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Finn
& Winter’s story will be here on April 13th!
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Winter Donovan loves two things: her sister
and her sister's ex boyfriend. She's spent her whole life doing the right thing
except that one time, that night when Finn O'Malley looked hollowed out by his
father's death. Then she did something very wrong that felt terribly right.
Finn can't stop thinking about Winter and the
night and he'll do anything to make her a permanent part of his life, even if
it means separating Winter from the only family she has.
Their love was supposed to be unrequited but
one grief stricken guy and one girl with too big of a heart results in
disastrous consequences.
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CHAPTER ONE
March
WINTER
I didn't know which one of us looked more
surprised when Finn O’Malley walked into the Riverside Café at about ten
minutes before midnight. The café was
experiencing a lull in the post-late night, pre-bar closings time period, and
there were only two customers: myself and a man in his fifties over by the
counter.
And now Finn.
“Winter,” he said, his tone a cross between
disappointment and disbelief which I understood immediately. He’d come to this
run down café—far from where he lived and worked—to…well, I wasn’t sure what
he’d want other than get away from anyone who might know him.
And there I sat. The girl who’d had an
enormous, unrequited crush on her older sister’s high school boyfriend. And
said older sister might have been the worst girlfriend he’d ever had. If my
speeding heart was any indication, my crush was far from dead.
“Finn. Good to see you.” He looked terrible—or
as terrible as Finn could ever look. Tall with dark hair set against ivory skin
and the lean, muscular build of someone who did manual labor for a living. Finn
would never look bad.
But grief had hollowed out his cheeks, and his
shocking blue eyes were bloodshot. His inky black hair stood in clumps around
his head as if he’d run his fingers through it multiple times. He wore a gray T-shirt
that hugged his strong frame but had dirt smudges all over it. His worn jeans
displayed dust and grime.
He worked in construction—or more accurately,
he flipped houses, the last I’d heard. Not that I kept up on the doings of Finn
O’Malley that much.
His eyes shifted around the restaurant, as he
probably wondered how he could take a seat away from me and not appear too
rude. I solved his dilemma by grabbing my purse and library book and sliding
out of the booth.
“I was just going,” I said.
He licked his upper lip and I about died on
the spot. But I was an adult now. All of twenty-two years. Crushes might have
made my heart squeeze and my knees shake, but they didn’t paralyze me. Giving
him a tight smile, I walked toward the door. He didn’t move, and unless I was
going to walk around a table or two, I’d have to brush by him.
So I did.
And smelled him.
And suddenly I couldn’t leave.
The sour, sweet stench of alcohol was so
strong I wondered if he’d poured a bottle of vodka over his head. It was a familiar
fragrance because my sister had been wearing it regularly for the past ten
years. Her alcohol addiction, among other things, was a reason Finn and she
were exes when many people had thought they’d get married out of high school.
I backed up. “Did you drive here?”
The side of his mouth quirked up—not quite a
smile, more of a wry acknowledgment of my thought process. “I’m not drunk,” he
said. “I…it’s a long story.”
“I’ve got time.” I started back toward the
booth. “Come sit with me. My book was boring anyway.”
Good manners drove him to follow even if he
didn’t want to. He dropped into the opposite bench, and I pushed my water glass
toward him.
“Thanks.” He drained it in three gulps. I was
way too fascinated with the motion of his throat and the way that his Adam’s
apple signaled every gulp. He set the glass down carefully as if almost
surprised by his own sudden thirstiness.
Due to his long arms, his folded hands reached
halfway across the table. I kept my arms locked by my side so I wouldn’t
accidentally on purpose touch him.
My role was friend, not girlfriend, no matter
how many inappropriate fantasies I’d dreamed up when I was a girl.
The waitress came out and delivered another
glass of water and refilled my now empty one.
“I’ll have a burger. Plain. Order of fries,”
Finn rattled off without looking at the menu. He pointed at me. “You want
anything?”
I shook my head. “I’m good.”
The waitress left, and Finn stretched his long
legs out and leaned back into the booth, looking completely wiped. If I moved
my legs, even a little, I’d brush against him. I stayed still because I wasn’t
sure what I would do if I touched him. Something embarrassing, no doubt.
“What are you doing here?”
Clearing my throat, I managed to form a
coherent answer. “I just got off work. Closed tonight.”
