Damn it.
He held her tube so she could hop into it and then pushed them both out into the swimming hole. He wasn’t sure what else there was to say. He’d just lost his mind and dragged her into the woods like a crazy person, and then she’d given him the single most devastating blowjob of his life. It wasn’t even the technique—though that had been beyond reproach. It was the fact she seemed to be having such fun while she was doing it. Sex had been a lot of things for him in the past—intense, distracting, toxic—but never fun. He wasn’t sure what to do with fun.
They paddled around the bend and there was the rest of their party, standing and bullshitting on the minuscule beach. Aubry stood away from the rest of them, her hand shielding the sun from her eyes as she searched—obviously for them. “Jules!”
“Shit,” Jules muttered. They barely got within reach of the beach when she jumped out of the tube with a splash. “I’m fine. I didn’t get eaten.”
Quinn crossed over to them and gave Adam a long look. “Are you sure about that?”
The choked sound Jules made had Aubry zeroing in on her. “Oh, we’re going to have words, and soon.”
“Great.”
And then there came Grant, the pinched look around his mouth doing nothing to make Adam feel less like punching his face in. “Took you two long enough. We thought one of your tubes might have popped.”
Jules’s grin was bright enough to blind. “Nope. Nothing like that.”
“I…see.” Grant took her in with one long look and then turned the same expression on Adam. “You work fast, don’t you?”
It didn’t matter that Adam had been feeling kind of shitty about how things just played out. He wasn’t about to have this asshole adding on the guilt. “None of your business.”
“Oh, I think it is. I’m concerned for Jules.”
The woman in question inserted herself between them, though Adam couldn’t begin to say which of them she was planning on saving. “Jules is standing right here and can hear you both. Why don’t we get moving? I’m working the second shift and I don’t want to be late.” She didn’t give them a chance to argue, moving back to the tubes, Aubry on her heels. The redhead took Adam’s tube, shooting him a sharp look over her shoulder. A look he fucking deserved.
Grant and his three chicks headed for the fire pit, leaving Adam and Quinn standing on the beach. Quinn crossed his arms over his chest. “Daniel’s going to kill you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re not even bothering to lie well when you say that shit.” He shook his head. “I’d get my story straight, and fast, because he’s going to hear about this sooner rather than later. You know how this town works.”
Yeah, he knew. Nothing stayed secret for long in Devil’s Falls—which had been exactly the point. But if Adam had half a brain in his head, he’d track Jules down tonight and explain nicely to her he couldn’t do this anymore and that he was sorry for taking advantage of her in her obviously unstable emotional state.
That was the problem, though.
He wasn’t sorry, and he didn’t want to stop.
Chapter Ten
“I thought Adam was your fake boyfriend.”
Jules had known this was coming the second she got out of Adam’s truck. Frankly, she was surprised Aubry had waited until they were alone to pounce. She moved around the now-closed café, wiping down tables. Her cousin Jamie had already closed the till and taken off for some hot date, so it was just Jules and Aubry and the cats left. “We are.”
“So you were having fake sex out in nature like horndog apes?”
She rolled her eyes. “We didn’t have sex.” Because he put on the brakes. She’d been so out of her mind with pleasure, she wasn’t sure she would have been smart enough to call the whole thing off just because there wasn’t a condom handy. And that was downright unforgivable. She wanted to be scandalous—not stupid. And having unprotected sex with a fake boyfriend, no matter how safe Adam made her feel, was stupid beyond belief.
“But you wanted to have sex.”
Yes. She did. A lot. More than a lot. Jules scrubbed at a coffee stain in the center of one table, pausing to nudge Ninja Kitteh out of the way when the striped cat came to snoop. “We’re two consenting adults. I don’t see how it matters.”