I flinch at the thought of being rough with her.
I don’t want to be like them, I don’t want to do anything to remind her of the nightmare she barely survived.
I don’t say a word aloud, but evidently Sam can still read my mind as well as I can read hers.
“Don’t be afraid,” she says, stepping closer. “If you’re gentle and different and worried because of what they did, then they win, Danny. And we’ll never be alone again.”
My jaw clenches as I shake my head. “I don’t want to hurt you. I couldn’t live with myself if I—”
“You could never hurt me.” She reaches out, her fingertips brushing across my chest. “You never have and you never will.”
Her elegant arms twine around my neck, bringing her breasts inches from my chest, sending her summertime smell rushing through my head. I’m so hard I feel like I’m going to explode, but I keep my hands by my sides.
“I want you,” she whispers, her breath warming my lips. “Don’t you want me, too?”
“God, yes.” I curl my hands into tighter fists, refusing to let myself reach for her until she understands exactly what she’s asking for. “But if I lose control, I’m not sure I’ll be able to get it back again. I haven’t been with anyone in a year, Sam, and I’ve been so fucking lonely.”
Sweat breaks out on my lip as I fight to swallow past the wave of emotion shoving up my throat. “What if, once I start, I can’t stop?”
“There will be no reason to stop.” She leans in, flattening her breasts against my chest. “Please, Danny, make love to me.”
My control snaps and desire takes over.
By the time my mind catches up with my body, my tongue is stroking into Sam’s mouth, hard and deep, and I’ve got her ass in my hands, drawing her tight against my aching cock. She rocks against me, making hungry sounds that make it clear she’s as desperate for this as I am.
We cling to each other, bodies straining closer, fighting to escape the boundaries of our separate skins, to become us again after all the terrible time and distance. I cup her breast, rolling her nipple between my fingers and thumb, trembling as she cries out against my mouth and bites my lip.
I bite her back, dragging my teeth across her bottom lip and sucking hard as I continue to pluck at her nipple, making her moan.
A second later, she’s got her hand down the front of my shorts and her fingers wrapped around my cock, stroking me hard, making my vision blur with how phenomenal it feels to have her hands on me again.
But I don’t want her hands.
“Hold onto me,” I gasp, head spinning as I wrap my arm around her waist and lift her out of the water. I’m out of the pool in three steps, laying Sam on the towels and shoving my shorts down my hips, so desperate to be inside her I’m shaking all over.
“Yes,” she pants, hands trailing down my stomach as she reaches for my cock again. “Inside me. Please, Danny, please I—”
Her words end in a cry as I lengthen myself over her body and drive between her legs with one long stroke. I sink in, pushing through her slick heat until I’m buried inside of her. I don’t think about holding back and couldn’t have if I’d tried.
A floodgate has opened and all the hunger I’ve ignored for the past year is rushing out, demanding release, demanding I get closer, deeper, that I show Sam with every thrust of my hips that she is mine.
That she belongs to me and I belong to her and nothing is ever coming between us again.
“You’re mine,” I whisper, trapping her chin between my fingers as I ride her, shoving in and out of her pussy with swift, hard strokes that end with enough force to make her breasts bounce every time I drive home. “You are mine. Mine. Forever.”
“Yes,” she gasps, fingernails digging into my ass as she pulls me in tighter, harder. “Yes.”
“And you’re never leaving me again,” I say, pace growing more frantic even as tears rise in my eyes.
I feel like I’m falling apart and being put back together again at the same time. My heart is falling out of my chest and into Sam’s hands and all the hurt of the past year is pouring out of me with every thrust into her heat. I’m fucking her with all of it, all of the hurt and the love and the abandon only she can make me feel.
Only her. Only my Sam.
“I’ve missed you so much,” I gasp, tears falling onto her cheeks. “I need you so much. Please don’t leave me again. Please don’t leave.”
“I won’t. I promise. I love you.” She’s sobbing too, clinging to me and feathering kisses over my cheeks, but we’re still fucking like we’re going to kill each other, like we’re going to come together so hard and fast we break through to the other side of two and become one.