Page 27 of Windlass

Angie faced forward before anyone else could see her expression, and before Stevie could see the red suffusing her cheeks.

“Sunscreen, Ward,” she heard Lilian say without comprehending the words. Laughter and more conversation flowed behind her with the boat’s wake. She focused on trying to calm her capillaries. She hadn’t just given Steviethatlook. She couldn’t have. Doing so would have been a terrible, terrible idea. She’d meant to bare her skin today—not her desire.

“You had the right idea,” said Stevie nonchalantly, setting a boat cushion on the bow opposite her.

Angie did not want to look at her. How much had Stevie seen in her expression? Just how wantonly had she stared up at her best friend, her body threatening to ruin the delicate balance they were already struggling to keep between them?

Gold flickered. She looked, drawn by the color, and forgot about the boat and their friends and the vanishing porpoises.

Stevie rarely showed skin. Her modesty had frustrated Angie for ages, each glimpse she’d stolen carefully squirreled away in the hopes she might one day gather enough for a full image, just so that she knew, exactly, what she denied herself.

She was not expecting to see Stevie sitting upright, hair down and whipping in the wind, board shorts and tank top cruelly absent.

“It’s much cooler,” Stevie continued, raising her face to the breeze, keeping her glasses between them.

Her tousled hair was too much. Angie couldn’t. She just couldn’t be expected to deal with this, not without burying her hands in that rippling gold.

“Uh huh.”

Maybe the wind would obscure the breathless note to her voice. Angie tightened her hold on the railing. Stevie gleamed beneath the July afternoon sky. There was a golden hue to her that had to be natural unless Stevie tanned on the sly, which Angie knew wasn’t the case. She had the tightly wound build of a boxer, the muscles of her shoulders bunched to support her weight, and the soft rise of her breasts—fuck her forthat—surprisingly lush beneath the sporty bikini top. She’d seen Stevie in a towel on many occasions, but Stevie always knotted the towel high on her chest, instead of wherever the towel happened to fall, as Angie did. She had not, therefore, had the warning she might have had otherwise, though warning would have helped her little. She’d seen Stevie’s collarbones, but drenched in sunlight they became something else entirely: a bridge to a country she’d never been, and from which she was terribly afraid she’d never return.

And then there was the rest of her. She did not, could not, stop herself from looking. Stevie’s stomach. Stevie’s hips. Stevie’s legs and ankles and ass. Her eyes lingered helplessly on the latter until they were drawn by the dip of her hips and the solid muscle of her thighs. Ivy had legs like that: absolutely devastating.Fucking equestrians. Legs that strong could pin her down easily, and she fell into the daydream of Stevie’s thighs around her hips, hands at her wrists while Angie begged—

She jerked her eyes away and laughed, or at least made a sound that might have been a laugh, if laughter could go through a woodchipper. She needed to backpedal fast.

“Damn,” she said. Might as well state the truth. “You clean up well.”

Teasing was fine. Teasing was safe. Normal. Except the skin of Stevie’s ankle just below the bone, which she’d seen before and shouldnothave been any different now, suddenly looked irresistible. She needed to trace that hollow with her tongue more than she could remember wanting anyone.

“Uh, thanks.”

She snapped her gaze back to Stevie’s face. Stevie’s cheeks were pinker than they’d been a moment ago, and if they’d been alone Angie would have slid across the bow and drawn those glasses off slowly, revealing the blue of her eyes a little bit at a time, while she straddled that smooth expanse of sun-warmed skin. The feel of that heat against her—theideaof that heat alone—forced her to shift her seat.

Each gentle impact of the hull against the surf was an infuriating reminder that no one had ever gotten her as wet as Stevie Ward.

Stevie had been good. She had been so, so good for so, so long. Not once in the years she’d been in love with Angie had she allowed herself to imagine fully what it might be like to fuck her blind.

Tonight, though, as midnight came and went and she could think only of the look on Angie’s face when she’d checked Stevie out more thoroughly than she’d ever been checked out before, her resolve broke.

She’d watched as Angie’s eyes had covered every inch of her skin, feeling their passage like the ghost of a touch. She’d watched, too, as Angie bit her lip, eyes dark with the unspoken thing between them. And she’d watched Angie shift her seat, hadseenthe way her legs pressed together, and that had beentoo much.

Angie wanted her. She could not be respectful, not with that knowledge burned forever into her brain. The way Angie had gazed up at her, asking for it—

Angie in a swimsuit had always been exquisite torture, but today had been a hell of its very own. She wanted to burn there forever.

She tossed once more, kicking off her blankets, and stared at the ceiling. Her whole body ached with the effort of keeping herself from slipping out of bed and down the hall to Angie’s door.

And if she did? Would Angie turn her away? Or would she pull her inside, lips parting, her waist curving beneath Stevie’s hands?

She flung an arm over her forehead.Stop, she tried to tell herself, but she could barely form the word even in her mind. Fever bloomed across her skin. The faint friction of her sleep shorts against her when she shifted, slight as it was, made her want to scream.

Did Angie have any idea? Did she haveany fucking ideawhat she’d done? Or was she sleeping, peacefully ignorant of the purgatory into which she’d plunged her friend?

Again and again, she saw Angie looking up at her, lashes lowering, her lower lip full and slightly indented from her teeth. Stevie knew with devastating certainty how that lip would feel between her own teeth.

She bit her lip—it wasn’t Angie’s, but her body let her pretend otherwise—and at last gave in to the temptation of years. The whimper that escaped her as her hand slid beneath the waistband of her shorts was pathetic. Thank god Angie couldn’t see her, hear her—fuck.Her clit was hard and slick beneath her fingers, and she closed her eyes, imagining it was Angie she was touching, Angie she was bringing to climax before Stevie even had a chance to think her name. The orgasm ripped through her, satisfying nothing.

It wasn’t enough. Once unlocked, the door behind which she’d barricaded every thought about Angie she’d never allowed herself to complete would not stay shut. Eyes closed or open didn’t matter—the visions waited for her in lethal detail. Angie, pinned to the deck of Morgan’s stupid boat, her chin tilted by the hand Stevie would tangle in the hair at the nape of her neck. Angie, breath coming too quickly, light olive skin glimmering where the sunlight fell on her cheeks, throat, and the cruel curve of her breasts. Angie, prone beneath her, hips rising to meet Stevie’s hand.

---