Chapter 7
Hunter
Team Sofa Kings is eliminated in Sitka because one of them suffered from a previously undiagnosed, but totally debilitating, case of ornithophobia. His trip to the Raptor Center had him breathing so fast and so hard, it won him a visit to the local ER, thereby killing his chances of winning the race. We watched them go—a sad, double dad-bod shuffle off the ship, followed by a ride in a van to the Sitka airport. They were off to Utqia?vik, where they’d join Team Barbie in exile.
In Juneau, Team Outlaws, who had emerged as the team with the most physical strength and stamina, were almost eliminated when they had trouble unraveling the clues of a downtown Juneau scavenger hunt. When they come in last at the pit stop, they are elated to learn that the Juneau leg is one of two non-elimination rounds in the race, and they’re safe…for now.
As we cruise toward Skagway that night, there are eight teams still remaining, including Team Primos, who are currently in third place, after Team Newlyweds and Team Soul Sisters who kicked ass on the scavenger hunt challenge. Bringing up the rear with Team Outlaws is Team Mom and Pop, who are starting to look very tired.
Because we’re a quarter done with filming, there’s a party on the ship tonight for the cast and crew, and I’m looking forward to it. Kit and I have worked hard to make Ketchikan, Sitka and Juneau run smoothly, and we’re a damn good team, in spite of (or maybe even because of) having to carry Rick’s dead weight.
I get to the lounge, which has been decorated with royal blue and white balloons. There’s a buffet dinner available, and the bar is open, too. The show even sprang for a band, so there’s live music and a parquet floor for dancing. My eyes slide over to the dance floor, hoping for a glimpse of Isabella, and sure enough, there she is, dancing with one of the crew members.
Bella.My lips spread into a grin. She gets under my skin faster than any other woman on the face of the earth.
We’ve only spent four nights together so far—that first night as we left Ketchikan, two in and out of Sitka, and one when we arrived in Juneau last night. Because we both have roommates, we can’t spend a whole night together, but that doesn’t mean we don’t make the most of the time we have.
Physically, our connection is just as hot and urgent as it was last summer, almost like we didn’t lose a year of time between then and now. Our bodies work in tandem, fitting together like lock and key, undulating like ocean waves, leading us to soul-rocking climaxes that satiate in the moment, but build cravings so sharp and strong, we reach for each other in desperation the moment we are alone together again.
I’ve noticed that we don’t talk that much between orgasms, and when we do, our conversations are careful. We talk about the race and the other teams. We talk about the boat. We talk about Alaska and where we’re headed next. We stay in the present, wary of saying or doing anything that could threaten the delicate balance that allows us to enjoy intense physical pleasure without the risk of falling for each other.
And yet, a couple of times, despite this care and caution, I’ve felt myself slipping over the line of casual fling into the perilous territory of catching feelings. When I do, I make an effort to recalibrate my expectations. Isabella was very clear with me: she’s not looking for anything serious with me. I’m Mr. Right Now, not Mr. Right—er, um, Mr. Perfectly Suitable—and I’m committed to enjoying the moment without any hopes for a future together.
I grab a beer from the bar and join Kit, who’s sitting alone on a leather love seat by the windows.
“Why aren’t you dancing?” I ask her.
“I don’t dance much,” she says, looking up from her phone.
“Me neither,” I say. “I’ve got no rhythm and no grace. Jiggling around on a dance floor makes me feel like an idiot.”
“Maybe nobody ever taught you how,” she says. “Bet I know someone who could.”
We’re both staring at Isabella, who’s dancing with a tall, blond guy a few years older than me, but still pretty good looking. He’s wearing an officer’s uniform, but I don’t remember meeting him.
“Who’s she dancing with?”
Kit squints. “Um…I think that’s Yuri.”
“Yuri? Tell me you’re Russian without telling me you’re Russian.”
“Maybe.” She shrugs. “I don’t know. He doesn’t speak with an accent.”
“What’s with his outfit?” I ask, narrowing my eyes at his hand on Isabella’s lower back. It’s a little too close to her ass for my comfort.