Surprised, his eyebrows shot into his
forehead. “What are you doing that has you working until midnight?”
“I work at Atra, the ink shop two doors down.”
“Oh,” he started and then stopped. “I thought
you were working at a marketing firm.”
A tendril of pleasure sprang to life at the
idea of Finn keeping track of me. We may have been friends once, but my sister
was the connecting thread. And when she’d snapped their tie, Finn and I had
drifted apart like florets from a blown dandelion.
He’d floated one way and I’d floated another.
We’d lived in the same city going on three years now—since he got back from
attending an out of town university—but the first time I’d seen him since he
and Ivy had broken up had been at his father’s funeral a month ago.
“No, I was downsized but I still do freelance
design work for them and a couple other companies, but my primary job is
commissioned artwork at Atra. I also help around the shop, doing bookings and
stuff. Tonight I had a late consultation with a friend of Tucker’s. He owns the
shop,” I explained and then shut up, not wanting to ramble.
Finn nodded as if he found this interesting.
“Sounds like you are putting your talent to good use. I always thought your
work was tremendous.”
“Thanks. So what brings you here?”
He looked around. The man hunched over his
coffee at the counter hadn’t moved. “I just got off work too.”
“I thought you were flipping houses?”
“Like you, I had a change in jobs.” His voice
was grim. It didn’t take a genius to guess the change wasn’t a good one like
mine was. Or maybe he was just angry about life right now, which he had every
right to be.
“I know this sounds like a stupid Hallmark
card, but it does get better.” I couldn’t hold myself back any longer. I placed
my hand over his folded ones. “I promise.”
He tilted his head back, and his eyes
fluttered closed, his ridiculously long lashes feathering across the top of his
cheeks. Was he shutting out the pain or me? Or everything?
After long moments of silence, so long and so
quiet that I could hear the hum of the refrigeration unit that held bottles of
soda and beer behind the cash register, he spoke. “When I was thirteen, my dog
Hunter died. Dad and I had bought him when I was four. He’d developed some kind
of doggy liver disease, and we had to put him down. That was the worst kind of
pain, I thought. But that was like a pin prick, while Dad’s death is like a
dull knife dragging itself across my body one painful inch at a time.”
I bit down on my lip so I didn’t cry in front
of him. I remembered that pain, and hated that someone I cared about had to
suffer it too. “I’m not going to say it’s easy to get over a loss like that;
only that it does happen—eventually.”
He snorted, a rough and unhappy sound. “I have
been drinking. Not going to lie about that.” His eyes opened halfway, which was
probably for the best. The piercing blue came off as too beautiful to be real
and too mesmerizing to look away. “But not tonight. Tonight I decided to throw
my bottles against the wall instead of drinking them, and because I’m a stupid
fuck, I failed to realize I was standing in the splash zone.”
The food arrived before I could respond. He
pulled a napkin from the tabletop dispenser and shoved half his fries onto it.
“Eat or I won’t be able to.”
Obediently I put a fry into my mouth and
watched him dig in. Grief or no grief, he was still eating, which was a good
sign. And he didn’t seem drunk. No
slurred words, no inappropriate comments.
“Sorry I jumped to conclusions,” I said after
polishing off another fry.
“Don’t be. With your past, I can see why you’d
be concerned,” he said between bites. My
past. He was referring to dealing with my sister’s addictions, which had
spiraled out of control after our parents died when she was nineteen.
“She’s better now,” I said. “If you were
wondering.”
“Really?” Disbelief was clear in every long
drawn-out letter.
“Really. She hit a bad place shortly after her
release, but she’s been clean for…” I counted in my head, “almost thirty days.”
“That’s good. Good for
her and for you.” He popped the rest of the burger into his mouth and washed it
down with the entire glass of water.
“Did you chew that or inhale it?” I laughed,
remembering the days he’d linger in our kitchen eating anything and everything
Mom would cook.
“I haven’t eaten since noon so if I could have
just pressed it into my face and absorbed it via osmosis, I would have.” We
shared a laugh, just a small one, but I was breathless by the end. His smile
was too much for me, and it was the first one I’d seen from him for so long. It
lit up his eyes and revealed the deep creases on the corners of his mouth and
his even, perfect white teeth.
