When I emerge from the house and hear hysterical screaming, I take off at a sprint. Every cell is fired up and on the precipice. I know without knowing that Grace is at the center of something. The furor is coming from the pool and I have to push my way through layers of people all craning to see. I reach the front to see Grace in the water. She’s back stroking with Sophie on her chest, both fully dressed.

“What the fuck?” I bark.

“You miss the catfight?” some callow kid in a white dinner jacket smirks.

“Shut the fuck up, Brat,” I snarl.

I tear off my jacket to go in and get Grace, but she’s a fucking Olympic swimmer and has reached the side already. She hangs on to the freeform edge and cups a bedraggled Sophie under her other arm. A couple of the valets rush over to pull Sophie out while her mother continues her screaming. I push a path through the stunned crowd and bend down to pull Grace out of the water.

The adrenaline is pumping so hard through my muscles that she comes flying into my arms, drops of water splashing everyone around us. She crashes into my chest wall with a jolt that makes her startle when she sees it’s me.

“Seems you can’t leave me alone for a minute,” she quips, between gasps, always the humorist.

“I’ll try to remember that next time you decide to go for a dip.”

“She attacked my daughter,” Cassandra Poole, Sophie’s hysterical stepmother shrieks. Pointing a talon at Grace, she storms toward us. I’m expecting another cat fight and seems like the crowd around are leaning in for the same. “We know who she is. What she is.” the woman snarls.

“Screw you,” Grace flares, “She started it and you’re welcome – I didn't see anyone else leaping in to rescue the landlubber.”

I don’t even bother to repress a grin. Grace sure knows how to stand up for herself when it comes to it She’s not remotely intimidated by the snob level of the company. My chest is so swollen with pride at her confidence, I retrieve my jacket and wrap it around her. Despite the warm day, she’s shaking.

But Cassandra isn’t backing off.

“Was it you that stole the bracelet from Maisie’s wedding,” She shouts so that everyone turns to Grace. I can see they’ve already come to a verdict. The entire group among themselves, gossiping in private. Inventing facts that fit their needs.

Grace’s cry of ‘No” is pitiful and rips my heart wide.

“What are you doing with this scummy little hoodlum, Hopper. Slumming it? You can’t find a nice girl of your own kind?”

“You aren’t my kind, Cassandra,” I shout so everyone is in no doubt where I stand. She’s a hypocrite, throwing her stepdaughter at me at every opportunity while she herself gave me a blow job in the bathroom at a museum gala last year.

“And that animal is?” she squeals in fury.

“Actually she is,” I announce.

This could be the fucking end of me if some of my clients here decide they’re too swell to deal with the likes of me, but I don’t care. Grace matters to me more than this bunch of phonies.

“She’s exactly my kind because I too was an animal locked in a cage once.”

A collective gasp goes around the crowd – like they’re all so squeaky fucking clean. Every last one of them has more secrets than they’d like to get out, a good percentage of them illegal.

“People get into bad situations, that does not make them bad people,” I shout, feeling like a political orator or some shit. “And believe me being locked in the system, doesn’t automatically mean you’re guilty.”

Grace is shivering way too much under my wing. “You’re OK baby, I’m getting you out of here.”

I start to push through the throng who part like we’re toxic contamination. When we reach the edge of the gaggle, I turn to them with one final announcement they can gossip over once we’re gone.

“You’re all demonstrating exactly how small minded you are with your self-righteous brainwashed judgment. For all your fancy private schools you haven’t had an original thought ever. So if you don't want to accept my girlfriend Grace, then you don't want to accept me. Just let me know and I won’t expect anymore of your invites to boring thousand dollar-plate dinners.”

I’d love to stay and tell them some more of what I think of them but I’m concerned at Grace’s shaking. I have to get her out of her wet clothes. I lead her across the grass and toward the cars parked at the front. Her legs are wobbly and she’s hopping along one-legged because she’s lost a shoe. In one move, I sweep her up into my arms and carry her bride-style against my chest.

“You’re all wet,” she whimpers as her hand rests on my pec, the shirt stuck to my muscle.

“You too,” I grin with a filthy undertone. Checking just how dripping she is is going to be my one focus.

“Sorry,” she mewls.

