Tessa stood outside of the Buttercup Inn, the hand-painted sign swaying gently above her head in the night air. The door was locked, of course. She was just debating whether or not to call Johnny to come down and get her, or to throw pebbles against his window or something, when a sudden chill lifted the hairs along her arms.
She wasn’t alone in the alley.
Holding her breath, Tessa dropped her car keys casually into her palm, one key sticking out between her knuckles the way she’d learned in the self-defense class the Sanctuary Island Sheriff’s Department had put on last fall.
Normally she wouldn’t have thought twice about it, she realized distractedly, listening for footsteps or movement behind her. Some of Johnny’s worries must have rubbed off on her after all, even though she didn’t truly believe she was in any danger.
A glass bottle clinked against the pavement, kicked by a careless foot, and Tessa spun with her fists raised and ready to strike out … at a wide-eyed Quinn Harper.
“I surrender!” Quinn held her hands up, her dimpled chin quivering with the effort of suppressing a laugh.
Tessa rolled her eyes at herself and blew out a breath. “Sorry, you just startled me, is all.”
“Here to see Johnny?”
Finally noticing the nervous anticipation jittering through the younger woman, Tessa raised her brows. “I am. Are you here to see Marcus?”
She tried to keep her tone completely free of judgment, but from the way Quinn stiffened, she didn’t quite succeed. That dimpled chin stuck out obstinately. “Yep. And I’ve already heard what a bad idea that is from everyone in town, it seems like, including Marcus himself. But I don’t care. I want to be here.”
For the first time since Tessa met Quinn, she glimpsed something beneath the bright, carefree mask the girl wore like a second skin. Quinn wasn’t just having fun, sowing her wild oats with a sexy older man. She was in deeper than that.
Tessa recognized the signs; she’d just spent an hour staring at them in her own mirror.
“Sometimes that’s enough.” Tessa smiled and watched Quinn relax enough to smile back. “Do you have a key?”
“I do, as it happens.” Producing her key with a flourish, Quinn let them in and led the way through the darkened bar to the back staircase. She navigated around piles of cardboard boxes and tables stacked with upside-down chairs as if she’d been there plenty of times in the dark.
Tessa followed her quietly, musing on the ways she and Quinn were different—the married virgin and the free-spirited single girl—and the ways they were the same. Both of them were laying their hearts on the line when they lay down with the men they loved … and both of them were likely to wake up one day with those hearts broken into a million pieces.
But wasn’t that true of everyone who took a chance on love? And wasn’t the hope of a happy ending enough of a reason to take the chance?
Tessa had already spent too much of her life cowering in the shadows and hoping the world would pass her by. And guess what? It did pass her by, but staying safe hadn’t kept her from heartbreak. Here, on Sanctuary Island, she had taken more risks and exposed her vulnerabilities and basically invited the world to take its best shot—and she was closer to getting what she wanted now, tonight, than she ever had been before.
At the landing at the top of the stairs, Quinn turned to the door on the left. Pausing with her hand on the doorknob, she gave Tessa a smile that looked brave in the dim light of the moon streaming in the window. “Have a good night,” she whispered.
Tessa’s heart began to gallop as she stared at the door on the right. Johnny was behind that door, waiting for her. “You, too,” she said absently, reaching for the doorknob.
“We’ll try to keep it down,” Quinn said, the sparkle and mischief returning to her laughing voice. “But no promises!”
She whisked away into the front apartment, leaving Tessa blushing on the landing. Did she have the guts to be like Quinn, to throw open the door to what she wanted and walk right in as if she belonged there?
Not really.
Sighing, Tessa lifted her hand to knock but before it connected, the door swung open to reveal Johnny’s lean, muscled form silhouetted in the moonlight.
Tessa clutched her coat around herself and swallowed dryly, her throat clicking in the silence of the hallway. Every cell of her body vibrated like a struck tuning fork, reverberating with Johnny’s nearness and pulling her in closer to him.
Johnny’s eyes glittered, nearly black with hunger. Without a single word, he reached out and drew her inside.
His heat scorched her skin, pouring off him in waves that made her gasp. The gasp turned to a moan when his arms clutched her to his chest and his mouth crashed down on hers. They surged together, ravenous and shaking with it.
“How did I wait this long?” Johnny muttered against the sensitive skin over her jawline. His roving hands combed through her hair and down her back, molding her more closely to him. Tessa’s breasts crushed against his chest, naked under her clothes, and even that rough caress turned her on.
She didn’t want to talk about why they’d gone years—years!—without this when they could have been … when all along, she’d wanted …
Dazed and in need of oxygen, Tessa tore her mouth from Johnny’s and pulled back far enough to kick off her shoes and shrug out of her coat.
“Don’t—”
Whatever protest Johnny was about to make died on his lips when his stare dropped to her body. His shirt hung on her slender frame, unbuttoned far enough to show the pale skin of her sternum. Her legs were bare, and he couldn’t see it, but she’d decided against underwear.
What was the point? she’d reasoned. They’d only slow her down.
The point was, she realized now as she fought not to squirm under Johnny’s intense gaze, that underwear made you feel more covered. Less bare.
Somehow, wearing Johnny’s shirt and nothing else, Tessa felt more bare than if she’d actually been naked.
“You’re wearing my shirt.” Johnny’s dark brown eyes lifted to scrutinize Tessa’s face. “You kept it. All this time. And you’re wearing it. Do you have any idea what that does to me?”
Tessa couldn’t hold back a smile. Maybe wearing sexy things wasn’t only about pleasing herself. Maybe it was about pleasing both of them.
“Do you like it?” she asked, sending a coy glance up through her lashes to check his reaction.
His reaction did not disappoint. Chest flexing, Johnny brought one hand down to palm the hard ridge of his erection, solid and obvious in his jeans. He made a sound like he couldn’t believe his eyes.
