Chapter 12
“Where’s your mother taking you?”
“Drive around. We’ll find something to do.”
“Have fun. I’ll pick you up around six.”
The good thing about Max entering his teenage years was that he no longer woke him up before eight a.m. when he didn’t have to get up early. At eight-thirty, when his phone had buzzed in the jeans that were thrown on the floor, Finn had gotten up and picked up his son’s call. Jane had been asleep, splayed across his body, and he’d had to move gently from under her to not wake her up. Like the evening before, he had walked with the buzzing phone in hand from her bedroom to the living room whose walls had known them in all sorts of situations, good and bad. Talking to his son there had felt surreal. Then again, everything about them was.
He returned to the bedroom, put the phone on the nightstand, and turned to look at Jane. He still couldn’t believe he had just woken up with her after dreaming of it for so long. Every inch of him smelled of her, every inch of her smelled of him. Her taste was still in his mouth. He slid under the blanket and pulled her to him.
She opened her eyes. “He can’t know that you’re coming to pick him up from within Riviera View, you know.” Her voice was groggy, but she was wide awake. She said it as if she was reminding him and herself what they were facing.
“For now, yes, he won’t know.” He hated lying, but it was necessary until they figure out how to handle this. He thought he’d feel worse about it, but he didn’t. Because being with her felt right. It was right. He wasn’t doing anything wrong. Not even to Max. Maybe it was an illusion colored optimistically by being here with her. It painted everything in bright colors, and he really believed he could and would find a way.
“I lied to my parents, too.” She sighed. “My alarm went off earlier, so I messaged my dad that I’ll be taking the day off, that I think I’m coming down with something. They know how cranky I get when I’m sick, so they won’t be coming here to check in on me.”
He smirked. “You get cranky when you’re sick?”
“Trust me, it’s not cute.”
“I want to know everything about you. In sickness and in health, Jane.”
She swallowed. “You know a lot.” Her voice came out hoarse.
“Yeah, I do.” He tilted his head and kissed her. If his words scared her, then so be it. He meant them. He wanted her with every vow under the sun, and then some. But, before that, he had fourteen years to make up for. He intensified their kiss and smoothed his hands down her body.
Last night in the kitchen, he had lifted her and realized she wasn’t wearing panties under his shirt. He had set her down on one of the breakfast bar chairs, slid down her body, between her legs, and made her come with his tongue.
He was going to do the same now. He kissed her breasts and lingered at the sunflower tattoo. She was his now, after so long. His sunflower girl.
He continued farther down and tasted her again. And again and again.
“I need you to fuck me, Finn,” she moaned. “Now.”
God, he missed this—the striking contrast between the pale, slender fragility of her thighs that his face was buried between and the feistiness of her verbalizing exactly what she needed and wanted from him.
Her fingers in his hair began pulling him up the more he sucked and licked, getting her close. She writhed against him and desperately clutched his shoulders.
He stormed up and pushed hard into her. She was so wet and so close that it took just a few thrusts before she shattered around and beneath him. Fuck, this woman could make him come so hard that he needed convalescence time.
“Tell me everything,” he said later in the kitchen, scrambling eggs into an omelet.
“What do you want to know?” Jane looked up from the vegetables she was cutting. In a long-sleeved tee and a pair of shorts, her legs looked endless.
“Why did you break up with Tom?”
She focused on the tomato again. “I didn’t see a future with him.”
He watched her. She wasn’t looking back at him; she just continued cutting the vegetable into little cubes.
“We were on and off as it was, so it wasn’t a huge shock when I finally broke it off. I did it a year before I moved here.” She stopped chopping for a moment. “What made you—”
“Divorce Avery?” he completed for her.
She bit her bottom lip and cast her eyes on her salad-cutting task.
“I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t take her anymore. I waited that long only because I felt like I would be failing Max if I broke his home. But that wasn’t the home I wanted to give him.” He divided the fried eggs between two plates and put the two slices of the bread she handed him into the toaster. He kept on making breakfast because he sensed that she needed the diversion and not have him look at her when he told her all that.