Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series Read online

  “Your mum?”

  “She died when I was almost eight. She’d had this horrible chest cold. It didn’t go away, then it got worse. I think with four kids, it’s hard to find time to get in to the doctor. Dad came in from a late job one night, some corporate party, and found her collapsed in the kitchen; we kids were already in bed. She died a little later in the hospital from a major complication of pneumonia.” Her voice stayed even while she shared this, but her hands got tight on the wheel.

  “I’m sorry, Destiny, that’s hard.”

  She glanced over at him, gave him this small smile that made her seem young. “You know, for some reason, it doesn’t bother me when you call me by my full name. I think it’s your accent.”

  He coughed out a laugh. “Nothing wrong with your name.”

  “A lot to live up to.”

  “Maybe. More likely that destiny just is what it is. Nothing you have to do or live for.”

  She laughed. “Very deep.” She signaled to exit. “You know, I kind of hate talking about my mom. I know I love her, but the older I get, the more the love feels like these really awful and sad memories but it’s just because I can’t remember things as well, and honestly, everything I remember is good things. And I hate it when I try to talk about her and find out from Sam or Sarah that I’ve got it wrong. That I remembered something wrong, or wasn’t really there and I’m just remembering someone else’s story or a picture, or something. So then, I don’t want to talk about her at all. I don’t know how much of my mom I have.

  “Ironically, the one thing I do have is her name. Her name was Marie, and I’m Destiny Marie, and Destiny was this name she loved and a total capitulation on my dad’s part because he thought it was hokey. He’s the one who started calling me Des. And now I think the full name is hokey because I lost my mom so young and heard Des a thousand times more than I ever heard myself called Destiny.”

  As the limousine bumped along the access road to the field complex, Hefin took a long drink of tea, hoping the hot sugar and caffeine would go down and find some words for him to say. Because he wanted to say something.

  What she shared, about her mum and dad, about what she had of her mum, well, that was a real thing. It had been so long since he had known some real thing about another person.

  Before he could think too hard, he said, “Maybe I should call you Destiny, then. All the time.”

  She slowed to a stop in front of the main building of the complex. Looked at him as he tried to breathe sense back into his body. Jesus. “All the time, huh?”

  “Sure. I think it … Suits you.”

  “How much time is all the time?”

  Oh. Here was why endless brooding and hardly talking to anyone was an advantage. Less chance of finding yourself square in a corner. “Just … Any of the times I would call you anything. Let’s say.”

  She laughed. “Sure. Let’s say.”

  He took a very long drink of tea, as much good as it was doing him.

  She moved to a parking spot a long ways from the front so she could take two spaces. She still had a kind of wry smile on her face. He’d like to kiss it right off.

  “So, Hefin, what next?” She unsnapped her safety belt and turned full toward him. Her hair moved around her shoulders, and her tee was a little tight. He could see the outline of her bra, small triangles and thin straps heading mysterious places. Her jeans were soft-looking and loose. Freckles everywhere. She should look girlish, but those angled brows over her smart gray eyes and her pretty mouth turned her slight figure and play clothes on their head and gave the impression of someone who knew herself as only a woman could. She was stripped to elements—she wore what she could move her body in, she let her own features show her intelligence without distractions.

  It was what had turned his head from the beginning.

  Her posture, her artlessness.

  Then, how she had tried not to let him see her cry but listened so carefully to him.

  “Where’s A-bear-ah-ron?” She had asked, her mouth as careful around the syllables as if he had handed her a priceless object to hold for him.

  “Ab-ba-eh-ron,” she had corrected herself, just by watching his mouth, listening.

  And she would let him call her Destiny. Trusting him with a memory she could barely recall but grieved over.

  What was it he was trusting her with?

  To forget him when he left? To not be hurt when he took pleasure in her body and never asked after her heart?

  This option, of course, gave him leave to touch her. Kiss her. Move his naked body over a naked Destiny and slide into her, and slide away, and again and again until that was everything that existed in the entire world, like the heat of that was the battery that powered the entire world.

