Page 31 of Catch Me (Townsend Legacy #4)

I vy

“I’ll catch you.”

I wrap my legs around Andreas the moment he lifts us from the couch.

The bulge poking at my ass tells me he wants it bad, and I want him as much as he wants me.

His words continue to whisper through my mind, as he carries me. They trample over my doubts and confront my fears. The fear of becoming so serious with someone so quickly. The extreme terror of what being in a relationship with someone who has such a high-profile career entails.

And then there’s the incredible, nearly paralyzing doubt of me being too overwhelmed by it all.

But Andreas’ three-word declaration wipes those fears away. For the time being, they do, anyway. I know they’ll all resurface again in the morning.

Right now, in the cloak of night, in Andreas’ arms, I believe him. I trust that my darkness won’t overshadow this, us.

“Stop thinking, baby.” His deep voice penetrates my thoughts as he lays me on his bed. “It’s just me and you here. Just us.”

I let out a sigh.

“Why are you so intent on taking care of me when this celebration was supposed to be about you?” I ask honestly. “Today is your day.”

“Is that so?”

I nod.

He turns his head and kisses the inside of my palm. A shiver races down my arm and over my entire body.

“If that’s so, then I should get what I want, right?”

I narrow my eyes. “Within reason.”

A wicked chuckle pushes through his lips.

My nipples harden.

“What I want is to hear you say my name.”

“Andreas.”

He shakes his head before kissing my lips.

“No, baby, not like that.”

He moves down the length of my body, easily undoing my jeans and pulling them down my hips. The speed at which he has my clothes off of my body, and my legs slung over his shoulders, has to be unprecedented.

“On your elbows,” he orders. “Watch me while I give you your first orgasm of the night.”

That’s the only warning I get before his mouth covers my pussy.

My eyes immediately roll to the back of my head, and I feel myself falling back against the pillows, but then the delightful sensations coursing through me suddenly stop.

A gasp from the abrupt cessation has me coming eye to eye with Andreas. And if I thought the chuckle he let out earlier was wicked, then I had no idea what wicked truly meant. Not until I see the glint in his eyes.

“Keep your eyes on me, baby, or I stop.”

I bite my bottom lip but only to keep from yelling at him to get back to treating my pussy like it was his first, second, and third course meal.

Still, a pleading, “Please,” escapes my mouth.

“Watch me while I make you come.”

I nod, which must’ve been what he was waiting for because a second later he’s back to devouring me.

I fist my hands into the bed sheets beneath my body, fighting against my instincts to close my eyes. Even though he can’t see me with his head between my legs, I somehow suspect he’d know it if I even blinked for too long.

Which would lead him to stop.

I swear I’d die if that happened.

“I’m, I’m, I’m close,” I pant, tightening my grip on the sheets, my hips straining upward, seeking out more of his glorious mouth.

All of a sudden, it all crashes over me at once.

My orgasm doesn’t build up slowly. It crashes through me like a tsunami. And I’m washed away with it, and all of the emotions swimming through me.

“Andreas!” I yell out, until my throat hurts.

My back bows off of the bed. It feels like this orgasm will never end. It’s because Andreas still hasn’t moved his mouth away from my body. He’s working to send me into multiple orgasms from just his mouth.

It works.

My second orgasm picks up where number one started to leave off.

Then number three sends me spiraling again.

I finally have to fight to push Andreas away from between my legs.

“I-I can’t take a-another, Andreas!” I pant out.

This crazy son of a bitch has the audacity to chuckle at the same time he moves to cover my body with his.

“That’s how I wanted to hear you say my name.” He smirks like he’s auditioning for the villain in his next role.

Then he kisses me, letting me taste myself on his tongue.

Now it’s my turn to wrestle with his clothing to get him as naked as I am. Andreas, not one to be outdone, moves my hands out of the way to pull my shirt over my head as well as undo my lace bra.

His mouth covers my left breast. A groan from deep down in my core pushes through my lips when he begins suckling on my nipples.

