Page 77 of Beached Wedding

I hadn’t said it either, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t feeling it. What a blind idiot I was! Ash was sweet and fun and Ihadwanted her wedding day to be perfect. I had wanted Shane to see what a treasure he’d found in her and for them to both have a good life together.

I hadn’t torpedoed their wedding for this. To end up with her lying against me like this, after I’d left to discard the condom and came back to gather her close, so her legs entwined with mine.

I didn’t know what to say, but her breaths fell into a measured cadence, telling me she drifting to sleep. I didn’t have to say anything. I could brood to my heart’s content.

Discontent.

Fuck. Until the last couple of days, this was something I had deliberately and determinedly not imagined happening between us ever. Ashley had been my roommate and workmate and someone I liked seeing every day, but that was it. Any sexual attraction I’d experienced had been firmly ignored because that’s what you did when women were employees or in relationships or showed zero interest in your dick.

If she’d been attracted to me during her time in Oz, she hadn’t revealed it. Even after the kiss on the dinner cruise, I had thought we could go back to being friends.

It wasn’t until things had gone off the rails on the heli-tour that I’d started to think we had both been harboring more sexual attraction than we’d wanted to admit. Our fight in the car had made it impossible to pretend it didn’t exist, but this?

So you don’t love me. Like that.

I didn’t know how I felt beyond wishing this wasn’t so fucking impossible. How did she feel, I wondered? Because in the car she’d said something about showing up for a wedding and not even getting laid.

I couldn’t believe she would be so cold-blooded as to fuck the best man as revenge against her absent groom. Not when her hug had felt so damned final. Like she was saying goodbye to me. Or to this.

She had tried leave before we crossed this line, but I hadn’t been able to let her go.Iwas the one who had kept her here. And kissed her. And let it turn into this.

Sure, she had kissed me back and locked her legs around me as though she would never let me go.

But she hadn’t said she loved me and I didn’t know if she was sparing me from having to make hard decisions or if she was taking her sister’s advice and cleansing her palate with some rebound sex.

Ah hell. I hated myself for even thinking that. For doubting her. But this...whatever it was...had come on so fast. And it was too intense. It was like dropping into the most perfectly formed wave, the kind that almost never happened, but when you found that kind of nirvana... Well, it became all you could think about. A fixation. You chased it until you found it again.

Which scared the hell out of me because Icouldn’t.Wecouldn’t.

Not right now. Not without deep costs.

Give me time, I silently begged her. I played my fingers in the tails of her hair. I needed time to figure out what to do. Maybe in a year?—

The ring of the room phone jarred me out of my ruminations and startled her awake. She sucked in a breath.

“You’re okay,” I murmured, cuddling her closer.

She made a noise that might have been dismay or remorse at realizing where she was, but she only withdrew her arm from where it was draped over my waist and curled it between us where the other was tucked like the wing of a bird.

The phone rang again. I stayed where I was, holding her nude warmth against my own.

“Aren’t you going to get it?” she asked.

“No.”

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know.”

It rang again, annoying. My phone had been buzzing as well, but it was over on the chair where I’d left it last night, face down on the cushion and muffled, so it was easier to ignore. I’d quit looking at it when people had begun texting to ask why Shane wasn’t responding to the statement I’d posted, asking if Shane was okay and whether there was anything they could do.

“Whitney wouldn’t know to look for me here, but she might be trying to find me.” Ash rolled onto her back. “We have a pedicure this morning.” Her enthusiasm level was that of the average colonoscopy patient. “Izzy made us wait to get them until today so she could come. Mom cancelled hers, but Whit insisted the rest of us keep our appointment. What time is it?”

She lifted onto her elbow to see the clock. Sighed. Her gaze came back to mine, troubled and searching.

“I have to shower and...” Her mouth pouted ruefully. She let her hand rest on my stomach. “Are you mad?”

Those eyes. Defensive and vulnerable and capable of toppling countries if she only understood the power she wielded with that liquid gaze of hers.

---