All Hands Below (16 page)

She nodded, curious. He had something for her?

“Then there’s no reason you and I can’t watch the rest of the fireworks together, is there? Like old friends? I promise to behave myself.”

Oh, this was cute, especially since
she
didn’t want to behave. Especially since she’d changed her mind four times about meeting him tonight. She’d paced the river’s edge, stalling, unable to make up her mind. Go inside the tent? Stay away?

In the end, she knew that seeing him would hurt. A
lot
. And marching smack dab into him as she rushed from the waterfront to avoid him struck her as a bit ironic.

Staring into his eyes, her heart pulsed to life. Her body hurt with so much wanting, and he wanted to watch fireworks, like old friends. Well, she didn’t do old friends and she wasn’t about to start with this one.

“Thinking too hard again, Evangeline?”

“You could be nice and hand over whatever it is you have for me.”

Liam didn’t hesitate. He reached inside his coat and pulled out an envelope. “Here you go. It’s from some people you met on the cruise, but I won’t spoil the fun for you.”

“I met a darling little kook on that cruise, too.” She smiled and took the envelope from him.

Her name was written on the outside in a fancy, feminine scrawl, but she didn’t want to open it in front of him. Every moment she lingered put her heart in danger.

“I’d like it if you stayed till after the fireworks, Evangeline. You’d planned to, anyway. Then I’ll walk you to your car. Or just walk away. Whatever you want. I don’t want you to leave on my account.”

She stuffed the envelope in her bag, relieved that one of them could draw boundaries. Too bad she had no intention of hanging around to test them. “It was good seeing you, Liam.”

The flicker of his lashes revealed he’d hoped for a different answer. “You’re going to miss the grand finale.”

“Actually, I never do,” she confessed. “I always pick a corner parking spot on the seventh floor of the parking tower. It looks out over the waterfront, and I watch from there. It also helps me get a head start on traffic leaving the area.”

“Do you always think ahead?” he asked her with a caressing smile.

“It makes things less complicated. That’s all.”

“And would I make things more complicated if I walked you to your car?”

“Not at all.” She set the pace toward the parking tower, hoping the brisk tempo could shake off her body’s awareness of the man strolling next to her.

He didn’t have to touch her to make her feel him. She could smell him. His scent found safe harbor in her memory, next to the feel of his naked skin. The memory of how he’d rubbed against her, melted into her when his cock and his tongue slipped inside her at the same time, had warmed her up on rainy Oregon nights.

“So, how long have you lived in Portland?”

She struggled to form a reply. “A-All my life.”

“Do you live alone?”

She nodded. “My parents are military retirees. They own a cottage along the northern coast. I umm…have a place outside of town.”

A vision of Liam lying naked in her queen-size bed, gazing out at the riverscape beyond her bedroom window, flashed across her thoughts.

“Any siblings?”

She shook her head. “I’m an only child. And you?”

He smiled down at her. “I have one sister. She just graduated college. But since she’s single and loves the rent-free comforts of home, she still lives with our parents in San Francisco,” he told her with a fond chuckle. “How about you, Evangeline? Are you a single girl living in the city?”

“I wasn’t always single, as you know,” she reminded him, a blush creeping up her cheeks.

He reached out and grasped her elbow. “You still are, aren’t you?”

She jumped at the shock of his fingers, warm and hopeful against her skin.

“I started seeing someone, but it’s not anything serious.” It wouldn’t hurt for Liam to know she didn’t just sit around and pine for him.

“Yet you came here tonight. Alone and…wearing that dress. Let’s cross, shall we?” he murmured, his breath whispering down her neck as he guided her away from the waterfront. They crossed the grassy parkway to the other side.

Southwest Yamhill was never so thrilling, Evangeline mused. Flutters in her stomach zoomed down her thighs. Liam strolling next to her, asking about all there was to do in Oregon, amped up her rioting senses.

“Let’s see…there are wine tastings and fruit picking,” she rambled. “Then there is the City of Tillamook on the north coast. The cheese factory there is-is—” She cursed the tremor that shook her voice.

