Fornever yours, p.1
Fornever Yours, page 1
Fornever Yours
NATASHA ANDERS
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2022 by Natasha Anders
All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by Natasha Anders
Chapter One
Regrets!
Elizabeth Finch had a few.
No! More than a few.
She had so, so many regrets.
There was a naked man in bed with her. And not just any man—she directed a quick glance over her shoulder to reconfirm his identity and stifled a groan when her eyes verified what she’d already known—her worst enemy. If this were a comic book, and Beth the hero, this man would be her arch nemesis.
God, this was an enormous mistake.
Huge.
Massive
Colossal.
Gargantuan.
Wait…was colossal bigger than gargantuan? The thought tripped her up for a second, when the behemoth—ooh good one—in bed beside her shifted and groaned.
Crap! She wanted to get out of here before he woke up. Worse than falling into bed with her arch nemesis, was waking up the next day to witness the smugness on his aggravatingly handsome face as he smirked about his latest conquest…Her.
Ugh. No thank you.
She peered around the room, assessing her options. Thank God they’d come to his place last night. Kicking him out of her house would’ve been a lot more awkward than simply sneaking out of his.
Beth wasn’t too fond of confrontation, and yet she always found herself in the midst of one whenever she and Gideon Hawthorne happened to be within five feet of each other. Which was not great since she saw him so often. Her best friend, Cat, was married to his best friend, Campbell Ryan, and as a result Gideon and Beth were forced to see each other regularly.
Worse, he lived much too close for comfort. He’d moved into her sleepy little seven-house cul-de-sac directly across the street from her, in the suburb of Newlands in Cape Town, just a few months ago and now Beth saw him every day.
Not ideal.
She gingerly pinched the thick wrist flung across her waist, between her thumb and forefinger, and held her breath as she lifted it inch by excruciating inch. His arm was limp and heavy and didn’t move as easily as she’d hoped it would.
He muttered something incomprehensible and she froze, her breath catching in her throat as she waited to see if he would settle again.
His body gave off enough heat to power a small city and Beth instinctively found herself wanting to huddle closer to all that lovely warmth.
No. Damn it.
This weakness was exactly why she was in this ridiculous position in the first place. Naked—oh GOD she was naked!—and in bed with the most irritating man in the world.
No, wait…
The Most Irritating Man in the World.
Slightly better. Only it needed to be highlighted in caps and bolds, possibly in italics as well. And underlined for good measure.
The Most Irritating Man in the World
God, she had to get herself up and out of here. She needed to think about how she was going to proceed from this moment forward, and she couldn’t very well do that while she was cuddled up to his hot—on oh so many different levels—and hard body. Beth might not like him, but she was honest enough to admit to herself that he was one of the best-looking men she had ever met.
Which could explain the guy’s oversized ego.
She refused to think about what else was oversized about him. And she absolutely refused to blush while not thinking about it.
He stopped mumbling and sighed, while his breathing settled into a nice deep, even rhythm again. Beth relaxed and continued to move his arm until she’d lifted it just enough to carefully wriggle out from beneath it.
The edge of the bed was a mile away. Trust Gideon to have a king-sized bed. It took forever to slide her legs over the side of it. The drapes were drawn and the room was gloomy. Added to that, she had no idea where the heck her glasses were, which meant she couldn’t see further than three feet in front of her, before everything became a dizzying blur.
Where were her clothes?
She tugged a pillow from the head of the bed, holding it up in front of her body in an attempt to cover her nudity until she found the dress that she’d worn to Cam’s birthday party last night. But she couldn’t spot the damned thing anywhere in the room.
Gideon’s bedroom was in a shambles and she flushed as she recalled how it had gotten that way.
Do not think about it.
Don’t!
Her eyes helplessly tracked to the huge easy chair in the corner and her flush deepened.
Gideon bent her over the back of the chair, his hands reaching down to possessively squeeze her butt.
“I love this arse. I’ve never told you that before, have I?” The already deep timbre of his voice had roughened into a sexy, gravelly rasp that caused her naughty bits to spasm helplessly.
He flipped her dress up over her butt and made a harsh, tortured sound of appreciation.
The flashback was both welcome and unwelcome. Unwelcome, since the recollection of how ridiculously turned on she’d been by his short, sharp—often crude—exhalations of appreciation was enough to make her cringe now. And welcome because she finally recalled where she’d lost both her panties and her dress.
She hastened to the corner and squeaked in fright when she nearly face-planted in the middle of the carpeted floor as she tripped over one of his large sneakers.
