Page 26

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

V elina…

I sucked in a sharp breath and instinctively cringed from the warm touch that roused me.

“Hey, all good, it’s just me. I’m home.”

The two words at the end felt… strange, falling from his lips. Like they were weighted with something more, a deeper meaning, than just the average.

“Welcome back,” I said tiredly, and he slid a hand under the covers, grazing those rough fingertips along the back of my thigh. I pushed up onto my elbows from where I lay on my stomach in the warm nest of blankets, the ceiling fan spinning crazily above me, pushing the cool air from the house’s air conditioner down like the wind over the arctic tundra.

“Is everything okay?” I asked. “Did I miss something important?”

“Everything’s okay,” he murmured. “You haven’t missed anything, I promise.”

The last was said on a grin and held an edge of a chuckle on the lilt of his words.

“Mm.” I settled back down and relaxed into the mattress, which was a hell of a lot more comfortable than the one at the La Chiquita – which might as well have been a plank of wood.

His hand moved from fingertips to the flat of his palm as he smoothed up and down the back of my leg and up onto my ass, kneading and massaging.

I groaned.

“You trying to start something?” I asked, and cracked one eye to look at him, head turned to the side and the other half of my face buried in the firm but soft cloud of his pillow.

“You want me to stop?” he asked.

“No,” I said, maybe a little too quickly, and he barked a laugh.

“What, you thinking I’m not going to find you as beautiful or something?” he asked, and his tone held an edge of carefulness to it.

I pushed up and arched an eyebrow.

“I wasn’t aware that you found me beautiful in the first place,” I said. “Easy, maybe, but not beautiful.”

Smack!

I yelped as he rubbed over the spot on my ass he’d just slapped.

“Don’t you ever talk about yourself like that, little girl,” he cautioned.

I rolled my eyes. “Yes, Daddy.”

Smack!

I writhed a little, biting my bottom lip, as he rubbed the smarting glow out of my ass cheek with a patient hand.

“Next time, it’ll be my belt,” he warned.

Oh, God… yes please, I thought, then it hit me. Old childhood memories of my dad in one of his drunken rages, ripping his belt from the loops, the lash of it against my skin as I threw up hands and just screamed for him to stop… but he never stopped. Not until I lay zebra striped and sometimes bloody.

I still had a few scars.

We all did. Every one of us kids. A lot of us, you just couldn’t see them.

…like Louie.

“Hey, come back here,” Saint ordered gently, and I shuddered, popping from my reverie like Sleeping Beauty waking from her prince’s kiss.

“No belts,” he said judiciously. “Crops? Floggers?” He tilted his head, and I swallowed hard.

“I don’t like stingy,” I mentioned, and he nodded. “Floggers for fun, crops for punishment, then.”

“Are we negotiating the terms of our relationship?” I asked. I know I made it sound like the very thought that he could want me was a joke in and of itself.

“Would it be so terrible?” he asked, and I felt surprisingly vulnerable in that moment.

I sat up, and I couldn’t help the look of soft surprise coming over my face as I twisted my body beneath the sheets and blankets lithely to sit properly and face him. He didn’t let go, his hand traveling over the soft, smooth skin of my ass, and my hip, coming to rest atop my thigh as I moved. God, the look on his face was serene as he stared vacantly and just seemed to enjoy the feel of me moving beneath his hand. He kneaded the muscle atop my leg, just this side of too hard, as I brought my eyes up, roving over his handsome face, searching for the truth, I guess. I was so often used to being lied to and led on, I was having a hard time believing this was real and not some dream.

Was I even awake? I wondered silently.

I stilled when I realized he was dead fuckin’ serious.

“You can’t be serious,” I said, and he barked a laugh.

“As a heart attack,” he said evenly and moved his hand up and down my leg in a light caress. I couldn’t get enough. I couldn’t get enough of the sensation of his rough hand over my soft skin. I couldn’t help myself. I closed my eyes and relished in the warmth of it, the roughness and the sensation of it, the contrast between the light touch and sand papery feel.

“I didn’t factor in on staying,” I murmured. “I was just here for a good time, not a long time. I-I didn’t know what I was going to do after all of this. I mean?—”

“Quit it,” he said. “You were never here for a good time, baby. I think what we have here is a failure to communicate.”

I opened my eyes and stared at him, stony-faced for a moment.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I don’t fuck for fun,” he said carefully. “It’s just never been me – never has been. I know it’s part of the biker lifestyle or whatever, but I play to win, I guess. I play for keeps.” His hand slid up under the shirt he’d given me to wear and cupped my breast.

I gasped as he played with my nipple between forefinger and thumb, squeezing it in a light pinch to get the blood flowing to it, rolling it back and forth. He set off a wave of sensation that swept through me gently, washing the thoughts right out of my head like a rogue wave sweeping the shells and sea glass I’d gathered right off the shore and back into the sea.

“I can’t think when you do that,” I whispered carefully.

“Seems to me, you think too much,” he murmured, and he brought his mouth carefully closer to mine, whispering the last just over my lips.

I gasped, and he murmured, “I’m going to kiss you, then I’m going to love you into a goddamned coma if I have to. You’re going to rest.”

“Oh, am I?” I asked weakly, and he chuckled a sinister and dark little laugh.

His voice dropped into something low and soothing as he said, “Why you gotta be so stubborn, huh? Why not let someone take care of you for once?”

“No one’s ever taken care of me,” I confessed. “I’ve only ever really taken care of myself.”