Seeing him again, trying to stay ahead of his lean-legged strides made her draw a blank. All she could see, feel, and think about was getting him naked.

“Is?”

“Amazing.”

“Okay.”

She had to get away from him—and quick. She was babbling like the village idiot. And when had her knees been taken over by balloons? Her vow to be strong was about to blow. If he so much as came within two feet of her… She walked faster, putting more space between them.

“I don’t want to miss the grand finale.”

When they reached the elevator of the parking tower, she turned to him. “You don’t have to go with me.”

“I’ll take you all the way, Evangeline.”

The elevator doors swayed apart. She stepped inside. Liam stepped in behind her.

They both leaned against the same wall and waited. Fifteen seconds passed.
Whew.
It felt warm in the cube. The seconds ticked on. Was it just her getting hot and sticky around him? Or was it because she’d practically run up Yamhill trying to keep her distance from him?

Why was the elevator taking so long to move? Don’t look at him. Don’t…look. She threw a peek over her shoulder.

As he gazed at the opposite wall, she lingered on his profile for an extra second. It might have been two. Or three. Surely it took more than a second to take in all of him—his cover model face, rock-hard shoulders and virile body.

The memory of how his stomach shuddered when she grazed her mouth along that taut path of skin below his belly button leached into her brain. As did his hairless, manscaped balls at the base of his nine-inch cock.

Her peek turned into a stare. She worried her lower lip between her teeth. Her mind spun back to the two of them on his bed, his fingers laced with hers, their mouths joined, their tongues exploring as his cock imbedded deep into her pussy and enjoyed her body with each thrust.

He cleared his throat.

“Evie.” He turned to her.

She blinked up at him, hopeful, hesitant. Knowing whatever he asked of her when he shortened her name like that, she’d say
yes
.

“Let me…”

Her areolas tingled into hard discs. She sucked in a breath as he reached out across the space between them…and pressed the button that would take them to the seventh floor.

Evangeline pulled her gaze away and caught her reflection on the opposite wall. A mirrored wall. Crap!

Liam had been staring at her as he’d watched her launch a lusty-eyed attack on his person. She’d eaten him up like a starving she-wolf, and he didn’t say a word. Didn’t make one move.

She wanted to howl her frustration. The sudden jolt of the elevator made her brace her legs. She felt the moisture of arousal slick her thong, felt its panel cleave to her labial lips. And the smell of him?
Whoa yummy
!

His scent intoxicated her mind with a rampage of hot images. Images she feared she was about to snatch from her mind and stuff into reality.

****

Liam studied her bright, pink cheeks.

Her struggle to hide the longing in her eyes would be laughable if he didn’t care so much for her, too. He ached to be with her. Inside her.

He could have just mailed the envelope, but when he received it with a request from the sender to forward, he decided to hand-deliver it himself.

No harm in that, was there?

Big mistake, he thought, standing there trying to keep his cock from springing out of his pants and pinning her to the wall. He had a selfish need to see if she’d found her dream life. To see if she was still available—but for what?

A simple fuck wouldn’t do.

The elevator shuddered to a stop. The doors swished open, and Liam hung back as she stepped out. Her hair tumbled down her back in a river of silk. The jounce of her ass under the cling of her dress made him ache to trace the outline of her thong beneath it…with his tongue. He’d follow the straps winging up along her shapely hips. Then he’d trace it right back down to the sweet spot between her legs.

“Coming?” she asked him.

“Yes. Please,” he muttered.

She stopped and waited for him. “Did you say something?”

He picked up his pace. “I’m liking the view from here already,” he breathed out uneasily.

She turned. He followed, listening to her boots click-clack-clack on the cement floor. Tension framed her shoulders. Liam wondered if she felt the same ache that ground at his gut.

Evangeline pulled her keys out of her purse as they approached a soft-top Jeep painted the same ethereal blue, he realized, as her eyes. It had been backed into a stall for a quick getaway.

He frowned. Unless he convinced her to spend the night with him, her quick getaway meant that she’d be seeing him in her rearview mirror.

