Page 49 of The Road Trip Romance

“You have got to stop doing shit like that,” she grumbles as she squirms beneath me. I know she’s trying to get away, but her movement is doing the opposite because now I’ve gone from hard as wood to hard as a diamond.

“Fuck, Sophia. You taste so good. Please let me spend more time feasting on you. I need more, gorgeous, so much more,” I manage as I grip myself through my wet boxer briefs.

“Tate…” She closes her eyes, and when she opens them, the dim light reflects against unshed tears, stopping me from moving at all.

“What’s wrong?” I ask as I bring a hand up to caress her cheek.

“I can’t do that again,” she whimpers, her bottom lip trembling.

“Do what, baby?” I question as I search her glistening eyes.

“I know it seems all great between Mark and me now, but that took years. If I let myself completely fall for you…I don’t know if I can be OK again when you leave me. I don’t know if the kids would be OK,” she says as a single tear finally makes its way over the brim of her lower right eyelid.

I wipe it away with my thumb and kiss her cheek and then her other cheek. “I won’t leave you or them, Sophia. This would be for the long haul.”

“How?” she says softly as the rain slows outside. “We live in two different worlds.”

I give her a small smile. “I like your world better.”

The sad smile I get back nearly breaks my heart in two. “But it’s not yours. I can’t up and leave the kids and go to red-carpet events across the country. How would that even work? You’d be away for months at a time filming. The kids need routine.”

“We can figure all that out. We could make it work,” I say as we both sit up and I take her face in my hands, searching her eyes.

She laughs a bitter laugh and I feel it in my gut like a sucker punch. “Tate, come on. Let’s be realistic here. I mean…we have this…thing between us…but I think we both are just in a place where we need…physical comfort,” she manages as she looks at me.

I shake my head. “No, that’s not it. There’s something more between us. I feel it and I know you do too. I’ve felt it since that first night; since you opened the door,” I say, my voice sounding more desperate than I’d like it to sound.

“Everyone OK?” Jordan’s voice calls out from near the tent.

“L-let’s just sleep on it,” Sophia stammers as she searches for her wet clothes and pulls them back on before opening the tent and going outside.

I pull on my clothes and kneel inside the tent for a moment, trying to compose myself before going out there. I hear everyone assessing the camp and figuring out what we should do next. But it’s like background noise to my thoughts.

So much for Tate Anders being able to get any woman. I understand Sophia’s trepidation, I do. But I know she feels the same. I can feel it in the way her body responds to me, the way she looks at me when she thinks I don’t notice, and the way she smiles when we have our late-night chats. There’s more between us than she wants to admit, I just don’t know how to make her admit it.

“Wow! That was a crazy storm,” Penn says as I make my way out of the tent.

“Yeah, great night for camping,” Jordan mutters under his breath.

“Hey, it looked fine on the radar. I don’t know where that came from. You guys want to stay?” Penn asks. Jordan and Rex groan. Penn loves this outdoors shit, but it’s definitely not our thing. We all turn to Sophia as if her opinion is the most important.

She surveys the campsite. Two tents have been blown over despite Penn’s expert skills at setting them up and three tents remain.

It’s then that the night sky clears and the campsite is illuminated by the crescent moon. We all look up and Rex whistles as Jordan and Sophia both gasp at the beauty of the stars above us.

“Let’s stay,” Sophia says, not bothering to move her gaze from the Milky Way up in the sky.

“Yeah, maybe we just sleep under all these stars,” Jordan agrees, stepping toward her and wrapping his arm over her shoulder. She nods as she continues to look up at them.

“Fuck yeah! I knew you guys were cool like that. Nature’s own television,” Penn says.

Rex snorts. “As long as I don’t wake up to a raccoon accosting me, we’re all good.”

“I’d be more worried about the bugs,” I state as I slap at a mosquito on my arm.

That breaks Sophia’s gaze. “The what?”

“Mosquitos,” I reiterate.

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