20. Tess #2
Instead, he took her wrist and lowered her arm until nothing covered her. His thumb brushed once over the inside of her wrist before he released it.
“Not a chance,” he said. “I’m looking at every one of these marks, Tess, because they’re a privilege. You’re flawless.”
“That is an outrageous husband answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting.”
His mouth touched her hip.
Tess went still.
Another kiss landed beside the first, then higher, following the pale lines pregnancy had left across her skin.
He made no attempt to hurry beyond them.
That was what undid her—the attention. Months of catching glimpses of herself beneath bathroom lights had trained her to look away first, but Camden seemed determined to linger over everything she had learned to conceal.
He isn’t looking for the woman I was.
His mouth moved across her belly, and Tess let her arm fall beside her.
Salt dried on Camden’s shoulders. Sand clung to his forearm where he supported himself beside her, and the roughness of his hands belonged to the marina now, not some distant stadium.
Tess reached for him.
Her fingers slid into his hair as his kisses moved lower.
He gently nudged her thighs apart, settling himself between her knees.
The sudden, scalding heat of his mouth against her center stole the last of her embarrassment and replaced it with something far simpler.
There was no baby monitor beside the bed.
No fuel-line pressure to check. No one calling either of them back to work.
Just Camden.
Just her.
He parted her, his tongue tracing a slow, deliberate line over her clit. Tess violently arched her back off the blanket with a sharp gasp.
“Camden…”
He paused long enough to look up at her, his jaw slick.
Tess tightened her fingers in his hair.
“God, please. Don’t move. Right there.”
Her grip kept him exactly where she wanted him. Camden buried his face between her legs again, his tongue lapping at her with a ravenous, demanding rhythm that drove her dangerously close to the edge. He stayed there until she was shivering beneath him, utterly wrecked in the midday sun.
Then Camden came back up her body and kissed her. Grit stuck to his forearm where it pressed beside her shoulder, and the blanket had started bunching beneath them, but neither problem seemed worth fixing.
His hand slid along her side, then stopped.
Tess opened her eyes.
That pause again.
He had been doing it for months in a hundred different ways—waiting for permission before touching her waist, stepping back when she entered a narrow aisle, treating every inch she offered him as something borrowed. At first, she had needed that restraint from him.
Now it was starting to make her want to scream.
“You’re doing it again.”
Camden lifted his head. “Doing what?”
“Thinking instead of being here.”
“I am here.”
“No. You’re managing me.”
His mouth flattened, but his hand stayed where it was. “I’m trying not to rush you.”
Tess slid both arms around him and pulled him closer. The movement erased the careful space he had kept between them.
“I’m not glass, Camden.”
“I know that.”
“Then stop treating me like I might break.”
His gaze stayed on hers as he shifted over her, planting his weight squarely between her thighs.
He guided his rigid cock to her entrance, pushing smoothly into her wet channel.
The dense, stretching heat of him filling her was exquisite, but his first movement was cautious enough to make her irritation flare again.
Camden had always been controlled on the field, able to hold back his strength at the last possible instant.
Apparently he had brought the same discipline into the sand.
Tess wrapped her legs around him.
“Stop.”
He froze.
She almost laughed at the alarm that crossed his face. “Not stop-stop.”
“Jesus, Tess.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I really didn’t.”
She caught his hips and yanked him forward, forcing a deep, hard thrust that shattered his careful restraint. “Quit apologizing with every movement.”
That landed.
Camden let out a ragged groan, fighting to hold his raw strength back against her demanding, wet heat. He looked away toward the water for a moment before returning his attention to her. “Working beside you every day in that shack was torture.”
Tess stared at him.
“You’d lean over the register. Reach past me for manifests.
Walk by wearing those cutoff shorts while I was trying to remember I had no right to touch you.
” His hand settled at her hip. “Then we brought our daughter home, and every hour became feeding schedules and laundry and trying to keep you asleep longer than forty minutes.”
“You could have told me.”
“You needed a partner. Not another demand.”
There it was.
The guilt had changed clothes, but it was still guilt.
Tess slid her hand behind his neck and pulled his forehead against hers. “I don’t need another apology tour.”
Camden stayed still.
“I needed you to earn your way home,” she said. “You did. Now you’re here.”
