No Place Like You Page 12

  “Condom?” she managed and he nodded. It took a minute to unhook her leg and wriggle free of her own underwear while he rummaged in his pocket. The pleasing sound of foil ripping reached her ears. She’d barely straightened again when Zach was lifting her, coaxing her legs back around his hips. Hands locked around his shoulders as she felt him nudging at her entrance.

  “Leah?”

  She wasn’t exactly sure what the question would be, but any that she could think of had only one answer.

  “Yes,” she said, and he pushed into her.

  “Oh God, yes,” she added. So good. So full of him.

  They kissed again, hungry and searching, mouths nipping and teasing, adding to the sensations flooding through her.

  She clenched around him. Zach groaned against her mouth and began to move.

  Her fingers dug into his shoulders as she held on and moved with him. The man was relentless, his rhythm sure and strong and fierce.

  Maybe this was the benefit of sex with a musician, she thought hazily. They knew how to keep time.

  Though how he knew the exact tempo designed to drive her crazy, she had no idea. But he did, and it was perfect.

  It was Zach and it was madness and dumb and he was leaving but she could care less about anything but the slide of her body against his and his mouth at her neck and the ache in her breasts and the need that was rapidly turning her liquid.

  “More,” she said to him, voice raspy. “More, Zach.”

  He obliged and everything blurred and shimmered around her as the world went away. Zach drove into her, pressing her into the wall until she was suspended in pleasure, unable to do anything but give in to him, let him have her. Let each move he made inside her drive her higher and higher until finally there was nowhere else to go and she broke and came around him, half-sobbing his name as he muttered hers like a prayer and came with her.

  Wall sex was awesome, Leah decided when her brain had cleared enough to function again. Somewhere in there after that amazing brain-melting orgasm, Zach had lowered her to the ground, and they’d were standing now, her forehead resting against his chest, his arms braced on the wall to either side of her. The smell of Zach and sweat and sex surrounded her. Someone should bottle that. Not a scent you might want to wear all the time, but it was heady stuff. It was making her knees feel wobbly all over again and she could feel the little sparks of hunger starting to simmer and burn, even as the aftershocks of what they’d just done shimmered through her.

  She wanted to do it again.

  Which was perfectly in keeping with her plan.

  She lifted her head and found herself staring at his chest. Which was currently heaving up and down. Which only served to emphasize how spectacular it was. Better than you got from just playing the guitar five zillion hours a day. He’d been a surfer when they’d been kids. That couldn’t be an easy habit to maintain traveling the world. What did he do now? Run? Work out? Yoga?

  He’d be a damn pretty sight in those tight-fitting bike-short yoga-pants things, all hot and sweaty … and damn, there were definitely more than just sparks of hunger now. A smart woman would leave now. But hell. This was their first night. And it had been a while since she’d had an orgasm that had involved another person. Zach was right here, all big and tall and willing.

  At least she hoped he was still willing. She leaned forward, and swiped her tongue over his nipple. The groan that rumbled through him was a positive sign.

  “Are you trying to kill me, woman?”

  “Dude, you’re a rock star. You’re supposed to be a sex god.”

  This time the sound that rumbled through him was laughter. “Not sure there’s anything I can say to that. If I say ‘yes,’ I sound like a conceited jackass, and if I say I’m not a sex god, well, that will get my man card revoked.”

  She tipped her head back, grinned up at him. “Well, then, how about we go with less talk, more action. If I’m remembering correctly, there’s a perfectly good bedroom back there.” She flapped a hand vaguely in the direction of the door they hadn’t quite made it through.

  “There is,” he agreed. “With a nice big bed.”

  “Good.” She pushed at his chest lightly. “Let’s go show it what a sex god can do.”

  chapter nine

  Turned out that a sex god could do pretty amazing things. And that she could keep up with him. Maybe she’d turned into a sex god herself. Or was that goddess? Leah smiled, thinking that post-sex thoughts got pretty random when her brain was this scrambled. She lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling. All her limbs felt distant and floaty, lost in a sea of satisfaction. She might eventually be able to move in a day or so. But right now she wasn’t sure she’d get more than an inch or two, no matter how hard she tried.

