I grab on to her hips, pull her down hard. Revel in her gasp as I lift her up and then slam her down again. Over and over and over, I bring her body down on mine. Over and over and over, she clenches around me.
“I’m so close—” Her voice breaks, her breath coming out in little pants that ratchet my arousal up another notch, though I would have sworn that wasn’t possible.
My body is stretched to the breaking point. I need to come, need to empty myself inside her with a desperation that borders on the violent. Though I try to keep them gentle, my fingers dig into her hips as I lift and lower her faster and faster.
“Ethan,” Chloe gasps. “I can’t—”
And then she shatters. Her eyes blur, her head falls back, her body goes taut and then relaxes even as her sex clenches rhythmically around my dick.
I want to make her come again, want these moments to last forever as I send her up and over the edge again and again and again. But my cock has other ideas and I can’t fight it. Not when Chloe feels so hot and wet around me. Not when she feels so goddamned good.
“Chloe, baby—”
She presses her lips against my throat, licks at the sweat pooling in the dips of my collarbones. It’s the last straw. Heat slams through me as my fingers clench on her ass, dig into her soft, resilient flesh. She gasps, her whole body shuddering against mine.
And then I’m coming, so hard and so fast that it feels like my spine is being ripped out straight through my stomach. Straight through my balls. Straight through the end of my dick.
I come and come and come and it’s more than pleasure. More than ecstasy. It’s a light in the darkness, a port in the storm. It’s coming home after a lifetime lost at sea. It’s Chloe and me and everything we’ve built. Everything we will continue to build. It’s our future, the future I am only now beginning to believe that we’ll have.
Long seconds pass while I’m lost in the maelstrom, lost in the feel of Chloe above and around me. Lost in the feel of her warmth curled up inside me.
After several long minutes, my heartbeat finally returns to normal. I pull out slowly, rolling Chloe over so that she’s cuddled into my chest and I can feel her breath against my neck, her heart beating against my own.
“I love you,” she says, her lips moving drowsily against my sweat-slicked skin.
“I love you, too.”
It’s a vow on my part as much as it is a declaration. Because loving her has never been the problem. I’ve loved her almost from the beginning—I started falling the minute she refused to drink the blueberry smoothie I made her and by the time she’d returned the Vitamix I’d bought her for the second time, I was all in.
Yes, loving her is easy. But keeping her—that’s something else entirely. I’ve already fucked things up with her, twice. I lied to her, tried to break up with her, hurt her over and over again when all I’ve really wanted to do is protect her.
I don’t know how one man can fuck up as badly—and as many times—as I have. And yet, by some miracle, she’s still here. In my arms. In my bed. Though, technical
ly, we’re in her bed at the moment.
That’s something else I intend to change as soon as possible. Not that I have anything against Chloe’s room—or her roommate. But I need her with me, in my space. I need her in my house, her stuff cluttering up my dresser, her shoes tripping me on the way to the bathroom, her sexy-sweet scent hanging in the corners of every room I enter.
I need her things mingled with mine, need her life mingled with mine.
Because no matter how much I’ve fucked up, no matter how many mistakes I’ve made, I can’t let her go. I won’t let her go. Not now. Not ever. We’re tied together, our lives twisted and tangled together long before we had a clue what we would mean to each other. I wouldn’t have chosen our past, how we started out. But it exists. It’s real, and it’s something we’re both going to have to live with—for better or worse.
That’s the nightmare. That one day she won’t be able to live with what Brandon did to her. With the part I played in keeping him safe because I didn’t know better. Because I was blind.
But that’s a future I hope will never happen—a future I’m determined to never let happen. Right now, in the present, she’s still here. Still in my arms. Still willing to give me—to give us—a chance to get this right.
It’s more than I deserve, but I’m taking it.
I stroke her back, murmur nonsense words in her ear as Chloe snuggles close to me. Her breathing evens out and she’s asleep again within minutes. She’s exhausted, the toll of the last few weeks—the last few months—impossible to ignore. For both of us.
I close my eyes, try to follow, but my mind is too crowded to allow any kind of sleep to creep in. Chloe’s words from earlier chase themselves around inside my head—and there’s a part of me that knows she’s right. That knows I’ll be messing with all kinds of old wounds if I keep pursuing this. Opening them up, making them bleed. Making her bleed.
Hurting her any more than she’s already been hurt is the last thing I want to do.
But as I lay here staring at the ceiling, I can’t stop thinking about my brother. About the fact that he hurt her when she was young and defenseless. About the way he continues to hurt her even now.
I flash back to the way he looked at her in my driveway that day when the whole world came crashing down around our ears for the first time. So smug, so satisfied, so convinced of his own invincibility. The nondisclosure agreement—agreements, I remind myself, thinking back to the call I just took—make him untouchable and he knows it. More, he revels in it.
I’m not okay with that.