  He’d very much like to see her naked if that could be an option.

  “What’s next, is that we go into the shop there, and buy a bucket of balls.”

  “You said balls!” She nudged her knee against his. So he grabbed it. This afternoon, at least, he would not be brooding or maudlin or worry about memories. As soon as the cap of her knee fit into his palm she bent her leg up so his hand necessarily slid onto her thigh. He rubbed into the crease her calf made, pressed against the back of her leg. Moved the soft, thin denim over the tendons that framed the hollow at the back of her knee. Watching her melt with his touch was mesmerizing.

  “What are we to be, Destiny?” His fingers found her skin through a small hole in her jeans. He could only fit a fingertip, and he could barely get the feel of the texture of her skin under his callus, but she reached over and put her hand over his, stroking his knuckles, the back of his hand. It was restless and soothing at the same time.

  Nearly unbearable.

  Groin-tightening.

  “We’re friends.” Her voice was soft, distracted.

  “Don’t want to kiss my friends.”

  She looked up at that, touched his mouth, pushed her thumb into his upper lip, and he closed his eyes to keep from licking her thumb. Felt a shiver bloom out of the tightness, down low, with the effort his restraint took. “You’ve just never had kissing friends?” she whispered.

  “You have a lot of those? Kissing friends?”

  With her thumb against his lip, she had made talking, the necessary movement of his mouth, a sex act. His erection was heavy, the pulse of it thudding like a mallet strike from the inside out.

  As an answer, he felt her breath over his mouth, her thumb still pressing.

  She pressed a bit harder and it slipped, turning out his bottom lip as she dragged her thumb down to his chin. He kept his eyes closed, let her ease his mouth soft.

  She moved closer, and he could feel the suggestion of the softness of her lips against his, but nothing more.

  “Do you know that your top lip’s bigger than your bottom one?” Her breath was warm, and she had either drank her own tea, or snuck a bit of his—his spine softened in Pavlovian response to the bergamot.

  “Yeah,” he whispered back, finding her waist by gliding slowly up her leg until the curve of it was in his hand. “When I was at university I was shy about it, so I grew a mustache, thinking to hide it.”

  Her husky laugh so close, and with his eyes closed, made his arousal urgent. He moved his hand down and back up again, this time dipping underneath her tee to her skin. Fuck. She was perfectly soft.

  He pressed in his fingers and she arched toward him, getting their bodies close, but she kept her head back so her lips were still teasing. “You must have figured out that the mustache only made it worse.”

  “Not soon enough to avoid photographic evidence of its disaster.”

  She laughed again, but this time it ended with their lips pressed together. He tipped his head and tasted her lower lip with his tongue; when she moaned, he shoved his whole arm up under her shirt so he could press his forearm along her spine. This left his other hand free to curve around her bottom, and it was the precise overflowing palmful he had been hoping fo
r. He pulled her into him, and somehow, she got her legs about his waist, the soft bench seat perfect.

  She kept her hips tipped back, and when he nudged his fly toward hers, he felt her smile and tip away a bit more. He smiled back.

  Their kiss got serious—her tongue met his and he slid his along hers, slowly still, soft still. She spent the longest, most awful moment sucking and kissing at his top lip. He could do nothing but submit as she explored it in every way possible, as if her hands weren’t moving all over him, up under his tee, over his ribs and sides and even, for one agonizing moment, into his armpits—raking into the hair and raking forward to scratch over his nipples.

  He groaned, an involuntary noise forced from his throat by the unending ache of his cock.

  He pulled her close again and this time she moaned right into his mouth, her lower back came uncurved, and she ground herself against him in circling, purposeful jerks.

  He laid into the kiss, found the loose waistband of her jeans and dove his hand in, under her small panties, the elastic rolling against the back of his wrist as he squeezed her, eased his finger tips closer to the crease, want like a live thing all over him, hot and mad. She took her hands out of his shirt and grabbed his face for a kiss without any finesse whatsoever, just sliding and breathing, then paused, pushed her arse into his hand.

