Hidden Depths(35)

“Hey. Hey.”

She bolted upright, feeling her stitches pull. Evan was frowning down at her as he stood over the sofa in what he called his lighthouse room. “Don’t do that,” he said vaguely, reaching a hand down under her braid to massage her neck.

“Do what?”

He sat down beside her, extending his massage from her neck to the shoulders she could feel were taut with the remnants of her dream. “Snap awake like that.”

Her eyes slid closed as his talented hands worked out the tension. “I didn’t mean to,” she mumbled.

“You keep doing it.”

It was her third day here. Or rather the third day after she had finally become conscious again. And Evan had pampered her and fed her and tended to her as if she was his own little patient, asking for nothing in return, sleeping beside her at night as she healed. Though she was just now becoming strong enough to take short walks, on his arm anyway, he left several times a day to “work out”, Bingo running beside him. That was where he had said he was going when she had fallen asleep on the couch, drowsy even as she watched his figure become smaller and farther away on the beach below the window, the dog’s bark lost to the insulation of this fascinating structure that Evan had created for himself.

He was working on something else too, on the other side of the island. A cottage, he’d told her, that had been in ruins and he was beginning to restore. He promised to take her there to show it to her when she was stronger.

These last few days with Evan were all so surreal. Like some world she had conjured up with just the two of them in it, isolated, safe. She wondered sometimes if she wasn’t really dead at the bottom of that boat she had stolen in the Maine harbor, dripping blood to mix with the rain, and this was some heaven she had been lucky enough to end up in when she died. Some reward for all the broken bones and insanity of her adolescence.

“That feels so good, Evan,” she crooned as he massaged her shoulders and she felt him freeze. Opening her eyes, she glanced over her shoulder and the way he was looking at her made her want to make him feel good as well.

Before she could question the thought, she turned around and climbed onto his lap, sifting her fingers through his hair and rubbing the crotch of her sweatpants against the erection beneath the fly of his jeans, feeling the electric pleasure of it as he let out a slight groan.

She kissed him, just lips at first, then tongue, then something else entirely. Something more, and he reciprocated, his hands on the small of her back, rubbing slowly.

On the main floor of this lighthouse oasis Evan had built, he had a huge library filled with every kind of book imaginable—classics and mysteries and philosophy and fantasy. He had a wall of DVDs in his bedroom that spanned a hundred years of films and more racks of vinyl records stacked up in the corners of every room than she had ever seen in one place.

Evan Reynolds had something on his island for every amusement.

But there was only one “amusement” Andrea wanted right now. And to even call it an amusement felt like a misnomer. It should be called sustenance. She needed it. She needed him. Her kisses turned frantic and his hands slid to her shoulders to tug her away. He was hard and throbbing beneath where she knew she was wet and opening for him even now.

Coming up on her knees, she started to untie her sweatpants and, though he watched, his words didn’t match the intense look in his eyes as he did so. “You’re not well enough.”

“I am too.”

He rubbed her back as she pulled her sweatpants slowly down, and his hands slid down to pet each inch of her ass as she bared it, until he brought one hand in front to dip between her thighs. She widened her stance as he inserted a careful finger inside her and she used it, this one part of him, to give herself a small modicum of relief, rotating her hips, riding him just that little bit, though what she really needed inside her was kept safely zipped up inside his jeans.

“Why are you doing this right now?” he asked, low.

“Because I want to.”

Sliding off his lap, she tugged her sweatpants completely off so she was bare on bottom, the T-shirt she was wearing skimming the tops of her thighs, and then she leaned over and went to his jeans, unsnapping.

The late-afternoon sun bathed the all-windows room in an orange light, mellow and warm. As she carefully slid the zipper of his jeans down and came between his legs, he widened them and she knelt on the plush shag rug in front of the sofa, widening her own legs as well, feeling the cool air between her thighs. Once she had his fly unzipped, she shoved the white cotton of his briefs aside and took the hot, silky length of him in her grip as he sucked in a sharp breath.