“Stop. Maverick, please!” she squeals, her face red from exertion and her eyes watery.
“You promise not to laugh at me again?”
“I swear.” She tries to catch her breath and I lean in, resting my forehead against hers.
“I’m sorry for overreacting earlier,” she whispers. “It was a bit of a culture shock for me. I don’t want or need you to have to experience life through my eyes. It’s not fun. I don’t want that for you.”
“Careful,” I warn, “It almost sounds like you’re trying to protect me again.” I smirk down at her and I can feel the erratic fluttering of her heart against my chest.
I don’t understand this reaction that I’m having to her, but the magnetic pull of her lips is inescapable as I lean in further to get a taste of her.
Her eyes light up before I kiss her again. “We should really get going.” I groan in between kisses and she nods, draping her arms around my neck. I want to fuck her. I want to fuck her so bad. Slowly and rhythmic, until the orgasms bleed out of her like the perfect song.
“We should.” Her voice is breathy. She wants me to fuck her too. She wants me to fuck her so bad. So hard. So soft. So completely.
“Beth?”
“Mmmhmm.”
“We didn’t come to California to be holed up in a hotel room?”
She shakes her head, biting down on her lower lip.
“Beth?”
“Mmmhmm.”
“There’s no way I’m leaving this hotel room. Not right now. Not when you’re so alluring and intriguingly irresistible.”
I ease off her and drag my shirt over my head. A look of hunger darkens her features as she stares lustfully at me.
She shakes her head at me. Ever the defiant one. “Staying in was my idea and you shot it down, so no, we are not staying in.”
I make a dissatisfied face at her and she laughs, tracing her hand over my stomach. The look in her eyes softens as she traces the knights on my torso.
“Do they have a meaning?” Her voice is soft as she glances up at me and I can see strobe lights going off in my head.
Now?
She wants to talk about this now?
The hammering in my pants slowly starts to fade as I settle beside her on the bed. Her eyelashes rise and fall gently against her cheeks as she waits for me to answer her poorly timed question.
Do I really want to go into all that now?
When I look back at her, she’s patiently gnawing at her lips. Sex would be so much easier. So much more fun.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” she says after a few more moments of awkward silence.
I take a deep breath. So deep that it stings my lungs. “This part,” I point to the knights and coat of arms, “Is my mother’s family crest.” Her eyes slowly fall to my bare chest. “The tower represents time and space and she’s trapped inside.” I can see the day I decided to get inked vividly in my head. The artist had been impressed with the design on paper, but when I showed him my scars, his eyes lit up with creative lust. He had made some minor adjustments to the design to mask my wounds perfectly and it had taken us about two weeks to get the whole thing done.
Beth is guiding her hands over those very scars now.
“And the dragon?” she asks, pulling me away from my thoughts.
The dragon... I expect that to be obvious, but I can already tell what her response is going to be, and I don’t know if I can take on much more of her insistence that I’m not as horrible a person as I know I am. She experienced first-hand just how dreadful I can be, so it boggles the fuck out of my mind that she is still willing to stare me in the face and tell me otherwise.
“It’s me,” I mutter, waiting for her response, but she traces the scales that are all welts and scar tissue from the accident.
“You’re guarding the tower,” she whispers, and I reach down to claim her hand.
“It’s the least I can do after what I did-”
“Stop that,” she snaps. “We talked about this. You didn’t do anything.”
“You weren’t there.”
“And you don’t remember,” she claps back, and I roll off the bed with a sigh.
“Today was supposed to be a celebratory day. Why do we keep fighting?”
She laughs, covering her face with a pillow before throwing it across the room at me. I dodge it, then pick it up from the floor and toss it back at her.
“We’re not fighting, Maverick,” she says. “We’re just having a conversation. We don’t agree with each other, but that is not the definition of a fight.”
My lips twitch as I stare at her. She really is from a different world, isn’t she?
“Then what is?” I ask, crossing my arms over my chest, only to free them in an attempt to protect myself from the rain of pillows and cushions she starts to hurl at me.
“Hey!” I chuckle and she sticks her tongue out at me like a toddler and stands up on the mattress, bouncing around as I throw the pillows back at her.
It’s weird having this kind of fun in a room like this. She’s still fully clothed in a floral dress with thin straps and she’s not horizontal. Still I think this is easily the happiest I’ve ever been in a room with a bed, that I’m not even on.
When I hop up on the bed, Beth jumps off and starts to run around the room, giving rise to a high-speed chase. She slips under my arm when I try to grab her, and I take a tumble onto the sofa.
“Truce!” I bellow, sprawled out on the couch, trying to catch my breath and she stops running. I watch as she walks over to the sofa, her brown hair flying all over the place.
“I win?” she asks, panting as she sits between my legs. “You can’t really want to give up victory that easily.
“You win.” I hold up both hands and she grins. “But you also lose, because I was gonna fuck you soooo good. And now, I’m not.”
She pouts at that and blushes red as a fully bloomed rose.
Chapter
Beth
We took California by a storm. I’ve never walked as much, seen as much, or breathed as much in my entire life. From the Hollywood Walk of Fame to Universal Studios, Malibu to the Santa Monica Pier, Maverick and I packed as much as we could into the weekend. In between all that, I also tacked a few more life lessons onto my list.
Don’t stuff your face with cotton candy and ice cream before being spun head over ass in a rollercoaster. (I didn’t throw up, but I came pretty damn close).
Rollercoasters are just as terrifying as they look – maybe even more so. Only tackle them if you’re willing to have your other half mimic your face of terror for two hours straight.
If Maverick says a body of water is warm, don’t believe him. I should have learned that lesson my first time at his condo. I did not. A cold pool is one thing. A cold ocean can very well turn your nipples to ice. Bonus: if Maverick’s lips are the ones soothing them back to warmth, it’s not half as bad as having them thaw on their own.
It’s very much possible to fall asleep standing up. Or while eating. Or both.
Malibu has nice houses. Okay beaches. There are a million better places one can choose to call home.
Kids love Maverick. Maverick loves kids. Watching those two things unfold causes wombs to get a very overactive imagination.