His hand tightened at her waist.
Tess held his gaze. “So be here.”
Whatever argument he had been building disappeared from his face.
This time, when she pulled him closer, Camden stopped holding himself away. He drove his cock deep into her pussy, the friction drawing a breathless sound from her lips as he established a heavy, relentless rhythm.
The blanket twisted beneath Tess’s lower back until a ridge of canvas pressed into the same spot every time she moved. She tried shifting around it once, then again, and finally gave up pretending it wasn’t there.
“Hold on,” Camden said. “The blanket’s folded under you.”
He started to lift away.
Tess planted both hands against his shoulders. “I have a better solution.”
His eyebrows rose just before she pushed.
Camden fell onto his back with a startled laugh, landing partly on the blanket and partly in the sand. Tess followed him down, settling over him with her knees braced on either side.
“Well,” he said. “Apparently we’re solving problems by force now.”
“You spent years playing professional football. You’ll survive.”
“I wasn’t complaining.”
She knew.
That was the dangerous part.
Sunlight caught the grin he tried to suppress, and something inside Tess loosened at the sight of it.
No careful husband hovered over her now, checking every movement for permission he already had.
Camden lay beneath her with sand on one shoulder, his hair tangled by her hands, looking more like the boy from that college field than the man who had once belonged to stadium lights.
Reaching down, Tess gripped his slick cock and guided it directly back inside her pussy. She sank downward to take his thick length completely, her breath catching as he bottomed out.
Tess set the pace herself, riding him hard under the open sun.
He brought his hands to her bouncing hips, steadying rather than directing.
His expression changed as she refused to give him the measured rhythm he had tried to maintain before.
His broad thumb slid upward, aggressively rubbing her swollen clit with every downward grind of her hips.
The overwhelming friction sent a blinding rush of heat straight through her core.
Then his shoulders tightened beneath her palms.
“There,” she said.
Camden blinked up at her. “There what?”
“You’re doing it again.”
“I’m trying not to send us both face-first into the sand.”
“That isn’t what I mean.”
His fingers flexed once at her hips, his thumb pressing harder against her clit.
Tess leaned over him. “Stop bracing against me.”
A rough laugh escaped him. “You make that sound easy.”
“It is easy.”
“No, Tess.” His gaze stayed on her face, his hips thrusting upward to meet her frantic pace. “Sleeping upstairs knowing you were right there and that touching you wasn’t mine to assume anymore… that restraint doesn’t just switch off.”
The words stripped the teasing from her smile.
For months, she had watched him keep every promise through action. He had waited when waiting hurt. He had taken the place she offered instead of demanding the one he wanted.
He already proved it.
Tess lowered herself until her forehead rested against his.
“You don’t have to prove restraint anymore.”
His hands remained at her hips.
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
Camden searched her face for another moment.
Tess straightened and caught his wrists, guiding his hands back where she wanted them.
“You missed me?”
His smile disappeared. “More than I know how to say.”
“Then stop trying to say it.”
She moved again, refusing to let him retreat into caution, grinding relentlessly against his thumb.
This time, Camden followed her pace, his thrusts turning brutal and demanding, and Tess felt the last of his restraint give way.
Tess’s legs finally began to give out.
The exertion that had felt exhilarating minutes earlier took its toll, and Camden caught her weight as she sank forward. His hands steadied her without interrupting the rhythm between them.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You’re shaking.”
“I said I’m fine.”
“And I’m saying you don’t have to prove anything.”
He shifted with her, giving her enough room to move without ending the moment. The blanket had become a useless knot under them, half buried beneath their knees and coated with sand.
Tess looked at it once and abandoned it.
She moved onto the open sand instead, getting on her hands and knees in the soft, warm powder.
Camden followed, kneeling close behind her. He pulled her hips firmly against his thighs and buried his length into her from behind. The new angle was impossibly deep, pulling a sharp gasp from her lips.
The tide rolled somewhere beyond them, swallowing the smaller sounds until the whole sandbar seemed reduced to sun, salt, and the solid heat of him at her back.
Sand yielded beneath her palms and knees as she adjusted, searching for a position that did not ask her tired legs to keep carrying everything.
Camden’s hand settled at her waist, his thrusts locking into a punishing, flawless cadence.
“Better?”