Page 68 of These Summer Storms

“Hmm.” The sound rumbled from him, straight through her. “It’s a little late for that.”

Her breath was shallow, and later she would blame the wind coming off the Bay for how the moment felt, like it might blow part of her away.

“I’ve never brought anyone here,” she whispered.

He was close enough that she could feel his warmth even before she lifted a hand and touched him. Close enough that he didn’t have to raise his voice for her to hear him say, “Good.” The gruff satisfaction in the word was more appealing than her feminist roots should find it. “You should be careful.”

Something flared in her. Hot. Certain. “Theyshould be careful.”

His jaw hardened in response, lips flattening into a firm line, somehow making him more handsome. “Yeah. They should be.”

She reached up without thinking, stopping herself from stroking her fingertips over his mouth just before they made contact. She detoured at the last second, her touch stuttering down his arm along with her courage, to his hand, clenched at his side. She looked down at his knuckles, healing. Soon, there’d be no evidence of how he’d punished people who should have done better with her.

She reached for his hand, and he gave it up easily, letting her stroke over his skin. “You were angry then. At the train station.”

“They were disrespectful.”

Alice couldn’t help her little laugh. “That’s a pretty old-fashioned way of thinking about it. They were doing their jobs.”

Just as he’d been doing. But Jack didn’t see the comparison. “Fuck their jobs.”

A gust of wind punctuated the crass reply, gifting Alice with an excuse for the lush shiver that thrummed through her. She didn’t stop touching him. Instead, she turned his hand over in her own, running her fingertips over the rough hills of his palm. “Thank you,” she whispered, too soft to be heard over the wind. “That night you exceeded my expectations.”

He sucked in a breath at the stroke over his skin, hand lifting, cradling her face, thumb stroking over the swell of her cheek. Tilting her face up to his.

It was a bad idea. But history was littered with women making bad decisions about men.

He kissed her. Or maybe she kissed him. Later, she wouldn’t be ableto decide, because she wanted to kiss him so much in that moment, on that beach, where she’d spent the majority of her childhood imagining kissing someone, she couldn’t remember what was truth and what was fantasy.

Whatever the truth, Jack made it feel like fantasy, slanting his kiss over hers like the pirate who’d dived into the sea, leaving his ship behind, to follow her to shore. Except he’d been furious then. She’d seen it in his controlled, perfect motions.

This wasn’t controlled. It wasn’t furious. But it was perfect.

He tasted like salt from the sea, and Alice licked into him, loving the way he pulled her closer to him, stroking over her back, down her spine.

Alice was five-ten and clear-minded enough to know that she was not the kind of woman men lifted off the ground. She’d dated enough to have put any dreams of being swung around like a Disney princess directly out of her mind (anyone paddling around the New York City dating pool understood the need for reasonable concessions).

But the moment Jack’s big hands slid into the back pockets of her shorts, activating any number of as yet undiscovered neural pathways, clear-mindedness was lost at sea. And then he did it—lifting her off the ground with a firm grip, with an ease that she would marvel at later, when she wasn’t enjoying it so much. She had no choice but to cling to him, wrapping her legs around his hips, breaking the kiss with a wild gasp. “Oh my god.”

“Mmm.” One hand—how was he holding her up withone hand?—slid into her hair and brought her lips back to his as he turned to walk her to the cliff face, where an outcropping of rock made the perfect place for her to balance as he broke the kiss and brushed his lips across her cheek and down her neck, his tongue sliding out to taste the salt on her skin.

She sighed; he groaned.

“We shouldn’t do this,” he said to the place where her neck met her shoulder. “I don’t want you to think…”

“That you want to fuck me again?”

He lifted his head and met her gaze, his eyes hot on hers. Irresistible.

“That you scoped out this spot”—she wiggled against him, extremely pleased with the gruff sound he made—“the moment you set foot on this beach? Waiting for your chance?”

He didn’t respond. Instead he took her face in his hands and kissed her again, stealing words and thought and breath until she had nothing left but the taste of him, and the feel of him, and a deep, wilddesirefor whatever was to come. Whatever he was about to do.

And he was about to do something—she could feel it in the way his muscles tightened and strained beneath her touch. In the way his tongue stroked along hers. In the way his thumb ran across her cheeks. In the hard press of him where he stood, between her thighs.

In the slide of his impossibly warm hand under the hem of her T-shirt, against the cool damp skin of her torso, pushing the wet fabric up as he searched and she held her breath and waited for him to touch her where she wanted him.

And then he was there, big and strong, testing the weight of her breast, his thumb stroking over the pebbled tip. She gasped into his mouth as he smiled, all triumph. “Cold?”