Chapter 14
“Are you sure no one knows you’re here?” Willow asked him, and the man had the audacity to laugh.
“Yes, Wills. I’m sure.” He kneeled above her and peeled off his T-shirt. “We’re on a private site, inaccessible by car. I paid cash and used my brother’s name. We are in middle-of-nowhere Plumas County, which means middle-of-no-one-gives-a-flying—”
She reached up and clamped a hand over his mouth. “What if there are kids ?” she whisper-shouted.
He laughed. Again. “Should I continue undressing, or do you want to park this”—he waggled his brows—“intimacy idea until I give you a tour of our very secluded surroundings?”
Willow blinked at him absently. She knew there were more words that came after he mentioned undressing, but for the life of her, she couldn’t remember what they were because Ash had already pulled her shirt over her head and had peppered her neck and shoulders with sweet, delicious kisses. And then she’d gone and gotten all in her head about where they were and who might find them and… She was doing it again.
“Wills?” Ash inquired, and she had the distinct feeling that it wasn’t the first time he’d tried to get her attention.
She stared at his lean, muscled torso that looked more defined, more man that it had four years ago. Who knew there could be such…changes between twenty-five and twenty-nine?
“What?” she asked, then shook her head. “Sorry. I was just…um…admiring the view.” Her cheeks flamed, which only made him grin wider. Then she remembered the reason for her hesitation in the first place, and she exhaled a steadying breath. “If someone did recognize us, and my picture got splashed all over social media in the morning as the homewrecker who came between country music’s bad boy and Scotland’s tennis darling…”
Ash lowered himself onto his heels and cradled her head in his hands. “You’re safe,” he whispered, all traces of his devil-may-care grin now gone. “I would never knowingly put you in that kind of situation, Willow. You believe me, right?”
She closed her eyes and nodded even as the entertainment news outlets’ posts and tweets replayed themselves on the backs of her eyelids.
Ash Murphy’s opening act attempts an encore but gets booed off the stage…or out of the bedroom.
Willow Morgan tries sleeping her way to headliner, but it’s love-forty in the game of Morgan vs. Calder-Payne.
She squeezed her eyes shut even tighter, but though she couldn’t see the posts, she still remembered.
“What happened to leaving the past out of tonight?” Ash asked softly.
Willow heard no anger or malice in his voice. He was simply calling her on her own rule that she was clearly breaking.
She opened her eyes and painted on a sad smile. “Memories are assholes,” Willow told him. “They don’t care about rules.”
Ash nodded. “Then I guess we have a choice to make,” he explained.
“What’s that?”
He kissed her forehead and then the tip of her nose, and Willow couldn’t help but smile for real this time.
He sat back on his heels and shrugged. “Hold on to the old memories or replace them with new ones?”
Willow wrapped her hands around his wrists and lowered his hands until each palmed the demi cups of her bra. “New ones,” she whispered, still terrified that someone might be waiting close by to blow their cover or that another camper might stumble upon their campsite.
Or what if she trusted the man who assured her they were safe? What if she seized the opportunity to replace the movie that played behind her closed eyes with something great? What if she allowed herself to see just how much he’d grown elsewhere in the years since she’d seen him last?
Ash flicked open the front clasp of her bra, and Willow gasped as he slid a palm over each of her now-exposed breasts.
“ Wow ,” she exclaimed. “You just changed the documentary that plays in my head to a super-sexy fantasy.”
He lowered himself to all fours and kissed each of her taut, sensitive nipples. “Who says fantasy can’t also be a documentary?” he asked, his voice rough and aching with a need Willow guessed matched her own.
She reached up and unbuttoned his jeans, then carefully lowered the zipper over his thick, hard length and pulled the pants down to his thighs.
“I think you have your genre wires crossed,” she finally replied, her breath coming in short pants as he nipped gently at her hardened peaks.
He unbuttoned, unzipped, and helped her shimmy out of her own denim. Then she stared at his half-removed pants and raised her brows. “If I can’t wear anything but my undergarments, then the same goes for you.”
“I was hoping in a minute or two that you wouldn’t be wearing anything ,” he replied, letting loose a soft growl that made Willow’s body hum.
He stood and let his jeans fall the rest of the way to the floor. Then he raised his brows and hooked his thumbs behind the band of his black boxer briefs.
“Wait!” Willow cried, then scrambled to her feet, letting her unhooked bra fall where she lay. “I want to do it,” she told him.
Ash grinned and dropped his hands, but Willow stayed frozen where she stood.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, and she felt her smile fall.
She brushed her fingers over the fading yellow bruise covering his ribs, the one she’d failed to notice when he’d been looming over her looking like he wanted to devour her and she’d been all too willing to let him.
Ash flinched.
“Sorry!” she told him. “Does it still hurt?”
He shook his head. “You just surprised me.”
Willow tilted her head up to meet his inscrutable blue eyes. “Admit that it hurts,” she said.
His brows furrowed. “What?”
“Bruises hurt, Ash, and that one’s a doozy. So why won’t you admit it?”
He laughed, but she could hear the bitterness in his voice. “Uh…you’re kind of killing the mood, Morgan.”
