Текст книги "Scorched"

Автор книги: Jennifer L. Armentrout

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

Tanner strolled by where I sat on the barstool in front of the kitchen island. He tugged a curl and then leaned against the island, angling his body toward mine. “So, what are we going to get into today?”

“Why didn’t you go hiking with them?” I asked instead of answering. One just had to take a look at Tanner to know he was all about physical activity.

He shrugged one shoulder, causing the faded T-shirt he wore to stretch across his chest. “They didn’t want me to go along with them, so you’re stuck with me.”

I thought it was a little strange that they would’ve said that, but knowing Syd, she probably purposely disinvited him the moment she realized I wasn’t going with them, leaving him behind to babysit me. But after our little one-on-one in the bathroom yesterday, I wasn’t sure being stuck with Tanner was a bad thing. “I guess I am.”

“Yep. So why don’t you go upstairs, put that bathing suit on and we’ll spend the day being lazy and getting sunburnt.”

I started to make up an excuse, but considering he’d seen me in a towel that barely covered anything the night before, it seemed stupid to not want to go out there in a swimsuit. Still, I hesitated.

“Come on, Andy.” He caught my hand in his and drew me off the barstool. His other hand settled on my hip. “Spend time with me.”

Staring into eyes that reminded me of the summer sky before a storm, I found myself nodding. His grin was easy and contagious as he tugged me against his chest. My heart stuttered at the contact, and he seemed to have no idea how he affected me as he swept his arms around me. Hugging me tight, he lifted me clear off my feet and gave me a little shake.

I squeaked like a dog toy. “Tanner!”

“Sorry.” He didn’t sound remorseful at all. “I get a little excited sometimes.” He put me down and let go. “Hurry. I’ll be waiting for you outside.”

I did just that before I changed my mind. Dashing up the stairs, I changed into the bikini and then tugged a tube dress made out of terry cloth over it. I didn’t stop to check myself out or take time to really think about the fact that it felt like we’d paired off. Kyler and Syd and Tanner and me. Of course, the four of us went out a lot, but it never felt like we were coupling.

Coupling?

I giggled out loud as I ran a hand through my hair, brushing it back from my face. Back downstairs, I stopped in the kitchen and before I knew what I was doing, I was standing in front of the fridge, reaching for a bottle of Miller Lite. I figured one could help me relax, so I started to kneel to grab one.

I stopped and drew in a shallow breath. What was I doing?

Clutching the door handle, I pressed my lips together in dismay. Did I really need a drink to relax? No. I didn’t. I didn’t need one. I wanted one. Big difference there. Drawing in a deeper breath this time, I shut the door and took a step back. Turning around, I gasped.

Tanner stood next to the sliding glass door. I hadn’t even heard him come in and I had no idea how long he’d been standing there, but I knew he’d seen me.

He smiled at me, giving me no indication that he was judging me, but he probably was. I was judging myself. “You ready?”

Leaving the fridge, I went to him and smiled weakly when he opened the glass door. I stepped into the bright and warm sunlight, sort of feeling like a different person. Like I’d stripped away a layer that had been itchy and uncomfortable.

Tanner prowled past me, peeling the shirt over his head as he walked. Dear mama, those blue swim trunks, a shade or two lighter than his eyes, hung indecently low on his hips. How in the world did they stay on him? When he turned to me, I couldn’t stop staring at those V-shaped indentations at his hips. Good Lord, his body was downright distracting.

He winked at me and then turned, diving into the pool like a damn pro. My eyes narrowed as I sighed. Even that was graceful.

I approached the edge of the deck, on the other end of the pool where there were steps, careful not to slip and fall again like a total turd. Tanner swam to the other side of the pool. With his back to me, he called out, “Are you getting in?”

Expecting him to turn around, I waited a second, but realized that he was…goodness, he was giving me time to get the dress off, and that was…that was sweet. Oh wow, that really was actually kind of sweet. Fingers trembling, I gripped the dress and tugged it over my head. I scanned the water, finding him swimming under it. Heart pounding, I dropped the dress within easy reach and had just reached the first step in the pool, water licking at my ankles, when Tanner’s head broke the surface.

I froze.

He’d made his way to where he could stand, bringing his chest out of the water. Sunlight glinted off his glistening skin, but it was the way he stared at me that tugged my breath right out of my chest.

His gaze was like a physical touch, and my body hummed in response. “Andy,” he murmured, voice deep and low. “I have a secret to admit.”

Feeling breathless and foolish, I resisted the urge to fold my arms across my stomach. “Is it an interesting secret?”

“Oh yeah.” His lips curled slowly. “Kyler actually invited me to go with them today.”

My brows rose. “He did?”

Tanner nodded. “I told him no. I’d rather spend the day with you.”

