“I’m gonna come, Liz.” She doesn’t hear my warning or doesn’t care, and the vibration of her moan takes my last thread of control, and I come, filling her throat as my hands curl into her hair.

When she finally pulls back, her lips are swollen and her cheeks are flushed. Her hair is a mess, half of it tumbling around her shoulders. I want a picture of her like that, turned on, lips swollen, eyes hot. But I don’t need one. I never forget a single second of my nights with Liz.

Chapter Eleven

Liz

He helps me to my feet. His eyes are all over me—my face, my breasts, my hips, the tops of my thighs. My skin heats everywhere his eyes touch, and I wait for his hands to follow, but they don’t. All I have is the heat of his hand holding mine.

“Do you feel okay?” he asks.

I nod. I feel incredible, as if every cell in my body has been hibernating, waiting for Sam, and now I’m buzzing as they all wake and stretch their arms. “What about you?”

He groans, a long, low sound that comes from his chest, and wraps his arms around me. “I haven’t felt this good in months.”

Something tugs in my chest, and I have to remind myself that he’s talking about the sex. He’s not talking about how it feels to hold me or look into my eyes or be with me. This is just sex, Liz.

He tugs on the tie binding my wrists, and my arms fall to my sides. Taking my hands in his, he brings my hands to his mouth and kisses the inside of each wrist. “Come with me.”

He leads me by the hand farther into the cabin and through a vaulted-ceiling living room to a massive bedroom with a four-poster bed, cedar plank walls, and big windows. There’s nothing but darkness beyond the windows now, but I’m sure there will be quite a view when the sun rises.

“This place is gorgeous.”

“It’s been in the family for sixty years. Dad led the charge in renovating it and adding the second story a few years back, but we all use it. Sometimes I come here and just spend the whole weekend in silence, looking out at the hills. Connor uses it a lot too—especially when Della’s in a mood.” His smile falters, as if he’s remembered my history with Connor. He looks as if he wants to say something else, but he just shakes his head. “Wait here a minute.”

“Don’t be long.” After he leaves, I climb into the bed and slide under the fluffy down comforter. Now that he’s not touching me, I’m too cold to be in nothing but my underwear.

When Sam returns, he’s armed with a bottle of red wine, a corkscrew, and two glasses. “Not much to eat here, but there's always plenty of wine in the cellar. Is Cabernet okay with you?”

“Sounds perfect.”

He pops the cork and fills both of our glasses before handing one to me. “You cold?”

“It’s okay,” I say, but my shiver betrays me.

“I’ll start a fire.”

I sip my wine and watch as he goes about the work of making a fire in the stone fireplace that faces the bed. The muscles under his shirt bunch and flex, and he adds wood and gets the flames burning to his satisfaction.

When he returns to the bed, he’s smiling. He lifts his glass. “To weddings.”

I giggle and tap my glass lightly to his. “To weddings.”

The wine is dry but smooth. Any tension I felt melts away as the alcohol spreads warmth through my chest and limbs.

I take another sip, then a full drink, drowning out the demons that tell me this will end after tonight. It always ends after the hookup. It has to.

I drain my glass and cling to the words he typed. You make me believe there could be more. You make me want something more. Now that he knows it’s me, does he still feel that way? And what is more? Commitment? Family? Or just more than a random hookup once a year?

“I’m glad you came tonight,” he says softly.

I have so many questions—like what he thought when he realized it had been me all this time, or if he knew before I stepped out of the car—but he’s pulling back the covers.

“If you’re going to be in bed with me, I want to be able to see you.”

“Did you . . . want it to be me?” I ask. I shouldn’t. There’s a rule about asking questions if you don’t want to know the answer. “When I pulled into the driveway, did part of you . . . Did you think I’d be the one coming here tonight?”

“You surprised me, I guess. Why?”

I shake my head, too insecure to explain why I need to know. I didn’t just want River to be Sam. I wanted Sam to want Tink to be me. When we’d exchange dirty messages, sometimes my whole body would go cold. Something about it would feel wrong. Off. But it was the thought of Sam that brought me back, that made the exchanges hot instead of mechanical. Arousing instead of creepy. But if that wasn’t the case for him—if spending the night with me is no different than spending the night with any other woman—I’m not sure I want to know. “Never mind.”

He’s studying me, brow wrinkled but a half-smile curving his lips. Like I’m a curious puzzle he’s trying to figure out. “Tonight, you were the only one I wanted to be with.” With his index finger, he traces the line of my jaw and the column of my neck, and a shiver races down my arms, leaving goose bumps in its path. His gaze dips lower and finds my breasts, my hard nipples, but then he looks me in the eye again and says, “I think about you. A lot.”

I bite my lip but I know he can still see my smile. “I think about you too.”