“No burgers on the west side of the city?” I
joked to disguise my growing and uncomfortable desire for him. Now was not the
time nor the place. He was not ever to be mine.
His grin grew wider. “Why do you think I’m
here? Trying to avoid being seen by my roommates. I don’t know if you met them
at the funeral?” I shook my head. I’d only had eyes for Finn. “I live with four
of them. Adam Rees is one.” Adam was a friend of Finn’s from high school. He
had a famous father. That was about all I remembered, but I nodded anyway, and
he continued. “Their idea of helping me cope is to get me involved in increasingly
dangerous activities.”
“What have your roommates made you do?”
“What haven't they made me do is the question.
I've been to strip clubs, paintballing, ATVing, a firing range, rock climbing,
fishing." Finn tapped a finger on the table to punctuate each activity.
“I've got two former Marines living with me, and I think they’re planning to
push me out of an airplane. So I can't go home."
“You can stay with me,” I said with a
nonchalant shrug.
His eyes drifted around my face, lingering on
my lips and then dropping lower. I could feel my unbound breasts tighten under
the cotton of my T-shirt. I hated bras and was small and perky enough I could
get away without wearing them. The only problem was I had fat, eraser-sized
nipples, and right now they were pointing directly at Finn. He stared at them
for what seemed like an eternity.
“Is that right?” His voice was husky.
The air in the room disappeared, and I barely
had enough breath to croak out, “No, Ivy’s there. She and I live together now.
Have for—” I paused, not wanting to bring up her recent incarceration, “—for a
couple of months,” I finished awkwardly.
He made a noise in the back of his throat, one
I couldn’t decipher. “So have you been seeing anyone?”
I didn’t know what to make of that. Why was he at all remotely interested in my
love life?
“No, not recently. Not since—”—” I broke off
again.
“Not since Ivy got out of prison,” he said
dryly.
“You heard?”
“I heard.” He was done with the subject of Ivy
and that was okay with me. It made me uncomfortable to talk about her while I
was perving on her ex-boyfriend.
Anxious to change the subject, I asked, “What
about you?”
“I don’t think what I’ve been doing
constitutes as seeing anyone. Not
since my dad died. Not feeling it.” His
blue gaze pinned me against the booth. I heard what he wasn’t saying out loud.
He had been sleeping around and from the interested way he was eyeing me, the
suggestion was I could be next. “I’ve been trying not to feel for a while but
tonight? Maybe tonight should be different.”
It wasn’t a question; it was an invitation.
And all the teenage feelings of longing and lust rushed over me until I was dry
mouthed and full of want.
He looked out the window, considering
something, and then back toward me. “You had a crush on me for a long time. Am
I taking advantage of you?”
I didn’t pretend I was confused about what he
was asking, even though it was a bit mortifying to be confronted by my
unreciprocated feelings. I shook my head. “No. I think it’s the other way
around.”
“It’s not. Why don’t we get out of this
place?” He stood and threw two twenties on the table and waited for me to lead
the way out.
I was acutely aware of his large frame behind
me as I walked carefully across the tiled floor to the entrance. The heat of
his body nearly burned me as he pressed against my back to reach around me with
a large, work-roughened hand to push the glass door open.
He placed a hand on my lower back and guided
me to his truck. It was a monster of a thing with big black tires and a
menacing silver grill.
“You really expect me to climb into this
thing?”
He opened the door and in one swift motion
lifted me onto the seat. “I forgot what a bitty thing you are.”
“I’m not small. You’re just very tall. With a
very large truck.”
His hands didn’t release my waist; instead, he
moved closer. I opened my legs to make space for him.
“Don’t worry, Winter. Everything’s going to
fit fine.” With a firm hand on my neck, he drew my face down to his. I heard
his lips part before I felt them press against mine.
A thousand thoughts tumbled in my head. Would
Ivy be okay with this? Should I really be taking advantage of a grief-stricken
man? How were his lips soft and firm at the same time? Could I have an orgasm
from just kissing? Was this what love
felt like?
His mouth took mine in a firm possession—no
hesitation. He wanted this if not me. And I took what he gave me because
when did a girl ever get to kiss the boy she’d crushed over for years? Hardly
ever.
Only in the movies.
I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and dug
my hands into his hair, giving into every desperate desire I’d always tried to
stomp down.
