Holding On To Heaven (Allendale Four 2)

He reached for me under the water. It cooled my overheated skin. “I love you, Heaven Reeves.”

“I love you too, Jackson Hall. But if I get bitten by a snake, it’s your fault.”

He pulled me into a kiss and I realized that he was probably right.

A swim really did make it better.

10

Jackson

I thought I’d feel guilty.

I thought she’d want me to stop.

I thought that crossing that line between love and lust was definitive. Two different, unique things. Things that you didn’t do with someone you respected and loved.

You didn’t take them to the edge of a ball park and screw them on a floating dock, until you did, and that’s when you realized, well, I realized that the line was blurry and dammit, freaking amazing.

I didn’t enter my relationship with Heaven a virgin, but before her I’d never been in love. Not outside myself, my family, and my brothers. I was a player. Elusive. Handsome and charming. I knew it. The girls back home knew it and no one begrudged it.

All of that stopped the minute Heaven came into our lives. Stopped cold.

That girl…she’d been barreling down the tracks with me before she sat on my lap and dry-humped me into oblivion all those months ago. I came so. Fucking. Hard, and the craziest thing was that it was enough. It was. I didn’t have to claim her body. I had her heart.

But then we had that talk—the laying it on the line talk—about her needs and wants and desires. Not treating her like a fragile child. She was right, but the stuff she went through…it wasn’t okay. Oliver fucking cried the day he told us about walking in on her with those blades. How he barely made it there in time to stop her.

We swore then to treat her with kid gloves.

Well, I just took off the fucking gloves.

I walked across campus the next day trying to hold back my swagger—the I-just-made-love-to-a-beautiful-woman swagger. Buuuut, it was impossible and when Anderson saw me coming, he raised an eyebrow.

“What’s going on?” he asked. We waited here for Heaven before their class and suddenly nerves shot through me. What if she had regrets? What if I read the situation wrong?

And like that, I deflated.

In a low voice I said, “I took Heaven for a ride last night—she needed a break after seeing her dad.”

“How did that go? I know she was nervous.”

I shrugged. “Not great? Not awful? I think she wanted to blow off some steam.”

We didn’t ask. That was the deal—part of the Don’t Treat Heaven Like an Object arrangement. We didn’t discuss our sex lives with one another.

Anderson and I stood in a moment of awkward silence.

I cleared my throat. “We made some progress…on her request.”

He nodded. “And everything went okay.”

“Yeah. Like, fantastic, but…”

His eyes narrowed. “But what?” There was a threat in his tone.

“But nothing, swear. Jesus, Anderson, I treated her right. You know that.”

He relaxed and ran a hand through his hair. “Sorry. I know. You said ‘but’.”