I can’t be Naomi’s lover, and I sure as hell can’t be her friend.
Right now, I can’t even stand this close to her, not without losing the last of my self-control.
“I have to go,” I rasp, my throat so tight the words emerge as a whisper. “Please just…let me go.”
Naomi’s eyes widen, but she doesn’t say a word as I turn and start back toward the entrance.
She lets me go, and I do my best to keep my pace slow and even.
I might be metaphorically running away, but I’ll do it at a sane, respectable walk, thank you very much. I’ll keep it calm and cool on the outside, even if—thanks to Naomi—my insides are a complete wreck.
Chapter Nine
Naomi
I’m dreaming, back in that delicious dream starring me and Jake and silk sheets and warm morning sunshine and not a stitch of clothing.
A part of me knows it’s only a dream, but I ignore that part.
I don’t want to wake up and face reality.
I want to focus on the way Dream Jake’s big, calloused hands smooth up and down my thighs, the way his fingers tease closer and closer to where I ache as our mouths meet in a kiss that takes my breath away.
We kiss like there’s no tomorrow, no yesterday, nothing but this moment and how perfect it is to be in each other’s arms.
“You destroy me,” Jake murmurs against my lips as he shifts his hips, nudging his long, hard length against my clit, making me gasp.
“Never.” My arms tighten around his neck as his palms cup the back of my thighs, dragging them slowly, insistently apart. “I just want to make you feel better.”
“And I just want to make you come.” His voice is sin and salvation all wrapped up in a sexy rumble that makes me shiver as he reaches between us, fitting the head of his cock against me and pushing inside.
He thrusts to the very end of me, inch by delicious inch, until I’m filled with Jake, my body vibrating with pleasure as he makes love to me the way only he ever has, with reverence and heat and just-barely-contained passion that makes it feel a little dangerous to be in bed with him.
Exciting, but dangerous…
Jake is good and kind, but there’s something wild locked away inside him, something primal that I’m not sure I could handle if it were completely unleashed.
But that part of him captivates as much as it intimidates. Even at fifteen, at the height of my fickle years, when I was still figuring out who I was and couldn’t stick to a hair color for more than a month at a time, I’d stuck with Jake for three years.
No matter how curious I’d been about what it would be like to be with another boy, ending things with Jake had been unthinkable.
That’s part of the reason I’d left Bliss River without saying a proper goodbye or ending things with the respect Jake deserved. I should have, but I was afraid if I stayed—or faced him on my way out—I might never go.
Even when I was young and stupid, something intuitive inside me had known that Jake was the one.
The one I’d never be able to quit.
The one whose kiss would always set me on fire, whether it was our first or our ten thousandth.
The one I’d keep coming back to no matter how many times he pushes me away.
Dream Jake fades into the ether—banished by the beeping of the garbage truck outside my bedroom and the sound of Maddie and Mick fighting about who used the last of the coffee in the kitchen downstairs—but I stay in bed, my body still aching from the dream.
“Ugh. Sex dreams are the worst,” I grumble, huddling under my down comforter, hiding from the chill in my childhood bedroom, wishing I could hide as easily from the truth.
Because the truth is that Jake isn’t simply an obstacle I must overcome in order to find my hometown happily ever after; he’s part of the reason I came home in the first place.
I haven’t wanted to admit it—even to myself—but as I left my parents the keys to my Miami condo and headed north to Bliss River, it was thoughts of Jake that made me drive a little faster. It was his face lingering in the corner of my mind that made me eager to return to a place where I might have a chance—even if it was only the ghost of a chance—with the one who got away.
“He didn’t get away. You pushed him away. You left,” I tell the motionless ceiling fan, rubbing a hand across my eyes. “And now you’re making both of you miserable.”
Jake looked like he was in physical pain as he left the fair Friday night and I’ve barely slept a wink since.