When the intensity eased, she took a deep breath and panted her way down from the high, her knuckles still gripping the headboard like she was hanging off a cliff. Wes shifted beneath her, leaving her straddling his chest. When she opened her eyes, she found his hungry gaze on her, his lips slick and smiling. “Insurance is fun.”
“Who knew?” She smiled. “I’m thinking of opening my own policy.”
“Yeah?”
She shimmied down his body but didn’t stop where he probably expected her to. Instead, she kneeled between his legs and took him in her hand. “Yeah.”
Heat flared in Wes’s eyes, and the tip of his tongue pressed into his lip. “This wasn’t a tit-for-tat agreement, lawyer girl. You don’t owe me anything in return.”
“This has nothing to do with tits, chef. Focus.” She ran her thumb along the head of his cock, spreading the drop of fluid there and feeling a kick low and deep in her own body.
Wes grunted. “Oh, don’t worry. You have my complete and utter focus. Bombs could rain down on the house right now, and I wouldn’t notice.”
“Well, let’s hope for no bombs.” Then she lowered her head and took him in her mouth.
The sound he made almost did her in, the utter primal pleasure in it, but the feel of him was even better. She was inexperienced in this art. Her sex life had been pretty straightforward in the past, the encounters so short-lived that she’d never gotten much opportunity to explore beyond basic missionary sex in the dark. But Wes had always stirred new urges in her. She’d wanted to lick every part of him from the beginning. Now she would lick the part of him that would get him to make those sexy, masculine sounds.
She dragged her hands along his thighs as she caressed him with her tongue, tasting the salty maleness of him and loving the way his thigh muscles flexed beneath her fingers, like it was taking everything he had not to utterly lose it. She wanted to keep making him feel that way. Knowing she could explore and tease him felt freeing. He made her feel so comfortable that this felt like an open invitation to just…enjoy and play and savor.
She traced her fingertips up his inner thigh and cupped him while she took him to the back of her throat. He made a choked sound, and his big hand planted on the back of her head, gripping her hair. He didn’t put any pressure, but she felt the need in the grip. He was riding his edge.
So she eased back and took her time, playing a little more and getting herself worked up in the process. Her own desire was pumping through her again as if there’d been no orgasm at all. She shifted, pressing her thighs together tightly, trying to give herself a little relief.
But Wes’s grip tightened. “Can’t. Bec. Too good. I want you. On top. Let me feel you.”
The broken commands made her blood run hot. She eased her mouth off him and looked up. His gaze collided with hers, and the impact of how he was looking at her almost knocked her backward. Never had she seen such naked desire directed toward her. It felt raw and real and like a drug.
He reached out for her, capturing her wrist and guiding her upward to sit astride him. When she smiled down at him, his hands moved to her waist, his thumbs tracing over her hip bones. “You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
“I think you’re out of your head right now, but thank you.”
He didn’t smile. “I’m out of my head over you.”
And then he guided her lips down to his and filled her both with his body and his words.
I’m out of my head over you.
She closed her eyes and let herself free fall into the moment.
But a while after they’d made love, when she was curled up in the crook of Wes’s arm, the words drifted back to her and poked at the dozing monster inside her, the one that she’d tried to hush earlier in the kitchen, the one that breathed the hot, horrible truth down her neck. I’m out of my head over you.
As Wes gently stroked her scalp with lazy fingertips, a desolate sadness welled up in her, making her want to cry. She couldn’t ignore the facts anymore. This was getting too serious, too real, too dangerous for them both. Part of her wanted to shut down her mind and just get absorbed in how she felt when she was with Wes, to tumble into the way he was looking at her and forget about everything she was dealing with, forget about the consequences. Pretend that fairy tales existed and people were meant to be and that a month of knowing each other wasn’t too short when it was destiny.
But those were little-girl dreams. Fantasies she’d believed when she was too naive to know better.
In the real world, a mother could leave her daughter without looking back, the best friend you thought was your prince could fall in love with someone else, and the places you thought were safe and true could become a tragic news story.
So even though this felt like the fantasy, the thing she’d hoped for, she knew it couldn’t be trusted. This was real life with two real people who had real issues. There would be consequences.
Wes was coming off a terrible time in his life, a time of instability and drama and danger. Before that, he’d been married to a woman who acted first, thought second. A girl with few boundaries and a wild streak. Rebecca represented the opposite to him, a sanctuary from everything that had torn his life apart. Calm, steady, lawyer girl.
But she was anything but that. She was selling him and everyone else around her a bill of goods. She was the staid mountain that had swirling magma just beneath the surface, ready to crack and explode, a disaster waiting to happen. She could feel it in every near miss. The mugging. The meltdown during the speech. The tense moments with Steven today.
She didn’t have it all together. She couldn’t let Wes get deeper into the quagmire with her. He’d be too far from shore by the time he realized they were both drowning. She’d seen the look on his face, heard his words. I’m out of my head over you. He was sinking already. As much as she wished she could give him what he was asking for—a relationship, a commitment, their whole stack of
poker chips placed squarely on their future—she couldn’t.
She would mess it up. And if she let him get in too deep with her, she’d mess him up, too. Just like she had with Trevor. She’d been selfish then, too. She’d made it about her.