Chapter Eight

The small confines of the boat closed in around her and her chest rose and fell with the ragged pull of air into her lungs.

He slipped a hand beneath her hair. He kneaded the base of her neck. “You’re shaking, mo chroí.”

My heart.

She squeezed her eyes shut with the slash of pain. “Don’t call me that.”

“Why not?”

Because every time she let him in, even a little, it ended badly for her.

“It hurts,” she said.

“No more hurting. No more fighting.” His warm mouth brushed across her forehead.

The sensation shattered her. When was the last time he’d touched her? His fingers danced across her skin. With the pads of his thumbs, he tilted her chin up, cradling her face while he explored her mouth with tiny nips and nibbles. She couldn’t keep up with her own heartbeat.

He’d never kissed her this way before. Fierce, fresh, tumbling kisses. Emotion whipped inside her, sinking and sliding darkly.

Tears prickled behind her eyes. How she’d longed for his warm, solid touch. A jagged sob snagged in her throat and her lips parted. His tongue licked swiftly inside her mouth, stealing her secrets.

Her troubled thoughts burst into flames and smoldered to ash as his hot mouth conspired with his clever fingers to seek out all the most susceptible places on her body—the center of her palm, the hollow beneath her earlobe, the notch of her clavicle.

Though she shouldn’t, she reached for him. She caressed his face, his neck, his bare shoulders. Her palms smoothed over the rounded swells of his pecs and along the hard plane of his abdomen. He was familiar yet foreign to her, like coming home after a long, agonizing journey.

He cupped her through the tight dress while he tugged at the low-cut neckline. She arched her back, offering herself up to him, because even when she wanted to hate him, she wanted his touch more. She craved it. He freed her breast from the confining material and gave her nipple a firm, wet tug with his mouth.

Heat flushed her skin. Hunger coiled in her heart and belly. She whimpered like a woman willing to do anything for this man’s touch because that was exactly what she was.

He tugged the dress lower and his hungry gaze clamped onto her flesh. His heavy lashes lowered until sharp shadows scored down his lean cheeks. A part of her, the part that fell instantly and completely in love with him in high school, delighted in his naked appreciation of her body.

He gripped her waist and his teeth scraped the sensitive skin where her neck and shoulder met.

“Shea.” His name slipped out as a desperate plea, though, truly, there was nothing she wanted from him.

Then the long shaft of his erection brushed her stomach and the lie washed away with the flood of her desire.

Fine. She did want something from him. She wanted him to sign their divorce papers. And she wanted him to fuck her.

God, she was so messed up.

His name kept falling from her lips and he urgently rucked up the hem of her skirt, clenching the fabric in his tight fists. Cool air rushed across her hot flesh and she gasped.

Discovering her panty-less, Shea stiffened, and then a savage growl vibrated in his chest.

“Holy fuck, Isobel.” Shock and arousal shook his voice.

He delved his fingers tenderly between her thighs to the patch of her curls. Questing, he found her humid flesh open to the invasion of his fingers. He nuzzled the side of her neck while he rubbed tension into her belly.

Delicious coils spiraled dizzyingly through her body. Her knees buckled, but she caught herself before she fell against him. More than anything, she wanted to lean into him, but he wasn’t her safe place anymore.

Maybe he never had been.

The warm whisper of his breath teased her ear when he asked, “Do you remember the first time I touched you like this?”

The night he’d returned from that first summer spent on the freighter, he’d climbed through her bedroom window and drowned her with kisses and apologies. She’d tried to extract promises that he’d never leave her again. Rather than give them, he’d teased and fondled her flesh until, panting and sobbing, her first orgasm screamed through her. When he’d left her bed in the black of night, he still hadn’t made her a single promise.

Her head moved with a jerky nod.

He skimmed over her wetness and then stroked deep, the touch so intimate, she couldn’t speak for the tears clogged in her throat.

He brushed a brief, hot kiss against the side of her throat, then slipped one hand to her back as he eased her down onto the table. Shoving the hem of her dress high above her waist, one work-roughened hand rubbed slow, drugging circles over her belly while the other tenderly stroked the source of her craving.

She watched him watching her body, mesmerized by the beautiful clash of hard and soft on his face. His probing, ravenous gaze fed her arousal until the sweet torture grew impossibly high and taut. Arching her back, she swiveled her hips, unabashedly chasing the pleasure his gentle, circling strokes wrought. She neared the peak and was ready to fling herself over the precipice when his fingers suddenly left her body.

Her protests died in her throat when he frantically worked the drawstring on his loose-fitting shorts and yanked the cloth down over his hips to stand naked before her.

She swallowed with an audible gulp.

He was big. His proud erection pressed against his stomach, so long and thick that the dusky head concealed his belly button. Though she’d never been with any other man, she spent her days around women in the mood to talk. Curious about some of what she’d overheard, she once took to the internet and came away convinced Shea was large. Larger than most. By a lot.

