Chapter Twenty-Nine

T he cliff was a lot higher than Tallulah had anticipated.

But she wasn’t scared.

Nothing seemed scary, anymore... except for maybe the possibility that she’d pushed Burgess away before she was sure it was the right thing to do. He’d helped her off the ATV with all the caution of a baker carrying a wedding cake to his van and now? Now he stood looking out over the lagoon, visibly assessing the danger with his arms crossed, those powerful muscles captured in sunlight, his dark hair with the smattering of gray being picked up and tossed every which way by the wind, jaw tight.

Burgess was the most beautiful man in the world, full stop.

He’d always been a certified stud—hello Mean Daddy—but her attraction to him had reached a point that was almost... unendurable. Like she’d had to restrain herself from licking his sun-heated back on the ride to the cliff. Or dropping her hand into his lap to feel the shape of his penis against her palm. Stroke it stiff. And the surge of horniness wasn’t only physical in nature. She was... emotionally horny. Was that even a thing?

Could be.

No, it was. Because as soon as he’d withdrawn from her, the desperation to feel their connection again came on like a magnitude ten earthquake. She’d soaked up his protectiveness like a greedy sponge, because it seemed... that’s all there was left. That’s all he was allowing her now that she’d made the potentially premature mistake of ending things.

So what was stopping her from turning to Burgess right now and asking him if they could just rewind? Back up to earlier this morning when she’d been venting and scared and unsteady. Panicked at the thought of being burned again. Maybe if she knew he’d take such immediate action to end things, she’d have kept her mouth shut... but keeping her feelings to herself wasn’t right, either. Was it?

“Listen, folks,” Apollo said, “When you get down there, don’t forget to explore. There are various shorelines and mini beaches. There is a cave behind that waterfall—”

“I’m going down first again, Tallulah,” Burgess said, pressing his tongue to the inside of his cheek. “I have to judge the depth for myself before you jump.”

Ozzie and Apollo both threw up their hands. “Mister Abraham,” Apollo said. “You are the most distrustful person I’ve ever met in my life.”

“So be it. I don’t—”

“You don’t take chances with her. We know.” Ozzie sighed and started to kick off his flip-flops, muttering to himself about how hundreds of tourists leap from that exact spot every single day. “I’ll jump first so you can see how safe it is.”

Before Burgess or Tallulah could protest, Ozzie backed up several steps, let out a yell, and did a pencil jump that kept him in the air one, two, three seconds before he plunged into the aquamarine water below. Tallulah held her breath until he surfaced a moment later, waving his hand—and possibly his middle finger.

“And you’re sure we can’t jump together,” Burgess said to Apollo.

“No. Now that is unsafe.”

Burgess nodded, that line bobbing and weaving in his cheek. “Okay. ”

He closed his eyes. Didn’t move.

A full twenty seconds passed.

“Burgess,” she prompted. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m trying to remember what you said that night I took you skinny dipping.”

“The pond was ice cold. I’m pretty sure I was just chanting oh God over and over again.”

His lips tugged. “Before that.”

Tallulah thought back, letting the rich velvet memories of that night sail into her mind like unfurling ribbons. A moment stopped like a freeze-frame, and she zoomed in, hearing her own voice drift back from weeks earlier. “Forever is composed of nows,” she said. “Dickinson. I told you it was the one time English Lit piqued my interest.”

“That’s it. Yeah.”

“Why are you thinking of that now?”

“Probably because I’m about to jump off a cliff.”

Tallulah laughed.

“I don’t know, I’m trying to enjoy this, not just get through it alive. The quote... it’s just making more sense now. If you live merely to get through everything, what parts are you enjoying, right?”

His interpretation made her chest pang. “That’s exactly right.”

“Okay.” He took a few steps back and looked at her. “You aim for the exact spot I land on, okay? If I resurface.”

Why did her heart feel like one of those movie theater popcorn machines, just crackling and popping and overflowing? “I will. Promise. I’ll see you down there.”

It was that promise—and that promise only—that made Tallulah watch. As she’d discovered with the zip line, it wasn’t easy to watch this man do something even slightly dangerous outside of her reach and the helplessness kicked in now, again, but she was so glad she watched because Burgess released a shout of pure enjoy ment, his huge, sculpted body creating the biggest splash she’d ever seen. When his face broke the surface with a reluctant smile and he flipped back his wet hair, the floor dropped out from beneath her feet and she went plunging into another, deeper, cavern of love.

