Being Me

His tongue presses past my lips and teeth, finding mine and stroking, and I feel him everywhere, the heat of how much I need him burning away the cold night. Everything fades away but the two of us touching, kissing, melding our bodies together. I am blinded by passion, by the relief of his return, by his body next to mine. Time stands still and somehow my blouse is gaping, my bra open, and I’m pressed against the tree with Chris suckling and licking my ni**les. My skirt is at my h*ps and I stroke the thick ridge of Chris’s erection, nearly desperate to feel him inside me, craving the connection I thought I’d never experience again.

“Chris—” I pant and yelp, the bark cutting into my back, penetrating the haze of desire overcoming me.

“Ah. The tree.” Chris pulls me from the tree, kisses me hard on the lips, and then shrugs out of his leather jacket, spreading it on the ground. He skims my jacket from my shoulders, spreading it on top of his. I shiver in a gust of wind and he takes me down to the ground, his big, warm body blocking out everything but him. Protecting me. He’s always protecting me, even from himself.

Our breath mingles, teasing me with a kiss yet to happen, with the depths of passion I feel for Chris expanding within me. Still, he doesn’t kiss me. He caresses my skirt up my h*ps again, his touch leaving goose bumps on my bare skin that have nothing to do with the night air and everything to do with the man. I reach for his waistband; that craving for him inside me reignites, becomes urgent. He echoes my silent plea, shoving down his pants, and I moan with the feel of the hard length of his c**k thick between my thighs.

On his elbows, he pins me in a sizzling stare as he enters me and it’s as if my soul sighs when he is finally buried deep in the depths of my body, stretching me, filling me.

“I thought I’d never be inside you again and it almost killed me.” His voice trembles with a vulnerability that means even more than his confession.

He begins to move, a slow, sensual slide of his c**k followed by another, watching me, me watching him, and we are making love, impossible and breathtaking lovemaking. We sway and meld together in a sweet, arousing dance, but it’s not the harmony of our bodies that reaches deep and claims me, it’s what passes between us as we stare at one another. He is as much a part of me as skin and bone, and it terrifies and completes me.

Chris dips his head and touches his lips to mine, teases my tongue with his, trails his lips over my jaw, over my shoulder, to my nipple. Every lick and taste, and tease, is tender, gentle, a contrast to the hardness of the past week and the man who’d been tied to those poles in the club. Suddenly I need him to know that I see both, I love both.

My hand slides into the silky long strands of his blond hair. “Chris,” I manage hoarsely through the delicious friction of his tongue against my nipple, my sex clenching around his cock. “Chris.”

His mouth comes down on mine, harder now, more demanding, a raw, hungry need in him rising to the surface. “You belong to me,” he growls. “Say it.”

“Yes. Yes, I belong to you.” His mouth finds mine again, demanding, taking, drawing me under his spell.

“Say it again,” he demands, nipping my lip, squeezing my breast and nipple, and sending a ripple of pleasure straight to my sex.

“I belong to you,” I pant.

He lifts me off the ground with the possessive curve of his hand around my backside, angling my h*ps to thrust harder, deeper. “Again,” he orders, driving into me, his c**k hitting the farthest point of me and blasting against sensitive nerve endings.

“Oh . . . ah . . . I . . . I belong to you.”

His mouth dips low, his hair tickling my neck, his teeth scraping my shoulders at the same moment he pounds into me and the world spins around me, leaving nothing but pleasure and need and more need.

I am suddenly hot only where he touches, and freezing where I yearn to be touched. Lifting my leg, I shackle his hip, ravenous beyond measure, climbing to the edge of bliss, reaching for it at the same time I’m trying desperately to hold back. Chris is merciless, wickedly wild, grinding and rocking, pumping.

“I love you, Sara,” he confesses hoarsely, taking my mouth, swallowing the shallow, hot breath I release, and punishing me with a hard thrust that snaps the last of the lightly held control I possess. Possessing me. A fire explodes low in my belly and spirals downward, seizing my muscles, and I begin to spasm around his shaft, trembling with the force of my release.

With a low growl, his muscles ripple beneath my touch and his c**k pulses, his hot se**n spilling inside me. We moan together, lost in the cl**ax of a roller-coaster ride of pain and pleasure, spanning days apart, and finally collapse in a heap and just lie there. Slowly, I let my leg ease from his hip to the ground, and Chris rolls me to my side to face him.

Still inside me, he holds me close, pulling the jacket up around my back, trailing fingers over my jaw. “And I belong to you.”

The unexpected vow does me in. Tears spring from my eyes, trickling down my cheeks. “I thought . . . I thought . . . I can’t go through this again.”

“Shhh,” he murmurs, kissing away the droplets clinging to my cheeks. “We’re together now.”

I shake my head, rejecting an answer that promises only one moment in time. “I have to know that the next time you get like that, we deal with it together, no matter what that means, Chris. I have to know.”

“I won’t get—”

His denial spikes through me and I try to push away from him, but he holds me. “Sara, wait.”