I really wish it was something I wanted. I really wish I had some desire to fulfill my father’s legacy, but I don’t. I’ve never been built that way. As long as Woolf will eventually get his head out of his ass, I’ll be free to do what I really want with my life, which is to work in a career I love, have my daughter by my side, and some day… the fates willing… have a good woman by my side to share in it.

That, of course, makes me think of Casey. The woman I know virtually nothing about, yet share knowledge of one of her most intimate secrets. The woman who I have no clue whether she likes red or white wine, yet I know she sucks my cock like she owns it.

Yup… she pretty much owns it, and just thinking about that wet mouth wrapped around my dick starts to get me hard.

I made Casey give me her phone number before I left. She fought me on it, insisting that was a little too close for her comfort. So I pushed her down on the bed, stripped her bare, and ate her pussy like a mad man. And when she’d get close… I’d withhold her orgasm from her until she promised me the number.

She obviously relented, she came fantastically hard, and now I feel like calling her.

But this being Casey, I expect she might ignore me.

One, two, three rings and I’m shocked. She answers, “Hey stud. Missing me yet?”

It’s maddening, but I do miss her. I also know she really doesn’t want to know that, so I keep it more on a level she understands. “Miss fucking that beautiful body.”

And Christ… I fucked that body a lot in the two days I had with her before I left. I thought we might burn ourselves out or even get a little tired of being around each other, but it never happened. We were insatiable… unstoppable… completely ravenous for one another.

“Mmmm,” she murmurs into the phone, and I can hear the playfulness in her voice. I caught her at a good time. “I miss that big cock of yours.”

That right there makes me go fully hard.

As I start unbuttoning my jeans, I ask her, “Feel like talking dirty to me while I jack off?”

“Only if I can play with myself at the same time,” she says with a hoarse laugh, causing me to groan and go harder yet.

Goddamn, I fucking miss her.

“Get naked,” I tell her. “It’s on.”

Chapter 11

Casey

“Seriously, Casey… will you just look over there once and put those men out of their misery?” Gabby grumbles at me.

Ignoring her, I tilt my head back so my face gets the maximum exposure to the hot Carolina sun. I push my feet further into the sand, wiggling my hips a little to settle deeper into my beach chair. My eyes are closed and I want to get into a nice, hot daydream about Tenn.

The slap on my thigh gets my attention though, and I surge up into a sitting position to glare at Gabby. “What the hell, Gabs? I’m trying to relax here.”

“I don’t like being ignored,” she sniffs. “Besides… I’m tired of those guys over there with their lame attempts to play Frisbee just so they can get your attention. They keep throwing it closer and closer to us, so just freakin’ look over there and give them a smile or something to appease them.”

Turning my head to the right, I watch as two guys look at me with their tongues hanging out of their mouths and unbridled hope in their eyes. I shoot them the bird and then lay back down in my chair, closing my eyes again and conjuring up an image of a naked Tenn Jennings.

Slap.

“For fuck’s sake, Gabby,” I yell as I sit back up again and rub my stinging thigh. “I’d like to spend a few hours on my day off relaxing in peace on this beach, and you’re ruining it.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she asks me with narrowed eyes.

I blink at her and take note of the eyebrows drawn severely in and the flat line to her lips. She’s seriously dismayed with me. “What do you mean, ‘what’s wrong with me’?”

She flicks her hands at the men over my shoulder who I just flipped off. “You’re acting strange. Those dudes have money… I can tell by the amount of gold hanging off them, their fancy haircuts, and their designer beachwear. Granted, one has a bit of a pot belly, but the other is kind of cute.”

“So?” I ask, not even bothering to look back over my shoulder at them. No sense in giving any false encouragement.

“So,” she drawls out as if she’s getting ready to reveal the secret to world peace, “that’s not like you to ignore that. That’s your modus operandi. Those guys are right up your alley. The Casey Markham I know and would love to kill on any given day would have sauntered her lovely ass up to them and had a date within about three minutes flat. So I repeat… what the hell is wrong with you?”

I open my mouth to try for some reassurance but apparently, Gabby hasn’t run out of steam yet.

“And on top of that, you’ve been withdrawn… hiding out. You don’t hang with me anymore. So something is up,” she proclaims.

“I’m hanging with you now,” I counter.

“Only because I dragged your ass out of your house,” she counters back. Narrowing her eyes further, she then one-ups me. “Plus… I saw a used condom in your bathroom trashcan when I peed so I know you’ve had a man at your house, and you never have men at your house. Never.”

“Eww. Gross,” I mutter. “How’d I miss that?”

“Casey,” Gabby barks at me to get me focused and back on track.

“Is it time for lunch yet?” I hear and turn my head to see Hunter jogging up to us with his surfboard under his arm. He starts to jam the end down into the sand, but Gabby points back out to the ocean.

“Get back in the water, baby,” she says sweetly.

“What?” he asks in thorough confusion.

“I’m in the middle of berating Casey. She’s on the verge of spilling some juicy secrets to me. So get your ass back in the water and give me a few more investigative moments.”

Hunter just stares at Gabby a moment. Then he starts muttering curses as he jerks his surfboard back under his arm and heads back to the ocean.

True love at its finest.

“Now—” Gabby says as she flips her legs to the side so she can face me.

“You really have him pussy whipped,” I observe thoughtfully as I watch Hunter running back in to the water.

“Focus, Casey,” Gabby says, snapping her fingers in front of my face.

I turn to face her and with a sigh, I tell, “There’s nothing wrong with me. You’re imagining things.”

“I am not,” she says confidently. “There is something going on with you, and I want to know what it is right now. Tell me about the man you had at your house.”

Mmmmmm. Tenn.

The corners of my lips tip upward and my eyes flutter closed, remembering what he looked like just before he left a few days ago. When he kissed me so thoroughly, I knew I’d be feeling him on my lips for some time to come.

“Casey… so help me God, if you don’t let me in, I’m going to schedule an intervention with the entire crew,” Gabby warns.

And that really gets my attention because I totally don’t want the gang sniffing around in my business.

With a huff, I turn around in my chair to face her and say, “Fine. What do you want to know?”

Gabby blinks in surprise, completely thrown off by my sudden capitulation. When she stays mute, I smirk at her and start to lie back down on my chair again.

“What’s his name?” she blurts out, and my reprieve is gone.

I sit back up and face her. “Tenn.”

“Like the number?” she asks curiously.

“No, like the poet, Tennyson. He’s thirty-three, from Wyoming, visiting the area with Andrea’s brother Kyle, and he’s hung like a porn star. He fucks better than a porn star.”

“What does he do for a living?” she asks me, resting her arms on her knees as she leans forward.

“Used to be a mechanic, but he said he’s in between jobs right now.”