Another orgasm passes over me suddenly.

“Shit,” he curses, while staring down at me. “If I knew how sensitive your nipples were, I would’ve started there, baby. Why didn’t you tell me?” His question is almost angry.

As if I denied him some sort of pleasure by not telling him.

“I didn’t know,” I reply. “I’ve never come from nipple play.” Not that the two lovers I’ve had before were particularly attentive to my nipples.

Andreas grunts out a curse, then covers my other nipple with his mouth. Sure enough, within minutes I’m coming again.

This is the orgasm that does me in, completely.

Andreas leans in and presses a kiss to my temple before moving to lay beside me. He wraps one arm around my waist, pulling me into him, but then does nothing.

“You … You didn’t …” I trail off.

“I got what I wanted.” He gives me a peck on the lips before cuddling even closer.

“Are you sure?” I’m worn out but I don’t like the idea of him not being satisfied.

“Certain,” he reiterates, sounding serene.

I turn my body so that we’re now face-to-face. He watches through heavy lids as I trail a finger along his lips. I giggle when he bites the end of my finger.

“You’re going to be tired tomorrow,” I tell him while we continue to stare at one another.

“I’ll be fine. I have enough energy to last me at least a month.”

I roll my eyes.

“Speaking of next month, I want you to come with me back home.”

My eyes widen. “Home?”

He nods. “Williamsport. It’s my mom’s birthday celebration. My dad always hosts a big party for her.”

“Are you sure about that? What about filming?”

“ Late Nights wraps up filming in two weeks, maybe even sooner given how smooth everything has gone so far. We’re ahead of schedule.

I have a few sponsorship appearances I need to do once filming ends, and we’ll probably do a wrap party.

But my trip home will be a few weeks after we wrap. Plenty of time.”

“I don’t know …” I trail off. Going home with Andreas will make this official, won’t it?

“We’re already official, Ivy.”

I blink before meeting his eyes again. I’d mistakenly spoken my thoughts out loud.

“You want me to meet your family.”

“Baby, I’m fighting real hard not to tell you that you are meeting my family because I want you beside me when I go back home. But I’m doing my best not to scare you off. If you knew how much I wanted you, you might try running for the hills. And, well …”

“Well, what?” My curiosity gets the better of me.

“If you run, I’d have to catch you, baby.”

His tone drops menacingly low, and a shiver courses through me.

I would let you catch me. I pinch my lips just to keep those very words from spilling out.

“What if I’m not as great as you seem to think I am?”

A frown instantly appears on his face. Andreas briefly closes his eyes, and when he opens them, there’s fire inside.

“Who was it?”

His tone is almost lethal.

“Who the hell was it that made you think you are anything less than perfection?”

His question would almost be laughable if it wasn’t laced with so much venom. As if I were to tell him who said person was, he’d get up from this bed and hunt them down.

Andreas continues to look at me expectedly, though.

“I had a panic attack on stage during my college graduation.”

His arms tighten around me, which gives me strength to continue.

“I was valedictorian of my graduating class with an undergraduate degree in finance and my Master’s in Business Administration.

“For weeks leading up to the ceremony, I’d had smaller panic attacks, but I would dust myself off after and continue finishing up my finals, perfecting my speech, and going into the office a few hours for the investment bank I was to start working at once I graduated.”

A chill runs over me as I remember that very hectic time.

“You never told anyone about your panic attacks?”

“I had my first panic attack in high school. I had no idea what it was, but one of the school counselors found me. She helped me through it, and later on, told my parents what happened. She recommended I start seeing a therapist.”

I pause to sigh.

“My mom basically told her that therapy and treatment was for the weak-minded and that it was an insult to even suggest a child of hers to be so weak. I never worked with that counselor again. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect my dad had her fired or removed somehow.

“After that, I did my best to hide them whenever they happened. Throughout college, they occurred here and there, but I thought that because I was living away from home, I had them under control. Until my final year of school. They started occurring more frequently.

