We arrived in Naugatuck on the first day of April. And it wasn’t just any old April day. It had sunshine and a fresh breeze, climbing up to seventy in the mid-afternoon.

I guessed technically I’d been living near the ocean for the last four years, but I could count on one hand how often I’d been to the beach, at least over the past couple years. I’d gotten so down, so focused on escape, that I didn’t think I’d been out to it once.

But I loved the ocean, the brisk freshness of it, the wild tumbling waves and the glittering, sparkling expanse of water beyond. I could listen to the smells and sounds of the beach all day long. Naugatuck, on the North Atlantic, fascinated me with how different it was than the coast I’d always known. I’d never traveled much so maybe I was easy to impress, but the different flowers blooming, the constantly changing clouds, the greenery from all the rain, everything I saw amazed me.

Every day I was there, it felt like my heart opened more. I hadn’t realized how long I’d been clenching it closed like a fist. It had eaten away at me, living in fear. I’d blocked so much else out of my world just to survive.

Now, I felt like I noticed everything. People smiling on the street, little kids licking ice cream cones, puppies biting their leashes. Birds, from sandpipers dancing back and forth on the waves to seagulls swooping and diving. There was so much wildlife on the island, much more than I’d ever seen in California. I’d grown up in an agricultural spot of the state, with plenty of livestock, but that paled in comparison to all the wildlife, plus the incredible marine life with crabs and sea stars and snails.

Bunnies darted in and out of our yard. Jax and I watched them in the morning, cozied up together. His friend Liam had to be one of the coolest, most generous, open-hearted people I’d ever met. Liam had grown up on the island and knew everyone. He’d found us a rental dirt cheap where we could stay for two months, until peak tourist season. By then, we hoped we’d find something more permanent.

But while we had this rental, we planned on enjoying it. It had an ocean view. I didn’t know what I’d been doing with myself, so close to the ocean in Southern California but never going out and enjoying it. But I guessed that applied to a lot of things. I hadn’t really been enjoying any aspect of my life, ocean included.

Over the first two weeks on the island, Jax and I took a lot of long walks, nothing to do and nowhere to be. We strolled all over the island, exploring, sometimes re-discovering spots for him since he’d spent some time there growing up when his parents had headed there for seasonal work.

“This place is still in business!” Jax lit up like a little kid, discovering a bakery he’d loved at 10 was still open and offering the exact same cheese bread he’d once adored. We quickly became regulars, going there for coffee and pastry in the morning. Jax, of course, didn’t ever stop bragging about me and my baking skills. Before I even knew what was happening, the owner was encouraging me to bring by some of my pies.

“The crusts are the tricky part,” she admitted to me.

“But your pastries are so light and flakey!” We lost ourselves to a good 20-minute discussion on crusts in particular, and dough in general. Only when she had to excuse herself to help another customer did I remember that Jax was sitting, waiting and possibly bored out of his mind.

“Sorry.” I sat down, wondering how much time had elapsed.

“I love watching you talk. You look so happy when you talk about pies.” He really looked like he meant it, too, as if just seeing me happy made him happy. I didn’t know what to make of it. I’d never experienced that before, his kind of unselfish, generous love. I wasn’t used to it yet, but I welcomed the challenge of getting there. Though I hoped I never took it for granted. I couldn’t imagine I ever would.

Liam and his fiancé Sophie had us over for dinner a bunch of times, barbequing and introducing us to Liam’s firefighting buddies and Sophie’s dance studio partners. She used to be a big-time ballerina in New York City, which sounded incredibly glamorous to me, but when I saw how content she was with Liam and in her dance studio on the island, I couldn’t deny she seemed to have found her true calling.

“You should come to a class some time!” she encouraged me. “Do you like dancing?”

“I’ve never really tried.” Other than occasionally drinking too much and jumping up and down to a DJ at a party, dance was not something I’d thought much about. I got the impression that Sophie had grown up very differently from me, basically with a major silver spoon in her mouth. But she wasn’t stuck up. She was welcoming and kind, not snobby at all, but every now and then a detail would emerge. Like she and Liam had first met because her family owned an estate on the island. I didn’t know exactly what it took to level jump from house to estate, but it sounded like big bucks, especially on an island as expensive as Naugatuck.

Turned out her older brother was Ian. I’d heard Jax talk about him from time to time, usually fraught with guilt over his injuries in the boat accident.

