Chapter 25

Gabe doesn’t stir as I lift him from the car seat and hold him loosely slung against my shoulder to carry him up to the house. “He’s like a sack of rice,” I whisper, as Maddie unlocks the door and lets us in.

I ferry him down the hall and deposit him in bed. Maddie tucks him in. The two of us stand there, staring down at him. He’s so stinkin’ cute with his face all pink and his hair all mussed, and I give in to the impulse to stroke his cheek with one finger. It’s as soft as it looks.

I look up to find Maddie’s eyes locked on my face. They’re soft, too, and full of wonder, but as soon as she realizes I see her, her whole expression changes. It goes—stiff, I guess. Like she’s shut down whatever’s back there, behind her defenses.

I want her to let me in there. To look at me that way, with all that vulnerability and need showing.

“This was a good day,” I tell her.

“Yeah.” I see it, just a glimmer of it, that softness. I want to reach out and stroke it like I did Gabe’s cheek, but it’s not a thing you can touch. It’s like a wild animal that you have to lure out with quiet and gentleness. What happened between us, back then, it scared both of us bad enough that we’re both like that, holding something back from each other all the time.

Except—except when we have sex. I don’t think either of us is holding anything back then.

She turns away from me, toward the door of Gabe’s room. “I’m going to take a shower.”

“You want company?”

Almost to the door, she turns back and regards me. Her lips twitch with amusement. Showering together is one thing we haven’t done yet, mostly because at night we’re busy crawling all over each other in bed, and during the day the one of us who isn’t showering needs to be watching Gabe. “So, like, more of a ‘getting dirty’ shower than a ‘getting clean’ shower.”

The way she says it brings my dick to immediate attention.

“Getting dirty on the way to getting clean.”

I hear her breath catch.

“You don’t mind that, do you, dirty girl?”

She whimpers her approval, biting her lip. Oh, that fucking lip. I cross the room, swoop her up, and carry her down the hall. She clutches fistfuls of my shirt and calls me a Neanderthal. The way she says it, I’m 100 percent sure it’s a compliment.

In the bathroom I strip her out of her clothes, my hands roaming everywhere. “The first couple of weeks you were here you drove me crazy every time you showered,” I tell her, kissing the corner of her mouth, her earlobe, her jawline, her throat, her tits. “I’d listen to the water run and all I could think about was you, naked and wet…” I groan. “I wanted to lick all that water off you…” I give her a demo, flicking my tongue over the whorls of her ear, along the line of her collarbone, down the slope of one breast until I can take the nipple in my mouth and treat it right.

Her knees buckle and I catch her, my arm looped tight around her, holding her up as I lavish all my attention on first one tight bud, then the other.

“You’re still wearing all your clothes,” she murmurs when I let her go, just long enough to turn on the shower.

I grab my T-shirt and tug it over my head, loving the hot way her eyes track my movements and her gaze slides down my torso to the button of my jeans. I put on a show with that button, slowly unfastening it and drawing down the zipper over my erection, which strains painfully against its constraints. I push my jeans and briefs down and stand naked before her, and she reaches out her hands, palms open, and begins to paint my body with big, lush strokes. Everywhere her hands touch there’s a rush of heat and sensation, and it all gathers into my cock like sand draining to the apex of an hourglass. I’m wound tight already and we haven’t even gotten under the water.

She steps into the shower and I follow her, loving her curves with my eyes—the flare of her hips, the heart-shaped curve of her ass, those generous tits, now drenched and dripping, the water streaming down the way I pictured, catching on the tips of her nipples and beading in her pubic hair and in her eyelashes. My mouth finds hers, my tongue licking against the wet silk of her lips and cheek and tongue like I’m still catching water droplets on her skin. She moans and leans into me, and the heat of her body with the heat of the water, touching me everywhere, is almost too much to take. She reaches past me for the soap, slicks her hands with it, and winds her fingers against mine until we’re both soapy. We touch each other like that, soapy and eager, almost desperate. She’s so slippery under my hands, everything is slippery, and it’s all I can do not to just plunge myself into her right now.

“No condom,” I groan.

“Jack,” she whispers. “If I said I have an IUD—”

“I’d say why the fuck didn’t you tell me that before, woman!?”

She frowns. “You have to swear to me that you’re clean…”

If her implied lack of trust burns at all, it gets swallowed in all the other heat around us, by how much in this moment I just want her no matter what. “I swear. I’m clean.” I’ve got something to tell her that feels like a big deal, even though it shouldn’t; it’s just a statement of fact, it doesn’t have to be all laden with meaning. But I have to catch my breath to get the words out, and they come out a little rushed, and cracked: “You’re the last woman I fucked without a condom.”

She takes a step back and holds me at arm’s length for a moment, and I see that wide-open look in her eyes again, and I have that same insane feeling of wanting to reach out and touch it, touch her in some place that’s beyond where my hands and fingers and tongue and lips can reach.

She takes a deep breath. “Okay. Okay.” She closes her eyes, then opens them again and turns toward the wall.

She puts her hands against the tile, steps with one foot onto the ledge of the tub, and I don’t wait for a written invitation. I cover her body with mine, our skin sliding soapy and slick and delicious against each other, and I thrust into her with one long stroke, she is so fucking wet and needy, and without the condom she is hotter inside than outside, hotter than the water raining down on us. We’re wet from the shower and her generous slickness and the beads of pre-cum easing my way into her, from the way she’s turned her head to catch my lips and lick hungrily into my mouth, from soap, water, sweat. My fingers weave through hers on the tile wall, the ceramic squares smooth and cold under our hands, her ass canted up to give me an angle that won’t let me last more than a few seconds, her body like fire around mine and, now, gripping my dick tight as she comes, and nothing, no amount of willpower or desire to make this moment last forever could possibly stop me from shooting my own wet heat into her like it’s just one more way the universe fits together.