Gavin
Forever begins tonight. Her words pump through my veins. They burn over my soul like a branding iron.
Emmy straddles my chest. Her dress rides high on her hips, and I’ve got a view to heaven’s door that I wouldn’t trade for anything right about now.
“You going to sit there staring all night?” She gives my tie another tug, and my hard-on threatens to burst through my boxers. “Because personally? I prefer to be dominated.” Her tiny pink tongue laps the rim of her lips.
This woman is perfect.
I flip her over, and now I’m the one doing the straddling. I pull off my tie and gently bind her at the wrists, more as a playful gesture, but, hell, if that’s the direction she wants to take the party, I’m all for it. I take her in like this, panting, anxious for me. Her long blonde curls roll over the carpet like a glassy sea. She’s beautiful. It’s hard to believe that the woman I’m in love with, the one God himself landed in front of me with nothing short of a miracle, just so happens to be the most gorgeous woman on the planet. I feel like a kid again, lying on the grass, watching amazed as the stars spray out in the night, and here I am about to kiss the sky in the most spectacular way.
I bow down and crash my lips to hers. Her mouth glides over mine, sweet and soft as an apology. Gone is the dominatrix, the overconfident, mouthy girl that I can’t get enough of, and here she is relinquishing her needs, surrendering to me like a dove. I drop kisses down her neck and linger before moving to her collarbone to savor her taste, the sweet honey of her skin. This is it, the line we’ve yet to cross.
“Take off your shirt,” she commands with a smile edging on her lips, but she won’t give it. “Undo your belt.”
“Pushy are we?” I dip a kiss to her collarbone. “I’m enjoying the hell out of it.”
“Sometimes you need to bark out a few orders to get what you want.” She grazes over my lip. “Besides, I sort of like my hands bound like this.” Her finger skims over my boxers. “All the important things are still within my grasp.”
I do as I’m told and give her dress a good tug in either direction, but it doesn’t budge. It’s strapless, so it’s got that going for it. It’s short, yet another redeeming quality, but right about now, I’d just like it off.
“Gavin.” She peppers my face with her lips.
I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was waiting for her to say it. I haven’t heard anyone say I love you in a good long while—maybe Brylee in jest. Zoey may have said it once, but only then. Mostly she’s too busy blaming me for things. But Emmy is the one person I really want to hear it from. Right now would be a good time for that. I pull back and trace her lips with my eyes, trying to will the words from her mouth. But they don’t come. Instead, she pulls me down by the neck and brands me with a kiss that says take off your damn clothes quick as you can.
My shoes flick off. I work off my jeans with my mouth still diving over hers. Her tongue glides over mine with a viral intensity, and I want to bite it, trap it in my mouth and never let it go. Her cool fingers dip into the back of my boxers, and she lets out a moan as if touching me like that were enough to get her to where she needs to be.
“Hold on, little girl. I want to be right there with you.” I pull up her dress a few inches. It’s so damn tight it hardly budges. I try to pull it down at the top, but it’s stealth.
“Did you graft this onto your body when I wasn’t looking?” I’m suddenly hating dresses of all makes and models.
She moans through a laugh. “There’s a zipper for that.” She glides it down her entire left side, and her dress opens a crack like a secret door.
“Much better.” I peel open the front, painfully slow, my eyes still locked on hers. I want her to feel this moment, to want it more than she wants her next breath. And there she is, naked for me. My eyes dip to her perfect tits, and I’m done. I reach down and lay a careful kiss over each of them. “I plan on spending an hour doing just this.” I sink a kiss in her cleavage and hold it there as my heart tries to fist pump its way out of my chest. My adrenaline shoots through the roof, and I’m amped up too damn much for it to ever be safe. Tonight is going to be one of those nights that penetrate into my memory forever. A good memory. I’ve needed one for a very long time.
Emmy wraps her legs around my back, and I take in the feel of her smooth thighs pressed against me. I’ve been waiting for this night for six, long weeks. My entire body aches to have her. I’m a man—who happens to like sex, and every second with Emmy has been an exercise in celibate futility. I run my tongue down her neck, and she glides the boxers right off my body. I give her ear a playful bite, and she gags on her next breath.
“I’m going to run my tongue right down to here,” I whisper, rolling my thumbs over her tits. “Then I’m going to move the party south.” I run my fingers down her thigh and glide over her panties, already soaked and in desperate need of removal.
She chokes out an inaudible sound. I love this version of Emmy. Lost in lust, without the ability to formulate a single thought.
“I bet you’re sweet through and through.” I move my mouth down and sink over her soft flesh just shy of my first target of the night.
She lets out a hard groan as the door bursts open.
“Shit.” I spike up, more pissed than curious. I fully expect the wind to have kicked it in, because it’s happened on more than one occasion.