He groaned and pulled me tighter to him, the
seat somehow perfectly situated at groin level so I felt the strong, heated
evidence of his desire through our
jeans. He rubbed his tongue along the edges of mine. He outlined my lips and
then stroked the flat of his tongue against the roof of my mouth.
Even if I hadn’t had a crush on him, I would
have been weak-kneed. Finn O’Malley knew how to kiss. He wasn’t just thrusting
his tongue into me, he was exploring me, learning me, tasting me.
A large hand cupped one breast and squeezed it
tightly. I cried out, part in pleasure and part in surprise at how the slight
pain felt so good.
“Too rough?” he asked, pulling away.
I shook my head. He gave a half smile and
yanked down the vee of my T-shirt until my bare breast popped out. The overhead
light had gone off in the truck, but there was enough moonlight that anyone
coming out of the café could probably see what we were doing.
But any concern I had ended when he placed his
mouth over my ripe nipple. With the same lavish care he took kissing me, he
explored every inch of my breast. The top received a dozen wet kisses and tiny
nips. The areola he licked thoroughly, and the nipple was sucked on so hard and
with such long draws that I felt as if a string connected my nipples to my
pussy. A string I hadn’t known existed.
While he sucked, he made low growls of delight
that fueled my lust. I squeezed my legs around his hips, drawing him closer,
drawing him inside where only he could relieve the painful ache between my
legs.
“Fuck,” he rasped, breaking our connection and
backing away. The cool spring air made my taut nipple tighten even more. “Not
here.” He gently straightened my T-shirt and then tucked me inside the truck.
We drove a short distance to a chain link
fence that opened upon a press of a remote.
“What is this place?” I tried to catch my
breath. Peering out the window into the dimly lit night, there appeared to be
nothing but bare land filled with machinery and surrounded by fences. Beyond it
was the river.
“My new job. Left to me courtesy of Mr. Sean
O’Malley.” There was a faint twinge of bitterness. “Dad wanted to stamp his
signature on the city and chose this downtown revitalization project. But then
he died and left it to me, so I don’t know whether to love or hate him.”
“It’s okay to feel both. Love and hate,” I
clarified unnecessarily.
“I suppose you’re right.” He stopped the truck
in front of a trailer.
“You can cry you know. I did a lot of that.”
“I like to have my emotional release come a
different way.”
“Like what?”
He shifted in the truck seat to look at me.
His hand reached out to cup my face. “You’ve grown into a very beautiful woman.
I’d very much like to take you inside the trailer and fuck you against the
wall.”
“That’s kind of a coarse invitation.”
His thumb ran over my lower lip, using some of
the moisture of my mouth to wet my lip. I shivered, and a grim but knowing
smile spread across his face.
“It’s the only kind I’ve got in me. All the
tender emotion has been eaten up by my dad’s death. I want to lose myself in
you, Winter.”
He got out of the truck and opened my door,
giving me an expectant look. Was I in or out?
I knew what he was saying. It wasn’t that he
loved me, wanted to date me, or wanted me to be his girlfriend. He’d probably
be disappointed if he saw me next to him tomorrow morning. He’d lie awake
wondering if he had to chew off his own arm to escape. He was offering a hard fuck
in his trailer, not lovemaking in his bed.
I knew all of this and still wanted him.
Maybe the sex would burn away his mystery, and
I wouldn't internally sigh when I heard his name. Maybe it wouldn't. But it was
a risk worth taking, and I planned to get my money's worth.
“How many condoms do you have?” I answered
boldly.
His eyes glittered in the moonlight. “How many
do I need?”
“Depends on your stamina and recovery time.”
“Honey, you're going to have a hard time
walking out of the trailer when we're done.”
My heart ached at his words, but I took his
hand and followed him inside.
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Woodland Series Reading Order
Undeclared (Book One) free 4/10
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Unspoken (Book Two) $.99 4/10
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Unraveled (Book Three) $1.99 4/10
Amazon http://amzn.to/19FKYqY
About the Author:
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Jen Frederick lives with her husband, child,
and one rambunctious dog. She's been
reading stories all her life but never imagined writing one of her own. Jen
loves to hear from readers so drop her a line at jensfrederick@gmail.com.
Website: http://jenfrederick.com/blog/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jensfred
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