The view isn’t good enough.
The carpet’s too old.
The front door sticks.
The bathroom isn’t big enough.
As we walk through the last house on the list today, I take in the open and airy living room that overlooks the Atlantic, a well-designed kitchen, brand-new hardwood floors, and a huge master bedroom that has a bathroom so big that it has a Jacuzzi tub. It falls well within the budget Tenn told me he had, which is apparently quite healthy due to some serious savings and equity from his house he sold in Wyoming.
“I dare you to find something wrong with this place,” I tell Tenn as we step out onto the back deck.
He walks up to the railing, places his hands there, and leans forward while staring at the ocean. His profile is as stunning as the full frontal, and I stare at this beautiful man while he stares at the ocean.
“I don’t like it,” he finally says.
“What the hell, Tenn?” I ask in exasperation. “What could possibly be wrong with this place?”
Blue eyes stay focused on the water but he speaks directly to me. “You’re not living here. That’s what’s wrong with it.”
Tenn’s face turns slowly to me and his eyes are turbulent… swirling with something that I would say almost borders on agitation. He turns his entire body my way, casually resting an elbow on the railing and clasping his hands together.
“Cat got your tongue, Goldie?” he asks wickedly.
I give a small shake to my head and practically stutter out, “Are you saying you want to live together?”
One minute, he’s leaning there all casual yet self-assured, and the next minute, he has me turned so my back is to the railing and he’s kissing me so hard I bend backward. His kiss conveys a message to me loud and clear. He’s possessive and he wants me in his bed, wherever that may be.
When he finally pulls away, I almost whimper at the loss of his mouth against mine. I loosen my fingers, which I find had somehow unknowingly fisted hard onto his t-shirt, and blow a huff of breath out.
“At the risk of getting attacked again,” I say as I smooth my hand over my hair in an effort to appear calmer, “are you saying you want to live together?”
“Yeah, Goldie,” he says with a small smile, reaching a hand up to absently tug on a lock of my hair. “I want to be in your bed every night.”
“But you’d probably be there anyway if we had separate places,” I point out matter-of-factly.
“And I want to be in your bed in the morning and on the couch when you get home from work. I want to eat breakfast and dinner together, and lunch when we can. I want to share closet space with you and figure out our bills together. I want to fight for space on the bathroom sink, and I want you to yell at me for leaving my clothes all over the floor. I want to know that when I think of the word home, it’s the place where your ass resides with me. I want the words “home” and “Casey” to mean the same thing to me.”
I reach my hands back to steady myself against the rail, because the feeling seems to have gone out of my legs. My voice is shaky… foreign sounding. “That may have been the sweetest, most romantic thing I think I’ve ever heard in my life.”
Tenn’s blue eyes lighten up and start to sparkle. He prowls forward and steps into my body, hands going to my hips. He dips his face to look at me and says softly, “So romantic we can move in together?”
My arms smooth up the hard lines of Tenn’s chest, grazing softly around to the back of his neck where my fingers disappear into his black hair. “Don’t you think this is awful fast?”
“No.”
“No?” I ask incredulously. “Just… no?”
“What more do you want me to say, Casey?” he asks affably. “I’m crazy about you. I want to be around you as much as possible. You didn’t mind me staying with you these last several weeks. We cohabitate quite nicely together, if I do say so myself. So, no… I don’t think it’s too fast.”
I pull back from our embrace and turn to face the ocean. He comes up behind me, wraps his arms around my waist, and rests his chin on my head. We both gaze out over the beauty of the ocean, and I wonder out loud, “What will my friends say? My family?”
A small rumble of laughter from Tenn’s chest vibrates up my back. “Do you really care? The woman who hasn’t cared a damn bit what people think of her for the last eight years?”
That’s true enough. I’ve never cared what anyone’s thought of me… well, except maybe my parents. I mean… I didn’t like when they’ve been disappointed in me but hell, even their most disappointed looks are filled with so much love, it really doesn’t pack much of a punch.
My friends will understand. The adventurous ones like Gabby and Andrea will pat me on the back and say, “Shack up, girl.”
The romantic ones like Savannah and Alyssa will just give me knowing smiles and silent approval with dreamy sighs.
Now my brothers… that might present a problem, but only in an overprotective kind of way. The good thing is that I at least know they like Tenn already, and they both moved in pretty fast with Gabby and Alyssa.
My parents… I really have no clue what they’d think.
So, there’s really only one thing to do.
Turning back around to face Tenn, I tell him, “I want you to come to dinner at my parents’ house so they can meet you.”
His eyes light up and those sexy lips quirk. “Want them to check me out first, huh? Get their stamp of approval?”
“No,” I tell him candidly and with my chin raised up. “I don’t need their approval. I say we can give this a try… at my house… for a while and see how it goes. I just want you to meet my parents so they can finally see that I’ve got my head out of my ass when it comes to relationships.”
Tenn throws his head back, and I get a flash of white straight teeth as he starts laughing. When he looks back at me, he says, “Fuck Casey… I adore you so much.”
I adore you too, I say with my inside voice, and hope that one day I can say that with my outside voice too.
Chapter 22
Tenn
I wasn’t nervous about the prospect of dinner with Casey’s parents. She, however, assumed I was and gave me a knee-buckling blow job not long before we left, I suppose in an effort to relax me. I wanted to tell the sweet minx that I didn’t need it but damn… with her on her knees before me, wrapping those lips around my dick. Yeah, well, I wasn’t about to tell her I didn’t need it. Sure as fuck wanted it, but didn’t need it.
Casey has babbled the entire way as she directs me to her parents’ house in Avon, which is about an hour south of Nags Head. We decided to take her Jeep since rain was forecasted for the early evening, but as has become our ritual, I’m driving.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve come to learn a lot about her family. While I know we spend an inordinate amount of time having sex, we spend a good amount of time before and after talking.
Once she got past the emotional block of sharing herself with a man on an intellectual and emotional level, she sort of blossomed. This specifically came on the heels of her ditching Jeff Parkhurst in the restaurant and seeing me waiting on my bike for her. It doesn’t mean she tells me all her secrets, and I can tell she’s still holding back a bit, but she’s definitely more open and free with herself. Definitely not guarded the way she used to be.
She’s pretty much an open book when it comes to her family, and I believe that comes from absolute and unconditional love between everyone. I’ve come to learn a lot about her mom, Lillian, who is a nurse, and her dad, Butch, who is a fisherman. Despite what Jeff Parkhurst thought, Casey didn’t exactly grow up poor. She wasn’t rich, but her parents provided a nice, middle-class upbringing for her and her brothers. They had enough money to support Hunter’s fledgling surfing career as he grew up, and with it looking like Brody was on his way to medical school being the brainiac in the family, they had plenty of money set aside in savings for him. Sadly, they ended up using that for his legal fees, but nothing could derail the disaster of him getting convicted and sent to prison for the drunk-driving accident that claimed a man’s life.