But it’s no storm blowing through.
It’s hurricane Zoey.
The night ended abruptly with screaming and cussing and an overall air of contention, and that was just from me. Zoey ran off to her room and locked the door. Emmy insisted on sleeping on the couch. I let her borrow my sweats since her things were in quarantine with my sister before taking off for bed. There’s no way I wanted to finish what we started with my sister in the next room. The cabin is the size of a thimble to begin with, and not one part of me wants to restrain myself when I make love to Em.
A quiet laugh pumps through me as I start the coffee. Emmy has the blanket pulled up to her nose with her hair splayed out, falling over the couch like a blonde waterfall.
She moans and stretches, and before I know it, she’s standing by my side, dripping kisses off my neck like wild honey.
“Give me a minute. I’ll make breakfast with you.” Her hand slips into the back of my sweats and glides over my bare ass before she heads down the hall.
Damn. Why couldn’t Zoey have waited a week?
Her bedroom door squeaks open, and she stumbles out, looking all of thirteen. No matter how old she gets, she’ll always be thirteen in my eyes.
“So who was she?” Zoey plucks a bowl from the cupboard before dragging three different cereal boxes to the table.
“None of your business. Why aren’t you in school?”
“It’s ski week. Why aren’t you giving me a big fat hug?”
“Because the last time I hugged you, I ended up with a broken toe.” It’s true. She drilled her high heel into my foot, and I limped for a week. I head over, risking life and lower extremity digits, and pull her into a strong embrace. “You didn’t come home for Christmas.” I give a dull smile at the thought of sounding like a nagging father.
“I sent a text.” She flicks my nose before heading to the fridge for milk.
“Yes—the text. I believe it read Merry X-Mas in its entirety. I’m glad you didn’t expend too much energy on your big bro.”
“Brevity is the new black.” She rattles a cereal box before opening it. “Anyway, it looks like you had a big hoe to comfort you.” She gives a cheesy grin. The oversized sweatshirt she’s wearing makes her appear downright fragile. Her hair is platinum, far more over-processed than I remember, and it makes her look like she’s pulling out all the stops to impress the boys. “What am I saying? This is probably a different skank. That was two entire months ago. Speaking of the mattress mites you like to haul home nightly, you should consider putting a do-not-disturb sign out front. Because that’s the last time I want to see your hairy ass hiked in the air.”
I close my eyes a moment. “I don’t have a hairy ass. You imagined the whole thing.” At least I’d like to believe both of those ideas. “How about next time you knock?” I swat her arm with a kitchen towel just as Emmy comes back into the room.
Zoey sucks in a lungful of air as if she’s choking on a Fruit Loop.
“She’s still here?”
“She can hear you, too.” I pull Emmy in close. “Zoey this is Emmy, Em this is my sweet little sister, Zoey.” It comes out dry and sarcastic without meaning to. It looks like Emmy is rubbing off on me, and I don’t mind one bit.
“Emmy?” My sister breaks her name into two equals parts as if she might be sick. “Where are you from, Emmy?” She says it slow in the event Emmy is from another planet where they don’t speak English. If Zoey keeps this crap up, she’ll be camping out on another planet, also known as the boathouse.
“Be nice, Zo. I’m not letting you talk to her like that.”
“That’s right.” Emmy strokes the back of my neck with her cool fingers. “When Gavin doesn’t let a woman do something, he means it.” She gives a little wink and defuses me just a bit.
Zoey’s mouth falls open. She looks genuinely stunned as if I had just told her to nosedive off the side of the mountain. Zoey has been known to pour on the drama. It’s part of her questionable charm.
“No, it’s okay.” Emmy pulls out a chair and sits across from my sister as if hostage negotiations were about to break out. She’s got balls. That’s one of the reasons I’m in love with her. “I’m originally from Hay—” Her fingers cover her lips a moment as if that just slipped out. I don’t remember her telling me where she was from. Who knows, maybe Zoey is the missing link that causes Em to pour out her secrets like pages from a diary. “I was just passing through Loveless, and I met your brother.”
“Nobody passes through Loveless with the exception of truckers and fuckers. Which one are you?”
“Watch your mouth,” I snipe.
“Relax.” Zoey pushes me away, and I take a seat next to Emmy. “She knows I’m kidding. It’s not like she’s some two-dollar whore you picked up at a bar.”
“Nope, she’s not.” I glance over at Emmy. I know what she’s thinking. “Have a little respect, Zoey.”
“So”—Emmy straightens, and her sweatshirt rides up her back just enough to tease me with the curve of her spine—“what are you majoring in?”
Zoey shifts her gaze from Em to me.