Chapter 8

Tanner

Snow could have started falling out of the sky, and I wouldn’t be able to pull my gaze away from Andrea. The glimpse I’d gotten of those curves the night before had been just a sweet hint and had in no way prepared me for this.

Andrea wasn’t just beautiful. She was stunning—fucking breathtaking.

Curves in all the right places. Soft where a man wanted his woman soft. Her breasts were full, swelling over the cups of her top, and her waist curved in and flared out sweetly at her hips. Her body reminded me of those old-school pinup models I’d been obsessed with in high school. She was a fucking goddess, and didn’t even know. Lust pounded in me, like I was under a jackhammer. I was so still, my body so hard that taking a breath required effort I couldn’t spare. Every muscle in my body was rigid with need, with the desire to cross the distance between us and sweep her into my arms, and to feel her softness against my body.

Fuck me, I had it bad for her.

Her hands fluttered to her sides and then to the water lapping at her thighs. “Why are you staring at me like that?”

The quiet question blasted through me. “I can’t look away.”

Andrea’s cheeks pinked under the sun. “That’s weird.”

“Oh no, being able to look away would be weird. No. Not just weird,” I decided. “It would be fucking sacrilegious.”

Her lips parted and then she smiled, and fuck if it didn’t feel like I’d just won something. As she glided past me, I ground my teeth until my jaw ached, denying the urge to reach out and just…fuck, just touch her.

I watched her slip under the water, my starving gaze following her as she swam to the other side. When she broke the surface of the clear water and glanced over her shoulder at me, my heart thundered in my chest.

Like she was some kind of siren, her look alone lured me across the pool. I ended up next to her, both our arms resting on the ledge of the pool, our feet not touching the bottom.

The sun dipped behind a dark cloud, and Andrea looked up, her forehead scrunched. “Do you think it’s going to storm?”

“I don’t know.” I didn’t look away, which told me I was bordering on being a creeper at that point. “I saw that they were calling for some storms this week. It’s August. Expected.”

Her legs floated, brushing mine. The mere touch, the slight glide of her skin against mine, packed a hell of a punch. “I just hope they’re not caught out in the rain or something. I know they’re talking about going hiking again on Thursday or Friday.”

“You’re not going to go with them again?”

She shook her head and laughed. A curl fell forward, sticking to her cheek. “No.”

“Me neither.” I reached over, scooping up the curl and tucking it back behind her ear.

Her eyes shot to mine, the brown hue warm. There was a multitude of questions in her gaze. Silence stretched out as we studied each other, and I’d have cut off a finger to know what she was thinking in that moment. I knew what I was thinking. A whole lot of want. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to see if her eyes darkened when she felt pleasure. I wanted to know what her expression looked like when she came. And I wanted to know what my name sounded like when she screamed it. Then she looked away, ducking her chin. The connection was broken.

Man, I needed to get control of my head. And my cock. Especially my cock, because if she looked down between us, there’d be no hiding how aroused I was, and that put the dic in “fucking ridiculous.”

Searching for something to take my mind off the hard-on of a lifetime, I cleared my throat. “So what makes you volunteer at a hotline like that?”

She tilted her head to the side. “I…I don’t know. I guess…” Trailing off, she sighed. Several seconds passed while it seemed like she searched for the right thing to say. “Those people, you know, they’re just like you and me. They’ve hit a rough patch in their lives and most of them just want someone to talk to—someone to listen to them. Actually hear them. I can do that.”

Instinct told me there was more to it. “Still has to be hard.”

“It can be,” she said quietly, squinting as the sun peeked out. “I’ve had a couple of calls where the people wanted to talk, and you think it’s going to be a normal call, but then you realize that they’ve already taken pills or something like that. Those…those are hard,” she admitted. “We really don’t know what happens to them. If the police got there soon enough—if they are even alive right now. If they tried again or if they found someone else to hear them. So, yeah, that part is hard, but their world? Those people calling? Their world is a lot harder than whatever I deal with when I answer those phones.”

Working at the fire department meant I saw a lot of terrible shit. Car accidents. Burn victims. Floaters in the river. And sometimes we were called in when the police or EMTs couldn’t get through a door. Found a lot of OD victims that way.

“So why aren’t you going into psychology?” Curiosity consumed me. “Seems like you might have found your calling.”

She smiled a little. “I don’t know if I have the empathy to pull that off every day of the week for the next forty years. Syd does. I don’t.”

I wasn’t so sure about that.

“What about you?” she asked. “Why do you want to be a cop? You seem to like doing the fireman thing.”

My lips curled up on one side. “It’s what I’ve always wanted to be.”

“Because of your father?”

Surprise shuttled through me. I’d had no idea she knew that my father was a cop. Had to have been Kyler. “Yeah, but not the reasons you’re probably thinking.”

She twisted toward me, her thigh glancing off mine. “What do you mean?”

