I HAD BEEN PACING a hole in the ground for ten minutes when Hannah arrived behind the surf shop the next morning.
“Good morning.” Her smile was easy and cheerful and her new haircut swayed around her face.
I itched to reach out and touch it. The memory of her silky hair in my hands yesterday haunted me all night.
Her smile dropped and she shook her head. “No. No way.”
I made a hoarse, unintelligible noise in my throat like huh? and my eyebrows shot up.
She pointed a finger at my chest and narrowed her eyes. The finger poked me and I glanced between it and her face with a mix of curiosity, surprise, and amusement.
“You’re not going to grab me, kiss me, and then get weird on me. I’m not being weird. So it happened.” She crossed her arms. “You kissed me. Twice. But you don’t get to be weird.”
Her haughty nature made me grin. The Hannah from a couple months ago wouldn’t have told me to stop being weird. “Sorry.”
She watched me. “You think this is funny.”
“I think everything is funny, bookworm.”
We watched each other for a moment.
Last night, I went for a drink at the bar after surfing. I couldn’t sit at home and think about Hannah touching herself. I had already been thinking about it all day. Thinking about her letting out those little sighs, like the one she did when our mouths met in her bedroom. Thinking about her arching off the bed, pressing her lips tight so she wouldn’t cry out when she came.
Fuck. It drove me crazy all day.
So I went to the bar to distract myself but it didn’t work. When I walked home and saw her sitting in the window of The Arbutus, smiling softly to herself while she read her book and sipped her wine, she was so goddamn gorgeous. Her hair was shorter. Her foot tapped gently on the floor. She wore a dress, a white and blue one I had never seen. Did she buy it for the date? And why did that make me so happy?
Standing on the sidewalk, I had remembered her mentioning practicing. Possessive irritation had ripped through me. I hated the idea of anyone’s hands on her.
Anyone but me.
I wanted to be on that date with her, but she needed this. She needed to love herself the way—
I swallowed hard, looking down at her outside the surf shop. “Did you have a good time on your date?”
A slow, shy smile crept onto her face before she nodded.
“I hope your date told you how gorgeous you looked.”
Pink washed over her cheeks and she grinned harder. “My date was lovely. I even got lucky.”
My cock reacted to her words. My head fell back and I closed my eyes, rubbing my forehead. My mind flooded with images of her in the dark. “Fuck, bookworm.”
She laughed. She actually laughed. I was in agony, fighting an erection and trying not to think about her in bed by herself, and she was laughing.
After I got home last night, I headed straight to the shower, thinking about her soft lips, the little sighs she made and the way she melted right into me while I stroked myself until I came.
“Where’s my shy bookworm?” I asked, shaking my head as her eyes shimmered with laughter.
My. It slipped past my lips without permission. I gauged her reaction, but she just smiled. The apples of her cheeks popped. Fuck, she was pretty.
She shrugged. “Guess you embarrassed it out of me.”
“Your hair looks nice.”
She reached up to touch it. “I like it, too. And this way it won’t get so tangled and in my face when I fall off my board.”
“You’re falling less and less these days.”
She bit her lip and shot me a tentative glance. “Wyatt?”
“Mmm?”
“I like surfing with you.”
Well, damn if that tiny compliment didn’t make me feel like a million bucks. “I like surfing with you too, bookworm.”
She rolled her eyes. “You don’t do much surfing out there, you just float and watch me make a sad attempt.”
“You know what I mean.”
Her cheeks were pink again and I wanted to feel the heat of them under my mouth.
“Anyway. Um.” She shifted, toying with her hands. “If I do find a, uh, boyfriend,” she said the word funny, like it tasted bad, “I still want to keep surfing with you.” She lifted her gaze to mine. “If you have time, I mean. If you’re still here in Queen’s Cove. And if you don’t have training or whatever.”
The thought of Hannah finding someone—someone who’d be sitting across from her at The Arbutus, someone who’d get to touch her hair and kiss her and make her smile like that—it made me sick. It made me feel like something had been taken from me.
Which was insane, because Hannah wasn’t mine. I was helping her out.
Guilt wrenched my stomach into a knot. I was supposed to be helping her, and I was trying to keep her. She trusted me and I was trying to get into her pants, telling her not to practice with other guys. Fuck.
I was such an asshole.
My chin jerked in a nod at her. My eyebrows pulled together in a frown. “Sure, bookworm. We can surf together as long as you want.” I gestured at the back door of the shop. “Shall we?”
We headed inside and retrieved our wetsuits. Hannah reached down and I watched as she pulled her shirt over her head.
Fuck. She was wearing that swimsuit again. The one that pushed her tits up into something incredible. If she knew how fuckable she looked in that suit, she wouldn’t have worn it around me.
Or maybe she would have. Yesterday morning in the back of the shop, she toyed with me, trying to get a rise out of me.
I waved the thought away in my head and turned to face the other way.
Surfing. That’s all we were doing today. I was going to be present with her, and with the ocean.
“Zip me up?”
