So what if Ty Sullivan was a lot hotter and more complex than expected. That was no cause to freak-out over a bit of pillow talk.
She wasn’t an emotionally crippled, wild child anymore, frantically seeking attention by whatever means necessary. Five years of staying clean and sober—and resisting the urge to knock back a bottle of champagne or snort a line of coke whenever she wanted to bolster her confidence—had seen to that.
She might like Ty, but she didn’t need Ty to like her, because she’d learned a long time ago not to let the opinion of others matter.
Every time Seb looked right through her and didn’t see her. Every time a new headline splashed her inadequacies across the front page of a tabloid rag. Every time she faced down her demons in a meeting, had taught her to ignore the sneers, the disapproval, the open hostility, and to keep the desperate desire to be loved kept securely under lock and key and move on.
Spending a couple of days enjoying the company of the likeable and very shaggable Ty Sullivan wasn’t going to change that. So there were no freak-outs required.
She squirted a generous dollop of Ty’s shampoo into one shaky palm and massaged it into her scalp. And the crushing weight on her chest finally eased up enough to allow her to draw a decent breath.
Even if she did like Ty Sullivan, he didn’t mean that much to her. He was just a handy port in a storm, a short-term friend with exceptional benefits, a good guy who had a weakness for bad girls and knew his way ’round a clitoris.
And she would certainly never mean that much to him.
She rinsed off the last of the shampoo.
A guy like Ty might find a bad girl irresistible for a weekend fling, but he would never consider hooking up with someone like her for the long haul.
But just to be on the safe side, she ought to establish a few simple ground rules before they took this any further. After all, Ty’s speciality was following the rules. And she’d become pretty good at it too, in recent years, when she had to be.
*
So what the heck happened to no more surprise booty calls with supermodels?
Ty listened to the rattle of the shower unit he needed to replace, the heady feeling of afterglow fading as he tried to figure out where his good intentions had gone wrong.
Zelda had started teasing him about the barbeque he’d skipped out on. He’d started flirting back to distract her and then, bam! They’d been racing back to the barge and getting naked.
But what had been a sexy game at first, light and flirtatious and fun, hadn’t stayed that way.
She’d captivated him and surprised him, and responded to him without holding one single thing back. He’d watched her eyes go glassy with stunned pleasure, seen her skin flush pink, heard her sobbing breaths as she came and he’d turned into a fucking caveman again. And for a moment there, while he was bucking his hips to get as deep inside her as he could, and she was riding him with her pussy muscles clamping down on his cock, he’d had the insane urge to stay inside her, forever.
Tugging on his shorts, he walked into the boat’s main living space. Noting the time, he headed for the fridge. So what if it was only three in the afternoon, he needed a damn beer.
This could never be more than a weekend booty call—because their lives would always be way too far apart, both socially and economically—so why couldn’t he shake the feeling this was already more than sex?
Zelda emerged from the bathroom in a puff of steam, one of his towels wrapped around her slim body. And the hollow feeling in his gut sunk down to tighten around his ball sack.
Relief shot through him. The panic retreating back where it belonged.
He and Zelda had a sexual chemistry that went all the way to eleven—and his life had been boring as hell for months now. An endless grind of long hours and limited recreation. If all work and no play had made Jack a dull boy, it appeared to have turned Ty Sullivan, attorney-at-law, into a sex maniac.
So maybe he needed to get a life. And what better way to do that, than to take a time-out this weekend, indulge the insane sexual chemistry between him and Zel, while discovering the fascinating woman who lurked behind the bad-ass sass?
“Hey.” He tipped the bottle at her. “You want a beer?”
She stiffened and shook her head, but he saw the flash of something in her eyes. The flash of something he recognized, because he’d seen it before in the people he was representing who had something to hide.
“No, that’s okay. I’m good. I need to get dressed.”
What was with that?
She gave him a tantalizing glimpse of one flushed butt cheek as she shot off towards the bedroom. And the knot of panic returned to tighten around his larynx.
Was she leaving? Had he done something wrong? Was that why she’d run off to the bathroom so fast after he’d screwed her like a caveman?
“Zelda, wait.” He placed the beer bottle onto the counter with a solid thunk and shot after her. “Where are you going?”