“Doesn’t have to be that way anymore,” he whispered, and his lips touched mine. I kissed slowly, and it felt… different… like I approached things with more trepidation.

I’d had what he was offering dangled in front of me more times than I could count. The promise of love and affection, and all the trappings of a relationship – but without any of the actual partnership that I craved.

No, it’d always been them wanting me to give my all while they barely tried, and this? This felt like he wanted more than that. I had longed for something like it to be offered, and I mean truly offered, for so long I didn’t trust it. I failed to believe it could be real. Yay, trust issues.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, drawing back, his thumb stroking my cheek.

I closed my eyes, leaned into the light touch, and asked timidly, “Is this for real, or am I just dreaming?”

He chuckled and asked me, “Why would you be dreaming?”

“It doesn’t feel real,” I answered automatically.

“Aw,” he chided. “It’s traumatized…” He was teasing, but he was also right. Still, it was a welcome respite from the heavy emotions settling onto my heart.

“Quit it.” I laughed, I couldn’t help it.

“It’s true,” he said. “When have I not been a man of my word?” he asked.

“That’s very true,” I murmured. “You sure you want something with me, though? I can be a real pain in the ass.”

“I think I can keep you in line.” He winked at me, those deep, soulful brown eyes holding a trickle of mirth, and I couldn’t help but smile, laugh, and shake my head.

“How do you do that?” I asked, easing into the idea of staying, not just for revenge, but because… I was wanted here…

Holy shit.

I didn’t think I had ever felt like I was actually and truly wanted anywhere I’d ever been before. I’d only ever just existed in a place…

“Do what?” he asked.

“Make everything a sarcastic joke but make it feel real at the same time?” I asked.

“I could ask you the same thing,” he said, tracing along my hairline, moving my bangs across my forehead, and tucking some of the longer strands behind my right ear.

“What are you doing to me?” I asked softly, closing my eyes, almost afraid to look him in the eyes when I asked.

He put his lips next to my ear and practically growled, “Loving you.”

There was nothing light, sarcastic, or joking about those two words. They were as stark and real as they got as he moved over me, laying me back in his bed. He had one knee between mine over the blankets, and with one hand, he reached up behind his head, grasping his tee and pulling, the material sliding over him and off his body, revealing a light tank under it.

He pulled that off, too, in much the same way, his tanned shoulders revealed, the muscles moving provocatively beneath the skin as he tossed both shirts away, to the bedroom floor.

I don’t know what it was for me, but a man’s shoulders really did it for me. Like it was my favorite part to look at, and turned me the fuck on.

Weird thing to be attracted to, I know, but I couldn’t help it.

He stood long enough to lose the jeans and to move my covers, while I definitely helped things along by grasping the hem of my borrowed shirt, peeling out of it, up over my head. It joined his clothes abandoned and forlorn on his bedroom floor, which, to my mind, was a good a place as any for them now.

He got back up between my thighs, and I parted my knees to welcome him. Everything about this sexual encounter with him was different from the ones before. It was as though this one was filled to bursting with promise, with meaning, with a depth I’d never explored with anyone before, preferring many, if not all, of my sexual encounters to remain… frivolous.

There was nothing at all frivolous about the look in his eyes, the stony concentration in his face, as he palmed my hips and smoothed those rough hands over my skin, all the way up to palm my generous tits and play the nipples until he had me giggling and writhing against him from the sensations he wrought through me.

He lifted my hips with one hand, lining himself up with my pussy with the other, and holding me aloft just so, slid into me to the root. I gasped, his cock filling me, but also just long enough to bottom out against my cervix. The alluring mix of pleasure with that sweet, sharp pain at my end made me pant.

He put my legs up along his chest, holding me up across my thighs, below my knees, as he drove into me tighter, harder, in these short strokes that took my breath away from something like seventy percent pleasure and thirty percent pain. A sweet pain, a beautiful torture. I arched, and he thrust. It was the perfect angle, hitting all of the right places, making me cry out with the delight of it.

His intense look of concentration was broken only by the smile that graced his lips, teeth white, framed by his golden tanned skin and dark beard as I made the sound. He took pleasure from my pleasure, and it only compounded the blissful feelings spreading through my veins, as though my blood sang and was quickened by moonlight as it flowed through my veins.

His touch held the fire of the sun, and I could almost feel it. This overwhelming sense of belonging to one another, and yet like the sun and the moon, separated by time and space, a tragic love story of long-distance longing, but never having quite found each other to touch.

It was like that, except the longing was over, and we were touching. Oh, by God, how we touched. So close, yet so far away – two beings becoming as close as we could without the true ability to become one. Sparks flying, the cataclysm of our energies nigh as we attained unearthly heights, and I didn’t know what to do.

I was afraid. Unsure if we would collide in our passions in such a way to tear our known world asunder or to make something incredible. Something new. With every thrust, it was like the strike of the hammer against the working. The passion between us our forge, and it remained yet to be seen after the quench if we would be formed into something indestructible or indescribably delicate.

With a final stroke, sparks flew, flitting along every nerve as I flew apart with them. He gripped my hips and bowed over me, arms slipping under me, wrapping me up, caging me under the shelter of his much larger body. I was vaguely aware, as I floated aimlessly and beautifully on the sensations pulsing through me, that he twitched inside me, coming as I had come, and I loved the feeling of it beyond all words, thoughts, or feelings.

I kissed his shoulder, the side of his neck, his bearded chin, and laughed. Finally, his mouth found mine, and we just melded . Welded together body and soul into something much stronger than even the sum of our equal, and yet still physically divided parts.