Summer's End (Wildflowers #5) - Jill Sanders Page 0,16

to normal.

“No.” She shook her head. “Don’t,” she warned. “I need…” She was pulling at the buttons on his shirt. When her nails scraped against his skin, he moaned. She reached for the button of his jeans and, after freeing him, she wrapped her hand around him. “I just need…” She leaned over and ran her teeth over his shoulder.

All the arguments he’d thought of over the past week and a half left him. All he could think about now was being with her again and how he was going to persuade her to take a chance on him. For good.

No matter what happened now, he knew Aubrey was the woman he wanted. And if he had to wait forever, he was prepared to wait forever.

Chapter 5

Over a year later…

Aubrey knew something was changing. She could feel it in the air.

For over two and a half years, she’d enjoyed her time with Aiden and enjoyed knowing it was still a secret from her friends even more.

Every single one of her friends, the Wildflowers, were now fully in love and engaged to be married, except for her. But it was for the best. She knew she didn’t belong in that elite group. She didn’t deserve love.

It was difficult to explain, but she had promised herself long ago to never marry. Not that she didn’t think others should, it just wasn’t right for her.

Every single time she felt Aiden growing too close to her, she’d pull back. What was between them was just supposed to be fun. Just sex. That’s all she wanted from him. That’s all she could afford to give him. It was what they had arranged when they’d first started being together.

Besides, the man was very good at the physical stuff. Okay, the best she’d ever experienced. He helped her take her mind off… well, everything dark from her past.

Over the past few years, she estimated that he probably knew as much about her as her sisters did. And the reverse could be said about him. She knew everything there was to know about Aiden Stark.

Besides knowing all the intimate details about him, like his favorite sex position and how he liked to snuggle afterwards, she knew that he was twenty-five and had a Bachelor of Design in Architecture from FSU. He was an only child of Robin and Carl Stark, whom she had met on a few occasions when they visited the camp. Aiden’s grandmother Nancy had been the sister of Elle’s grandfather Joe and had passed away long before Aiden had come along.

He’d been in only one long-term relationship with a woman named Danelle. She gathered that he’d been broken after that relationship had ended but hadn’t asked who had ended it or why.

It had been almost six months since she’d broken things off with him for the last time. He’d spooked her that first time he’d mentioned the L word. Sure, he’d convinced her that he was only talking about their time together, but she’d bolted just the same.

She’d kicked herself more than a dozen times after that. Each time she’d needed a release, she’d gone crawling back to him. This last time, however, she’d been left sexually frustrated and hornier than, well… ever. Aiden had been there to scratch that itch for so long that she’d grown accustomed to being liberated from her pent-up frustration.

Now, almost six months to the day since she’d called it off with him for the last time, she walked around the campgrounds agitated enough that she was surprised she didn’t bite anyone’s head off. Sure, her classes helped relieve some of the physical tension, and she had her friends to talk to. But still, the secret she’d kept from them weighed heavily on her, and she knew that if they ever found out about it, she’d have some explaining to do.

Seeing how happy her four friends were with their fiancés had her even more agitated. Not that she didn’t like the four men. Levi was one of her favorite people on the campgrounds, and he and Scarlett were perfect together. Dylan, Liam, and Owen Costas had grown on her over the past year as well.

Even Scarlett and Zoey’s mother, Kimberly, was now happily and openly seeing Reed Cooper, a local who lived in a massive mansion across the water from the camp.

Now that it was just her living alone in the three-bedroom apartment on the third floor of the main camp building, she tried to convince herself she deserved to