most certainly still loved her husband. But, oh, how he’d disappointed her.

She didn’t blame him for being tempted. Two decades of financial struggle had been hard on Frasier—closing the fishery after more than a hundred years of continuous operation, turning the family home into a bed-and-breakfast to make ends meet, and then watching Rowan lose what little was left of the once-impressive Flynn fortune.

But she believed money wasn’t all that mattered, and losing money was no excuse for losing your moral footing. What about a sense of history? Family tradition? Loyalty to one’s roots? Mona knew that if it weren’t for her, Frasier would have sold the land out from under them without a second thought. And then what?

She’d always been more of a visionary than her husband, and Mona had no doubt that in his old age, Frasier would regret that decision with every fiber of his being. It would have made him heartsick to see his island destroyed.

So that’s how Mona had become the only landowner on the cove to tell Jessop-Riley and their league of gluttonous jackals to go screw themselves.

This had made her rather unpopular.

“I ask only that we get through festival week as a cohesive unit,” Mona told her group. “These seven days are about the power of love, not the lure of cash. Can we aspire to live as our higher selves for just this one week? That still leaves us fifty-one weeks of the year to wallow around in our greed and fight like schoolchildren.”

Polly raised her hand. “I’ve pretty much drained the merlot. Is there any more of that chardonnay in the fridge?”