Page 111 of Brewbies
Because she took his heart with her.
Epilogue
FINISH: THE SENSORY EXPERIENCE OF COFFEE JUST AS IT IS SWALLOWED.
KAPALUA VILLAS, MAUI, TWO NIGHTS LATER
A gentle breezesifted through the gauzy curtains, carrying with it the ecstatic chorus of tropical birdsong. Between the sex, the sun, and steady stream of heavenly, heady Kona coffee, Darby wasn’t exactly sure what time it was.
And to be honest, she didn’t care. In fact, she might never care about anything ever again except staying exactly where she was, doing exactly what she’d been doing for as long as humanly possible.
Provided fresh trays of beautiful food kept arriving on their private balcony overlooking an endless bolt of crystal blue that might very well be forever.
Or so a girl could hope.
“Ethan?” Despite his name being half absorbed by the pillow where Darby’s sweat-kissed face was buried, Ethan lifted his disheveled head. The rest of him remained heavy and slack, and their limbs were intertwined in a position that mimicked two sky divers colliding in midair.
“Yeah?”
She rolled her cheek away from the buttery pillowcase to find eyes that rivaled the pristine Pacific. “I love you too.”
His flushed cheek creased in a smirk. “Yeah, you fucking do.”
With considerable effort, she peeled her arm from the mattress and caught the perfect globe of his bare ass with a resoundingsmack.“What d’you mean, ‘Yeah, you fucking do? You don’t know me.”
“Don’t have to,” he drawled, despite having proven irrefutably that he knew her very,verywell. “No one would do what you just did to me unless they loved that person.”
A Cheshire Cat grin spread slowly across her swollen lips as she remembered—in detail—the sexual equivalent of a trust fall. He was surprisingly limber for a man who’d spent so much of his time obsessively hugging the straight and narrow. “Good point.”
“But tell me tomorrow,” he mumbled.
“I will,” she said on a yawn.
“Good. Because I plan to tell you every day for the rest of our natural lives.”
Eyelids that had been filling with sand only seconds before snapped open. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
Ethan’s deep chest rose and fell in a regular rhythm that Darby had already come to recognize as his imminent departure from consciousness. “What do you think I’m saying?”
“A man like you talks about spending the rest of his life with someone, and usually there’s a very different kind of legal proposition involved.”
Rough, warm fingers found the back of her knee, anchoring it over Ethan’s hip. “A man like me does what the fuck he wants.”
“He finds out his ancestors were pirates, and all of a sudden he’s a rogue,” Darby said to the billowing canopy of the four-poster bed they’d rarely left except to find an alternate surface on which to bone.
“I still think Roy is full of shit.” Ethan traced his fingers up her thigh to palm her ass. “But I sure do love plundering this booty.”
Darby flung a dramatic arm across her eyes as she groaned. “You really are a walking dad joke, you know that?”
“How about you come walk my plank?”
“That’s it.” Darby began to squirm away from him. “I’m ordering more coffee.”
With a burst of momentum that left her dizzy, Ethan rolled her beneath him and pinned her arms above her head. “Not until I’ve buried my treasure.”
Then she felt him hard against the most deliciously sensitive part of her, and she forgot to protest.
Ethan sank himself by fluid degrees, moving into her like the tide. Drawing her deeper into herself.
Deeper into love.
