Luke Harper was finally starting to settle into his life – a life that had previously been full of more heartbreak and pain than most people ever experienced. He had a job he loved, and was blissfully content in his on-again, off-again relationship with the striking, and highly sexual, Holly. But, life throws Luke another curveball with the arrival of the alluring April, a woman stuck in a tumultuous, violent marriage to a famous athlete. Luke soon finds himself torn between what is safe, familiar, and right, and what is dangerous, unknown, and forbidden.

“My fingers are sticky,” she said, holding them up near my face.

“Well, if you weren’t such a messy eater you wouldn’t have that problem.”

She laughed as I grabbed her hand and put her fingers in my mouth. I tasted blackberry.

“That just really turned me on,” she said.

She jumped to her feet and started backing away from me.

“Where are you going?” I asked, still sitting on the sand.

“Away from you!” she laughed. “My mom always warned me about men who randomly sucked on your body parts.”

“What did she say about them?” I asked.

“That they’d get you pregnant and ruin your life.”

“Let’s test that theory.”

I jumped up quickly, and she let out a startled scream. If someone had been watching from a distance, they probably would have thought something awful was going down.

She took off running down the beach, her long legs propelling her smoothly through the sand. My initial impression of her having probably been an avid lifelong runner were being proven true.

Thankfully, I was taller and had spent years running for baseball training. I began to make ground on her.

She glanced behind herself as she ran and let out another startled scream when she realized I was much closer than she expected me to be.  She tried turning on the jets, but I was still gaining on her. I reached my arms out and grabbed hold of her shoulders.

“Help” she yelled to no one in particular.

We were both breathing heavily, and when she turned around to face me I pushed her down onto the sand.

I knelt down between her legs and put a hand on each one.

“These things sure do move quickly.”

“That’s not all they do.”

She leaned up and grabbed the neck of my shirt, pulling me down toward her.

I hadn’t kissed a girl on the beach like this since I was in high school. There was something sexy about it: laying in the sand, waves crashing at the shore, not a soul in sight.

We rolled around in the sand for a while, kissing, touching, breathing heavily. A couple of people even walked by, but we took no notice.

Finally, we stopped after I rolled her onto her back and sand fell off of my arms and onto her face.

She playfully made spitting noises trying to get the sand out of her mouth, acting like she was drowning under a pile of it.

I stood up, and then reached out my arm to help her up.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

JJ Rossum traveled the world as a child, and called many places “home”. Currently, home is Portland, Oregon, where he is at work on other novels that were hatched while people watching during many airport layovers.

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