Page 28 of Windlass (Seal Cove #3)

“I’d rather say less.” As Angie had intended, Stevie’s eyes were fixed upon her chest. If Stevie didn’t touch her tits soon, she and they were going to combust.

“But I want you to say more.” She let a bratty whine enter her voice, wondering if that would break Stevie’s annoying, and quite frankly surprising, maturity and end this conversation.

Stevie pushed out of her chair roughly. Angie whimpered with relief when Stevie’s hands wrapped in her hair, tilting her head up. Stevie like this, assertive, confident—she could come from watching. Maybe she could convince Stevie to film it.

“I’ll say more inside,” said Stevie, looking down at her. “Coincidentally—”

“—that’s what she said,” Angie finished.

Stevie’s phone buzzed. Her hands closed tightly around Angie’s hair, tight enough to hurt, which focused all her attention on the control, the trust, she’d placed in Stevie’s hands.

“Morgan?” Angie asked, dread rising. “You’re not on call, are you?”

Stevie nodded, extracting one hand from Angie’s hair to pull out her cell. When she looked up from her phone, however, the despair in her face shifted back to hunger. Angie reached for her waist.

“Before you go, tell me how you’d fuck me?” she asked.

Stevie grabbed Angie’s wrist, stopping her.

“You’re making it impossible for me to leave.”

“Maybe you won’t have to. You won’t know if you don’t answer the phone.”

The phone had started buzzing again.

“Fuck.” Stevie picked her phone up. “Hey, what’s up?”

Angie took advantage of Stevie’s preoccupation.

Biting back a sound as Stevie’s fingers curled deeper into her hair, she tugged Stevie’s shirt out of her way and slid out of the chair to kneel.

She saw the stricken look flash over Stevie’s face as she licked the curve of her hip just above her belt.

The plane of muscle hardened beneath her mouth.

Angie couldn’t help herself. A breathy moan escaped her as she tasted Stevie’s skin for the first time.

“I can be there in twenty, yeah,” she heard Stevie say in a poor approximation of normality. “What? I’m fine. Just doing stuff in the barn. See you in a few.”

Yes, they certainly had done stuff in the barn.

She slipped her tongue beneath Stevie’s belt as Stevie hung up on Morgan.

Stevie’s hand pulled her closer, demanding now, and she obliged—she licked the line of Stevie’s belt like she would her cunt, and Stevie knew it.

When Angie slid a hand up Stevie’s inner thigh, she was wet through her jeans.

“Are you sure you have to go?” Angie paused as she tugged Stevie’s belt lower, then, thinking better of it, unbuckled it entirely.

Stevie didn’t stop her or answer. Her body held itself rigidly.

The hand still wrapped in Angie’s hair twisted, which she took as answer enough.

Watching Stevie watch her, Angie unbuttoned Stevie’s jeans and slid down the zipper.

Stevie wore patterned briefs as a rule. Today’s featured beavers with monocles.

Angie stroked the front with light fingers.

The shudder that took Stevie’s whole body ended in her hand, which pulled Angie’s head against her, roughly, just long enough for Angie to taste her through her underwear before Stevie ripped her away with a sound of such immense frustration that Angie, shaking herself now, almost laughed. She licked her lips instead.

“I have to go, and it’s going to kill me.”

“I’ll be thinking of you,” Angie said suggestively.

“Don’t you dare.” Stevie released her hair slowly, clearly taking care not to pull any strands, which was ironic, all things considered. Angie appreciated the gentleness anyway. “The next time you come better be for me.”

“Super-fucking-inconvenient timing as ever,” said Stevie as she slid into the Seal Cove equine clinic ambulatory pickup.

The inside of the cab smelled as usual: horses, manure, fly spray, and the faint, non-specific funk that arose from one-too-many to-go cups spilling one-too-many coffees over the years.

“Tell me about it. I’d just sat down to eat.”

“I was hoping to,” said Stevie, thinking of Angie’s mouth.

“You didn’t get dinner?”

“It’s fine. I’ll eat out later.” A pity that joke would go unappreciated.

“You want to pick something up?” asked Morgan. “And don’t say—”

“Your mom,” Stevie finished for her. She tucked her hands beneath her thighs and hoped they stopped shaking before they got to wherever Morgan had told her they were going. She hadn’t taken in a word. Angie’s mouth had thoroughly melted her brain stem.

Angie. Angie’s mouth on her hip, on her clit.

Was there some way to get out of her job that would let her return home?

She felt the ghost of Angie’s tongue against her with every breath, the way she’d managed in those two seconds of contact to erase everyone else who’d ever touched her.

There was the way Angie had looked, kneeling before her: trusting, vulnerable, and so very fucking hot.

She so rarely saw trust or vulnerability in Angie’s eyes.

If someone had made her choose between that look and the sensation of Angie’s lips and tongue sweeping over her, she’d be hard-pressed.

She leaned her head back against the seat.

“I thought you missed dinner?” said Morgan, a question in the phrase.

“Huh?” Stevie looked at Morgan, who was looking at the road.

“Your face . . .” Morgan started. “Hangry Stevie doesn’t smile. How are things at the house? Better?”

