Page 13 of The Gift that Keeps On Giving

“Everything, Ruby.” He tilts my head in the other direction, going to work on the opposite side of my neck. “I remember everything.”

“I remember everything about you, too,” I whisper, the long, low squeeze of my core making me languid, hot. “You always gave the best hugs. Always made sure I was being safe on campus, paying the security guards to watch me when you couldn’t.” A memory strikes me, and I perk up. “How is your father doing? I remember he was visiting during our last tutoring session. Such a nice man.”

His jolt is almost imperceptible. Maybe I imagined it. Or maybe Cameron and his father aren’t as close as they used to be and it’s a sore spot. My recollection is of him being a nice man, if a little…flirtatious. “My father is doing well,” he says, tone a little short. “Still heading the athletic program at Dartmouth.” He tilts my face up, examining me in the moonlight. A clear move to change the subject, though I’m happy to let him. “The Ruby I remember was a buttoned-up good girl with her nose buried in a book. I never expected to see you like this.”

“Like what?” I ask, playfully.

“So…at home in a micro bikini,” he laughs, and I join him.

“I’m still a buttoned-up good girl,” I say, letting myself lay back in the water, floating faceup in front of him, moonlight spilling across my belly, thighs and breasts. “And my nose is usually buried in a book. But…there’s another part of me, too. I don’t think I was ready to acknowledge it until now.”

He stands in between my spread thighs where they float in the water, his knuckles dragging up the valleys of my sides, then back down to tease the strings on my hips again, tugging the material tighter against my core. Watching his handiwork from above with rapidly shallowing breath. “Why weren’t you ready until now?”

“I don’t know. I think I just needed the right opportunity. With someone I trust.” I allow him to pull aside the string shielding my slit, a shiver passing through me over the depth of his groan. “Two people I trust is even better than one. Four if we’re counting your wives, which I am.”

“Can’t believe we’re talking about my wife while I’m looking at your bare cunt.” He bends down to get closer, running his heated gaze over my mound. “God, Ruby. I could sculpt for a million years and never form anything so fine.”

“There’s that poet’s spirit I remember,” I whisper, warm…everywhere. I can almost feel my estrogen fizzing in my veins, energizing my extremities.

“I’m not a poet. You’re just fucking inspiring.” He sips a kiss onto my navel, his palms skimming seductively up the outsides of my thighs. “I’m proud of you for opening your own bookstore, just like you always dreamed of doing.”

I hum a yes. “The dream doesn’t match the reality exactly, but…I have hope that it will, one day. Good things take time.”

“Sometimes they even take six years.”

“Exactly.”

His hands are on my breasts now, tugging aside the little triangles to palm them bare, kneading hard enough to make me moan an encouragement, then massaging circles onto my perked-up nipples. “I could blow just from touching you, Ruby. My God. You’re so smooth and golden all over. I’m so fucking worked up right now, it’s insane.”

A ribbon of trepidation slithers in my tummy.

It would be so easy and perfect to take Cameron inside of me right now. I’m so turned on from his touch, it probably wouldn’t even hurt that badly to have my first time right here, right now. In the pool beneath the moonlight in the presence of palm trees. But just like earlier, with Dean, I’m hesitant to have my first time in private with only one of them. Wouldn’t that only add to their vitriol? Wouldn’t that be unfair?

And wouldn’t that make my mission to reunite these best friends that much harder?

“Can we kiss for a while?” I whisper, sitting up in the water and snaking my legs around his hips, gasping when his rampant erection meets my sex. “I didn’t get enough of your kisses earlier on the beach.”

“Pretty damn sure I’ll never get enough of yours.” Cameron’s strong hands seize my bottom, and he turns, walking us to the side of the pool. Pressing me up against the smooth tile, crowding his hips in between my legs. “But I’m willing to kiss you until we find out.”

“That sounds nice,” I whisper against his lips.

Cameron’s kisses are more exploratory than Dean’s. Gentler, too, but no less arousing. He primes my mouth with side to side drags of his open lips, before plundering me slowly, his skilled tongue drawing hiccupping moans from deep inside of me, as if he’s reached into the bottom of some unknown well. As a freshman in college, I daydreamed about Cameron laying me down on a soft patch of grass and celebrating me with his mouth, his whispered poetry, gazing down at me with soulful eyes, whereas my daydreams of Dean were hot, furious fucking, usually in the back of his truck.

How lucky I am to be gifted these contrasting men.

All I want to do is luxuriate in them.

And that’s exactly what Cameron and I proceed to do. Bask in kisses that proceed to turn more starving, my body strainingbetween his and the tile wall. I sense we’re reaching a point of no return and I should stop us, but I can’t, I can’t, because I love being flattened against a hard barrier by this big man with no purchase for my feet and nowhere to go, his mouth molesting mine on repeat, the very taste of him smacking of hunger.

I’m not expecting him to rake his open mouth over to my ear and whisper, “Tell me what you did with Dean.”

I don’t process his words right away, because I’m dizzy from kissing, but eventually they sink in…and confuse me as much as they flush my lower body with humidity. “You want to know…that?”

Chapter Six

Cameron

Yes, Idowant to know what Ruby did with Dean.

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