“His…uniform? He’s, like, the first officer or navigator or something. That’s what he wears.”
I continue to glare at his hand.
“Hey, Hunter Stewart,” says Kit, knocking her knees into mine. “You’re not jealous, are you?”
“What? No!” I shake my head at her like she’s crazy, then shift my gaze back to handsy fucking Yuri. “But I’m gonna knock his block off if that hand slips any lower.”
Kit hoots with laughter. “Men are ridiculous. How I’d hate to be a slave to testosterone.” She goes back to her phone for a second, leaving me to brood. A few minutes later, she looks up again. “So, what’s your move, tiger?”
“My…move?”
“Whether you like dancing or not, maybe you should cut in.”
“Maybe I should,” I say, chugging the rest of my beer and stalking over to the dance floor.
Isabella catches my eye as I approach, grinning at me from over Yuri’s shoulder. I frown pointedly at his hand, then slide my gaze back to her face. Understanding my issue immediately, she rolls her eyes at me like I’m being ridiculous.
Maybe. But I still don’t like it.
The song is ending so I tap handsy fucking Yuri on the fucking shoulder. “Can I cut in?”
Yuri doesn’t even look at me. “No.”
Huh. I wasn’t expecting that.
I tap his shoulder again, and now he looks at me, jaw set, and eyebrows raised.
“Let’s try it this way,” I say. “I’m cutting in.”
“Nope,” he responds. “You’re not.”
This fucking guy.
“Bella,” I say, ignoring Yuri. “I would like to dance with you.”
She looks back and forth between us like we’re naughty children, and she doesn’t have time for our shenanigans, then says, “I think I’m finished dancing for now, boys.”
Backing away from Yuri, she leaves the dance floor and heads for the bar. Yuri scowls at me. “Thanks, friend.”
“I’m not your friend,” I growl back.
“You’re a pain in the ass is what you are,” he says, following Isabella to the bar.
I want to tell him that Isabella is mine. I want to tell him that she’s already chosen me. I want to say that I’m fucking her every night, and there’s no room in that equation for him. But I realize that my feelings and internal dialogue are coming perilously close to boyfriend territory, so I take a deep breath, determined to keep my feelings in check.
“Hey, there.”
I whip around to find Marcia Brady from Team Brady standing behind me. I haven’t had a chance to speak to her one-on-one outside of the race yet. But I know she’s doing well. She and her brother have been maintaining a spot in the middle of the pack since the first challenge.
“Hi.”
She grins at me. “Want to buy me a drink?”
No, I think. Not really.
As I face her, I realize she reminds me of my little sisters, Parker and Reeve, which makes me feel unexpectedly protective. I tilt my head to the side.
“How old are—I mean, are you even legal?”
“Yep. As of last month.”
“Newly minted twenty-one? You’re a baby.”
“Twenty-one isn’t a baby. I’m fully grown, and I can prove it…if you want,” she says, taking my hand and pulling me over to the bar before I can slow her down. She squeezes between Yuri and another crew member, ordering two shots of tequila. When she turns around, she offers one to me with a pretty smile. “What are we drinking to?”
Isabella, who’s standing on the other side of Yuri, leans around him to catch my eye. She glances at Marcia with annoyance, then slides her eyes back to me.
Turnabout’s fair play, sweetheart, I think, picturing Yuri’s hand on her lower back a few minutes ago and the way she rolled her eyes at my objection.
“Let’s drink to you,” I say, winking at Marcia for Isabella’s benefit. “I hope you get to the end.”
“Me too,” she says, throwing back the gold liquid with a wince. “Oooo! Yuck! That was strong! Want another?”
“He doesn’t.”
Isabella is suddenly standing beside me, her hands on her hips, her posture saying that Marcia should probably take off her hoop earrings if she’s planning to keep talking to me.
“I think he can decide for himself,” Marcia says defiantly, tossing her hair and flagging down the bartender. “Two more shots, please.”
“Sure. Okay,” says Isabella, her voice dancing on the edge of dangerous. She turns to me, her eyes arresting mine. “Decide, Casanova.”
