CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Jake
She’s so good. So beautiful. So perfect.
She feels even better than she did the first night I had her, and something in my gut tells me it’s only going to get sweeter, hotter, sexier. Every time with Shane will be better than the last because every time she’s going to let me get closer.
Closer to her, this woman who takes me to places I’ve never been and makes me so intensely aware of the way we connect that I swear I can feel the echo of her pleasure pulsing through my body when she comes.
And fuck, it’s incredible. A burst of nirvana that throbs through my balls and dances up my spine, lighting me up even as it takes the edge off the need to spill myself inside her. I’ve never had any trouble with stamina in the bedroom, but tonight I set a new personal best.
By the time I flip Shane onto her stomach and slide into her from behind, she’s come for me three times and I’m determined to have one more. One more before I go, before I come so hard inside her sweetness.
“One more, baby,” I whisper against her neck as I ride her, my balls slapping between her legs as I drive in hard. “I want to feel you go one more time.”
“I can’t,” she gasps, even as she arches her hips, taking me deeper. “I’m already buzzing all over. It’s so amazing, Jake. Like I’m high.”
“I’m going to get you higher.” I reach beneath our joined bodies, finding her clit while I thread my free hand through her fingers, pinning her to the mattress. “One more. Let me feel this sweet pussy tight on my cock, princess. I want you to come with me, come with me.”
She moans, her spine bowing even more. “Oh God, Jake. Oh God…”
“Yes, you’re almost there. I can feel you.” I shift my angle until the head of my cock grinds against her inner walls as I move. “Come on, baby. Come for me. Come, Shane. God, yes. Fuck, yes.”
She comes with a wild, shameless cry that goes straight to my dick, and I’m a goner. I slam home, burying myself deep inside her as she takes me the rest of the way, her body contracting around my cock, squeezing me tight as I come so long and so fucking hard.
So hard that my vision blurs and my mind and body separate and for a few seconds I’m outside myself. I don’t know where I go or what I think while I’m there, but when I come back down to earth, I’m lying heavily on top of Shane with the flesh of her shoulder trapped between my teeth and my arm wrapped so tight around her waist I can feel the bones of her back hard against my ribs.
I start to lift myself off of her, worried that she can’t breathe, but she reaches back, slapping my ass.
“Stay,” she demands, fingernails curling into the flesh she just spanked, making me grunt with approval. “Just for a few more minutes.”
“I’m not crushing you?”
“Yes, but I like it,” she says, sighing. “It’s keeping me from floating away on an orgasmy cloud.”
I relax onto her, smiling as I nuzzle her hair, clearing a path to her neck. “You can float away if you want.”
“No, I want to stay here. With you.” She pats my ass affectionately. “You do good work, dragon.”
“You, too, princess.” I kiss her neck before flicking my tongue across the damp skin. “And your sweat is delicious. Almost as delicious as your pussy.”
She laughs softly.
“What’s funny?” I ask, when no explanation is forthcoming.
“You’ve gone down on me twice, and I still haven’t given you a blow job,” she says. “That’s never happened to me before.”
“Then you’ve been dating the wrong men. I love tasting you, feeling you come on my mouth.” I hum appreciatively. “Just thinking about it would get me up again if I hadn’t just come so hard my dick almost fell off.”
She laughs harder, and the contraction of her inner muscles forces my spent cock from inside her. “Oh shit. Sorry.”
“Had to happen sooner or later.” I roll onto the mattress, smiling at her as she curls onto her side, looking up at me through wild blond curls. I smooth the strands from her face. “Is it possible that you got even more beautiful in the past few minutes?”
She grins. “Orgasm-colored glasses. That’s what my girlfriends call it.”
“I didn’t realize orgasms had a color.” I scoot closer so I can run my hand over the tempting slope where her waist becomes her hip, the need to touch her a compulsion I don’t care to resist. “I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s just you.”
“You’re pretty beautiful yourself. And I think I could become addicted to your body. Seriously addicted.”
My smile stretches. “Good.”