“Don’t be,” I burr, “You were spectacular.”

“I’m too mouthy,” she says, apologetic.

“I’ll be the judge of that. I have to get you out of these clothes right now.”

“Please,” she whimpers.

“Please what?” I grit. Her other hand curling around the back of my neck, her breasts pressing into my pec muscle is more than I can stand.

“Please strip me out of my clothes. I’ve been dying for you to say that for a month.”

“Really?” I croak. “I thought we were strictly hands off.”

“That was before you put your hands on me.”

“I think it was because I put them on you if I remember right,” I say with a grin as I recall our first meeting, my out of order behavior. “Which I know I do, because it was unforgettable.”

“A girl can change her mind,” Grace whispers, her lips tremble whether because she’s cold or burning hot I can’t be sure but I think it’s the latter.

“Have you?” I husk.

“About you? Yes.”

I don’t need to hear another word and I’m not about to wait for her to change it back again. I duck back around to the other side of the pool, the part hidden by huge bushes covered in bright pink flowers. I kick open the door to the pool house, step through and heel it shut.

I throw Grace down on the bed and reach to loosen my pants. My wood is beating an agonized drumroll, but Grace pops right back up. My jacket falls away from her shoulders as she gets to her knees then climbs up my body. With her limbs clasped around my frame, we’re all hands everywhere at once. I need to touch every part of her and don’t know where to start first. I want it all. Now.

Grace is tearing at my shirt buttons. The wet fabric hinders her unfastening so I take hold of the collar and rip the fucking thing. The buttons fly off and go popping around the room.

Grace gasps and giggles.

“Tarzan,” she mutters.

“Your turn, baby.”

I rip the dress down her shoulders barely any less roughly. The drenched fabric sticks to her curves making my balls clench with urgent desire to have them bared and in my fists. I tug it down to her waist but her body calls too loudly to my cock, my mouth. Her nipples are prodding through the wet lace bra and I tear that from her too so her tits bounce free.

“Fuck, you’re delicious Baby,” I grit out, the lust making my voice croak.

I have never wanted to be buried deep inside a woman as much as I want Grace’s wet pussy clasping my solid shaft. I palm the underside of her tit and shove it roughly up into my mouth. Grace undulates with a low moan as I nip at her nipple, alternating with laving my tongue across the point. Her shivering has taken on a different tremor now. From shock and chill and outrage, she’s shifted to breathy lust.

“I want a taste of all of you,” I add, shoving the wet bunched fabric down over her hips.

She’s tearing at my pants too so we’re in a tangle of hands and kisses and soaked material. But the most soaked are her panties. Sodden of course from the water, but also glistening with the juices pouring out of her. I can’t restrain a feral growl at the sight of her bare pussy.

I rise up back to standing, pick her up and deposit her on a console table, sweeping the shit decorative objects to the floor. I push her thighs apart and gaze on her pink pussy, flexing eagerly with desire for my dick, or my fingers, or my mouth. I don’t know which to giver her first.

“Fuck I’ve waited for you so long, I can’t wait another second.”

“Don’t wait,” she whimpers. “I want you inside me right now. I need your cock filling me hard.”

Her hands have pulled my belt apart and I give her some assistance with the pants fastening so she can free my raging cock into her grasp. The jolt of pleasure from her touch lands directly in my balls. I grasp the root and move my burning shaft toward the only place it wants to be.

I find the hollow of her pussy and swirling the head into her entrance, almost blow my load right there she feels so incredible.

“I need a taste of all of you first, Princess,” I growl, shocked at the low feral tone in my own voice, completely out of control.

“I taste like pool,” she resists. I will eradicate her shame if it’s the last task I ever perform.

“You taste like you,” I husk, “and it’s fucking nectar.”

She moans out a long sigh as I lap across the length of her from her ass, across her spread entrance and her hard little clit. As I lick circles around the point Grace gasps and her entire body trembles.

“You like that?” I look up from between her thighs.

Her eyes are rolled up half delirious in her head. As answer she threads her fingers into my hair and tugs my face back down on her spread pussy. Happy to oblige I lick and bite at her folds, sucking the ravenous hard triangle between my lips before plunging my tongue through her tight entrance and all the way inside her.