I turned to see her standing with her back to me, wetsuit unzipped and smooth skin so close. I swallowed, and my throat was thick. I pulled the zipper gently, slowly, slower than necessary. Definitely slower than I would with a tourist doing a lesson. At the top of the zip, my fingers brushed the ends of her hair, and she shivered before turning and giving me a little smile.
“Hey, professor?”
Fuck, that nickname. I thought about her calling me that last night with my hand wrapped around myself. The soft, playful, teasing way she always said it made me come almost immediately.
“Mhm?” I closed my eyes and rubbed the bridge of my nose. Deep breath.
“You didn’t ask me if I did all my homework.”
Blood surged to my cock and I exhaled through my nose.
Helping her. Not fucking her. Helping. Not okay to take advantage of her. She was less experienced. Helping. Not getting hard in my surf shop while talking to her. Not jerking off thinking about her mouth on my cock.
I couldn’t think straight right now. “I’m sure you did.” I opened my eyes to see her watching me with a smug grin.
Fuuuuuuck.
My cock ached. That smug grin told me everything I needed to know.
“I thought about you while I did my homework.” She gave me a shy but pleased smile before she walked to the door.
I watched her ass in the wetsuit and longed to slap it for what she was doing, teasing me and pushing me to the edge of control like this.
She was making me want her, and she knew what she was doing.
Hannah paused at the doorway and raised an eyebrow, still wearing that smug smile. “Are you coming?”
We didn’t talk much on the water that morning. The cold water helped my erection subside and I focused on Hannah, hopping up on her board and catching waves. Sometimes, I threw out feedback, but I mostly let her figure it out herself. Her intuition was sharpening, she was learning the perfect timing of the waves, she was learning which waves to catch and which to let go because they were too messy, and when the ocean tossed her off her board?
She laughed. More and more, she laughed. She was learning it didn’t matter if she failed. It didn’t matter if she didn’t nail that one wave, because there’d be another. There was always another. Each wave existed only in the moment and then it was gone forever.
Something panged in my chest but I ignored it.
The feeling swerved right back around, and I knew Hannah and I were like that. Spending time with her was the easiest thing in the world but come September, I might be leaving if the competition went well. The sensation sharpened, pinching me. Hannah and I existed in the moment like everything else in the universe. I thought about my aunts, how temporary it was for them, too temporary, and how heartbroken Bea had been when her wife passed. How heartbroken she still was. The woman wouldn’t set a foot back in town since she sold me the house.
The thought of not surfing with Hannah, not spending mornings out here in nature with her? It made me feel like I was losing something important.
I swallowed and let a wave roll past me, taking the thoughts with it. I didn’t want them. Didn’t want to think about it.
Present. Focused. I was with Hannah this morning, so I turned my thoughts back to the now.
When this was all over, I could reminisce and deal with those emotions. But for now, I was going to enjoy the moment.
After an hour, she grew tired so we paddled to our cove and floated side by side on the water, soaking in the morning rays of sun.
She lifted her head. “Did that guy contact you?”
I opened one eye. “What guy?”
“The Billabong guy. Emilio something.”
Right. I nodded. “He did.” I called him back the other morning and he had walked me through what a sponsorship would look like. The company would pay me to wear their gear and take a couple pictures at a studio as long as I got to pro level and kept my nose clean.
She gestured, like go on. “Well?”
I flashed her a grin and shrugged. “It depends how I do at Pacific Rim.”
“And if you do well…?”
I stared at the sky. “It sounds like I have a sponsorship.” A splash of water hit me in the face and I burst out laughing. “What was that for?”
She beamed at me, so bright I thought my heart might crack open. “Wyatt. You did it.”
“Not yet.” It was so easy to rest my gaze on her. Like it belonged there. Like looking at her was healthy for my soul.
“You will. This is big. We should celebrate.”
“What did you have in mind?”
She tilted her head and chewed her lip. “Will you take me camping?”
“Camping.” I snorted. “With bugs and dirt and peeing in the woods?”
When she laughed, her chest shook, and mine flooded with warmth. “Yeah, that camping. But also with trees and sky and stars and a campfire. I used to go with my parents. My mom loved it. We’re allowed to have campfires, right? I see people having them on the beach all the time.”
During summer, there was often a campfire ban in our province because a hot, dry summer led to wildfires, which was where my brother Finn was right now. Every summer, he left to fight wildfires around British Columbia before returning in October.
“We’re in the fog zone, so we can have a fire. Do you have camping gear?”
There was that big smile again. I’d do anything to keep it on her face. She nodded. “We have a tent and stuff in the garage.”
We decided to go the next night. There were a lot of provincial parks in the area, campgrounds owned and maintained by the province, but they booked up months in advance. Besides, they were too populated. Hannah wanted nature, silence, and stars. I knew a spot further up into the forest where we could camp undisturbed.
The thought of having her all to myself for a night sent blood rushing to my groin. I shoved the thought from my mind. We’d have separate tents. It wouldn’t be like that.
On her board beside me, Hannah let out a long sigh. “I’m very relaxed today.”
Another image of her in bed flashed into my head and I stifled a tortured groan. She giggled.
On second thought, a night alone with Hannah, with her all to myself, teasing me and shooting me those smug looks?
It was going to be fucking agony.
