Page 69 of So Close

“It’s usually deserted.”

“Isit?”

“Unless you have work to do?”

He leaned close, his breath a whisper against her ear.

“The only work I have to do today,” he murmured, “is the kind it takes to get you to scream my name.”

34

It was technically a woods hike, not a beach hike. They walked several miles, mostly along the ridge of a cliff that rode the edge of the Pacific, the world falling away to one side of them into the vastness of gray water and sky. It wasn’t sunny, but Auburn said that was for the best, because then they wouldn’t get sunburned on the beach. She said it suggestively, and he thought about the prettiest, pinkest parts of her, exposed to the air and the breeze, which would tease over her nipples and ruffle her curls and—

He was walking behind her and she was wearing a sporty sundress, made of some stretchy material that clung to every curve and flared out into a skirt that didn’t even make it to midthigh.

“It’s hard to walk with an erection,” he said grumpily.

She stopped abruptly and he crashed into her. She turned around.

“I can help with that.”

The breath went out of him at the same time the blood plummeted south. “It wasn’t meant to be a hint—”

But he didn’t even get the whole sentence out before she grabbed his hand and tugged him a short distance off the path and into a secluded grove. Then she was on her knees, grappling with the button and zipper of his cargo shorts, releasing him from his boxers so he sprang up, long and thick. It was a relief to feel the cool air on his hot, tight flesh.

He got to watch her face when she first saw him, too. Eyes big and pupils already blown black, nearly blocking out the last ring of blue. She licked her lips, and not for show, he didn’t think. Just because she liked the slickness all over his plump head. Then she was licking him, popping him past the rim of her lips, sucking generously and loudly, which—holy fuck, he wouldneverhave predicted how much that would turn him on, the sound of her wet mouth. The feel of her tongue, licking stripes up the length of him and swirls around the head.

Some women hated giving blowjobs and some women liked it. Some were decent at it, some weren’t. She was so good and so enthusiastic that he was losing his mind. She was finding spots on his cock he hadn’t known were there, drawing lines and connecting dots and his balls pulled up so fast, the heat shooting down his spine so he barely had time to warn her, “Jesus, Auburn, I’m going to—”

But she knew. She’d grabbed his ass the moment he’d swelled in her mouth, and she wasn’t going to let him go. He came just the way she’d wanted, against the hot, wet back of her throat, so much pleasure he didn’t mind losing control.

The truth was, he didn’t mind losing control when it came to her.

He leaned back against a tree, trying to catch his breath and get his bearings. His knees were water. “Holyshit, Auburn.”

She grinned at him. “Better?”

He tipped his head back. “It’s hard to walk when you’re a limp rag,” he said, but he couldn’t make it sound grumpy, not even to joke around with her. He just felt too good.

“There’s no pleasing some people,” she teased.

It took a while before he could pull himself together, but they made their way along the rest of the main trail and down the nearly invisible, unmarked spur to the secret beach. They came down a series of heavily overgrown switchbacks and stepped off a driftwood snag onto the beach.

“Oh. Wow,” he said.

“Pretty, right?”

It was a white sand beach tucked into a cove, cupped on one side by red cliffs and on the other by hillside ruffed with overgrown green. Along the back edge of the beach were boulders, tumbled probably over thousands of years from the cliff above—some smooth, some ragged, gray, brown, reddish, flecked. He leaned against one and stared out at the water, gray like the sky and capped in places with white. “It’s amazing.”

She took off her running shoes and socks, and he watched as she walked down onto the sand. He knelt and began untying his shoes.

She slung the backpack off her shoulder and began unpacking things from it, then said, suddenly, “Shit.”

“What?”

“I forgot—how could I—how could I forget a blanket?”

“We can sit on that rock over there.” He gestured.

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