Dayyyum. This is hot as fuck.I smile because Isabella’s possessive side is new to me—and entirely unexpected—but I love it. I fucking love it.
“No, thanks,” I tell Marcia, without looking away from Isabella’s dark-brown eyes. I hold them. I own them. “No more for me.”
“Good choice,” she whispers, her voice low and gritty. The band starts playing a cover of Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida,” the unmistakable vamp kicking off their next set. She takes my hand and leads me to the dance floor. “Dance with me.”
“I’m shit at dancing,” I confess, following her all the same.
“I’m not,” she says, choosing a spot on the parquet and lacing her hands behind my neck.
I pull her against me, my hands flat on her lower back, our bodies flush, her gorgeous breasts crushed against my chest. We move to the music, staring into each other’s eyes until it gets to be too much—too intense. I look away from her, but her eyes pull mine back like iron filings near a magnet. I’m lost in her. I’m losing myself. I pull her impossibly closer, and she sighs, resting her cheek against my chest.
Can she hear my heart?I wonder. Can she feel it thundering under her ear? Does she know it’s beating like that because of her? Would it matter if she did?
The lead singer leans into the microphone which garbles the words of the song, but I know the lyrics by heart. I listened to this song non-stop the summer it came out. I was fifteen at the time, and my mother had died five months earlier.
For some reason I can’t explain, Once you’d gone there was never
Never an honest word…
I had raged at God that summer, furious and broken, trying to be strong for my younger siblings, but utterly devastated inside. My father had checked out. Paw-Paw picked up the slack, doing every tour my father couldn’t handle.
My gran tried her best to be both mother and father to all of us that summer, but she only had two hands. Because Harper, Tanner, and I were already teenagers, we were expected to take our mother’s loss in stride, or at least try to deal with it by leaning on each other. Parker, Sawyer, and Reeve were five, four and one, and needed more hands-on attention than we did. And yet…they were so little, they didn’t know what they’d lost. They didn’t know the incredible woman who’d just been deleted from their lives. They had no dreams of her clapping in the bleachers at our high school and college graduations or dancing with us at our weddings or holding our children in her loving arms one day.
Harper, Tanner, and I knew exactly what we’d lost, and it hurt worse than any pain I’d ever known before or have endured since.
I close my eyes and hold on tighter to Isabella, and eventually the song ends. She leans away from me and smiles.
“Let’s get out of here.”
***
Isabella
I could feel an intensity thrumming through him as we danced.
I don’t know what he was thinking about—if it was me or something else entirely—but I picked up on it, and against my better judgment, I want to ask him about it. I know it’s not smart for us to forge an emotional connection. I know that this entire arrangement is only temporary and ends when the race ends. But my best friend is also married to his brother. I care about Hunter. I can’t help it.
Messy.That’s what this is. No matter how neat I want my life to be, I feel like messy is inevitable.
Instead of going down the hallway toward my cabin, I pull Hunter outside, onto the open-air deck called the Sun Lounge. Almost everyone is inside drinking, dining, and dancing, so we have the quiet space to ourselves.
It’s only nine o’clock, so the sun has just started its slow descent. By ten-thirty, it will fall below the horizon, but a lavender-purple light will cast the world around us in dim, dreamy dusk for five hours until the sun rises again at three thirty.
I walk to a railing, leaning against it, watching the wake created in the water by the motion of our small ship. Hunter stands beside me, his hands clutching the railing.
“I like your jealous side,” he says.
“I like yours, too,” I say. Much more than I should.
“Yuri’s old enough to be your father,” he mutters.
“Well, Marcia’s young enough to be your daughter.”
He chuckles at that, the sound low and lovely.
“If I had her when I was ten.”
“She’s still too young for you,” she amends.
“I guess we’re better off with each other.”
“I guess so,” I agree.
“Not that we’re together,” he quickly adds.
“Not at all.”
“It’s just temporary.”
“Which is for the best,” I add, “considering everything.”