Yeah, you’re real tough now. Wasn’t it just a few days ago you walked away because a twelve-year-old was mad at you?

How could this be the same man who said those callous words to her?

The fear of that man hurting her again lingered, ruining the moment—and she resented it like hell. Resented it so much that it eclipsed the trepidation to leap and so she went, her feet leaving the hard stone, gravity yanking her body down so fast, she almost didn’t have time to suck in a proper breath. But she did have time to watch Burgess’s face while she was still in the air. To watch him bare his teeth against the terror of watching her fall.

He loved her, too.

Big, boundless love.

That was the truth that was occurring to her as she sank into the warm water, bubbles dancing around her body and carrying her back up to the surface where she sucked in a breath and laughed, loud and shaky at the same time... but the sound broke off on a whimper as soon as she realized the water was a little too present on her nipples. And elsewhere.

She couldn’t feel the cloth of her bathing suit. At all.

“Burgess,” she gasped. “It happened.”

“Fuck.” He swam in her direction while looking around for Ozzie, glad to see the man was climbing the steep path back to the top of the cliff with his back turned. “Come here.”

Nodding, she swam to meet him. Beneath the surface, he took her bare hips in his hands and turned her around to face him, crowding her front to his warmth, the familiar texture of his hard, hair-covered chest. “Didn’t he say there was a cave behind the waterfall?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, let’s head that direction.” He looked around, both of them did, but there was no yellow in the immediate area. “You can hide while I find the suit.”

“That was amazing ,” she breathed, her head tilting back so she could see the cliff from which they’d jumped, smiling to acknowledge Apollo’s wave. “I want to do it again.”

“Me too, actually,” Burgess said slowly, surprising her. “But maybe we should get you a wet suit for next time.”

She snorted into his wet shoulder. “What were you thinking about on the way down?”

Too briefly, he looked uncharacteristically shy. “I was thinking I wish Lissa could see me. She wouldn’t believe it.”

Tallulah smiled to hide the fact that heat was crowding behind her eyes. “I think she would. I think she would even expect you to fly. You’re her superhero.”

His Adam’s apple slid up and down as they continue their progress toward the waterfall. “What were you thinking about on the way down?”

Apparently, cliff diving made everything clearer, or perhaps it just dislodged her filter, because the truth came spilling out in a big old, waterlogged confession. The truth as well as she knew it, anyway. Where she stood in relation to Burgess... the ground wasn’t firm, she only knew she wasn’t ready to say goodbye completely. “I was thinking I don’t know if I want to break up,” she blurted, her whole body turning to jelly. Wobbly, insubstantial jelly. “I was thinking... this morning I just needed to vent and get my frustration off my chest. I didn’t need an immediate solution, you know? I just wanted you to know what I’ve been going through. You didn’t have to try and fix it in two seconds, Burgess.”

They’d reached the edge of the waterfall and so she was yelling to be heard over the noise. Meanwhile, Burgess was staring down at her with an unreadable mask, but very clearly not breathing, not a single breath. “Are you saying you want to be with me, Tallulah?”

“I’m saying I...” Yes , screamed her head and her gut. Her heart, however, which had sustained the most damage, balked. “I’m saying I don’t know yet,” she said, sounding winded. Because she was. Mortally winded. “But it’s too soon to let you go. I can’t.”

Burgess’s chest rose and fell in a plummet. He ducked beneath the waterfall into the hollow behind it and Tallulah followed, the world turning darker and more muffled in an instant.

“Why?” he said, raggedly, taking her by the meat of her arms, his intensity yawning the pit in her stomach wider. Wider.

Once again, her wounded heart intervened, lassoing the words I love you and dragging them back into her mouth. The disappointment of her not saying those words were a visible blow to him. He closed his eyes and she closed hers, too, even while sliding her arms around his neck, her thighs wrapping tight to his hips, water lapping around them. “Can I show you, instead of tell you?”

“You’re not all here with me, Tallulah.” Their foreheads met, his hands slipping down her wet back to clutch her buttocks and rock her closer, his hips tilting in a way that drew a whimper from her throat. “Please, gorgeous, don’t break me like this.”

“I need you.”

Those three words weren’t fair, because she knew he’d cave.

Knew she could get what she desperately needed—to be connected to him again. It had only been a few hours since he’d started to shift away and her entire being bled as a result. Couldn’t he see that? Couldn’t intimacy be enough for now?

“You need me? Is that all?” Burgess waded out of the water, carrying her into the opening of the cave with his teeth bared against her mouth. “My survival depends on you.”

