Chapter Thirteen
River
My heart pounded as I finished my run. When the hell was I finally going to adjust to this altitude? I’d been running every day for the last five weeks and I still felt like I needed a lung transplant after four miles.
“It’s embarrassing, Zeus,” I said as we stretched out near the steps.
He looked up at me with an exasperated expression and laid down while I worked out my quads. I glanced over at the flower beds I’d put in last weekend and wondered what Avery would have planted.
Would she have wanted one around the mail box I’d just put in? Did it even fucking matter? I closed my eyes against the onslaught of pain I knew was coming. Every time I thought about her was followed by an exquisite ache somewhere in the vicinity of where my heart used to be.
I clicked my tongue and Zeus jumped up, following me into the house. All the furniture I didn’t like had been taken away, but I was too damn lazy to pick out anything new. I’d donated damn near every piece that had come from Alaska. It just hadn’t fit here. It was too much…Avery. I’d kept the bed, though. I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of the one place I’d slept next to her, made love to her.
Maybe I should have told Bash that I wanted a different house, one she hadn’t been in. He’d already been pissed at me for insisting on paying him for this one. Not that I cared. I wasn’t going to live in a house that another man paid for—I didn’t care if he called it a signing bonus or not. Maybe another house would have been better. One where I didn’t see her smiling, crying out in pleasure, or picture her arching underneath me.
One where I didn’t see her standing in my kitchen.
My heart stopped beating, my breath faltered, and the only muscle I moved were my eyelids, trying to blink away the vision of Avery standing at my stove, making breakfast.
Hell, I would have thought she was a mirage, if not for the smell of bacon and Zeus’s excited yipping. Damn, that dog turned into a pitiful puppy when she was around…just like his owner.
“Hi,” she said softly, the island between us.
“Hi.”
She licked her lips nervously, her hair a wild tumble around her shoulders that I was desperate to slide my hands through. “So, I used my key.”
“Finally. It only took me moving three thousand miles away to get you to do that.” My feet were frozen. No matter how much I wanted to move, to get just the slightest bit closer to her, they wouldn’t comply.
She forced a smile, and it was the most beautiful damn thing I’d seen since she’d smiled here six weeks ago. “I’m a little slow to act sometimes.”
“Snails are faster,” I agreed.
“I’m here,” she said softly, her nervousness showing in the way she twisted the spatula in her hand.
“I’ve noticed,” I said. Why? For the first time, I was scared to ask a damn question, scared that this was just a visit. Scared that all she wanted was my friendship when I loved her so much that I ached with it.
She swallowed, taking the rest of the bacon out of the pan and then moving it off the heat. “I thought maybe I was too late,” she said, looking up at me as she came around the island in a pale blue sundress that matched her eyes to a T. “I wondered if you’d moved on. It’s not like you’re hard to look at,” she muttered.
My forehead puckered, trying to figure out what the hell to say to her that wouldn’t send her running back to Alaska.
“I had Harper drop me off. She has Adeline at the school right now, picking up enrollment papers.”
My heart slammed to a beat again, life rushing through my veins. She was moving here. She’d brought Adeline.
She was staying.
“And when we pulled up, I was terrified that I’d find some other woman here, you know? Because I was so fucking stupid to let you go.”
I stepped forward, and she put her hand out, taking a step back and shaking her head. “No. I told you once, I can’t think when you touch me.”
My feet stayed planted only with the utmost effort.
“But then I got out of the car and saw the flower beds,” she whispered. Then she smiled so brightly that her entire face lit up. “And I saw the swing you put on the front porch, and I knew.”
“Knew what?” I asked her, needing to hear the words.
“I knew that you hadn’t moved on. That this was still our house, even if I’d pushed you away. I knew that you still loved me.”
I almost laughed. Almost. “I’ve loved you for seven years. It would take a hell of a lot longer than a month to stop. It would take about seven eternities.”
Her breasts rose and fell quickly as she struggled for control. “Thank God,” she said as her voice broke. “Because I’m so in love with you that I don’t know what I’d do if you ever stopped loving me.”
Three steps and she was in my arms, my mouth fused to hers. The kiss was desperate, hungry, with an edge to it that I hadn’t intended, but it was there all the same. I picked her up, and she wrapped those legs around me, her bare feet digging into my back as I carried her to the counter and set her ass on it.
“I missed you so fucking much,” I told her in between kisses down her neck, the tops of breasts that peeked just above the fabric.
“River,” she moaned, her hands tight in my hair, threading through where I had it pulled back. I’d never heard a more beautiful sound. “I can’t think.”
“Good,” I told her, stroking my hand up her dress, caressing her thigh. “I let you think too much and look where that got us. From now on no head, just heart.”
Her hand covered my heart. “What does yours tell you?”
I smiled, happiness bursting through me in ways I never thought would happen again. “That I’m going to love you until the day I die.”
“Good,” she said. “Now you’d better be quick. You’ve got maybe an hour before Addy is back.”
“Welcome to life with a kid.” I laughed, kissing her as my fingers slipped under her panties. “I haven’t showered,” I told her.
“I could not care less,” she said, ripping my shirt over my head, then gasping as I parted her and ran my fingers from her slick entrance to her clit. “Just don’t stop.”
“There’s no chance of that,” I promised. “You’re all I’ve thought about since I left Alaska.” I stripped her panties off her and dropped my shorts to the ground, pulling her to the edge of the counter, my mind focused on getting inside her, fucking her until she couldn’t ever think about walking away from me again, and then making love to her until she agreed to marry me. “Shit. Condoms are upstairs.”
“I’m on birth control,” she said, her voice breathless as she brought her mouth back to mine. “Now, River.”
Raising her dress to her waist, I nudged her entrance with my dick and then thrust home.
Holy. Shit.
“I didn’t imagine it,” I said into her mouth between kisses. “We really are this good together.”
She rocked her hips against me, her feet digging into my ass for leverage. I groaned and gave up trying to talk. I used my body to tell her everything I needed to say. Every thrust was my vow of love, every kiss my plea that she never leave me again.
Every gasp from her lips told me how much she’d missed me. Every rake of her nails told me she was as desperate for this as I was.
I grasped her hips and pulled her closer, changing our angle to hit her where I knew it would make her writhe.
“Yes, River. Yes.” She chanted my name as I thumbed her clit, kissing her deeply, stroking her mouth with my tongue the same way I moved within her.
She was molten, pouring over me, setting me on fire as I thrust again and again, never giving her a chance to catch her breath.
She tightened around me, her cries growing louder, her breath catching and then holding as she came apart in my arms, arching against me. I was helpless against her, my orgasm ripping through me, shredding everything I was and rebuilding me as nothing more than Avery’s man.
It was perfection.
She was perfection.
Our breathing was ragged as she stroked my hair, my lips pressed to her neck. “Wow,” she said, reminding me of the first time she’d seen our house.
“Is that all you can say?” I asked her with a laugh.
“Do you have something better?” she asked with a grin as I pulled back to look in her eyes. She was so beautiful, her lips swollen from my kisses, her hair wild from my hands.
“I do.”
She arched a delicate eyebrow at me.
“Welcome home, Avery.”