He glances at me, a smile playing on the corners of his gorgeous mouth. “I’m having fun with you, Bella.”
“Me, too.” I pause for a second, then turn slightly to face him. “When we were dancing…I sensed a—I don’t know—change…in you. You got serious or something.”
He leans his hip against the railing and looks at me.
“It was that song ‘Viva la Vida.’ It was popular the summer after my mom died.”
I wasn’t expecting him to say that. Not at all. I’m not prepared for the simple terribleness of his words, and it flusters me.
“Oh. Oh, Hunter. I’m so…I-I mean, I knew your mom had passed away…I’m so sorry for asking.”
“Don’t be,” he says, taking a deep breath. “It was a long time ago.”
“But songs take you back.”
He snaps his fingers. “In an instant.”
“How did she…?”
“Avalanche,” he says. “She was doing a heli-skiing tour in January of that year. She’d done them a million times, and nothing had ever gone wrong. It was a fluke. It was…”
“A tragedy.”
“Yeah,” he says, bowing his head and readjusting his hands on the railing, clenching hard, then releasing.
“I’m so sorry.” I cover one of his hands with one of mine and squeeze gently. “How old were you?”
“Fifteen. I turned sixteen that October.”
He moves his hand a little, lacing his fingers through mine so we’re holding hands.
“Sixteen,” I whisper.
“Yeah.” He turns to me. “What were you like at sixteen?”
“I spent that summer in Mexico with my aunt and uncle.”
“I love Mexico! Where do your aunt and uncle live?”
“They lived in Guadalajara. Near the beach. They’re in Seattle now. They were the last of my family to come north. I…” My voice trails off.
“You what?”
I look up at him, at his blue eyes shining in the lavender light. When we’re naked together, he’s demanding, but he never hurts me. I feel safe with him.
“I met a boy that summer.”
What are you doing?I never talk about Santos. I never talk about that summer.
“First love?” asks Hunter.
“Yeah.”
“So, he was pretty important to you?”
I gulp, then nod. Like most things that end badly, they’re best left in the past. What’s the point in dwelling on things you can’t change? I’m annoyed with myself that I’m telling him about this, but I can’t seem to help myself.
“It must have been hard to go home,” he says, “after making an intense connection like that.”
“It was.”
“Did you try to—”
“What? Stay together?” I stare at him for a second before wiggling my hand away from his. “He lived in Guadalajara, and I lived in Seattle. We were kids. It was impossible.”
“Sure. But he was important to you,” says Hunter, his voice gentle, his eyes searching mine. “A lot.”
“That didn’t matter.” I look back down at the ship’s wake. “I had to go home, and he had to stay there.”
“So that was it? You never saw him again? Never talked to him again?”
“We stayed in touch over text for a few weeks after I got home, but it was too hard. It hurt too much to stay in touch. My life was in Seattle. My friends. My family…”
“Right,” says Hunter, nodding at me. “But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t traumatic. Losing my mom when I was fifteen? It was the most traumatic experience of my life. And no, you didn’t lose a parent, but the love you feel at sixteen is…is…” He shakes his head. “It’s so real, so alive, so fierce…it imprints on you. Losing it would scar you…would be…”
“Terrible,” I whisper.
“Terrible,” he echoes. “I’m sorry, Bella.”
I blink at him, realizing for the first time that I must have tears in my eyes because he’s blurry. In the same instant, I realize that comparing the loss of my teenage boyfriend to the loss of his mother is totally unfair.
“Losing your mom was worse,” I say, swiping at the tears on my cheeks. “Way worse. Mine was only a teenage—”
“Don’t do that,” he says, cupping my cheek gently. “It’s not a competition. Being forced to give him up hurt you. Losing my mom hurt me. I think that losing someone you love at that age changes you. No matter who it is. No matter what kind of love you feel. The loss is agony, and that pain changes you. That’s all I’m saying.”
I don’t like it that I’m crying in front of him—I don’t want to talk about this anymore, but I also feel so close to him right now, so tender toward him, so overwhelmed by the patient way he’s trying to understand me, by the sweet sympathy and compassion he’s offering with his words, with the warmth of his palm against my skin.