She unlocked and opened the driver’s side door, and tossed her purse inside.

Then she turned and approached the rail to stare out at the view. The pyrotechnics beyond zoomed into the skyline and filled the night with bells of color.

None of it matched the vibrant beauty of the woman standing at the rail, watching the show.

Liam glanced at the door she’d left hanging open on its hinges and hesitated, cued in to her intent. She planned to leave—without him.

He cleared his throat and shoved his fingers deep inside the pockets of his jeans. “You were right about the view from here—”

She spun around, closed the distance between them, and pulled his head down to hers in a blaze of white-hot need. Her mouth fused into his and lit up the sparks that just needed the scorch of her lips to ignite.

Chapter Seventeen

Liam’s scent, the tenor of his voice, his casual chitchat…she barely understood him.

Excited thoughts tumbled around her brain. What was a girl supposed to do with all this hotness in blue jeans following her around? Refusing to let her go?

Get swept away and take him right along with her!

“Mmphht.”

Was that Liam or her?

The hands bracing her back to hold her close, to hold her in place for the sexy storm of kisses raining down on her lips—definitely Liam.

He pulled away and rested his chin on her head. His hardened rod mashed up against her stomach. Then again, she wasn’t complaining. A minute passed. When their breaths settled, he tilted her face up to his. Hunger darkened the tint of his eyes.

“I take it you’ve missed me as much as I’ve missed you, Evie?”

“Maybe,” she whispered, then attacked his mouth again.

Liam’s laughter muffled against her lips. He pushed her back against the side of the SUV, whispering her name as he did so. His hand caressed her breast through her dress, his touch urgent and searing.

He shoved the fold of fabric covering one breast aside to reveal the lace caps of her demi-bra.

“Someone might see us,” she gasped.

“Everyone’s watching the fireworks. We’re seven floors up. Hardly anyone on foot here, sweetheart.”

He tugged down the top of her bra, dipped his head, and pulled her nipple deep in his mouth. She gulped as a dribble of cream oozed onto the panel of her thong.

Liam lifted his head and gazed down at her as his hand whisked the hem of her dress up. With her heart hammering against her ribcage, she arched her hips against him as his cock catapulted at her pussy, stone-stiff and determined.

She spread her thighs.

“Look at the sky, baby,” he instructed, dropping his head to kiss her neck with lips that promised bliss to come. His hand skated across her stomach and swept into her thong.

She shook her head, not about to miss a moment of this. Of him. Of his fingertips gliding between the lobes of her sex. “I don’t care about the grand finale.
Ohh
…”

Two fingers slid inside her opening, already sodden. She bit her lip. Dizzy with sensation, she clenched her thighs to prevent her knees from buckling. When his thumb found her clitoris like a bulls-eye, she whimpered.

“It doesn’t bother you—” she broke off to suck in a block of air when his digits filled her, stretching her channel with yet a third finger, “that we’re in a parking garage?”

His sinful smile brimmed with mischief. “I want to make you come before a car drives down that ramp.”

Liam put words to motion when he crouched down before her, his fingers still lodged inside her body. He swept aside the panel of her thong, whistled at the scenery that glistened beneath, and clamped his lips and tongue onto the dampened folds of her sex.

She tilted her head back, her eyes half-closed as his tongue licked her creases, reacquainting himself with her taste.

A gratified sound vibrated from his throat. The warm licks of his tongue fiddling along her folds sent stars bursting across her mind. Fireworks thundered in the sky while her body sank into the pleasure of his mouth nibbling and sucking on her engorged pussy.

“Delicious.” His tongue-tip feathered around her clitoris.

He slipped his fingers from her channel, only to dive his tongue into her channel in a thorough sweep before retreating. Then his lips claimed her clit once more with fast, hard sucks.

He left no lobe or ruffle unlicked. Her pussy, clit, lips—everything quivered as Liam explored those supple folds.

Tilting her hips, she rubbed her pelvis against his mouth, thrust her fingers through his hair, and gazed down at the movement of his head between her thighs, awestruck. The energy of his tongue gliding around her slit dragged a groan from her throat.