“Bullshit.” Jackson lifted his other hand to cup my face in his palms. “You aremyhero, and you will fuck off with insulting my husband. I wouldn’t let my brother do it. If my father had tried, I wouldn’t have let him do it. I sure as shit won’t let you do it, either.”
To my shame, a tear spilled out of my eye to track down my cheek. He brushed it away with his thumb. Strong arms pulled me in, and now, it was my turn to cling against him as the sobs claimed me. Three years had passed since my accident. Three years of pain and nightmares, some spent with a woman I thought loved me but who could never understand what I’d gone through. She’d never tried.
Jackson, strong, wonderful Jackson was right. This was a tie that bound us. I’d never seen a battlefield. I would never go to Mars. But I did understand what it meant to give yourself for a greater cause, and to never leave a man behind. Even if I hadn’t had the chance to serve my country, I’d been ready to. That counted.
“Oh, babe,” he murmured into my hair. “You don’t have to carry this alone.”
“I didn’t want you to have to carry it at all,” I said, and pulled back to look into his face. Tears had escaped to trickle down his cheeks, too, and I loved him all the more to see them unabashedly on display. “Signing up for Mail Call was about supporting the people I couldn’t go to Mars to heal. I wanted to give you the welcome home I always imagined, with the sign and the smile waiting for you when you arrived. I didn’t want you to hear about how I’d failed to-”
His stern look stopped me. “Not failed.”
“How I hadn’t managed to get to Mars,” I corrected. “Or been able to help how I’d wanted to.”
“Better.”
“Then I met you, and I wanted to give you everything you needed without weighing you down…”
The kiss smothered my words into a soft moan. He pressed his lips to mine, and his powerful body shoved mine backwards until it rested on the mattress. I stared up into his eyes and found that hungry predator’s stare looking back at me, whetted by his desire and driven by a near-Gordian tangle of emotions I had no way to decipher.
I had never understood the idea of being ravished by a gaze until that moment. In his eyes, I could feel myself stripped bare and laid out for his consumption, claimed and taken with only a look. Each time we touched, I thought I couldn’t ever want someone more.
Each time, I was wrong. My cock ached where my clothes held it back. My heart ached where our collected fears held it back.
“Let me show you what I need, Bastian,” he said, voice a deep rumble.
Then he was on me, lips locked to mine. His hands pushed between us to run over my chest and towards where my shirt rested on my shoulders. I thought he intended to pull the fabric off as the kiss heated. Instead, he forced his hands behind my back to grab the collar of the shirt.
He pulled down. My own shirt became an effective binding, caught at my elbows and trapped behind my body. I gasped against his lips. The end of the sound became a soft whimper as he ran his hands down my torso, pausing to circle my nipples with his fingertips as his caresses reached them. They hardened to sensitive points that I would swear felt air currents gusting against them, they were so sensitized and ready for touch.
Our kiss broke. He smirked down at me, and then slid himself down my body to follow his hands. Again, he paused as he reached my nipples, and this time, IknewI felt air currents. Warm breath heated my skin, a prelude to the first stroke of his tongue tip. My back arched, bowing up at the shock of how hot his tongue felt, how desperately I wanted it.
A low chuckle rolled out of him. “Like that, babe?”
“God, please, Jackson,” I groaned. “I want you so fucking much.”
“Mm. This is about whatIneed, remember? You said so.” He looked up at me along the length of my body. “What I need is to watch you writhe. Hear you call my name. Know what I need most?”
I shook my head.
“I need to watch you come for me. I need totasteyou.” He bent his head again to lap his tongue over my nipple in one long, hot stroke.
I cried out as his tongue seared against me and left trails of heat behind it. He’d ensured I couldn’t move, not to stroke his head or pull him to me for more kisses. I was at his mercy, and I knew he would make good on those arousing threats he’d just spoken.
Kisses traced a path down my belly, over the thin line of hair that guided him towards the button of my jeans. That button didn’t stay fastened long. He had it undone and the zipper down before my brain could finish its frantiche’s really close to my cock!lap. My shaft strained against the dark blue cotton of my underwear, trying to burst out into freedom as he pulled off my shoes, my socks, and my jeans to throw into a corner.
My binding shirt, holding my arms back while leaving my chest bare, and my underwear were all that remained. Jackson kneeled up so he could look me over, lips parted to show the tip of his tongue as it wet his lips and licked the tip of one canine like a wolf.
It was delicious agony when he leaned forward to kiss the curve of my cock with the fabric still over it. Whatever cavernous emotions I’d tried to fall into earlier, he had pulled me out of the mental cave and focused me on a purely physical need. I could think of nothing but how his mouth would feel wrapped around my cock at last, how it would feel to have that sweetest heat enveloping me. He was a millimeter of knit cotton away from sending me into orbit with his mouth, and I could feel every fraction of a second pass while I waited for it.
Then he stood up, and I whimpered at the torment that he would make me wait even longer. Fouled up in my shirt and stuck on my back, I watched as he pulled his own shirt over his head to reveal his beautiful chest. The low light hid the battle-etched enigmas of his scars, but it couldn’t hide the chiseled shape of his muscles as they rippled with the motion of his arms. He let me look, too, when he noticed my stare, stood there balling his shirt up and passing it from hand to hand.
It was worse with his pants, if that’s possible. He unbuckled his belt slowly, letting that jingle of metal go on as long as it could. That is a primal noise, one that reaches deep into you and grabs at a part of your hind brain inclined to take you places. Filthy, naughty places that you try not to think about, because once those thoughts take root, you will end up in a bus seat, staring into space with a funny expression and making the rest of the passengers wonder about you.
The belt came out from around his waist with a single tug. Muscles played in the low lamplight as he coiled the leather strap in his hand, his eyes never leaving mine. I rolled my hips in hopes of relieving the pressure of an underwear seam on my cock – but really in hopes of an ounce of sensation, ofsomethingtouching that rock-hard shaft while I watched my husband undress.
He turned to the side to give me his profile as he unbuttoned his jeans and pushed them down over his hips. It utterly delighted me, that guy stuck on the bed with a hard cock trying to burst through a perfectly good pair of underwear, to see Jackson’s own cock straining against its own cloth prison. At least, for the second I bothered to look at it, because his removal of his pants revealed hips and muscled legs and my attention had lost its adhesive the moment my own pants came off.
The smile that unfurled on his lips did as many terrible things to me as the sound of his belt buckle. He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his underwear and pushed down. Suddenly, my attention turned sticky again, glued to the long, thick shaft that sprang forth from the top of the waistband and stood out proud to taunt me.