“I’m giving myself to you,” she whispered, rubbing her bare sex on the ridge inside his shorts, eager to be filled by his strength, his heat and hunger and urgency.

“You’re not giving yourself to me completely. You don’t think I can read you by now?” Even as frustration rippled through that harshly delivered statement, he was reaching down to untie his board shorts. “Fuck it, though, right? We’ll call it a massage.”

“No.” Slowly, she parted his lips with a lap of her tongue, suctioning him gently, before sinking into a long, wet kiss, their tongues meeting and retreating, going deeper, deeper until he was groaning, slapping her sex with the hard inches of his, stroking himself, his fist knocking into her inner thighs as he moved it, fast and rough. “It was making love and we both knew it,” she breathed against his mouth. “Every time we touched, that’s what it was.”

Burgess made a sound, a shiver wracking his big body. His voice was thick with rust when he spoke. “And now?”

“Now I’m scared to trust what I’m feeling.”

“How do I fix it?” he demanded, pressing the head of his arousal inside of her. Thrusting his hips in an upward drive and seating her in one savage move, leaving them both panting against each other’s mouth. “Tell me how to make you love me again,” he rasped, gripping her butt hard and working her up and down the stiff jut of his erection, his breath pelting her lips. “I will never, ever, hurt you again, Tallulah. I’ll jump off a much higher cliff first.”

He didn’t give her a chance to respond, because his mouth found hers and ruined it forever, kissing her with so much passion, tears formed in her eyes and her hips eagerly demanded more, more, bucking in time with the jerks of his hands, his thickness finding the deepest angles of her core, their wet bodies slip-sliding together, their groans steadily growing louder until the waterfall was no longer drowning them out and he had to keep his mouth stamped over Tallulah’s while he fucked her, raw and hard, while her toes dangled somewhere in the vicinity of his bent knees.

“God, Tallulah, baby, I need to come so bad.”

“I want it. Let me have it.” She rained kisses all over his perfect face, her hips hinging up and back, thighs beginning to tremble, along with the rest of her. From the intensity of the act, the riot of emotions breaking free and running like escaped felons inside of her chest. “Don’t keep it from me again, please.”

“I can’t. I’m not strong enough.” His eyes met hers, glazed, his tongue licking the side of her neck in a wonderfully obscene way, before finding her lips and weaponizing himself against them, lapping the inside of her mouth with a growl. “I’m hungry and your body is the only one that feeds me.”

“Devour me, then.” She constricted her inner walls, watching his face transform with the agony of pleasure, her own following suit with great pulses and the locking of muscles, the rocketing of her hips. “I’m going to eat you up, too. You feel that?”

“Feel it?” Burgess’s pumps grew disordered, his breath turning shallow, fingers digging harder into the flesh of her backside. “You smile at me, Tallulah, and I know I’ll feel it for centuries. You have no idea what this does to me. Fucking you. Making love to you. Watching my cock turn your mind blank. No. Idea. ” He growled one final word. “Mine.”

She bit at his mouth. “Mine.”

“Mine.”

The imminency of release was transforming both of their expressions, knowledge that the end, the beginning, the everything had arrived, their mouths surged together and fused, Tallulah’s sex tightening up around his shaft in an almost unbearable, prolonged ripple, and Burgess erupted inside and out, liquid heat flooding inside of her while he pressed a guttural shout into the side of her neck, his hands grinding her down violently and intuitively on his hardness in a way that was necessary and right and also agonizing, because it prolonged her orgasm until she was slapping his shoulders and writhing on that rigid pike, exciting him further, exciting herself further while stickiness ran down the insides of her thighs and the waterfall made them the sole humans on the face of the earth. In that moment, that’s exactly what she wanted.

To have no choices to make.

No feelings to deal with.

Just to... be. To stay and be and lose herself in what only this man made her feel.

But as soon as they finished crashing, down, down, down and recovering with gulps of air and calming hands, Burgess read her mind before she even had a chance, letting her down carefully and pulling her into his embrace, his lips pressing a kiss to her temples, her cheeks, her eyelids. “Yeah. We belong to each other. Period. No matter what. You just have to decide if you want to be each other’s together or apart, Tallulah.” He studied her face for a long moment, adoration etched into every one of his features, before kissing her mouth long and firm, stroking back her wet hair and pressing their foreheads together one final time, making eye contact that left her knees shaking. “I’ll go find your bathing suit.”