“Open your legs.” His husky voice rasped with his barely restrained control.

She never could deny him for long.

When he stepped between her thighs, his hips spread her wide. His hardness pressed against her vulnerable core and her flesh resisted him, just as her heart did. With the tip of his heavy shaft poised at her entrance, he teased her with his fingers until she’d returned to the mountaintop and hovered at the edge of the cliff.

He nudged inside.

She cried out with painful joy as her body sucked him deeper. He resisted. She shifted her hips and moaned when he slipped another fraction inside her.

Then it was a sensual altercation. With little wiggles and undulations, she tried to entice him farther inside, but he delayed, teasing and tormenting her aching flesh until she begged him in a hoarse whisper to “do it now, please.” She needed him inside her.

That she begged him rankled, but her anger fractured to tiny bits of nothingness when he pushed inside the wet constriction of her body, gentle in the way only a big man could be. Her body succumbed to his power even as she squirmed at the impossible thickness of him.

“That’s it, a chuisle mo chroí. Let me in.”

Pulse of my heart.

The endearment pulled a sob from her.

His lips caught at hers while he pushed into her honeyed core, inch by glorious inch. When she’d taken him all, a shaking breath rattled through her. If he could give her more, she’d have taken that, too. There was no part of him she could refuse. Not in this moment. She wanted all of him. One last time.

He grasped her bottom, his fingers biting into the plump roundness, and set a steady, upward plunging rhythm. With every voluptuous plunge, sensation spiraled and multiplied. Each thrust drove another memory from her mind. The first time he kissed her. The first time he made love to her. The first time he took her from behind.

Moisture leaked from the corners of her eyes as all her senses burst to colorful life. Having been dulled and grayed for so long, sensation overwhelmed her. She clung to him, lifting her knees to wrap her legs around his lean waist. The position allowed him to wedge deeper and a guttural groan tore from him.

He tugged her wrists above her head and anchored them to the table. “You think another man is going to be able to give you this?”

A broken sob escaped her.

“You think you’re done with me?” He thrust in a tireless rhythm, in and out, the friction slippery and sweet and carnal. “Tell me you never want me again. Tell me you can bear the thought of never being with me this way again. Say it and I’ll stop right now.”

No one would ever fill her the way he did. No one would ever be able to touch her so deep.

Tears streamed down her cheeks. “Never,” she whispered.

His big, driving body was unrelenting, as though if he loved her fiercely enough he might be able to push out all the anger and hurt and fear.

“We are not getting a divorce, Isobel. Do you hear me?”

He couldn’t stop her. They both knew it. But their bodies sang with the promise they made to each other long ago, with their words and their bodies.

“You are the only one,” he rasped. “There can be no others.”

His hands braced on either side of her head, she gripped his wrists and held on while the orgasm crashed over her. Turning her head, her teeth scraped over the script tattoo on his forearm while the muscles of her pulsing core spasmed with brutal pleasure. With her throaty moans, she swallowed the Gaelic words inscribed in his flesh, translating roughly to “one heart, one way.”

Inside her, Shea grew unbearably thick and hard. His long, deep plunges became short and urgent until he shuddered and his heat flooded her in violent pulsations.

In the silence afterward, their ragged breathing mingled and for one brief, painful moment, she lived in him as the beating of his heart.

With the pad of his thumb, he wiped away the tracks left by her tears. She blinked rapidly as she returned to herself. To the place where grief and doubt outlasted passion.

Unlocking her legs from around his waist, she wriggled out from under him. She tried to pull away, but he caught her easily with one hand at the small of her back. He tugged her close, drawing her against his body until her cheek rested against his collarbone.

He held her, his mouth near her temple. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

She swallowed convulsively. “It’s all we do anymore.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way.”

With the sharp bite of longing, her eyes filled with tears once more.

Shaking her head, she pressed her palms against his chest, but her soft shove didn’t budge him. “We’ve tried everything. Nothing ever works for long.”

Weariness filled his frustrated sigh. The sound, small and seemingly harmless, carried with it years of arguments and painful memories, and might as well have been a slap to the face.

Shame built as a sob in her throat.

Snatching the envelope off the counter, she thrust it at his chest. “Just sign the papers, Shea.”

His expression hardened, and for the first time that day, she recognized him as the man she thought to divorce.

On his chest, his larger hand covered hers. Instinctively, his fingers sought the secret crevices between her knuckles.

“We had a deal,” he said, his voice like velvet wrapped in steel.

Alarm bells went off inside her head. She tried to pull back her hand, but his grip tightened.

“You’ve had your kiss.” She rattled the envelope. “Sign.”

A cold sneer curled his lip. “I wasn’t talking about kissing your mouth.”