  “Yeah,” she whispered, or breathed, or thought—he didn’t fucking know.

  He slipped out of their kiss to get his mouth at her throat, to open his eyes and watch his hand working under her jeans. She shifted again and straddled him so she was on her knees, her hands back under his shirt, then she rucked it up, right under his armpits. He knew she wanted it off, but he wasn’t giving up his position. “Destiny,” he said, squeezing again, hard, gathering up more of her flesh, spreading her.

  “Let me, Hefin.”

  He slowly removed his hand, but trailed his middle finger just inside the crease of her bottom, and it made her grunt against his shoulder. There was sweat in those twin depressions at the bottom of her spine and he teased those last before he backed away and pulled off his tee for her.

  Her eyes had bled out from gray to deep charcoal, her cheeks bright red, hectic. Her hair was dark and wet along her hairline. There was a spotty dark triangle on the breastbone of her tee where she’d sweat through it. She was breathing so hard that her throat hollowed out with every sharp inhale.

  He was right fucked.

  “You’re beautiful,” she said, and leaned over to steal a fast kiss over his top lip.

  He grabbed her again and made her take it slower.

  He needed the time—even if they didn’t have any at all to spend.

  Chapter Ten

  Des sank into his arms again, kissing the cords of his neck, biting them, tasting the tang of wood resin as it steamed out of his skin.

  Hefin was all wires and ropes and tight, efficient muscles. His skin was a flawless pale gold with sleek brunette hair in the dips and furrows of his chest. He moved against her like he couldn’t ever get enough of her, but it was graceful too, like they were dancing, like he was leading her to music in his head.

  It reminded her of his hard, nearly choreographed movements carving: every stroke had power but a kind of ultrafine grace and precision. She wrapped her arms around him and stuck her ass out, licked the little scoop his collarbone made in his shoulder, bit the soft skin at the top of his arm.

  He felt amazing. Better than she had imagined, all those weeks, looking at him, fantasizing about him. In his arms, she sank into dozens of moments where they had held eye contact and looked away. She touched him and her touch made him real, finally.

  He licked her, bit her, in return, got his hand over her ass again, and she curled her hands into the trough of his spine to keep from shoving her own hand down the front of her jeans and pushing over her clit. She was hanging in a wet, warm wave right next to orgasm and all it would take was a few taps with her ring finger.

  She huffed out a breath against the overwhelming, slippery, inevitable pulses, tried a tiny buck of her hips for relief. Even that little movement made her cross her eyes when Hefin’s response was to squeeze, superslow. Just a little hard, and a lot low. She breathed in some kind of squeak when two long, rough fingertips kind of skidded and dipped for a frustrating second into her softness.

  “Easy,” he breathed.

  She skated her hand down his chest, and when she brushed over his belly it scooped in with his gasp. She rested a single finger against the first button of his jeans. They both stilled.

  “This is getting so crazy,” she whispered against his jaw, pushing her nose along his temple.

  “Completely mad.”

  “I mean”—she reached to hold tight to her senses to make sentences and to think—“I guess it’s kind of appropriate that we’re rounding the bases at the ballpark.”

  He exhaled a laughlike noise. “You know, I didn’t even know what that meant until my wife explained it to me.”

  Des settled her ass down a bit and eased back. Okay. Ex-wife mention was definitely a way to slow things down. He seemed to realize it and pulled his hand from her jeans again. Brought both his hands to settle at her hips, his head bowed, breathing hard. “Uh, oops,” she said.

  “I am a right pig.”

  She tangled her fingers through his crimpy, wavy hair. “No. Don’t do that.”

  He looked at her, his eyelashes tangled at the corners in a squint. His neck was red, and the color blended over the topography of his chest, highlighting his lean musculature as if the sun had touched all the jutting places. He was beautiful like this. Softened way up. His expression was so chagrined it managed to break up the scruff and angles into boyishness. “But you were—I think you were right there, Destiny, in my arms, I—”

  “I’ll survive it.”