“What is this? The inquisition? I’m majoring in none-of-your-damn-business, so get your things, and get on your little merry way.” She stabs her spoon into her cereal so hard milk laps over the side.
“Zoey!” I’m ready to boot her out on her ear if she keeps this up.
Emmy vacuums the air from the room with her next breath as she rises from the table. “I think I’d better go.” She stalks down the hall, and I pin her to the wall with a kiss.
“Don’t you dare think of going anywhere.” I tether her wrists with one hand and pull them over her head. Emmy gives a slight, curt smile that says keep trying big boy, so I brush my lips over the divot in her neck until she moans.
“Right there,” she whispers, so I do it again.
“I was sort of hoping you’d say those words to me last night.” I make love to her neck for a sweet, brief moment. “The only difference is my mouth would have been in another location entirely.”
Emmy growls in lieu of a laugh, and I can’t help but smile.
“Zoey has been out of control ever since my parents died. Trust me, she’s like this to everyone. And with you—she’s probably just hitting her stride.” I hate to admit it, but Zoey likes to think she’s the number one girl in my life, and up until I met Emmy she was.
Em’s dimples invert as she makes a sour face. She’s taking me down, reducing me to a puddle without even trying.
“How about you and me get dressed.” I take a bite out of her, soft-as-a-petal, earlobe. “I can take you out for a drive in a little bit.”
“Can Zoey come, too?” She bats her lashes quick as moth wings. “We can push the truck off the cliff. I promise I won’t tell anyone.”
Emmy has a way of tickling my gut with her dry sense of humor. At least I think she’s kidding.
“Nah, let her stay here and stew.”
“Sounds like a great idea. That might give her the time she needs to find the hatchet she’s going to bury in my skull.”
“I promise that will never happen. Well”—I rake a kiss over her cheek—“maybe in a proverbial way.”
“I’ve met girls like Zoey before. She’s fully capable of inserting a blade.”
“In that case, I’ll bury all the hatchets.”
“Ha ha.” She flicks my chin. “I see what you did there.”
Emmy heads for the shower, and I make a beeline to drill a new one into my sister.
“What the fuck’s the matter with you?” I turn the chair around and sit on it backward.
“Wow”—she mumbles through a mouth full of cereal—“you kiss all your whores with that mouth? On second thought, that probably gets them going.”
I reach over and snatch her wrist, resisting the urge to squeeze the shit out of it. Zoey has my mother’s eyes—a deep marine. Every time I look at my sister, I see her. It’s like staring a ghost in the face, bittersweet. Her attitude, however, comes straight from Satan. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what I did wrong.
“That person you were so very rude to just so happens to be the girl I’m going to marry. She makes me feel alive and is the only person who’s ever managed to pull me out of this coma I’ve been living in for the last few years, so I’d appreciate if you could show her an ounce of kindness.”
She gently slips her wrist from my grasp.
“No shit? You think you’re going to marry that chick?” She glances back at the empty hall. “So exactly how long have you known Mrs. Right?”
“Six weeks.” I regret it as soon as the words leave my lips.
“A whole six weeks?” Her brows rise in amusement. Her hair is cut to her shoulders and for some reason this makes her look older than her almost twenty years. “I’m shocked you haven’t tied the knot by now. How do you know this person isn’t after your money?”
“Because I don’t have any.” I know she’s talking about the cabin, the business. Zoey has always thought more of me than she ever should. “All right. I get it. Look, don’t give me a hard time. I’m in a good place.”
“Okay.” Her lips crimp to the side. “I just want you to be happy. Nobody wants that for you more than I do.”
“And I want the same for you.” I tousle her hair like I used to. Zoey hated having me mess up her hair. You’d think I was plucking her fingers off one by one the way she would shriek. “You’re going to love Emmy. She’ll be the big sister you’ve always wanted. You’ll see.”
Zoey slumps in her seat. “Let the record show, I have a bad feeling about this.” Her lips invert into a frown. Her eyes reduce to jealous slits. “If this ‘Emmy’ person is up to no good, she’ll have to answer to me first. Nobody messes with my big bro.”
“She’s not messing with me.” And every last ounce of me wishes she were. “Give her a chance, Zoe. She’s the perfect girl for me. There’s no one else, and there’s not a thing you can do to stop it.”
“We’ll see.” She drops her spoon and sulks like an abandoned ten-year-old.
I pull her up from her seat and wrap my arms around her childlike frame. “I’ll always be here for you, Zoey. I’ll never walk away from you.” I know the exact words she needs to hear because I’ve needed to hear them, too. “There’s room in my heart for one more person, and I’m hoping the same is true for you.”
“Everything is changing.” She holds on tight like I’m about to get sucked out the window.
“Sometimes that’s a good thing.”
It’s about time things changed around here.
Emmy has changed them all for the better.