“Only because you taste so good.” My scent lingers on his lips as he tips my chin, bringing my gaze up to his. His tongue traces the seam of my lips, encouraging them to part. His kiss is slow and indulgent, the intimacy of the moment bringing us closer physically. With no real thought for the consequences, I move under him. Widening, arching, stretching.
“Let me get—” He makes as though to move, maybe for his jeans and his wallet, when I bring my hands to his ass, pressing him back.
“I’m on the pill,” I whisper, not quite able to look at him. I’ve been taking it for years, swearing I’d never put myself in that position again.
“You’re sure?” He almost pushes in right then, moving back a little like he’s annoyed with himself. “I don’t want you to—”
Sliding my hand between us, I glide the head of his cock against where I’m so slick. “Do you want to ask me again?” I tip my hips, my words a husky sex-drugged slur.
“No.” He swallows thickly, glancing down at where I hold him, to where I tease us both. His head comes up quick, his blue eyes burning with such intensity that the moment seems to take on its own significance. “I’d sell my soul to be inside you.”
“Then you’re getting me cheap,” I whisper with a tight-sounding sigh.
“No, little love,” he says, bringing my hand to his chest. His twilight eyes are dark and kind of starry as his heart beats slow and steady under my fingertips. “You’re getting me. I couldn’t sell my soul because I gave it to you willingly eight years ago.”
Danger, my head seems to say. But it’s with my heart that I answer and with my body. A held breath, and he slides into me, the exhalation a ragged, pained thing.
“Oh, Kennedy.” His arms trembling in the periphery of my vision, and I move instinctively against him, wanting to be filled, to be stretched, as an image flickers to life in my head. Legs splayed, his fingers between my lust-slicked legs, the look on my face almost beseeching.
“Oh, God!” I hold him there, everything dialled way up high, the beginning of my orgasm already fluttering around him.
“I—” He breathes heavily into my neck as, with a slow slide, he pulls back. As he slides back in, he lights me up like a firework. “Fucking love you.”
Everything inside me fractured, the gaps filling with stars as I’m swept away by the rhythm and the feel of him, by the sentiment falling from his lips. You’re everything. You’re mine. I’m never letting go. I try to ignore the words, to harden my heart. Instead, I find they feed it as I cry out. As I plead. As I come apart in his arms.
27
Roman
PRESENT
RIDE A COCK HORSE
“Kennedy? I remember the name of that nursery rhyme.” I didn’t really forget it. I just didn’t tell her, concerned she might think I was taking the piss.
“Huh?” Her enquiry is kind of sleepy and kind of satisfied. I suffer a moment of déjà vu at the sight of her wearing nothing but moonlight, a smile, and a sheet. Not exactly déjà vu, given we’ve been here before, but maybe it’s more that this moment will play out again and again over our lifetimes. “That thing you said?” She leaves off mentioning before I went on my date with Drew like she’s worried about reminding me.
“Yeah. It’s called Ride a Cockhorse.”
Tipping her face to the pillow, she smothers a laugh. “Only you,” I think she says. She got that right, at least. “Is this my cue to ask what a cock horse is?” she says, emerging again. She cocks her head over her shoulder and with a flutter of her lashes she adds, “Because modesty is one of the things I like best about you.”
“I thought you liked best how I’m hung like a cock horse.”
“Ass.”
Pretty sure donkeys have whopping great cocks, too. But I keep that to myself as she sighs and shivers a little as I draw a figure eight on her shoulder blade.
“You like that, do you?”
“No need to sound so self-satisfied,” she kind of purrs. “I’m a tactile creature on the inside.”
I smother a chuckle. It must be way on the inside, underneath all those echidna quills.
“It’s true,” she adds, sensing my silent amusement. “From a little baby, stroking my back would send me to sleep, so I’m told.”
“Baby Kennedy,” I muse. “What was she like?”
“I can’t remember, and I guess there’s no one around to ask. But this I know, baby Kennedy liked to be touched.” There’s something vulnerable in those words, something raw and kind of honest. “I forgot how much I liked it,” she says on a sigh, and I decide, right here and right now, I’d stroke her back for as long as she likes. Until my arm falls off.