“Back then I was so busy that I just wanted to pretend they weren’t happening.”

I swallow before speaking again.

“But while I was on stage, my mind went blank. It was like I kept trying to restart my brain while pushing away the growing panic but that just made things worse. I don’t even fully remember what happened up there.

All I recall is afterward, being in the emergency room with Mya and Ari sitting beside me, both of them in tears.

“They had to fill me in on what happened.”

“I’m sorry, baby.”

“Everything got worse afterwards. I had a complete mental breakdown. I was admitted to the hospital’s psychiatric ward.”

“Were you …”

I shake my head.

“No, I never thought about taking my own life or anything like that. But I just felt … tired. Drained. I didn’t want to do anything. Once I was discharged, my parents took me back home to Michigan.

“For weeks I did nothing but sit in my room. I barely brushed my teeth. My mother called me a drama queen. My father told me I needed to suck it up and get it together.”

I ball my hands into fists.

“But I couldn’t. I wanted to just shake it off, but the thought of even leaving the house would send me into another panic attack. Needless to say, I lost the job opportunity at the investment bank.

“After two months of this, my parents finally agreed to pay for me to see a therapist.”

“Did things get better after that?”

“Not immediately,” I admit. “By then videos of what happened at graduation began to circulate on the internet. One YouTuber with a decent-sized following showed it, and I began getting really ugly messages from people I didn’t even know.”

A cold, sinister look passes over Andreas’ face.

“Fuck that motherfucker.”

His tone makes me shiver. I reach out to place my hand over his racing heart.

“They were just some internet trolls.”

I try to play it off, but the expression on Andreas’ face tells me he’s not buying it. “Fine, they were a little more than that. They were vile.

“It took months for it to die down. I didn’t tell anyone except for Dr. King about it for a long, long time. When I told my mom, she said that I deserved it for embarrassing the family the way I did.”

My bottom lip starts to tremble from remembering the coldness in her eyes and tone as she said those words to me.

“Your mom?” Andreas asks as if for clarification.

I swallow the lump in my throat. “Yes.”

He pulls me into his chest, wrapping his arms tightly around me.

“It’s not as bad as I’m making it sound,” I defend out of habit. “My mother and father are both very successful and accomplished. All they’ve ever wanted for me and my siblings is to live up to the life they’ve provided for us.”

Andreas grunts but doesn’t say anything. Still, I feel his increased heartbeat through his chest.

“Honestly,” I look up at him. “They’ve always had high standards for us. We were taken care of very well and I never wanted for anything.”

“Except to be seen,” Andreas says.

My lips part with a comeback but nothing comes out.

“You were provided for materially, but not in the other ways that mattered. Especially not when it counted the most. You couldn’t even share with them that you were being horribly bullied online without receiving more ridicule from them to your face.”

My gut tells me I need to respond. Andreas hasn’t even met them. I shouldn’t let him speak about them like this.

Yet, I can’t find the energy or the motivation to defend them.

“I worked at my family’s bank for a while, but then after talking with Mya about it, she helped me find the place with Ms. Baldwin. It was cheap enough to sustain myself for a while on my savings. So, one weekend I packed up and moved to L.A.”

Though I tell him about waiting until my parents were gone, a piece of me still feels like a coward for leaving the way I did.

“I went low contact with both of them.” I snort. “I’m trying to, at least. They still take it upon themselves to contact me when they think I’m taking too long to reply to their messages.”

“Like your mom showing up out of the blue at your apartment,” he comments.

I nod.

His jaw tightens.

“They’re your parents, so I’ll keep my real thoughts about them to myself, but I’ll be honest with you, baby, if I saw you subject yourself to people who treated you this way, I might lose my nice guy reputation. Quickly.”

His tone is sharp, unrelenting.

I lean in and press a kiss to his lips before rubbing his chest.

“We both know your ‘nice guy’ reputation is about as real as your stage name.” I grin. Andreas is kind and considerate, but beneath the exterior is a man burning with passion and, dare I say, vengeance if needed.