My father was the last person I wanted to talk about, but I found myself running my mouth anyway. “Walter—my father—was a shit husband and dad, but he was even more of a shit cop.”

Andrea blinked, obviously taken aback.

I laughed under my breath and looked away, casting my gaze to the woods surrounding the pool. “He couldn’t keep his dick in his pants and he couldn’t keep his nose clean, you know what I mean? He’d let people slide if they could do things for him, like cut him deals on shit. Not drugs and that kind of shit, but you’d be surprised by what people will do to get out of tickets. When I was younger, I didn’t get why my mom cried all the time or why my dad didn’t always come home after his shifts. I didn’t get that he was a bad cop, probably wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for his partner. She was the one who showed me what it was like to be a cop, to respect that uniform and your role in society. I have no idea how she dealt with my father as long as she did—or how my mom did—but because of her I knew I wanted to be a cop.” I took a breath, feeling the tops of my ears burn. “Anyway, I guess I wanted to be one because I could somehow make up for how shitty my father was at it.”

“Wow,” she said, placing her sun-warmed hand on my shoulder. “I didn’t know any of that.”

My gaze fell to where her small hand rested. Such an elegant and graceful hand, one that could’ve wielded a scalpel artfully, just hopefully not to my heart.

Heart?

Why in the fuck was I thinking about my heart and her cutting into shit?

And I was still hard.

Her hand slid down to my forearm. When she reached my wrist, she squeezed gently. “You know, you don’t have to make up for how lousy he was.”

“I know.” My voice was rougher, abrasive.

Her slight smile grew. “But you’ll make an excellent cop. You’re a good guy. Most of the time,” she teased.

I wasn’t having good-guy thoughts right then. Nope. Not at all. I couldn’t help it. I had to touch her. I needed to, and my control thinned and then snapped. So I did.

Andrea

I saw the change in him immediately. Those baby blues darkened to azure, and I stilled, barely breathing. Part of me wanted to dive underwater, but that was such a small part. The rest didn’t want to move.

My heart skipped as Tanner moved, but it wasn’t closer to me. He pushed away from the ledge. But before I could feel a second of disappointment, he shifted so that he was behind me, his forearms resting on either side of mine on the pool ledge.

I sucked in air as I tensed, keeping the front of my body against the slippery side of the pool. What in the world was he doing? My imagination fed me a ton of naughty images as the clouds darkened over us again.

His breath was warm on my shoulder as he spoke. “Can I tell you something?”

Closing my eyes, I nodded. “Sure.”

“I’m glad you didn’t want to go hiking. I like having you all to myself.” He moved one hand off the ledge and it landed on the bare skin of my side, underwater. I jerked back and came into contact with his large body. I didn’t move. Not even when his chest rose sharply against my back. “Are you?”

All thoughts scattered when his hand slid to my hip. The small stretch of material did nothing to block the feel of the rough callouses on his palm.

“Andy?”

My breath stuttered. “Yeah…yes.”

“That makes me happy to hear.” His hand drifted off my hip, over my belly, stopping just above my navel. I didn’t even have a chance to think about sucking in my stomach. My mind was blown by the touch and my arms shook. “Are you okay with this?” he asked as he flattened his hand.

I could barely get the words out. “Okay with what?”

“With this.” He leaned into me. His entire front pressed against my back as he used his hand against my stomach to hold me in place. Against my lower back, I could feel the hard length of him, and my blood trilled through my veins. “You feel me and you’re okay with that?”

Lust blurred my thoughts, mingling with confusion. While my body was a hundred percent on board—hell, it was on a train that had already left the station—I didn’t understand why he wanted this—wanted me now. But I wasn’t sure if that mattered—if the past really had any place in the here and now. And when had I ever really stopped to think about anything? Obviously not often.

He skimmed his hand up my side, and the answering shivers radiated throughout my body. “Andy?”

Normally, I hated it when he called me that, but right then, he could pretty much have called me anything, and I’d have been okay with it, especially with his hand so close to my breast. “I feel you,” I whispered. “I’m…okay with that.”

He made a deep, raw sound, and I thought I felt his lips brush my shoulder. “Thank. God.” His hand stopped just below the swell of my breast. “Because if you’d said no, I think I might have cried.”

My lips twitched. “Seems a bit extreme.”

“You have no idea how badly I’ve wanted to touch you. Actually, I don’t even think I had any idea,” he mused. Then his hand was over my breast. “No idea.”

I arched my back as a moan escaped me. “Oh God…”

His hips pressed against me, and I thought for a moment I’d slip right under the water. A tempest of sensations rose swiftly, like the summer storm brewing over our heads. His hand closed over my breast, gently kneading. “What I’d give to see them,” he said, his thumb swiping over the crest of my covered breast. “But that’ll have to wait.”

I didn’t want to wait.

But I didn’t have to.