“How’s your brother?” I asked Sophie one night, as she and I sat out on the porch at their place enjoying beers.

“Has Jax mentioned him?” She seemed surprised I knew about Ian.

“He has. Does he come by and visit? Or…?”

“No, he lives in Scotland.” She shut down the subject quick, asking me about my pies. I knew she was deliberately distracting me, but I was easy. Ask me about baking and I had no problem launching into a lengthy discussion on the subject.

But it did leave me wondering what was going on with that fourth friend. Jax and Liam were still obviously as close as brothers, and they talked and texted with Chase who lived down in Florida, harassing him all the time about when he and his wife Emma were going to come up and visit. But Ian, who still seemed to be on their minds all the time, was always absent.

“Do you think Ian will ever come to Naugatuck?” I asked Jax late one night. We’d cooked dinner and made love and were laying together, naked, nothing but a brief breather between rounds. My Jax was insatiable, and with him, I was, too.

“Nope.” He sighed, and I could tell the answer troubled him.

“Does anyone talk to him anymore?”

“Liam and Sophie went to visit him around the holidays, but what they saw wasn’t good. He’s walled himself off.”

“That’s so sad.”

“You worried about him?” He kissed me on my head, letting me know with his gestures as he’d told me many times, he thought I was a good person. He was always so complimentary, making me feel like I was so special when to me it was just common decency. But I didn’t exactly mind him doting on me.

“I am.”

“This time last year I would have said it didn’t look good for Ian. But now that I have you?” He swept a hand down my back, pressing me to him. “Now I know anything’s possible.”

At times over the past year I’d worried that my fixation on Jax wasn’t so much about him, but instead was about my desire to escape. I’d certainly relied on my fantasies of him to get me through the dreariness of my reality. During those long, difficult months of separation, I’d even tried to convince myself that Jax couldn’t be all I’d built him into. There was no way he was such an incredible blend of strong and sweet. No one who looked like the badass hero from an action movie could actually be so caring, considerate and thoughtful. And no way could the sex be as good as I’d imagined it would be.

Hello, reality better than the fantasy! Jax was everything I’d lain awake dreaming about and more. Every day I felt like I discovered something new about him that made me love him even more, hearing about the mischief he and his friends Liam, Chase and Ian had gotten up to as kids on the island. Learning how much he’d had to stay strong with his parents so volatile and unreliable. Seeing him lighten up more, relaxing, I couldn’t believe how much more my heart grew full for him every day.

He was already talking to a couple of friends of Liam’s about opening a bar on Naugatuck. That man had so many friends, I had to wonder, who wasn’t a friend of Liam’s?

One afternoon, we enjoyed a moment sitting out on the deck listening to the sounds of the surf. It was brisk out, with bright sunshine but a chill in the wind. A California girl like me would have felt cold, except I had Jax. He hugged me onto his lap, keeping me so warm. The man was a walking radiator.

“Just think, if I ran a bar here, no motorcycle clubs.” He sounded like a kid in a candy shop.

I had to laugh, picturing the tough crowd that used to hang out at Ace Bar. The crowd I’d married into. That all seemed so far away now, such a different life. “Nope, that is not the scene here.”

On Naugatuck, I’d seen more men in pink over the past two weeks than I had all my life. The tourists seemed to all think they were in a photo shoot for a preppy clothing brand. I’d seen women sporting tortoise shell headbands and madras plaid skorts, like they’d found an ugly tablecloth and decided to wear the thing.

But I loved it. The whole place felt like a perpetual vacation to me, a safe haven where nothing bad ever happened. Sophie had told me all about the Naugatuck historical preservation society and how they liked to keep things the same way it had been since it was a whaling town in the 1700s. Some streets were still cobblestone and the street lights looked like old fashioned gas lamps. Hydrangeas bloomed all over downtown, carefully tended, never vandalized. The dogs looked better fed and groomed than most of the people I’d known back in Cavallo.

I knew Jax and I needed to start making money sooner rather than later. We both had some cash reserves, but instead of spending it all it would be far better to invest it into something else—a place to live, a new bar, who knew, maybe even a pie shop? The nice woman who owned Jax’s favorite childhood bakery had loved the first set of pies I’d brought her. It felt like a promising start. Everything did.

“I think I’ve seen you smile more in the last two weeks than the whole past year.” Jax held me to him, and I could hear the smile in his voice.