  Her shoulder was pressed to Zach’s. Who also lay, breathing heavily, on the well-rumpled bed. She leaned into him a little harder—all the movement she was capable of. “You okay over there?”

  “Just trying to remember how to talk,” he said.

  “Oh good, I like it when I disrupt a man’s brain functions.” She turned her head toward him to find those ever-changeable Harper eyes were watching her from just a few inches a way. The look of sleepy satisfaction in them made her smile widen.

  “You seem to be talking okay,” Zach said.

  “My mouth is moving, but not sure about the rest of me, if that makes you feel any better.”

  “You always did like to talk. Which is fine with me, by the way. I like a girl who can use her mouth.”

  She snorted at that.

  He rolled his eyes. “Mind out of the gutter, Santelli. That’s not what I meant. I’m a songwriter. I like words.”

  “Nice save,” she said dryly.

  “I noticed you like words too, just now,” he said, wriggling his eyebrows at her.

  “Shut up.” She was blushing. No idea why. She hadn’t blushed when he’d said all those dirty things in her ear. No, she’d dug her nails into his back and egged him on.

  “No blushing. We’re just getting started. I intend to find out all the things you like, Leah.”

  God. If it was going to get better than this, then she would probably just spontaneously combust. But what a way to go.

  “I like your thinking,” she said. “And I have to say it’s good to know that you sex gods are pretty good in bed after all.”

  He laughed. “I was just thinking the same thing about sound engineers.”

  “What, you’ve never slept with a sound engineer before?”

  He shook his head. “Most of the sound engineers I know are male. So, no. And I’ve definitely never slept with my producer.”

  Leah laughed. “Well, that’s what you get for working in a male-dominated industry.”

  “I’m regretting my life choices as we speak.”

  “So you should,” Leah said. “Look what you’ve been missing out on all these years.”

  He blinked, and for a moment she thought she saw something like—wistfulness?—float over his face. That couldn’t be right. Zach Harper didn’t do “wistful.” He’d always been a charge-at-life, head-down, no-holds-barred kind of guy. Besides, what did he have to be wistful about? He was finally getting to do what he’d always intended. Joining Fringe Dweller had sidetracked him, even if it’d been a successful sidetrack. As far as she knew, he’d always intended to be a solo artist. Or at least the front man of his own band. Or his and Faith’s band. And now he was back on Cloud Bay, and back in her bed, knowing neither of them held any strings for him. What more could a man want?

  Nothing, she told herself firmly. There was nothing more he wanted and therefore nothing for him to be wistful about. Which was good, because the thought that Zach might be wistful about anything in their past was kind of freakin’ terrifying.

  He would be leaving at the end of this. That was what she wanted. That was what she was counting on to stop her doing anything stupid. Like letting her heart get involved.

  So what was rea
lly needed here was a way to distract him if his brain was going down any sort of nostalgia track. And she had a pretty good idea how to do that. In fact she was pretty keen on the thought. Which was kind of crazy, they’d already done it twice. And those two times had involved three, maybe four, orgasms. She was already losing count and it was only their first night. The man really was a sex god. A fact she fully intended to take advantage of.

  Starting right now.

  She rolled toward him, and threw her leg over his thighs.

  “Leah?” he said, sounding startled.

  She kept her voice light. “If you think I’m wasting any of this, you need to think again.”

  “I think we’ve created a monster,” Zach said with a grin.

  She reached out and put her hand on his cock, delighted to feel it start to stir to life again under her palm. Apparently sex gods had divine powers of recovery too. “Not yet,” she said grinning down at him, “but I’m working on it.”

