Somewhere on St. Thomas: A Somewhere Series Romance by Toby Neal

stared at his bronzy-brown, shoulder-length hair, fluttering in the breeze off the bay.
    Of course? I thought he’d said he was on a mission to see and experience. That’s what he’d told me when I’d met him in Saint Thomas. Back then, he’d seemed just like so many rootless young men traveling through the Virgin Islands before him.
    “What is your degree in?”
    “Why are you asking me this now?” He narrowed those cobalt eyes on my face.
    “I’m not sure. I’ve just been thinking…I might have been wrong about you.”
    He cocked his head at me, his gaze full of secrets. “That’s exactly what I was hoping for by putting us on time-out.”
    “Time-out sucks,” I said. He laughed.
    I’d employed all sorts of underhanded tactics all week to wear down his resolve not to do anything sexual with me. I took every opportunity to snuggle and rub against him. He’d pulled away like I was leprous. I flirted outrageously, licking everything from straws to ice-cream cones suggestively, and he’d just looked away. I’d even slid a hand into his pants one day and incurred wrathful flashing blue eyes and a forceful removal of my hand.
    “Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much,” I’d said, to which he did not reply.
    I was so sexually frustrated that I wondered if it were possible to spontaneously combust, just start having a nonstop orgasm right in public. Right here at the railing. Eyes rolled back in my head, body twitching. I might be a virgin, but I knew about orgasms and knew when I needed one.
    The thought made me smile. That would fix him for holding out on me.
    He turned and caught my smile. “What?”
    “I was just thinking that I’m so sexually frustrated right now I might just…start coming apart at the seams. Right here. Right now.” I held his eye.
    The color rose like the red in a thermometer under my redhead’s skin as I blushed involuntarily at my own boldness, but I took a leaf from Meg Ryan in the new movie When Harry Met Sally . I began to pant.
    To moan.
    I arched my back, holding on to the railing, thrusting my breasts forward. I never broke eye contact with his hard blue gaze.
    “Ohhhh…” I moaned. My breath hitched as I arched my back in invitation.
    Rafe’s eyes widened in shock, then darkened as his pupils expanded. His nostrils flared. His hands gripped the steel railing hard.
    “Don’t,” he whispered hoarsely, and I suddenly knew he wasn’t as indifferent to me as he’d been pretending all week, damn him for deciding to be a gentleman.
    He was suffering, too.
    Good.
    Fellow park visitors yanked their kids away as I continued my performance.
    “Oh, oh…I need you,” I panted huskily, and felt the flush of whole-body arousal tighten my nipples to diamond points and loosen my knees. Heat suffused and pooled in my lower abdomen. “Please. Please. I can’t wait any longer.”
    What had started out in play had become a real confession.
    He grabbed me by the arm and frog-marched me away from the view and the crowd. I could feel his anger and arousal in every powerful stomp of his feet, in the way his long fingers bit into my upper arm and in the rigid set of his shoulders.
    I might have provoked him a little too far.
    I was terrified and eager to see if this outrageous ploy had worked. I had only three days left in San Francisco before I returned to college in Boston, and I didn’t want to return to college still the virgin from the Virgin Islands.
    He hauled me into a warm cranny beside one of the storage areas, pushed me against the wall, and bracketed his hands beside my head. His eyes, the color of the deep blue sea, promised retribution.
    “Everyone tells me redheads are trouble,” he ground out. “And I’m beginning to believe them.”
    He kissed me so hard I tasted blood, and I couldn’t have been more thrilled.
    I gave back as good as I got, pulling him in to me with handfuls of leather vest and T-shirt. All six foot three of him was rock-hard angles and