How could I not know sex felt like this? Was it with everyone, or did Murphy take extra pleasure in ensuring my bones melted with my orgasm?

I spent a minute gaining my bearings as Murphy crawled his way up my body with kisses and nibbles and licks.

He licked my stomach. Why did it feel so damn good? I dragged my fingers into his hair and mussed it more the closer he came. “Did you like that?” he asked, carving out the curve of my waist with his teeth

I squirmed away at the tickle, but he held me tight in his arms as he reached my face. “Hello,” he said.

I smiled the first real smile I’d given anyone in a long time. It felt good too. “Hello.”

He dropped a kiss to the center of my chest. “Any special requests?”

“I wouldn’t know what to request, nor what constituted special.”

He shrugged and scooted down to trace my nipple with his tongue. My brain went fuzzy, and I grabbed his shoulder for support.

“I’m content on spending as much time as necessary to learning what you like.”

He popped my nipple out of his mouth and trailed up toward my neck. I could smell myself on him and his cologne. The heady scent of sex. Something I never considered having a smell.

“What have you learned so far?” I asked, in an attempt to distract myself, so I didn’t beg him to touch me harder, faster, anywhere I could get him.

As he flicked his tongue into the hollow at my throat, my pulse ratcheted higher, my heartbeat roared in my ears with unfulfilled need. Even after he’d taken the initial edge off.

“I learned you like my mouth on your neck. And you are ticklish. Also, you sigh in such a pretty way when I suck on your clit.”

Each word he spoke licked across my skin, pushing me closer to begging for him. Maybe it had been his plan all along to reduce me to a whimpering pile of ash and body fluids.

“You can tell me what you want, you know,” he murmured, never moving his mouth too far off the surface of my skin. “As I said, I’m open to special requests.”

I blinked down at him and the lazy way he traced my body. “It’s not really a special request, but I’d like you inside me. Now please.”

He stopped, lifted his face, and grinned. “I think that is the nicest way a woman has ever asked me to fuck her.” With his eyes hooded and his hair mussed, he looked darker, more devilish mostly naked draped over my lower extremities.

“Are you going to do it?”

Another chuckle. I suspected this one was at me not with me. “We are going to do it, probably as many times as you can handle. I’ve thought of little besides you wrapped around my dick for years.”

“Must make working difficult.” I tried for funny, but the tremor in my voice gave me away.

He tilted my chin up and looked into my eyes. “Don’t worry. You’ll catch on. Just like riding a bike.”

“I wouldn’t know. My doctor suggests I don’t ride bikes, or horses, or anything that can cause an impact to my head.”

Murphy sat up on his knees and climbed off the bed to remove his underwear. “Doctor is a smart man. Let’s keep this safe and clean. Do you want me to get you a helmet? Would that make you feel better?”

If I had anything within hand’s reach, I would have thrown it at his smug face. “Shut up and get over here.”

He sank down onto the bed and shifted my legs around his, so he knelt in between my open thighs. He’d grabbed a condom from somewhere and rolled it down his length. I couldn’t help but stare. Then he finished and locked his eyes on me.

There were many things in that stare. Heat, longing, and a gentleness I already knew him capable of. He shifted my hips and then spread out on top of me, his legs between mine, his dick pressed…

“Oh,” I said.

He slid himself against me, the head of him rubbing my clit with each pass. He shifted a little higher until each pass brought him closer and closer to dipping inside me. Fucking tease.

When he finally slid home, we both gasped in unison. “Are you okay?” he asked, bracing his weight on his hands next to my rib cage.

I nodded, incapable of human speech at the moment. For a second, we stayed there, joined together, but I was too far gone to sit and wait. I wanted the friction, the heat of his body on mine, the scrape of his chin everywhere.

Not waiting, I wrapped my hands around his waist and tried to make him move. He didn’t budge but watched my feeble attempts with a soft grin. “Do you think I could help here?” he asked.

Bastard.

“Yes, please. You’re inside me. We should probably, you know…”

“Fuck,” he supplied, and even though I was broaching thirty, my face heated at his words. The blush fled in the wake of him arching his hips up into me. The pressure agonizingly building in my belly started to ebb and make way for a different kind of need.

The kind poets wrote about.

The kind people paid money for.

The kind I didn’t know existed.

I should hate him a little bit for showing me this side of sex. Otherwise, I’d be oblivious, and most of my information involving the actual biology would center around romance novels and late night TV. Oh, but I couldn’t hate him when he stoked to life such delicious sensations inside.

His cock grazed my clit, and I nearly shattered right then. I’d had orgasms before. A twenty-something woman does not go years without at least exploring her body’s needs. I’d just never found a man I wanted to spend time with enough to get to the act.

