Sink or Swim (Beach Kingdom Book 3) Read online

  Jiya held her mother’s clear approval to her chest as she jogged down the hallway to her room. Before she even walked over the threshold, she knew Andrew would be standing at the window. The rain had soaked him even more thoroughly, plastering his hair to his forehead, but the way he watched her was so hot, it was a wonder the rain didn’t turn to vapor. With his harsh breaths fogging the glass, he crooked a finger at her and she went.

  She ran to the window, threw it open and was dragged through the opening before she’d grasped his intention. Their bodies fell together in the small breezeway between their houses, mouths open and hungry on each other. They stumbled in their enthusiasm to taste, to touch, to get as close as possible. Her back landed on the outside of Andrew’s house and he growled, thrusting his hardness up between her thighs, yanking her knees up so he could do it again and again with more insistence, his mouth taking over her neck, cleavage, throat.

  “Did you just agree to marry me?”

  “Yes,” she gasped.

  Andrew moaned her name, rolling his forehead side to side in the crook of her neck. “I’m out, Jiya. It wasn’t pretty, but I’m out. You’ll have an honest man from now on. I’ll make you so proud to have me as a husband.”

  “I’m already proud. I love you.” They kissed hard, then sank into a raw, wet dueling of tongues, only breaking away to suck in oxygen. “Take me inside. I need you. Please, I need you.”

  “Inside. Right.” He licked rain off the swell of her breasts with a savoring tongue. “Jesus, I’m dying to make you come. I’m fucking dying for it.”

  Jiya’s fingers got lost in his hair, twisting. “As many times as I want.”

  Not a question.

  Fog rolled into his eyes. “Yes. Over and over, until you order me to stop.”

  The moisture slicking Jiya’s folds made her squirm and Andrew took the hint, pulling her off the house and lifting her toward the window. He set her butt on the sill and she turned, dropping down into his nearly pitch black room. With the beat of her heart resounding in her ears, she pulled her dress off and watched Andrew climb into the window after her, ducking his wet head beneath the frame. When he straightened, the diffused moonlight outlined his thick shoulders and desire stretched out in her belly, needy and anxious.

  On his way toward her, Andrew yanked off his sodden T-shirt and dropped it on the floor, fingers wasting no time working his belt, pulling leather through loops. “Sweetheart, baby, let me get you off. Please.” His zipper was shoved down, pants kicked off. “I’ve been a wreck without the honor. I want your come all over me. I want your body to run out of the shit.”

  The pressing of his muscular frame to her softer one forced the air from her lungs in uneven gasps. Already her thighs were trembling, her stomach hollowing. Every inch of her skin was sensitized beyond belief. So much so that when Andrew tucked his fingers into her panties to pull them down, she fell back against the wall, panting.

  “Goddamn. You missed my cock so badly,” Andrew said, his mouth moving on her ear. “And you’ve only had it once, Jiya. When you’re getting it on the regular, you’ll feel empty and irritable without it. You know what’s so fucking nice about that? I’m going to love you being irritable and bossy with my dick. I’m going to get so hard every time and you’ll have a fat cock to play with.”

  “Andrew,” she half admonished, half moaned. “Stop. I can’t take it.”

  His smirk would have been cocky if it wasn’t for the absolute adoration shining from his eyes. “What about my tongue?” He dropped to his knees for the second time that night, his rough hands massaging a path up her thighs. “Can you take that?”

  “I…” Her neck lost its function. “I-I don’t know…”

  The press of his lips over her clit set loose a series of little explosions all along her nerve endings and before she knew it, her hands were locked around Andrew’s head, pulling him close. “Tilt your hips,” he breathed in between licks of her sensitive flesh. “Let me tongue it all down. Every spot.”

  Twin lights spun in front of her eyes, growing brighter the longer Andrew remained on his knees. In a seemingly unconscious move, he propped her thigh on his shoulder and slipped his tongue inside her entrance, twisting his face left to right and groaning. “Oh my God,” she pushed through clenched teeth, her core beginning to clench hard, so hard. “I’m going to. I’m going to.”