I lean forward and press my lips urgently to his.
His other hand reaches up to cup my jaw, and I wrap my arms around his waist, pulling him closer. I moan softly as his tongue slides against mine. A building ache throbs deep inside of me, and I pull at his polo shirt.
“Baby,” he says against my lips, his voice low, “we can’t fuck here.”
“Why not?” I ask, biting his bottom lip with my teeth. “We’re all alone. I want you.”
“We’re not alone,” he says. “There are people just inside. Anyone could come out here.”
The breath I draw is jagged. My pussy has its own heartbeat.
“Hunter,” I whimper. “Please.”
He clenches his jaw, the rapid movement of his chest betraying his quick, shallow breathing. He grabs my hand and pulls me behind him, away from the lounge, away from the hot tub and its cameras. As we round the deck, away from the horizon, the light is darker purple. It’s quieter too. He finds a small alcove marked “Deck Chairs,” but because half of the chairs are set up on deck right now, there’s a little bit of space for us.
He pushes me against the wall of the small nook, kissing me with abandon as he reaches under my dress and yanks my panties down. As I step out of them, I grapple with his shorts, unzipping the fly and reaching inside for his erect cock.
He’s hard as a rock. I’m slick and ready.
Instead of making him lift me up, I turn around, looking at him over my shoulder.
“Fuck me from behind.”
I pull my skirt up, baring my ass, and place my palms flush against the wall in front of me. I feel his cock, lubricated with precum, seeking entrance to my body, and spread my legs to widen my stance. He squats slightly, lines up, then straightens, sliding inside of me easily and burying himself to the hilt.
Grunting his pleasure against my neck, he grabs my hips for leverage and starts thrusting. There isn’t a steady rhythm to our coupling—it’s fast and frantic. As my cries grow louder, his hand covers my mouth which I find so bossy and erotic, I climax almost immediately, my forehead falling limp against the wall as he follows me to bliss. Through our layers of clothes, I can feel his thunderous heartbeat against my back, his hot panting on the back of my neck.
My tongue darts out to lick his hand, and he uncovers my mouth, sliding his fingers to my jaw, and turning my face so he can kiss me. He is still buried deep inside of me as we kiss, and—God help me—I still want more. More sex, yes, but also more…more…
Tenderness.
I crave his tenderness.
Fuck.
The sex is even better this time around, but I can feel something else growing swiftly inside of me; I’m starting to crave more than just these breathless sexual encounters.
I break off our kiss.
“We should…”
“Yeah,” he says, sliding from my body. A sudden coolness on my back tells me he’s stepped away. I hear him zip up his fly as I reach for my panties. The evidence of our lovemaking drips down my thighs as I pull them on. I smooth my skirt, then turn around and face him.
And he’s…fuck me again, but he’s so beautiful, it hurts my heart to look at him. His eyes are soft with awe and gratitude and wonder. I ache with yearning, my longing for more is almost painful.
“I should go,” I whisper, grateful for the dim light; relieved that he can’t see the tears that are gathering in my eyes.
Still, he seems to sense something’s off with me.
“Hey. Are you okay?” he asks.
He’s trying to get me to look at him, but I won’t. I can’t. If he looks in my eyes he might see—might know—that I’m veering wildly off our agreed-upon course.
“Yep,” I say. “I just…”
I just think I’m developing feelings for you all over again, and there’s no place for them in our three-weeks-of-fun arrangement.
“What?” he asks. “Talk to me, baby.”
“I’m just tired,” I whisper. “Long day.”
“Sure you’re okay?” he asks again. He doesn’t reach for me, but his tone is concerned. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
“No. I’m fine, Hunter. I promise,” I say, stepping around him, out of our little alcove in the shadows. Over my shoulder, I give him a tiny, forced smile. “See you tomorrow, okay?”
“Of course,” he says, his eyebrows knitted. “See you tomorrow.”
Without looking back, I scurry to the lonely sanctuary of my room.