Page 43 of Over & Out (Redbeard Cove #3)

Hopper

I ’m in love with her. I already knew it, but it’s so clear now.

Chris stands before me naked, vulnerable, but with her chin proudly lifted, her back tall as she lets me look her over. And there it is, louder than that fucking gong.

I’m in love with you.

I open my mouth to say it, because my idiot heart wants so badly to tell her. Luckily I wrangle my brain to the front of the line to say a smarter thing first.

“Can I touch you?” I ask.

Chris’s brow furrows.

“I mean on your scar.”

“You want to feel it?”

I shake my head. “I want to touch you everywhere I think you’re beautiful, Chris. And that’s everywhere.”

Her bottom lip pulls into her teeth, her eyes glassy. She nods .

I press a kiss to her forehead. To her temple, to her chest. Then I drop low, my hands on her hips.

I never thought she was overreacting, even before I saw it. Even if it was the tiniest notch of scar tissue, I knew what it meant to her. I put it together. Her dad died in a fire. Her dad rescued her. This is a burn—one that represents so much more than singed flesh.

I kiss her hip first. One side—the one untouched by the flames.

Then I kiss the other. The scar tissue is satiny soft, though her flesh is a mountain range of bumps and twists.

The scarring covers the space from that hip all the way to her lower ribs.

It stretches in a diagonal swath across her torso, a perfect stripe where the burning wood fell.

“It was a ceiling beam,” she says. “I was sleeping. If I’d been in a different position, I’d be dead.” She sucks in a breath. “He promised he’d quit drinking. He promised me. But he lied. He got drunk, and he fell asleep with a cigarette, and now this is all I have left of him.”

The last words come out in a whisper.

I fight my own feelings; the ones where I’m furious at a father for breaking his precious daughter’s trust. For hurting her so badly. For getting himself killed and leaving her lonely and lost.

But the strangest thing happens as I press my lips to her scar.

I’m not turned off by the sensation of her skin under my touch; I knew that wouldn’t be possible.

But what I didn’t realize would happen is I can feel her pain.

I can feel a fraction of the agony of being trapped, the terror rippling through her so many years ago.

The knowledge that she was going to die .

Then seeing her father—her best friend, her ally—die saving her.

My eyes fill with tears I don’t want her to see, because I don’t want her to think I’m pitying her.

I’m not. I’m knocked down by her bravery.

Her ability to be this incredible woman, full of sunshine when she’s happy and brilliant snark when I piss her off.

This person who walks through the world wearing this reminder of what she went through on the outside, when most of us get the privilege of wearing our scars inside, where no one can see them.

I want to tell her all this as I cover her with kisses, as I grip her thighs and press my forehead into her stomach.

Instead, I say, “I love you, Chris.”

I whisper it against her, like the chickenshit I am. But she brings a hand down to my jaw. Her eyes are wet, but her expression is strong. Like she was preparing herself for anything after sharing herself with me like this. A rejection. Revulsion.

Impossible.

“What did you say?” she whispers, tipping my face up.

“I said I love you, Chris. I’m so in love with you sometimes I feel like there’s not enough air in this world for me to breathe, because all I want to do is keep saying it.”

Her eyes well over, and I stand, gripping her face in my hands.

“Say it again,” she whispers breathlessly after I kiss her so deeply I feel like I’m trying to get her to meld to me.

“I love you, bangles. I love you, I love you, I love you. ”

She’s crying. Hell, we’re both crying. But Chris is the one who leads me into the bath. She climbs on top of me, sending heat ripping through my core as her center lowers onto my stomach.

“You don’t have to say it back,” I say. “I just said it, not expecting?—”

She kisses me, cutting off my words. Then we’re all fumbling limbs and sloshing water.

She’s on her knees, her breast in my hand, her nipple tightening under my tongue.

She’s moaning after I coax her to her feet and situate her over my mouth.

She’s shuddering as I pull her clit between my lips, stroking the inner walls of her pussy with two fingers, then three.