“But the withdrawal would be terrible,” she says, draping her leg over mine. “Worse than giving up refined sugar, which I did for two months and did not enjoy at all. Losing three pounds wasn’t worth it.”
“There won’t be any withdrawal because I’m not going anywhere. And you don’t need to lose weight.” I let my eyes play over her curves. “You’re perfect the way you are. Especially your fucking gorgeous ass. Have I mentioned how much I love your ass?”
She laughs. “Yes, I think you might have mentioned it a few dozen times, Mr. Ass Man.”
“I’m not an ass man. I’m a you man. I’m a fan of all your parts. Inside and outside.”
“You think my liver’s sexy?” she asks, wiggling her eyebrows.
“Hot as fuck. But I was talking about the way you make me laugh. And the way you show who you really are to the world, no matter who’s watching. You’re always you, and that’s special.”
“Thanks,” she says, eyes softening. “You know me pretty well for a guy I just met.”
“It doesn’t feel like we just met,” I say, letting my heart speak before the afterglow fades and I lose the courage. “It feels like I’ve known you for a long time. Or like I’ve been waiting to know you.”
“Me, too.” She reaches out, laying her hand flat on my chest. The tenderness in the touch makes me ache with something sweeter than lust. “So talk to me, dragon. Fill me in on all the things I missed while we were waiting.”
So I tell her about the start of my career and how weirdly stressful it was to have all my dreams come true, almost like my brain wasn’t ready for success to come a few years ahead of schedule. She tells me about switching majors as an undergrad so she could study veterinary medicine instead of pediatric medicine and how her aunt supported her completely, even though Shane had never even cared for a pet of her own at that point.
“But I was afraid working with sick kids would make me sad all the time, and I knew I loved animals,” she says. “Ten cats and hundreds of hours of vet school later, I still did.”
“You miss practicing.” I push on before she can answer because the truth is written all over her face. “You should get certified and go back to doing what you love.”
“But then I’d have to find someone to run the charity, and it’s so much more complicated than it looks. I know all the ins and outs because I helped Aunt Tansy with it for years.”
“So, you take the time to find the right person and train them,” I insist. “Life’s too short. You should love your work. And you should bring your cats to the city.”
She laughs. “Oh my God. Can you imagine this apartment with ten cats in it? I kid around about it, but in reality it would be a madhouse, and they’re happier in the country. Though, I would love a dog someday. I think little dogs can be happy in the city. I just have to convince the HOA to allow animals in the building. They haven’t for the past fifty years.”
“Well, if anyone can change their minds, I’m betting on you,” I say, kissing the back of her hand.
She smiles and tells me about the time she convinced her high school to change their mascot from a Trojan to a Fighting Pumpkin, just because it made her friends laugh. I tell her about dressing up as my school’s mascot for a job fair to earn extra money and passing out in the summer heat. She confesses that she is bored to tears by most sports, but thinks she could learn to like hockey. I confess that art puts me to sleep, but that I enjoyed the statues and drinking champagne with her on the museum roof.
We put on a few clothes—boxers and an undershirt for me, pajamas for her—and move to the couch to watch some mindless T.V., but end up talking some more instead. I tell her what a cocky little shit I was as a kid, and she says that she was shy when she was little and didn’t really come out of her shell until after her parents died.
“It’s like you said about life being too short. It hit me not long after the crash that I might not have as much time as I anticipated,” she says, her fingers playing back and forth across my chest. “One morning I woke up and everything I was thinking started coming out of my mouth. At first Aunt Tansy thought I was having a mental breakdown, but eventually she realized it was the new me and embraced it. Word vomit and all.”
“I like your word vomit.” I hold out my arm, surveying it seriously. “And I like Fergus. I can’t believe I made it to thirty without naming my forearm.”
She hums in agreement. “Serious oversight. Especially since Fergus is so much fun to stare at and stroke lovingly.”
