All or Nothing (bad boy romantic suspense) by PJ Adams Page B

happened.
    He’d got under her skin and into her heart like no-one ever had before.
    And the physical... Lying in bed at night, blankets pulled tight against the chill night air, how could she not keep coming back to the physical?
    That first night, when he’d come in out of the storm, and she’d handed him a towel and shown him through to the bar’s back room. Standing there, shirtless, toweling himself down. The square shoulders, the neat ripples and lines of chest and abs. The dark fuzz of body hair across his chest and thickening down his belly to wear he’d freed his belt and undone the top button of his pants. That image was frozen like a snapshot in her head, as if he’d just stepped out of a glossy magazine or a movie.
    Later that evening, when everyone else had gone.
    They’d flirted, they’d chatted and kissed, and then... he’d just picked her up and put her on a table, pushed her back down and removed her little black skirt.
    That first touch, his knuckles against the lace of her thong... his face against her, buried in her heat, teeth and lips and tongue working her through that fabric until, finally, he’d pulled the thong aside and driven his tongue deep inside her.
    She’d never been a screamer until that night with Denny. She’d never been a one to actually, Goddamn it, black out when she hit her peak, but she had with him.
    All he had to do was give her a particular look, touch her in a certain way, and she needed him, had to have him.
    She’d never known anything like that before, and now, late at night, alone, she would press and squeeze and grind her body as she remembered how it had been, physical echoes of a passion that now seemed such a long time ago.
    §
    A week... A week of aching and missing and that big, unresolved uncertainty: too much remained unanswered; there were too many what ifs and could have beens.
    “Call him.”
    She was on the porch of one of the cabins, taking a break. It was one of those blue-sky White Mountains days where the late fall air tastes of winter already and bites you to the bone.
    How long had she been standing there, leaning against one of the wooden posts by the door and staring out over the trees? Mind wandering, miles away from the here and now.
    Marshall stood there before her, studying her, the two of them on eye-level as the porch was two steps up from the track where the big man stood.
    “Jus’ call him, Cass.”
    “Thought you said I’d be a fool to?”
    “That was Sally said that, and it was before you’d spent a whole week pining all day long, like you’ve been doing. I’ve seen how you’ve been. An’ I saw how you were when you showed up at our door with him in tow. I saw that spark in you that I’d never seen before. An’ I saw the way he looked at you, the way he was when he was around you.”
    That was a big speech by Marshall’s standards: that many words from him were worth so many more from someone else.
    “You did?”
    “You got it again now, just talkin’ about him, Cass. That look in your eye. Only time before I ever see chemistry like that it was me an’ Sally. She an’ her city ways an’ her snooty folks all disapproving. Put it down on paper an’ we had nothing going for us: she was at college, her family had expectations, she had ambitions. An’ I was just fixin’ automobiles and  drinking with my buddies like we’d invented it.”
    He shrugged, and paused a while, then went on: “But there was that spark in her eye, an’ she said she saw the same thing in mine. You lay everything else aside when there’s that spark, is what I say, Cass.”
    “So why didn’t you say all that a week ago?”
    “You have to see it for yourself, Cass. That ain’t a journey anyone else can make for you.”
    “So why are you telling me now?”
    “You’ve made that journey, haven’t you? You’re there .”
    §
    She didn’t call him.
    She went back to dressing the bedroom in the cabin, to occupying her head with anything