This was not the same as doing it myself. The scent of our joined bodies, the sweat, all of it had a carnality and barbarism to it I didn’t anticipate. And it wasn’t displeasing, anything but. I arched into him now, trying to meet him thrust for thrust as a bead of sweat rolled down the center of his chest. I licked my lips. I wanted to lick it off and bite the skin afterward. What kind of person wants that?

He changed the angle and lifted my knees up around his hips, and I marveled at the way a simple move could change the entire experience. My orgasm loomed easily ahead. I needed a little extra push. I eyed him for a moment. Would touching myself put to question his masculinity.

I rolled my eyes, and threw my hands to the bed. He stopped and met my eyes. “Are you ok? Do you want me to stop?”

“Can you even do that?”

He made to pull out, and I clutched his forearms tight. “No. Please. Don’t.”

He settled back on me and forced me to maintain eye contact. “So what was that all about?”

“I just need more…”

“Then say something, Beautiful. I’ll take care of you, or you take care of you and let me help.”

He shifted back into position and arched into me. As he instructed, I kept my eyes on him as I slid my hand between us.

His jaw tightened, and he groaned softly as he kept his gaze on my hand. When I started a hard swirl over the swollen bud of my clit, he started pumping into me faster. “I’m going to come, and it’s going to be soon. I want you to come first.”

The pressure felt too much, until he shifted his knees up and changed the angle once more. With the new position and the sensation on my clit, I fell over the cliff, kicking and screaming. It rattled me from scalp to toes, and I had to jerk my hand away from my body in the aftermath of the sensation.

Murphy kept going until he dropped his forehead down and surged inside me once more holding to my body tight. I could feel the pulse of him there, and I wanted more.

Once he came back, he went to the bathroom, cleaned himself, and me, as I watch bemused, and then he lay down in the bed next to me, still naked. “What was that?”

He didn’t answer right away, but nuzzled the sensitive skin of my neck with this lips. “That was me taking care of my woman.”

“Your woman, huh?” As archaic as him saying such a thing sounded, I sort of liked to hear it.

The thought started a cascade through my brain like a house of cards tumbling from the top. I didn’t stay and cuddle him. I didn’t ask him to join me. I didn’t offer any explanation. On the outside, I looked like an asshole right now, curled up in the shower, but on the inside, everything that had been holding up that house of cards was crumbling too. The structures I’d built against others to keep me safe, broken, cracked, ruined. The walls I’d erected to ensure no one could hurt me. Nothing but drywall and paint chips.

I rocked forward as I sat in the shower until a soft knock came at the door. “Mara, are you alive in there.”

I sniffed as delicately as I could and called back. “Fine, be out in a minute.”

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to open up to Murphy. What scared me was with these foundations and boundaries decimated, I’d have nothing to keep the rest of me in. I’d spiral and break and splinter into rubble.

I rocked and let the hot water turn cold until my teeth chatter, and my fingers turned a little blue.

See. Already happening. I couldn’t even care for myself properly. Out of sheer embarrassment of having a breakdown at his house, I pried myself off the cold tile and shut off the water. I wrapped a towel around my body and opened the door to find Murphy standing there.

“Are you okay? I didn’t hurt you did I?” Of course he’d ask if he hurt me.

I didn’t dare call him Saint Murphy now. Not while I was so close to crumbling to the floor. Instead of talking to him, I dressed quickly and flashed him the cheap smile I pulled out when I wanted men to leave me alone. “I gotta go. I’m supposed to meet that woman again, Martha.” I lied.

He stood in his boxer briefs with this hands on his hips watching me make my way to the door. “Can I give you a ride home?” he asked. The hurt etched into his face pushed me out the door faster.

He didn’t sign up for this shit. He didn’t know what I held back inside me. The rage, the depression, anxiety, everything that could break a grown person into rubble and rock.

I made it home and barely shoved into my hotel room before a sob broke loose. I tucked my knees up, my core tight and sore with each movement. It reminded me of him and what we shared.

The tears stopped after a while, and the room stopped tilting like a carnival ride, so I got up off the floor. I snagged a tissue out of the box on the table and wiped my face. No doubt I’d have mascara down to my chin by now.

I tried to wipe what I could away and ended up staring down at the notebook Parker gave me. The one I hadn’t brought myself to use yet. I toed off my boots, sat in the chair at the desk, and opened the cover. A pen sat in the tray by the lamp, so I grabbed it and settled back in.

The notebook and I stared each other down. It asked me if I wanted to spill my secrets, and I asked it if it had more paper stuffed in the back for all my issues.

Obviously, I was losing my grip on reality if I considered a conversation with an inanimate object to be valid.

I poised the pen on the page and thought about what made me feel safe. Only one word sprang to mind.

Murphy.