I pressed both hands flat against my stomach like I was trying to keep something from escaping. The sheet was twisted around my legs. My hair was sticking to my cheek. My entire body was covered in a sheen of sweat.
I untangled myself from the sheet and sat up on the edge of the bed. I sat there for a moment and tried to shake off the erotic dream. And damn, had it been a good one. It had been so real. It felt like there had been actual hands on my body.
And of course, I couldn’t forget the star of the show—Colt Anderson.
I pressed my palms hard against my eyes as if I could scrub the images from my head. It didn’t help. The second I lowered my hands, it all came rushing back.
The two of us on the sand under a sky that was blanketed in the brightest stars I had ever seen. The sound of the wavescoming in slow and even. His hands had been everywhere. And his mouth… hot damn.
His voice low against my ear saying things that were probably a combination of things he actually said and excerpts from the spicy books I read.
I stood up. I needed air and cold water. I crossed to the window and opened it. The morning air came in, salty and cool. I inhaled the familiar scent, closed my eyes, and let it move through me. It immediately made me feel better.
The dream wasn’t about to let me forget a single detail. The way he’d looked at me. Smirked at me. Kissed me.
I told myself not to look toward the Anderson property but of course I did. I couldn’t see anything. That was the goal of the tall shrubs and strategically placed fencing. It ensured they had plenty of privacy.
I needed coffee and a cold shower. I pulled my hair up off my neck and held it there for a moment, letting the breeze wash over my damp skin. Unfortunately, the heat I was feeling came from the inside. The cool breeze was doing very little to help cool me down.
I turned on the water, running it lukewarm before stepping in. I let the water run down my spine until my skin was covered in goosebumps and the last traces of that dream had been rinsed away. Or at least that’s what I told myself. The images were still there, burned into the back of my eyelids every time I blinked. His hands. His voice. The way Dream-Colt had looked at me like I was that mermaid he’d been drawn to that first time he saw me.
Seven years and my subconscious still hadn’t gotten the memo. I wrapped myself in a towel and stood at the sink, studying my reflection. My cheeks were still flushed.
I brushed my teeth thinking back to that first summer with Colt. It had been the worst. Or the best depending on how I looked at it. I’d been twenty years old. He’d been twenty-seven.That gap had felt enormous and also completely irrelevant because when we were together the math didn’t matter. It had felt like standing too close to the sun. It was hot and a little dangerous. And completely worth it.
I’d known who he was before I knew him. Everyone in Surfside knew the Anderson family. Their house was impossible to miss, especially next door to mine. They arrived every summer like royalty and departed the same way. I’d been too young to care about them when I was a kid. By the time I was old enough to notice, I was too busy surfing and working and generally not paying attention to the rich neighbors.
And then there was that night on the beach. Nobody had ever looked at me like that before. I walked away from him because I never imagined I had a shot. Why would someone like him be interested in me?
But then he’d shown up at the bonfire two nights later. We talked and talked and then talked some more. We were sneaking off together. I’d told myself it was nothing. The typical summer fling that I didn’t tell anyone about.
The secret had been half the thrill at first. Dad had been going through so much that year. Mom had been gone three years and he was still figuring out how to be a single father to two girls. He didn’t need to come home and find his twenty-year-old daughter sneaking out to spend the night with a twenty-seven-year-old Texas billionaire. He would have lost his mind.
So we kept it quiet. Colt had understood without me having to explain it. He didn’t push me to define things or make it official or anything like that. It worked for us. At the time, I’d called it freedom.
Looking back, I understood it had also been incredibly convenient for him. I made it too easy. I dried my face and reached for my moisturizer, working it into my skin.
The second summer had been even better than the first, which was saying something. We’d known each other by then. The early awkwardness was completely gone. We’d fallen right back into it the night he arrived, like no time had passed at all. You didn’t feel that way about something casual. You didn’t lie awake listening to someone breathe and feel like everything was exactly right with the world if it was just a summer thing.
The third summer had been the one that changed everything. By that point, I’d stopped pretending. I was in love with him. I never told him of course. That would have ruined the easy nature of it.
He’d sat with me the last night of that summer. I still remembered every detail from the way the air smelled to the sound of the crickets. He’d held my hand and looked out at the water and told me he didn’t know when he could come back. He told me Texas had him. The family business needed him. He told me not to wait.
He’d been kind about it but it wasn’t anything he hadn’t told me before. We were a summer thing. And despite him telling me not to wait, I did. For two years I waited. And the third summer when he didn’t show up, I figured it out. I realized it was truly over. I moved on.
I didn’t stop loving him, but it stopped being painful. I knew he was dangerous to my heart. Unfortunately, my heart had no self-preservation. I was falling head over heels for him again.
I needed to get downstairs. I needed the normal things like cartoons on the TV with River and Ocean arguing. That would get me back on track. I could handle all the complicated feelings with a little normalcy.
The kitchen smelled like coffee. Becca was already at the counter in her robe with her hair piled up.
“Coffee?” she asked without turning around.
“No, thanks.”
I could feel her watching me as I pulled a glass from the cabinet and filled it at the sink. I sliced a lemon from the bowl on the counter, squeezed it in, and watched the juice cloud through the cold water. I drank half of it standing there at the sink.
“Okay,” Becca said.