The violent lurch forward dislodged the pillow from her grip and sent it flying a few feet in front of her. She muttered bad temperedly beneath her breath as she caught her balance and hastened to retrieve the pillow. She was bending over to pick it up when she heard a long, deep groan coming from the bed.
“Fuuuuuuck, why is there a little dude with a hammer banging away at my frontal lobe?” Gideon’s grumpy morning voice was dipped in dark chocolate and sprinkled with crushed rocks. Beth loathed that she found the sound of it so damned sexy.
She froze on the spot and risked a peek at him over her shoulder. He was pushing himself up onto his elbow and blinking at her in confusion.
She winced when she saw the gradual recognition in his eyes and tried not to cringe when that recognition was immediately followed by a regretful and heartfelt, “Shit.”
Nice, just what every woman wanted to hear the morning after the worst mistake of her life.
“Lizzy?”
She hated it when he called her that. Which, of course, was why he persisted in calling her that.
“Aah Christ, Lizzy…”
She became aware, and self-conscious, of the fact that she was bent over with her naked butt sticking up for his viewing pleasure. Mercifully, he appeared too distracted to take a verbal potshot at her about it.
Self-conscious, she straightened to her full—annoyingly lacking—height of five-foot-one inch and turned around to face him. Pillow firmly in place over the bits that he’d had such an absolute blast exploring last night.
Very thoroughly exploring.
“G-Gideon.” She managed to inject some formality into her voice and pushed her wavy fall of brown hair out of her face. She took a deep breath, composing herself, and formed the words in her brain before allowing them to pass her lips. “I think we can both agree that last night was a mistake.”
She was proud of the steady assertiveness in her voice then nearly kicked herself when his lack of response prompted her to add a small, uncertain, “Right?”
He glowered at her for a long moment, before barking, “What the fuck happened?”
Wait, what?
“Don’t you? Uhm…” Crap! How drunk had he been? Had he even been capable of consenting to her clumsy advances? Had she been the one to make the first move? She didn’t think so, it had felt mutual. They’d been dancing and then sort of leaned in toward each other, and…
She was anxious at the possibility of having misread him last night. He hadn’t appeared that drunk. “Don’t you remember what happened?”
He pushed himself up into a sitting position, and groaned, one large hand going to his forehead. She tried not to drop her eyes to his ripped, naked chest.
Not appropriate, considering her current concerns.
“Yeah, ’course I remember, but I don’t know why we did what we did.”
“I d-didn’t force or coerce you to—”
He interrupted her with a sarcastic little chuckle.
“Don’t worry Lizzy-bit, I won’t be reporting you to the cops for assault or anything, I wanted to fuck you. I just don’t know why.”
He’d never made a secret of the fact that he didn’t like her. She knew he thought she was bossy, and irritating, and judgmental. Which she was—around him. He was such a slacker and he annoyed the crap out of her.
Take this house for example. He’d moved in here because Cam owned it and—as far as Beth knew—that meant Gideon could get it at a third of the usual rental price. God only knew where he had lived before. In the two years Beth had known him, she’d been happy not to have that information.
He was the worst kind of man-child. She had no idea what he did to earn a living, and when she’d asked him, he had leered at her and told her that he was gigolo.
A reply that she was actually inclined to believe. Since he had moved into this house three months ago, there’d been a steady stream of women of all ages traipsing in and out at all hours. It wasn’t hard to guess what he was doing with them.
It made her queasy to know that she’d succumbed to his questionable charms as well. When had she become such a cliché?
“It was a mistake,” she said. “A momentary aberration. We were both in a weird space.”
“You were crying,” he recalled, his voice grim. “Before we danced, I found you crying on the patio. You never told me why.”
“It’s not important. Can we just move on from this, please? And forget it ever happened?”
He rubbed his beautiful eyes, which looked bleary from lack of sleep, before reaching back to massage the nape of his neck. His bicep bulged with the movement and Beth’s throat went dry.
Damn it. She was being so basic right now. His masculine beauty had been distracting enough before this. Due to some unfortunate voyeuristic bad habits she’d developed since he’d moved in across the road from her, Beth had known what lay beneath his usual uniform of old t-shirts and butt-hugging ripped jeans. But that had always been from a safe distance. Now that she’d been up close and personal with his perfect body, it was going to be difficult to get the image of a naked Gideon Hawthorne out of her head.
She had also known of his tattoos, but she’d never been close enough to appreciate how beautiful they were. A full sleeve wrapped around his bicep and down over his left arm, which also extended over his shoulder and halfway down his broad back, as well as, a half-sleeve on his right forearm. Cryptic, beautifully designed artistic pieces.