“You have no idea,” said Stevie, several seconds before it occurred to her this was not, in fact, the sort of thing someone would say if they were pretending they were not thinking about fucking their roommate.

“Uh huh.”

“We needed an adjustment period.” Period . Her period wasn’t about to start anytime soon, was it? That was the last thing she needed. Sure, she could work around it, but she’d rather not.

“She keeping Lana out of the house?”

“So far,” said Stevie. Not even the mention of Lana’s name cooled her down.

“Good. You don’t need that.”

“Angie doesn’t need that.”

“Also true. Hey, did you check your email?”

“Why would I check my email? Don’t answer that.

I’ll do it now.” She dug out her phone. A notification from Angie waited on the screen.

Her heart would have jumped if it had ever stopped pounding, but Angie’s tongue had also broken its speedometer.

Checking email could wait a moment. Concentrating was extraordinarily difficult anyway.

She slid the notification open and stifled whatever damning noise had been about to slip past her lips.

Angie had sent a photo. In it, her breasts spilled obscenely from her hands, raising questions about where the hell she’d positioned her phone to take the shot, but those were not questions Stevie was currently prepared to consider.

Angie’s nipples were concealed, but only barely.

The darker skin around them peeked through.

“Got the email?”

“Almost. Checking something else real quick.” She downloaded the photo to her phone and spent another few seconds staring, then typed out a reply.

SW: Brutal. Gorgeous. Bet you’d feel bad if I’d been driving .

There was more she wanted to say, but Angie shrank from sentiment.

Telling her she was beautiful would earn an eye roll if said with too much genuine emotion, and buying her flowers?

Might as well buy them for herself with a card that read, Condolences, you lost the girl immediately .

She looked at the photo one more time before regretfully navigating away from Angie’s absolutely glorious tits and to her historically tits-free email.

“What am I looking for?”

“It’s from Ivy.”

“Ivy? Okay, Ivy, Ivy, Ivy . . . aha.” She clicked. “‘Lawn games, cocktails—’ Morgan what the fuck is this?” Stevie knew, of course, what the fuck it was (Ivy putting the ‘gay’ in ‘engagement’) but she could not say that, and she knew how a Stevie-in-the-dark-about-a-secret would react.

“Ivy’s idea of a low-key weekend.”

“Why do I feel like by lawn games, she doesn’t mean cornhole?”

“Because you’ve met Ivy Holden, and we’ve both seen her lose at cornhole.”

“And . . .” She read further. “Cocktail attire? Is she serious?”

“It’s a nice island. She’s probably serious.”

“I don’t own cocktail attire.” She hadn’t thought she’d needed to make ‘casual attire only’ part of the conditions of her assistance. An amateur mistake in retrospect.

“Have Ange take you shopping. She loves that shit.” Morgan turned down a side road. “Or see if your brothers have a nice shirt or something.”

“You’ve met my brothers, right? About twenty million times?”

“I might have something I shrank by accident. Unless you want to borrow a dress, and then you’re better off with Ange.

She’s closer to your size than anyone else.

Ivy probably has a shirt, too. You’ve got nice slacks.

Or wear a polo—it’s not like any of us care, and we’re the only ones who will be there. ”

“Then why am I going shopping?”

“Because you said you didn’t have anything. I’m not making you. Keep reading.”

“Full weekend of activities, looks like. Could be fun.”

“Keep reading.”

“I don’t know what—oh.” She zoomed in. “Is that a typo?”

“You tell me.”

“ Mandatory karaoke? I would rather swim naked at night with sharks.”

“Maybe we can suggest that as an alternative,” said Morgan. “I can’t sing for shit. I know you can’t either.”

“Guess we’ll have to duet Nickelback.”

Morgan snorted. “They’d pay us to shut up. You have to promise you won’t let Emilia bully me into singing with her.”

“Because she’s such a bully.” Stevie tried to imagine Emilia bullying anyone, let alone Morgan, and failed.

“She can be persuasive.”

“Well, she’s not going to show you her tits in front of the rest of us.” Why had she said tits? Angie was at home touching her tits, and she was here in a truck talking about karaoke .

“Breasts. They’re breasts, not tits.”

“If the rest of the world knew you were such a prude, they wouldn’t swoon over you half as much.”

“Just don’t call my girlfriend’s breasts ‘tits,’ okay?”

“Emilia won’t show you her breasts in front of the rest of us.”

“No, and she might not show them to me later.”

As someone who had very recently been promised access to tits herself, the horror of being denied was overwhelming. And the way Angie had first held her eyes as she teased her, then closed them when her mouth had skimmed over Stevie’s briefs, as if overcome—

“Hey.”

“What?”

“Did you get a chance to restock the gauze yesterday?”

“Yeah.” Angie, leaning back against the counter holding Stevie’s shirt, lips parting—lips Stevie would not be allowed to kiss, which was bullshit, but she’d respect it until Angie changed her mind. “How much farther?”

“Ten minutes?”

“Then let me pull up some bad music so we can practice.”

Mostly she needed to let her mind and body slow the fuck down. Beneath the thrum of her nerves, though, and the nearly blinding pulses of desire that shook her each time another image of Angie appeared in her mind’s eye was a happiness bright and fierce enough to overpower even desire.