  Then his tongue found her clit and she buckled, saved from falling only when Andrew pressed a fist to the lowest point of her belly and pinned her to the wall. He twisted that fist slowly, gently applying suction to her clit and pleasure wracked her body. Jiya literally felt like she’d been flung off a precipice and her fingers turned to claws, raking the walls on the sides of her hips, and then his shoulders. His eager grunts sank her nails in deeper, instinctively, and that allowance to let herself be amplified satisfied something inside of her. Something deep. And her flesh seized all the harder, leaving moisture on her fiancé’s French kissing mouth.

  Jiya was all but depleted when Andrew stood, but one look at his fierce expression robbed her of exhaustion. She wrapped her fist around his shaft and watched his muscles ripple into tightness. Pressed her tongue to his shoulder to absorb his shudder, listened to his shallow breathing. “I can feel your engagement ring on my cock. You have any idea what that does to me?” Andrew said through bared teeth. “Put me between your legs. That’s where I belong.”

  Her hand shook while guiding Andrew to her entrance, whimpering when he flexed his hips, his chest expanding, eyes pinched shut, like he might go berserk unless their bodies joined together soon. She fed the head of his thickness inside of her, crying out when he stooped down and thrust up the remaining distance inside of her. Deep. Elevating her against the wall.

  Growling into her neck.

  “Andrew,” she sobbed, reeling from the absolute fullness, knowing she couldn’t fit more but shifting her hips against him anyway, bringing up her knees, in an effort to do the impossible.

  “I live to love you,” he said in a hoarse voice, sliding his hard length out and grinding back deep, his hands holding her thighs in a bruising grip. “I live to fuck you. Thank Christ I can finally do both.” He propped her leg on his hip, that left hand sliding in between their bodies to pet her clit with knuckle rubs and slow revolutions of his thumb. “A better man might have waited for our wedding night.”

  She shook her head, a new, lazier quickening beginning in her belly. “No.”

  “No is right. I’ve reached my limit for living without this tight, girl-next-door pussy.” His thumb applied more pressure to her bundle of nerves, moving side to side with devastating care. “You’re going to be so well fucked by our wedding day, I might have to carry you down the aisle. Would you like that? God knows I’m already your servant.”

  His words and touch were a potent combination and her already sensitized flesh couldn’t handle the power of both at the same time. As he filth talked into her ear and played with the swollen bud between her thighs, she came in a long, drawn out wave that brought tears to her eyes. “Andrew. Andrew. Oh.”

  “Yes!” he roared, impaling her hard against the wall, driving his manhood into the eye of her storm. “Fucking drench me in it, you beautiful woman. Cover me in it.”

  Jiya vibrated like a tuning fork, her belly tightening and twisting, legs jerking. She could only hold on to Andrew’s shoulders—bloody from her fingernails—and endure the measured pumps that elongated her climax endlessly, until she was almost begging for it to be over, because surely her body would disintegrate under the constant pressure, release, push and pull. Sated or not, though, she needed Andrew’s release to feel complete. Satisfied. And it occurred to her even through her drowsiness that she knew how to get him there.

  She kissed his mouth and he surged forward, melding their lips together like she tasted better than anything in the world and was about to be discontinued. “Andrew,” she moaned when he attacked her neck with his teeth. “You said—”r />
  “That I wouldn’t pull out this time?” Fevered eyes lifted to hers, so intense they made her head spin. “That’s why I’m trying to make it last. I want to remember this.” He kissed her hard, dipping his tongue into her mouth. “I want to watch your eyes while you feel me finish.”

  “Do it now. I want to feel it now.”

  Jiya felt his abs tighten against her belly. His right forearm came to rest on the wall above. His upper lip curled in almost a snarl as he started to thrust. “Tell me to come. Say it again.”

  “Come inside me. I want it.”

  He lunged and flattened her hard against the wall, his flesh smacking up into hers, his arousal growing impossibly larger inside her, his breath hot on her cheek. “Do you understand that I’m obsessed with you, Jiya?” She couldn’t answer because his rough, upward drives were stealing her ability to do anything but hold on and withstand the pressure that built deep inside her once again, almost tauntingly. Her back slipped up and down the wall, aided by the perspiration building on her skin, her legs attempting to remain wrapped around Andrew’s pistoning lower body. “Anything you want, sweetheart, you say it. You tell me and I’ll give it. I’ll make you happy. Just keeping looking at me like you are right now.”