With incredibly nimble fingers, he slipped them under the cup of my bikini top. Heat exploded as the tips of my breasts tightened to the point of pain and my body sparked alive. My nipples had never been that sensitive before. Normally, I could do without them being touched, but now?

My hips rocked back against his as a jolt of pleasure moved from my breast and then straight down my belly. “Tanner.”

“Fuck. I like it when you say my name like that.” His mouth touched a spot below my ear as he caught my nipple between his fingers.

I cried out, stunned at the fierceness of the sensation pounding through me. My chest ached, felt swollen with need. His lips moved over my neck, trailing hot and wet kisses to my shoulder as he continued to touch me.

My chin fell and I opened my eyes. In a pleasured haze, I stared at his hand. He’d tugged the cups of my top down and my breasts were exposed, above water but blocked by the side of the pool. In reality, Syd and Kyler could return at any moment, but I didn’t want to tell him to stop.

“I couldn’t wait. Fucking beautiful,” he said, kissing my neck, and I knew the moment he’d lifted his head and stared over my shoulder. “Jesus. They are perfect.”

Sometimes I was insecure about the size of my breasts. Syd hadn’t understood why, and time and time again, she’d told me that she wished she had what I did, but with bigger breasts came bigger problems. They weren’t perky like smaller ones. Bluish veins were visible on the sides. The skin puckered and did weird shit sometimes. But the way he touched me was reverent, and with the combination of his fingers and the water teasing the tips, my insecurities were quickly floating away.

Tanner murmured something against my neck and then his hand left my breast, gliding down my stomach. When the tips of his fingers reached the band on my bottoms, I held my breath, and those tiny kisses picked back up along my neck, scorching me.

He waited. “What do you want?”

Oh God. That was all I could think. Over and over. Oh God. Then I wasn’t thinking as his hand moved over my bottoms, between my thighs. His fingers played over the material, causing me to jerk against the arm he used to hold himself afloat.

“What do you want, Andrea?” he asked again, voice husky.

“Please,” I whispered, and I wasn’t even sure what I was asking for, but my body moved, seeking relief from the torment he was creating.

He cursed again and then his hand was slipping under the thin material of the bikini bottom. As he kissed my jaw, he touched me—really touched me. He cupped me with his longer fingers. “You’re so warm,” he said. “So hot.”

Oh my God, he was doing it…right here, in this pool, and in broad daylight. This was really happening. Hadn’t I just told him yesterday he had no chance of getting laid? Boy, I really hadn’t put up much of a fight, but I wanted him—had wanted him for so very long, and I didn’t want to think about all the nothing that came after this.

I’d never been more turned on in my life.

I didn’t have a chance to say any of that. His thumb pressed down on the bundle of nerves, and I cried out his name, trembling as startling pleasure rose violently. He didn’t even get a finger in me, didn’t even try. He worked with pressure as his other finger skimmed my center.

“Andrea.” His voice was raw, primitive in my ear. My hips moved against his hand almost frantically, and I whimpered, so close to release. “That’s it. Let go.”

I did.

I let go. Every muscle in my body tightened and then the release whipped through me so quickly I was left breathless and dizzy, spinning me into the kind of freedom a bottle could never give me. My arms turned to mush, and I would’ve slipped right under the water if it hadn’t been for Tanner pushing his body against mine, wedging me against the side of the pool.

My head fell back against his shoulder, my breathing rapid as his thumb slowed against me. I don’t even know how much time passed before he slipped his hand out of my bikini bottom, but I could feel him against me, still so hard and practically burning. He fixed my top without saying anything, his hand lingering in the most delicious way.

“You,” I said hoarsely, wetting my lips. “What about you?”

He pulled back just enough that he was able to turn me in his arms. Thrown off, I gripped his shoulders. My eyes met his and held. A heartbeat passed as he stared down at me. Our legs tangled and then he pressed in between mine. I felt him, right against my core. A strange sound rose from the depths of me, part moan and part yearning.

“Me?” He lowered his forehead to mine. His hips did this remarkable and downright sinful roll. “I can—”

Sharp bright light cut through the sky above us, wrangling a gasp out of me. Tanner’s grip tightened, and a moment later thunder boomed so loudly it felt like it rattled my bones.

“Oh my God,” I said, eyes wide.

Tanner was already turning me around, lifting me with one arm, which was freaking impressive. “We need to get out of the pool before we’re fried.”

I so was not going to dispute that.

We scrambled out of the pool, and I stopped to grab my dress just as the sky ripped open and cold rain pounded down, causing me to shriek. Tanner laughed as he grabbed my arm, dragging me over the deck as our feet slipped in the rapidly gathering puddles.

Neither of us said anything as we stared at each other in the chilled air of the house, soaking and dripping wet, but there was nothing that needed to be said. The truth lay in the open between us.

Everything had changed.