  * * *

  The next time she got to pause for breath was when she was wrapping her wet hair in a towel after a bone-melting session of shower sex. It had been awesome, but her stomach was starting to suggest that it was long past dinner time and, judging by the way her legs were trembling, there was no way she would survive another bout with Zach without refueling.

  “You got any food in this place?”

  Zach paused in the act of wrapping a towel around his waist. She was tempted to yank it off him again so that she could keep admiring the long lean lines of his body. But that would have to wait. She was still getting used to the sight of him. He was different now. More muscled. All man. And she needed to adjust her mental image. Let reality override memory.

  “I have the basics,” Zach said.

  “Right now, I’ll take anything,” she said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.”

  “Worked up an appetite, have you?” Zach said, tucking the towel into place.

  “I calculate that we’ve burned about eleventy zillion calories between us. I think we’ve earned a snack.” She wrapped the towel turban style around her wet hair and left the bathroom to find her clothes. It was late now, and she doubted anyone was going to come to the guesthouse, but you never knew. After all, Eli and Billy were on the island. And Billy, like most of the Blacklight guys, was a night owl. It would be just like him to turn up on Zach’s doorstep wanting to chew the fat about old times. And while she might be able to come up with a feasible excuse for why she’d used Zach’s shower after a long day of recording in the studio, she doubted she could justify being found wearing only a towel while eating a meal with Zach. So, clothes were necessary.

  By the time she dressed and finished drying her hair, Zach had relocated to the kitchen. She found him rummaging in the fridge, looking at the shelves, and pulling random stuff out.

  “What did you find? Anything good?”

  “Eggs, bacon, cheese, leftover Chinese from the other night. I think there’s chips and salsa and stuff in the pantry,” he said. “I got groceries a few days ago, but supplies are getting low again. There’s bread and shit. You know, peanut butter, jelly.”

  “You still like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?” she asked, delighted. “Some things really never change.”

  “Hey, you have a thing about doughnuts, I have a thing about PBJ. Everyone’s gotta have a vice.”

  “I’m pretty sure that rock star sex gods are supposed to have vices other than peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,” she said. “It would ruin your street cred if that ever got out.”

  “I think you overestimate how much street cred I might have,” Zach said, bending to take plates out of the cabinet. “And peanut butter and jelly is always pretty easy to find when you’re on the road. It’s my version of comfort food. Dad used to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at midnight and sneak them up to me in my room when Lou wasn’t looking.”

  “That definitely sounds like Grey,” Leah said with a smile. “Okay you can have a sandwich, but I think I’m going to make bacon and eggs. Assuming this place has a frying pan of some kind.”

  “This place has just about everything,” Zach said. “Dad went all out stocking the guesthouses when he built them. He wanted his friends to be able to do whatever they wanted. Including cooking. Not that I’m sure many of them ever did.” He moved to another cabinet, extracted a frying pan. “If I make toast, do I get some of those bacon and eggs as well?”

  “Deal.”

  The cooking went fast enough—it wasn’t like bacon and eggs was anything too complicated. And she and Zach moved easily together around the kitchen, passing plates and utensils and ingredients without the need to talk much. Almost as though they had been cooking together for years. Maybe it was all that time they’d spent watching Lou cook in the Harper kitchen as kids, or the time Zach had spent hanging around the Santelli house, angling to get his hands on some of Leah’s mom’s lasagna. Whatever the reason, it was kind of nice.

  The bacon and eggs eased some of the rumblings in her belly, and by the time she was finishing her third piece of toast, this one smeared with some of Zach’s peanut butter, she was starting to feel human again. And starting to think a little harder about what they had just done.

  Sleeping with Zach. Which, from the point of view of her very satisfied body, was undeniably awesome. But from the point of view of the rest of her life, it also had the potential to be undeniably complicated.

  She put down the toast, suddenly not so hungry. “You know, we left the rest of those beers outside.”