She strokes my forearm, and it’s sweet and silly and just right. Something that feels a lot like love swells inside of me, and I figure now is as good a time as any to tell her about the uglier parts of my childhood
“As far as what Bash found out about me… When I was six, my dad starting bringing me along on jobs,” I say. “And by jobs, I mean to the places where he stole things. My father’s definition of ‘work’ was figuring out ways not to get caught taking what he thought the world owed him.”
Shane shifts in my arms, lifting sad eyes to mine. “I’m sorry. That’s terrible. You were just a baby.”
I shrug. “Yeah, well, babies have small bodies that are good for getting boosted through windows. Dad was practical. He probably would have let me out of the family business once I got too big, but about six months in, my mom found out what was happening. They got into a huge fight, and he hit her. It wasn’t the first time he’d done it, but it was the first time I saw it happen.”
Shane pulls back, sitting on her heels on the couch beside me as she takes my hand and squeezes tight.
“She hit her head on the kitchen counter on the way down to the floor.” I’m still able to see it in my mind, as clear as the night it happened. See it and feel that tidal wave of fear rushing over me as I realize I might be losing the person I love most in the whole world. “There was blood all over the linoleum and Dad was still screaming… I got so scared that I ran. I ran and ran until I was lost in a neighborhood even rougher than mine. Two cops on patrol picked me up, heard my story, and told me they would help.”
Her eyes fill with understanding. “But they didn’t help?”
“No, they did,” I say, glancing down at our joined hands. “They took me home, arrested my piece of shit dad, and told my mom what she needed to do to get a restraining order. I thought everything was going to be okay. But it turned out my old man had a friend down at the station, a captain he paid off with a cut of his take in exchange for turning a blind eye to the breaking and entering on our side of town.”
“Shit,” Shane says.
“Yeah. It was shit. Dad was free, no charges filed, within a few hours.” My tongue slips out to wet my lips, but they go dry again almost instantly. “Not long after that, he was back home beating the crap out of me. I was pretty sure he broke something, but I didn’t know for sure until an X-ray of my ribs years later. He didn’t take me to the doctor. He locked me in my room and told my mom he would kill me the next time either of us talked to the cops.”
I shake my head. “After that, she was so scared she did whatever he said. She even let me go back to helping him after I healed up. But I never blamed her for it. She had four kids, and my youngest brother was just a baby. He could barely breathe most of the time because of his asthma, and she was just trying to keep us all alive. I know she did the best she could.”
“I would like to kill him for you,” Shane says, the lack of heat in her tone more chilling than if she’d shouted the words. “I know you don’t need that now, but if I could time travel…”
I smile. “Nah, I wouldn’t want you getting your hands dirty. He wasn’t worth it. And he got what was coming to him. He was shot while we were breaking into a house about a year later. The guy almost shot me, too, before he saw that I was a kid. Still, he held me until the police arrived. By the time they got there, Dad was already dead. We buried him right around my eighth birthday.”
“And that’s why you don’t trust the police,” she says gently.
“That was the start of it,” I say with a shrug. “But it was also growing up where I did. Cops that drove through my neighborhood assumed we were all the enemy—every poor, angry, fucked up kid on the streets, even the ones who just wanted to grow up and get out. It didn’t feel like they were there to keep us safe. It felt like it was us against them, except that they had guns and power, and we had nothing.”
Shane presses her lips together, and her brow furrows.
“Go ahead.” I nod. “Say what’s on your mind.”
“I’m not sure what’s on my mind,” she says. “I mean, I can see where you’re coming from, and I’m so sorry those things happened to you and your family. But I keep thinking of Father Patrick, the priest at my school.”
I wince. “Bad priest?”
She shakes her head. “Oh no, the total opposite. He was an angel. After my parents died, he was always there for me, even when I was lashing out and breaking the rules and generally doing my best to get myself kicked out of school. He never judged, or said anything about my parents being in heaven because it was God’s will, or any of the things I hated to hear because they felt like lies. Like these paper-thin bandages laid over a wound so deep that the blood soaked through them in an instant.”
She swallows. “But Father Patrick didn’t preach… He just loved me. He loved me, and every other kid in that school. He never offered any bandages, but he helped me heal all the same. I don’t know if I would have made it through that first year without him.”