Willow’s throat tightened, and she nodded. “I know. But if we’re going to really do this, I want all of you, Ash. I don’t think that’s something I ever had before.” She realized now that despite the sweet things he might have said to her when they were together, she only knew Ash the performer, the guy who was always a little bit still on even off the stage. “I want…” she continued, blowing out a long breath. “I want whatever is going on in your head…and…whatever you’re feeling in your heart.” She slid her arms around his waist and pulled his bare torso to hers. “Please?” she added.
Ash rested his chin on top of her head and exhaled. “I already told you I still loved you, and I meant it. What else do you need from me?”
“Everything,” she replied matter-of-factly. And Willow realized she wouldn’t settle for anything less. “But tonight…just two more things.”
He pulled back enough to look her in the eyes. “Name ’em. I’ve got nothing to hide from you.”
Willow both shivered from the breeze sneaking in from outside and crackled with electricity at being so close to Ash Murphy after all this time.
“Does the bruise hurt?” she whispered.
He nodded. “But only a little now that it’s had time to heal.”
“Do you think you deserve to be hurt by those who are supposed to love you?”
A muscle in his jaw pulsed. “Willow…” he whispered through gritted teeth. “I’ve seen what people say…about you being too smart to…” But his voice trailed off, and she could tell he was too scared to finish the thought, scared that he might be right.
“I don’t care what other people say.” Willow wanted to believe that was true, that she was stronger now than she was before. That her life was her life despite so much of it being lived in the fishbowl of the public eye. She leaned up and pressed her lips to his—and felt him inhale a stuttering breath. “I forgive you,” she said softly, then kissed him again. “Your brothers are happy you’re home.” Another kiss. “Maybe it’s time you let yourself off the hook too.” She kissed his cheek, his mouth, his neck.
She felt him tremble beneath her touch, this big, strong man who was the boy she fell for one summer four years ago. Then she lowered his boxer briefs as he stepped out of both them and his jeans, and she took him into her hand, stroking him from root to tip.
Ash stumbled back a step before righting himself again.
“You okay?” she asked.
He nodded and finally gave her what she wanted to see, his smile.
“I guess you make me weak in the knees, Morgan,” he admitted.
Willow did a victory dance in her head.
It was real.
This was real.
They were real.
She stepped out of her underwear, and there was nothing left between them. Then she spun him so he stood where she had been and nodded toward the sleeping bag.
“Lie down, cowboy, and let me have my way with you.”
“That sounds like a lyric from a song,” he replied.
Maybe someday it would be. But tonight those words were only for them.
“You gonna do as you’re told, handsome?” Willow added, emboldened with a confidence she hadn’t known she’d possessed before tonight.
Ash grinned, then lowered his exquisite naked body to the floor beneath her.
Willow climbed over him, lowering herself to her knees, one on either side of him.
“I’m still on the pill,” she told him. “And I haven’t… I mean, it’s been a while since…”
“Me either,” Ash replied, and though her eyes widened in question, she didn’t want to know how long it had been since he’d slept with another woman. She didn’t want to think about him sleeping with anyone other than her. Period. And she wanted to make him forget that he ever had. So she glided over him, already slick and ready to obliterate his memory of any woman who came before.
“You’re so beautiful, Wills,” he whispered. “Wherever you go, always the prettiest damned woman in the room.”
Willow’s cheeks flamed, and a fire ignited in her core. She tilted her head forward, her hair falling like a curtain around their heads, and gave him one final chaste brush of her lips before sinking over him, burying him deep inside.
Something feral and animal tore from Ash’s lips as he rolled them both onto their sides, hooking her leg over his hip as he slowly slid out and then filled her again, making her cry out as she tried to pull him closer, tighter, deeper. The only thing Willow loved more than making the first move and reducing Ash Murphy to his basest form was Ash Murphy stealing the control right back from her and making her see stars.
He rocked inside her, and when she grabbed his ass and he slipped a hand between them, rubbing a finger over her sensitive, swollen clit, she arched against him, biting his bottom lip, and they both lost the ability to form intelligible speech.
The temperature had dropped outside their tent, but inside they were a tangle of sweaty limbs, of hot lips rubbed raw from deep, hungry kisses that refused to cease.
Who was this man who hadn’t known her in years yet knew without fail when to roll her onto her back and hike her leg higher, when to plunge deeper, and when, exactly, to swirl his thumb between them right when she thought she couldn’t hang on any longer?
Willow cried out Ash’s name as he shuddered inside her with one final growl. His arms gave, and he collapsed onto his elbows, still shaking, his face buried against her shoulder.
“It’s okay,” she whispered when she found her voice again. “You don’t need to hold yourself up anymore.”
He was quiet for several seconds, still trembling above her, but then he ground out a single word, “Okay,” and let the full weight of his torso fall against hers.
She held him tight, combing her fingers through his sweaty hair, and kissed his temple.
“Don’t you dare leave me again, Willow Morgan,” he pleaded with a shaky whisper. “I won’t survive it.” And now she knew that he remembered the words he’d spoken the morning when he thought the farthest she’d go was the bathroom to brush her teeth.
“Neither will I,” she admitted.
Because there was no getting over Ash Murphy. It took her until now to realize that she never had.