  “How is that?” she gasped, her vision winking in and out when the base of his shaft found her clit, grinding down on it with every frenzied stroke.

  “Like I’m yours. Like you’re mine.” He made a choked noise and pressed their foreheads together, slamming into her one final time, setting off her third climax. “Christ. Oh Christ, Jiya, that’s so fucking good. Fuuuuuuck.” His eyes never left hers, so through her own tumult of sensations, she felt every expulsion of his breath, every tremor that passed through him, the ecstasy, the love, the weight of lust being lifted, the awe and gratitude, the relief. Almost. “My God, I’m still hard. Still so hard for you.”

  Those words were barely out of Andrew’s mouth before he ripped her off the wall and spun her around. He used a foot to widen her stance and yanked her hips high against his belly, leaving Jiya balanced on her tip toes. There was no finesse in what happened next. Just a desperate, dying man trying to get to heaven and her body was his only means of getting there. He walked her forward against the wall and fucked her until she had to use a forearm to muffle her screams. After a minute of no mercy pounding into her body, Andrew let out a guttural groan into her neck and more liquid heat bloomed inside her, coasting down her inner thighs.

  Andrew turned her back around and buried his face in her neck, rocking her side to side. “I’m sorry.” He tucked her hair behind her ear. “I’ve just been waiting to be like this, with you, so damn long, sweetheart.”

  “No more waiting,” she whispered, swooning down to her toes when he carried her in all his sweaty, shirtless glory to the bed. “Now we just love.”

  Andrew lay down beside her, pressing a soft kiss to her mouth. “I’ve got enough love to carry us through a hundred forevers together, Jiya.”

  Their smiles were unrestrained and rife with affection. “Then we better get started.”

  EPILOGUE

  Five years later

  ANDREW SAT ON the beach and stared out at the horizon, where the Atlantic kissed the baby blue afternoon sky. He was heavy with contentment. The kind some men searched for their whole lives but never found. It made total sense to him why people did everything they could to stay young. Why characters in movies doggedly searched for the fountain of youth. If they possessed one tenth of his happiness, he understood why they would want to live forever.

  Just under five years earlier, he’d married the love of his life, making her Jiya Prince.

  The mere memory of that day made him cough into his fist to relieve the tightness in his throat. After making her wait on him so long to get his shit together, he’d wanted to give her the exact wedding she wanted—and that had been a traditional Indian ceremony, Andrew and Jiya exchanging vows beneath a madhap on the beach, his bride painted in intricate henna designs that made her even more beautiful in her pride. The ceremony had been woven into a three-day party that people were still talking about. It should have been a blur, but Andrew could remember every detail about it, down to the lace pattern on her veil to the number of tears she’d shed during their first dance as a married couple.

  Handler had become a distant memory, though Andrew had seen him once at the grocery store with a young woman wearing a Tulane sweatshirt. The cop’s gaze had passed right through Andrew as if he was a ghost, but Andrew knew Handler had seen him. That single encounter had only made Andrew more secure in the fact that his past was well and truly buried. With some work on Jamie’s part, the brothers had figured out the identities of Handler’s two victims. Thankfully, neither one of them had children, but one of them had a wife. The other was the son of a single mother. Once a year during the holidays, the brothers sent an anonymous cash gift to those remaining family members. They couldn’t take back the unfounded violence that had occurred, but Rory, Andrew and Jamie hoped it helped in some small way.

  It was late September now. Not many people on the beach, but Andrew wasn’t surprised when he heard a deep male voice speaking in baby talk approaching from behind. A moment later, Marcus sat down on the sand with his daughter bundled in a pouch on his chest.

  “How long are you going to carry her in that thing?” Andrew asked, reaching over to let Ellie snag his finger. “She’s almost one, man.”