“I’m glad,” I say. “Wish there were more like him.”
“But there are,” she says, with complete faith. “For every priest who molests children or makes ugly headlines, there is a Father Patrick quietly working everyday miracles for people who need him.”
I grunt, seeing where she’s headed.
“I’m not claiming to know what it’s like to grow up in the inner city,” she says. “I know I’ve led a privileged life. But I do believe in taking people for who they are. And priests and policemen are people first. That means most of them, on an average day, are somewhere between good and evil, depending on how well they slept the night before and if they’ve had enough coffee.”
My lips twist. “Most people are too lazy to be truly good or truly evil?”
“I think so.” She shrugs in a way that is both frustrated and forgiving at the same time. “Or too distracted or confused, or just so wrapped up in their daily drama that they can’t see the world outside themselves. But you’re right, some people are criminal assholes who abuse their power.”
She tightens her grip on my hand. “But some of them are also heroes, people who are willing to take a bullet for a stranger, or to go without sex forever because the Catholic Church makes crazy rules and then refuses to change them for hundreds of years.”
I smile. “Father Patrick really was a hero.”
“You bet your sweet cock,” she agrees with a straight face. “Can you imagine living your whole life without orgasm-colored glasses?”
“Not since last Saturday.” I draw her into my lap so I can hug all of her at once. I wrap her up in my arms, bury my face in her sweet-smelling hair and promise, “I’ll try.”
“That’s all any of us can do,” she says, kissing my forehead. “Try to believe in the good in people and to be better than the ones who let us down.”
“I aim a little higher than that,” I say, curling my fingers around her thigh. “Being better than my criminal, wife-and-child-beating, piece of shit father is setting the bar pretty low.”
She kisses my cheek. “You’re worth ten of him. A hundred. You’re a good man, Falcone.”
“Even when my stubborn side is showing?”
“Yes.” She straddles my hips, sending fire licking through my body. “Even when you’re stubborn, you’re also patient and thoughtful and sexy as hell.”
“We should probably be done with the serious talk.” I cup her breasts through her tank top, loving the way her nipples tighten at the brush of my thumbs. “I’m suddenly having a difficult time concentrating for some reason.”
“Me, too,” she says, her breath coming faster as she circles her hips, grinding against where I’m hard. “But I have one very important question to ask you first.”
“What’s that, princess?” I pulse against her, fucking her through our clothes.
“Will you do me the honor of getting me fake pregnant tonight, dragon?”
My rhythm falters for a moment, until I realize what she’s saying and relief spreads through my chest. “Really? You sure you’re okay with that? If not, we don’t have to—”
“I’m okay with it. As long as we make sure Keri finds out in a way that won’t attract a lot of attention.”
“I can slip the news to a mutual friend of ours, a woman she works with.”
“Perfect,” Shane says, smiling as she reaches for the bottom of her shirt. “Then I guess the only thing left to do is for you to pretend knock me up.”
Her shirt floats up and over her head, revealing her stunning tits. A moment later, her breasts are in my hands as my tongue plays back and forth between her nipples, licking and sucking and biting until the rock of her hips grows urgent and demanding.
“Yes,” she pants, fingernails scoring the back of my neck. “I want you so much. I want you inside me again. Right now.”
I reach down, shoving my boxers low on my hips, freeing my cock as she slips out of her sleep shorts and panties in record time. A moment later, she’s straddling me again, positioning the head of my cock and sliding down until I’m fisted in her wet heat.
“That’s it,” she sighs, teeth digging into her bottom lip. “That’s what I need.”
“So you want me to fuck a baby into you, princess?” I grip her hips as I thrust even deeper, until my cock butts against the tightness at the end of her.
Mischief flickers in her eyes, and even before she speaks I know she’s going to play along, “Yes, dragon. Take me bare and don’t you dare pull out until it’s too late to do a damned bit of good.”
And so I do.
And I don’t.
And it’s so good I don’t see how anything, anywhere, anytime could be any better.