“I’m really happy.” A simple statement, I spoke it from the heart. “I never thought I could be this happy.” I felt a little choked up, burying my head in his chest. I loved listening to his heart beat, so steady and sure.

“You deserve it, Sky. I used to see you in that retirement home making everyone else happy every day. Now it’s time for you to feel happy.”

I kissed him, because sometimes that communicated better than words how I felt. And then, quickly, kisses weren’t enough. They rarely were with Jax. I pressed against him, needing him inside me. He could light a match in me with a single glance, a tempting stroke across my skin and I’d be ready to go.

He stood, picking me up like it was no big deal, not even breaking our kiss as he carried me inside our rental house. Right next to the water, the place had a lot of windows. He set me next to one in the living room, stripping down my jeans and off my shirt like the pro he was. I moved to start undressing him as well, but he turned me around, facing the window.

“Step back into your shoes.” I shivered, not knowing exactly what he had in mind but knowing I’d like it. I slid my feet into my heeled wedge sandals, giving me a couple of extra inches. All the better to line us up. He growled in appreciation, running his hands along my ass, my thighs, my lower back.

“Put your hands up to the frame.” I positioned my hands, one on either side of the window, shivering as he pulled off my panties. He leaned against me from behind and I could feel his huge cock, hard and throbbing with heat. I pressed back into him with a long, “mmmm,” letting him know just how good he felt.

He reached around, cupping my breasts, massaging them as he whispered hot in my ear, “I’m going to fuck you against this window. Are you ready?”

I whimpered in response, my “yes” a breathy exhale as I spread my legs. I wanted him to ram into me the way only he knew how, practically making me come with just the force of his first, possessive thrust.

He snapped open my bra, throwing it to the ground. Then he pushed the center of my back forward, pressing my breasts to the cold glass. My nipples pebbled, from the feel of his control as much as the cool, smooth pane pushing against them. I turned my face, resting my cheek there as well, arching my back, my legs wide apart, feet jacked up in my heels.

His impossibly thick and long cock at my entrance never ceased to make me tremble. I wanted it so much, but it was always intense, stretching me so wide. I shook with anticipation, fingers gripping the wood frame. One hand on my hip, the other grabbing my ass check, he entered me with a predatory thrust. I screamed at the assault, the feel of him pushing into me, fucking me with long, powerful, strong strokes.

He returned his hand to the center of my back, holding me there as he forced my hips back into him, burying his cock again and again into my soaking wet pussy. Fevered as he made me, a strange calm overtook my mind. No worries, no anxiety, no wondering about the past or the future. I was completely in the moment, aware of nothing more than our bodies, the juncture where we joined, so slick and hot, the feel of his hands on me, holding me where he wanted. I could completely let go, surrender to it and I almost felt like I was floating, pleasure buoying me up as I moaned in rhythm with his thrusts. He fucked me so hard I had no words, no thoughts, only desire, shivering and shuddering through me.

“You’re mine. All of you, Sky,” he growled, bringing his hand to my hair, gripping it in a fist. “Mine.”

“Yes,” I groaned spreading my thighs as far as I could manage, keeping myself upright so I could take it all, take all of his pounding. He could feel me tremble, sensing the tension in my body right before release. He pounded me, fast and sweaty, demanding and relentless.

I came so hard he had to support my body, holding me up with his hands as he came deep inside my pussy. My head fell back onto his chest as I cried out, shuddering with orgasm, feeling him pulse in me. I never wanted it to end. I never wanted him to stop. With Jax, every moment made me crave another, and another.

“I’ll never get enough of you.” He echoed my thoughts as he scooped me up and carried me into the bathroom. He turned on the shower, getting the spray hot and steamy the way we both liked it. With a mischievous grin, he told me, “Now climb in here and show me how dirty you are. I’ve got just what you need.” He held up the detachable shower nozzle and even though I’d just been soundly fucked, still feeling the ebbing throbs of a stunning orgasm, my clit throbbed once again, knowing what he was capable of with that shower head. Just when I thought I’d hit a new high, Jax introduced me to the next level even higher up.

I didn’t know what I’d done in life to deserve him. But I planned on spending the rest of my days devoted to living up to the ideal he seemed to worship. Even though he made me feel like I didn’t have to do a thing. He loved me exactly as I was.