  “You’ve had a shitty day.”

  She teased him by working her face into an angry pout. “That’s very true.”

  He winced. “Maybe I might’ve had you talk about it instead of mauling you.”

  She almost automatically denied that and tripped over what he was offering. To listen.

  To listen to her problems.

  Listening to problems seemed like something more than a fling, but listening to problems in combination with even near orgasms could be another kind of problem.

  For all her jokes about a kissing friend, the couple of kissing friends she’d had just ended up as regular boyfriends. Hefin couldn’t be her boyfriend. He lived in Wales, a place as unimaginable as the moon. Maybe even as far.

  She scooted off his lap and swung her legs into the driver’s footwell. He picked up his T-shirt and shrugged into it. The close front cabin of the limo was redolent with the saline tang of overheated bodies mixed with Hefin’s perfumey tea.

  Kind of wonderful, actually, but something between them, invisible and palpable.

  “Do you still have those doughnuts?”

  Hefin looked around and pulled the bag up where it had fallen into his footwell. “Affirmative.”

  “Hand them over.”

  He passed over the bag and she handed one to him and pulled out one for herself. They ate a few bites in silence, looking out the windshield at the beautiful pale blue sky over the fields, or at least, that’s what she was looking at, so she wouldn’t have to look at Hefin’s puffy top lip, burned from kissing, sinking into chocolate icing.

  Her doughnut was too sweet, the decadence a disappointing echo of actual pleasure. She chewed the heavy dough just enough to swallow it without choking.

  “Ball for your thoughts,” he said.

  “What?”

  “We’ll hit balls for thoughts. Do you play baseball?”

  “Not at all. I once broke my arm playing foursquare.”

  “So we’ll buy our bucket of balls. And given your history of injury, rent a couple of helmets, as well. Then we’ll go into the cages. I don’t mind saying that I’m a fair hand at hitting balls, so when I miss a
ball, I’ll tell you something about myself. When you hit a ball, you tell me something about you.”

  “Why?”

  He didn’t answer and so she finally looked at him. He was already looking at her, with that open gaze of his. “I think it’s probably a bad idea,” he said. “But I find I want to do it anyway.”

  “Okay. Why is it a bad idea?”

  “Because everything we do together is just another way to say good-bye, and we haven’t properly met in the first place. If you want to know more than that, you have to hit balls with me.”

  “We have to tell each other real stuff, though? Not like what our favorite ice cream or color is?”

  “Right. Only real stuff.”

  “And you’re not going to go all cheesy and Bull Durham on this activity?”

  He laughed, that cute, polite huff into his chest. “You can swing however you like. No copping a feel disguised thinly as coaching the batter.”

  “Do they have nachos here?”

  “God, yes.”

  “I require a trencher of them, with extra of the orange cheese and jalapenos.”

  He wrinkled his nose and the expression looked ridiculous on him, but of course, also hot. It was a little unfair. “Can we put jalapenos on half, perhaps?”

  “You can buy your own baby nachos, perhaps.” She tried a little imitation of his accent on perhaps. The burr felt silly in her mouth, but she liked doing it. Loved his singsongy accent that made even the serious things he said sound like a ballad.

  He grinned, and she let herself just look. She studied the horizontal crease his smile made in the space between his top lip and his nose. How his scruff darkened the brackets in his cheeks. His big dark eyes. His grin softened into an equally considering look when he realized she was staring.

  So they both just looked. She relaxed in his regard and focused on all the details she’d never been able to steal in her scurries by his workstation in the library. She found a tiny, healed dimple in his earlobe where it might have been pierced once. He had a scar at the very edge of his right eyebrow, white with age. The bridge of his nose was pink, a little shiny, and she wondered if it had burned at the park. She tried to guess his age, just from looking at him, and didn’t think she’d guess he was any older than herself, even though she knew he was ten years older. There was history in his face, but not such a rough kind. An artistic earring, a childhood fall, a face unused to smiling.