“I can’t believe you can ask me that. Yes,” he said definitely. “I like it. A lot.”
“I’m nervous,” Tessa explained with a breathless laugh. “I’m sorry, I wish I weren’t.”
“Don’t be sorry. I’m nervous, too.” Johnny’s mouth twisted in a rueful grin. “I’m not a virgin, but it’s been a while.”
Struck, Tessa said, “Wait. How long has it been for you?”
Johnny frowned. “Since before we got married.”
The ground shifted beneath Tessa’s bare feet, her entire life and everything she thought she knew rearranging itself around her. “You haven’t … you never slept with anyone else while we were married? I assumed you did.”
Crossing his arms over his chest, Johnny said, “No way. We made vows, Tessa. That means something to me. It means a damn sight more than getting my rocks off, I can tell you that.”
“But … it wouldn’t have been a betrayal.” Tessa was still reeling. She couldn’t wrap her mind around it. “Not really. Our marriage was in name only. I would have understood.”
She would’ve hated it, but she would have understood. And on some level, she’d been glad to think that even if Johnny wouldn’t touch her, he could be happy with someone else even briefly.
But apparently not.
Johnny’s jaw looked as hard and uncompromising as the marble of her favorite pastry board. “What, you think I couldn’t keep it in my pants? I’m so ruled by my dick that I’d break our vows, betray your trust, abandon my family…”
He choked off the words, but Tessa made the connection. “Your father was long gone by the time you lost Angie,” she said slowly. “You told me that earlier, but I didn’t put together what you meant. I was too focused on the tragedy of your sister’s death. But that wasn’t the first tragedy your family suffered, was it?”
Johnny’s lip curled in something like a sneer. “A tragedy is a horrible accident, a loss that haunts you every day. My father leaving my mother for the woman he was cheating on her with wasn’t a tragedy. It was just your average, everyday garden-variety faithless loser running out on his family. Happens all the time. We were better off without him.”
Thinking back to the details of Johnny’s story about his past, the things Tessa had missed in the first flush of horror and sympathy, she remembered that the pond where Angie drowned had been a favorite fishing hole of Johnny’s. Stocked with fish by Johnny’s long-gone father. Who had been thrilled when Angie, their “miracle baby,” was born.
At some point, the Alexander family had been whole and happy. Johnny could deny those memories all he wanted, but on some level, he was still grieving the loss of that unbroken family as much as he was the loss of his sister.
“A man doesn’t cheat.” Johnny met her gaze, direct and serious. “A man keeps his word and he stands by his family. To do anything else…”
He shook his head, disgust twisting his mouth down, and for the first time Tessa got an inkling of what she’d been asking when she asked Johnny for a divorce.
To Johnny, who had learned the pain of his father’s abandonment down to his bones, their “marriage in name only” was sacred. Something to be protected and cherished, even if it wasn’t exactly the kind of marriage most people had.
She understood him so much better now than she ever had before. He might not be driven to stay with her out of love, but as far as Johnny was concerned, love was irrelevant.
He would stay because that was what a man did—the kind of man he wanted to be. The kind of man his father wasn’t.
To be asked to break those vows must have felt like a blow against everything Johnny had worked to become. And he’d fought back, heroically, by following her to Sanctuary Island, by agreeing to couples therapy in spite of his discomfort, by kissing her … and now that he was finally willing to admit defeat, Tessa didn’t know if she could bear to let him go.
“You’re a good man, John Alexander.”
The words weren’t enough. They were too small to encompass the way she felt about Johnny, the awe and fierce love and desperate longing that filled Tessa at the thought of the life she could have with this man.
They were so close. Closer and more connected than they’d ever been, and so heartbreakingly close to being a real married couple.
Maybe a night of passion would help them move forward together; maybe it wouldn’t. Tessa wouldn’t know unless she tried.
“I’m only a man,” Johnny said, every atom of his attention focused on Tessa. “Better than some, worse than others. But I’ll make you this promise, Theresa Mulligan Alexander. No man has ever wanted to touch any woman more than I want to touch you at this moment.”
With a silent prayer for the night to come and a vow to spend the morning begging Johnny to stay and try, Tessa threw herself into his arms. He stumbled back before taking her weight, kicking aside his packed duffel bag to lay her down on the soft, faded white sheets of his bed.
Tessa opened her heart and her body to the man she loved, reveling in the closeness, the almost unbearable intimacy of sliding skin to skin, mouth to mouth.
They rocked together, limbs entwined and heartbeats synced, on the too narrow bed in the corner of the studio. Tessa could see the moon through the window over Johnny’s shoulder. It silvered his silky-hot skin, limning his shoulders with a white glow. He moved inside her, gently at first but then with more urgency, and the moon blurred and spangled into a thousand pinpricks of light as Tessa gasped and shot into the stars.
Johnny’s breath was harsh in her ear. He sank atop her, his warm, heavily muscled frame so welcome even as she struggled to draw a deep breath. Breathing was overrated, Tessa decided, delirious with the pleasure still sending aftershocks through her newly awakened body.
“I thought I would feel different,” she whispered. “When I wasn’t a virgin anymore. I thought it would change me. But I feel more myself—the person I’m meant to be, deep down—than I ever have in my life.”
Johnny slid to the side, taking most of his weight off her but keeping her tucked close against his chest. He was silent for so long that Tessa’s eyelids began to slip closed, weighted with exhaustion.
“I know exactly what you mean.”
Johnny’s low voice reached into Tessa’s sleepy, sated half-dream. She woke up just long enough to smile at the kiss Johnny pressed to her temple—the same good-night kiss he’d given her every night they were together, and it did feel different now—before sinking happily into sleep wrapped in her husband’s strong, steadfast arms.