“Why were you crying?” he persisted. She glared at him, annoyed that he was pushing this.
She didn’t want to think about the devastating day she’d had yesterday.
Not now. Not in front of him. Not when—combined with the disastrous mistake she’d made last night—it would send her spiraling again. She needed to be at home.
Needed time to process everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours.
“That’s none of your business. I’m going to get dressed, leave, and forget this whole thing ever happened. I’d like for you to do the same.”
“It’s going to be hard for you to forget the most amazing night of your life, Lizzy-bit.”
The ego of the man. It annoyed her that she was also fascinated—and a little turned on—by the fact that the mild lilting Scottish burr of his was thicker this morning. He tended to code switch around their friends and the accent was usually barely noticeable, but right now those rolling r’s were coming thick and fast. And it was making her knees wobble a bit. She refused to let him see that though.
“Get over yourself, please,” she grumbled, backing away from him with the pillow still clasped in front of her.
His lips angled upward in a lazy, sexy grin. He leaned back against the headboard and folded a long arm behind his head. His muscles, so beautifully delineated beneath all that smooth, tanned skin, bunched and tensed with the movement and her throat went dry as saliva pooled in her mouth.
“Three—no four—orgasms, was it?”
“I was faking it,” she lied.
Aah, the irony. Beth usually did fake it. She often found sex boring, messy, and overhyped. She couldn’t honestly say that she enjoyed it much.
Usually.
Last night, however, had been primal, crazy, unbelievably hot and—yes—those four orgasms had been mind-blowingly real.
Why? Why him? Was it his size? His penis was long and girthy. It had filled and stretched her and had hit her spot with unerring accuracy—something only her trusty g-spot vibrator had been able to do before. Beth wasn’t entirely sure if that was because the man himself knew his stuff, or if it was because of the meaty heft of that beautiful penis.
Stop thinking about it.
She continued to backtrack toward the chair, hoping she wouldn’t trip over another unseen obstacle, just wanting to get out of here without humiliating herself even further.
He laughed at her words. The sound was sleep roughened but loud and filled with genuine amusement.
“Shit, I didn’t know you could be this funny, Lizzy-bit. You’re usually so fucking uptight.”
“Don’t call me that and I’m n-not uptight, I merely find your company tiresome.”
Jeez, that sounded uptight as hell. Even to her.
He laughed again, attractive crinkles forming at the corners of his eyes while his perfectly even, perfectly white teeth sparkled at her from between those sensuous lips. He had a gorgeous mouth, featuring a thin, wide, wickedly curved cupid’s bow resting atop a luscious full lower lip. His smile was the full package—flawless teeth, beautiful lips, laugh lines around the eyes, and dimples.
Frikking dimples.
No one person should be so blessed in the physical beauty department.
But there he sat, Mr. Perfect. With the gorgeous body, the stunning face, thick, wavy—too long—black hair, with just a hint of a widow’s peak, a straight, perfectly proportioned nose, all nicely tied together by the most striking pair of eyes she had ever seen.
Deep pools of gray with arresting striations of blue, it was hard to look away from them. Add to that the fact that he also had long, thick black lashes and straight dark eyebrows…and he was just too damned good to be true.
And that irritated Beth to no end.
Beth had first met Gideon at one of the lowest points of her life—yet despite that—she had still found herself so diverted by him that she’d embarrassed herself by staring at him silently like an idiot. Worse, she’d then tripped over her feet and—most alarming of all—had found herself completely unable to speak.
Her tongue had felt swollen, her throat constricted, and it had sent her into a panic. Those beautiful eyes had openly mocked her reaction before he’d dismissed her with a disdainful little smirk.
So rude.
Beth’s response to him had mortified and frightened her. She wasn’t so shallow as to be affected by someone’s physical attractiveness, and yet her unprecedented response to him had spoken for itself. She’d resented the crap out of him because of that. She still did, actually.
Anybody who had the power to turn her into the tangled tongue girl she’d worked so hard to move on from, was best avoided.
And her dislike of the man deepened whenever she was forced to spend time in his presence. Yet oddly, it was that intense dislike which had helped her eventually overcome her initial terrifying inability to speak in his presence. She was often so pissed off with him that the words she needed to say in order to verbally eviscerate him came fast and smoothly.
He was offensive, abrasive, lazy, egocentric, and deliberately, infuriatingly dismissive of her every opinion.