Then she’s greedily switching spots with me, sinking her mouth onto my cock.

The sensation of her hot mouth gliding over my shaft is almost too much to bear. I grip her hair in my fingers, apologizing for thrusting too deep. She shakes her head, her mouth full of me, her throat loosening as she takes me even farther in, so far I can feel myself sliding down her throat.

“Fuck,” I groan, feeling my balls tightening. I’m going to come like this, and I don’t want to. I want to, but I want more. I pull out, shaking my head.

“Not like this,” I say. “I want to be inside you, Chris. Can I? Please?”

She nods, reaching for a drawer in the cabinet next to the bath and pulling out a condom. I don’t want to think about the reason she has those there. I want to fully erase the men she’s been with, scream at them that they had no idea what privilege they held in being with her .

I’m frightened by the violence of these thoughts. The protectiveness that feels feral when I think about Chris.

But soon she’s sheathing me with a condom and turning around, blessing me with her perfect ass, glossy with water, her pink opening just visible as she bends over for me. “Like this,” she insists. “I want to come like this.”

I’ll do it upside down for her if it makes her happy. I’d happily go down on her every day for the rest of time if it made her look at me the way she’s looking at me now over her shoulder, like a fucking pin-up model.

The bath’s only got an inch of water in it now, the floor beside us flooded. “We’ve destroyed your bathroom,” I rasp as I get to my knees, positioning myself behind her.

She grips the edge of the tub. “I’ll get an outhouse.”

“I’ll build you a new bathroom,” I say. “I’ll build you a house, a fucking city.”

I hover at her entrance, the sounds she’s making giving me life and making my cock so hard I swear to God it’s turned to something inhuman.

“ Fuck ,” I breathe as I enter her; as her pussy slides slickly over me, her muscles and heat gripping me and nearly making me come on the first fucking thrust.

“You,” I say, restraining myself as I pull out, “are perfect.” I kiss her shoulder as I slide in again, her body lifting as I fill her completely.

“Hopper!” she cries.

I pull her hair off her neck as I thrust again. “Perfect.” I kiss her neck, lowering my other hand to her stomach. I press my palm across her front, across the strongest, most beautiful part of her. “You’re fucking everything, Chris. Everything.”

She grinds down onto me, guiding the pace so we’re clapping against each other, our slick, wet skin gliding and making obscene noises that I know I’m going to think about for years.

She comes. She comes so hard I can feel her gripping me. And I come so very, very close. But I don’t want to yet. I don’t want this to end.

I move to slide out of her, though, because I’m not going to keep going if she’s done. When I do, she turns around.

“Again,” she says, her expression wild, her lips swollen and as pink as her beautiful pebbled nipples.

I let out a low sound I didn’t know I could make. She doesn’t have to ask me twice. I press her up against the back of the tub, kneeling between her legs. “I want everything with you, Chris. I want to take you in every way I can.”

“Then maybe you should.”

I grit my teeth at the challenge, entering her again. “Like this?”

Her back slides up the slick tub. “Yes,” she breathes. “And other ways.”

“Fuck, Chris,” I say, my orgasm building fast.

“I’m not delicate,” she says as I gently grip her hips. “Give me more.”

She’s teasing me. Testing me. Desire makes me nearly blind. “You sure?” I ask. “Because I could be a fucking animal right now.”

“Then be one,” she challenges .

So I do. I hoist her leg up over my shoulder and slide in deeper. I fuck her so hard her arms flail, gripping at me, scratching me, begging me for more even as I explode inside her.

Even though I ascended to a higher plane fucking Chris in the tub, an hour later, I’m lost in the fucking cosmos.

We tangle ourselves in her sheets, which we drag from her room to the floor in front of the fire.

I make her come so many times she tells me she’s not going to be able to come again for a full business year.

But she does. For me.

By the time we look at a clock, I’m shocked to see it’s eleven.

“Hungry?” I whisper as I kiss my way down her chest, her breasts, her beautiful stomach.

“Yes,” she says. “For everything.”