  “I don’t think a few hours in the open air is going to hurt them,” Zach said, pushing his own plate away. “But I can grab them if you feel like one. They might still be cool.”

  She shook her head. “No, it’s a bit late for me. And we have to work tomorrow.” She shifted on the chair.

  “Something on your mind?” Zach said, watching her.

  “I was thinking that we need to talk about how we can handle this,” she said, waving her hand back and forth between them. “I mean, if this is something you want to keep doing, of course.”

  Zach nodded without hesitating. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

  She tried not to feel too pleased about that, but it made her feel ridiculously happy. She smooshed that part of her back under control. “Okay, then we need to talk about it. I mean, do you want everyone to know?”

  “Do you?” he parried.

  Part of her wanted to shout it from the rooftops. But luckily that wasn’t the part that was in charge. She took a breath. She’d started this whole thing by being honest. No point changing that approach now. “You’re leaving. It seems kind of mean to let everyone get excited about the two of us being together if it’s only a short-term thing.”

  “So you don’t want to tell anyone?” Zach asked. He pushed back his chair, expression not quite a frown, but definitely not entirely happy.

  “I just think it’s going to cause more trouble than it’s worth,” Leah said. “For one thing, I don’t want to be the ‘got the gig because she was screwing the talent’ girl. And for another, well, you know what your family’s like. Mine’s probably worse. If they think we are seeing each other, they’re going to start spinning all sorts of fantasies in their heads.”

  “I think they’re all pretty distracted by Faith and Caleb’s wedding, don’t you?” Zach said.

  “In my experience, wedding fever spreads very easily,” Leah said. “I’m not sure why this idea bothers you. I mean, you’re leaving, right? This is temporary. Why make it more complicated than it has to be?”

  He shrugged. Then picked up his plate and carried it over to the counter, dropping the silverware into the sink with a little more force than seemed strictly necessary

  “Zach?” she said. Lou had raised all her kids to be helpful—they didn’t get out of doing chores around the house just because they were Grey Harper’s kids. But Zach had never struck her as the kind of guy who got up a
nd started doing the dishes straightaway after dinner. The fact he was doing so now meant that he was either pissed off or trying to avoid the rest of this conversation. Well, she wasn’t gonna let that happen. This was something that needed to be sorted out before they went any further. Otherwise someone was going to get hurt. And she didn’t want that someone to be her.

  “Where do you keep the dish towels?” she asked, joining him at the sink.

  “I was just going to put everything in the dishwasher,” Zach said.

  That only confirmed her suspicions. After all, no one who regularly washed dishes would put a cast-iron skillet in the dishwasher. “How about we just finish this conversation? Then we’ll know where we stand.”

  “Not big on beating around the bush, are you?” Zach said.

  She shook her head. “Generally I find it just saves a lot of time to ask the question up front.”

  “If you want to keep this secret, that’s fine with me,” Zach said.

  He sounded casual enough, but she wasn’t entirely convinced he was telling the truth. Though, she couldn’t really figure out why he wasn’t perfectly happy to be agreeing to sneak around. Wasn’t that what guys wanted—hot sex with no commitments? No needy females demanding their attention all the time? She shook her head. She really hoped Zach wasn’t one of those guys. The rock star cliché. She didn’t want him to be the cliché. But then, why was it throwing her that he wasn’t behaving like one?

  Maybe she was the one who was odd. But she couldn’t see any other way that this would work. Leaving aside the fact that Zach was Faith’s brother—and that was kind of awkward—Cloud Bay was too small a town to not expect everyone to get very interested very fast if Zach and Leah started dating in the open.

  “Good,” she said eventually. “Then we’re agreed.”

  Zach hitched a shoulder. Not exactly a full-blooded nod of agreement. But it would have to do.

  “So how do you see this working?” he asked. “I mean, Faith and Mina both live right here, so it’s not exactly going to be easy to fly under the radar. Are you thinking we do this at your place?”