  “When she stops running for the freaking hills every time I set her down now.” Marcus made a face at the smiling baby. “You do run, don’t you? You do. You dooooo.”

  Andrew laughed. “What language are you speaking in?”

  “Jamie calls it my native dialect.” Marcus poked his daughter in the belly, making her giggle. “Daddy Two is funny, isn’t he? Is he funny? Is he?”

  “I thought we agreed I’m clearly Daddy One.” Jamie sat down beside Marcus on the sand, still dressed in his teaching clothes—a sweater vest and slacks. He leaned over and kissed Marcus, then did it again, apparently for good measure. The baby clapped her hands, squealing when Jamie blew a raspberry into her neck. “How was the shop today?”

  “Booming,” Marcus said, lifting the baby out of her pouch and handing her squirming body over to Jamie. “Our little mascot here isn’t just cute, she’s kind of a goldmine.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  Last month, Marcus’s juice shop—The Main Squeeze—had been featured on a local news station when word got around that a giant was filling juice orders with a tiny baby strapped to his chest. Business had been steady since opening the shop, but now there was a daily line down the block. Andrew might be biased, but it didn’t surprise him one bit that people traveled from all over Long Island to see his niece. She was undeniably perfect.

  “Hey,” Rory said, walking up beside them and taking a seat to Andrew’s right. He dropped an envelope full of cash into his lap and adjusted the collar of his Castle Gate polo shirt. “That’s the take from the lunch shift. Mind dropping it at the bank for me? Olive is meeting me here. I’m taking her out for a celebratory milkshake.”

  Marcus threw up his arms. “She got that paid internship at Cornell?”

  “Yeah, their medical center in Manhattan. Starts in two weeks.” Rory beamed with pride. “She’s going to be a kick-ass psychologist.”

  As if on cue, Rory’s wife arrived in Andrew’s periphery, laying a big, smacking kiss on Rory’s cheek and falling into his lap. “Hey, everyone.”

  “Congratulations, Olive,” Jamie said, smiling over at her while juggling his daughter. “Proud of you.”

  Marcus reached over and gave her a high five.

  Andrew leaned down and kissed her cheek.

  “Thanks, guys,” Olive said, flushing. “You’re not upset that we’re looking for a place outside of Long Beach?”

  “No,” Andrew said, inhaling the salt-tinged air and letting it out. “No, seeing his face at work is more than enough.” Ror
y shoved his shoulder, but Andrew just smiled. “Look how much has changed over the last five years, right? We’re all still sitting here. We always will.”

  “Always,” Jamie said.

  Rory nodded. “Always.”

  The low buzz in the sky turned all their heads to the right. Andrew’s chest swarmed with pride and he squinted to watch the plane approach against the blue backdrop. He’d come to associate that humming engine sound with Jiya over the last five years. His wife was now a licensed pilot. She worked in a managerial capacity now at Spice, but she’d started giving flying lessons when Rick, her mentor, retired. She’d also started flying advertisements over the busy beaches in the summertime, not to mention the odd marriage proposal—those were her favorites—and she never failed to come home with an air of exhilaration after being in the sky and he thanked God for the day he’d bought those lessons.

  Andrew frowned when he noticed a banner attached to the back of Jiya’s favorite red striped Cessna. She wasn’t on the clock. Today was supposed to be a pleasure flight.

  Then he read the banner and the sand shifted under his feet.

  Andrew, I’m pregnant.

  A collective gasp went up among the group before a round of back slapping ensued. Andrew could barely feel any of it through the inundation of contentment and happiness.

  I’m going to be a father. I’m married to my soul mate and we’re going to be parents.

  Life was huge. Life was beautiful. Life was his wife and he wanted her on the ground now. Was she insane telling him something so important when he couldn’t hold her?

  “It’s a good thing I’m moving out, A,” Rory said, bringing him and Olive to his feet with a whoop. “Looks like you’re going to need the extra space.”

  The five of them laughed.

  “Jesus, my wife is pregnant,” Andrew breathed, shooting to his feet so fast, he got lightheaded. “I need to get to the airfield.”

  “Go,” Jamie said, eyes glinting. “We’ll get dinner started at the house.”