Chapter Twenty-Six
SHANNON
We spent hours talking and drinking with his friends and teammates.
They were a big, rowdy crew, and they served each other a ton of shit at every turn, and I saw why this was home to Will. It was just like my big, rowdy crew.
They told stories about their training days, their deployments, and the never-ending series of pranks they pulled on each other. It was a facet of him I’d never seen before, and I adored it. His arm stayed draped over my chair, his fingers mapping the space between my shoulder and elbow, and for the first time, I couldn’t grab hold of the darkness I felt when he was gone. As far as I reached, I couldn’t dredge the anger and emptiness that simmered beneath the surface just weeks ago.
I didn’t know whether that meant I’d let it go, or was allowing the steady pressure of his affection to slough it away for me. Or perhaps it was like he said while we watched the waves on the shore of La Jolla Cove this morning, “The best medicine is always salt water. It heals everything, every time.”
I couldn’t find any of it, so I stopped looking. I curled into his easy touch, sighing in relief when his thigh edged to mine and my body hummed with another point of contact.
We were tipsy as we walked back to his parents’ home, and my mind was heavy with questions—was he really leaving the military? After all this time? What was next? What did it all mean for us? Was he in pain now? Was there anything I could do? Would his shoulder ever improve?—but the questions could wait.
Once inside the front door, his palms dropped to my hips, squeezing, speaking the language that required no words. I looked up at him in the darkness, smiling, and took his hand. I led him through the house to the blue-gray room, motioned for him to step out of his sneakers, and then walked him backwards until his legs hit the bed. Wedged between his knees, my fingers tangled in his hair while his hands traveled over my back and thighs.
I threaded my fingers through his short beard, tugging just enough to bring his eyes up to mine. “I have something to say to you,” I said. “And I expect you to listen.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, a smirk playing on his lips.
“I love you,” I said. I could live for centuries, and I’d never forget the way Will’s eyes softened and glowed when I said those words. “And you have to know I don’t come to that statement lightly, and—”
“Shut up,” Will interrupted. His hands raced up my body to cup my face. “I love you, too, and I’m not listening to any opening remarks or qualifications on the matter. You are my fire and ice, my calm and chaos, my everything, and I can’t remember life before loving you. Now shut up and strip, unless you want me ripping those clothes off.”
He started unbuttoning his shirt, but I shook my head, wrapping my fingers around his wrist, and said, “Let me.”
His gaze never left me as I peeled his clothes from him. With an arched brow, he watched while I undressed without ceremony and crawled into his lap.
My hand smoothed up his flank and over his chest, pausing at his scarred shoulder. “Let me,” I whispered.
Will sucked in a breath as my lips feathered over his skin. I kissed every spot from his shoulder to his ear and back again, and I gobbled up each sigh and hum that slipped from his lips. Rising up on my knees, I pushed him back toward the pillows. He was quiet and obedient, and his eyes bathed me in the most glorious heat. I gathered him in my arms as best I could, my head on his chest and my hands flat on his back, and though his hips were bucking up in slow jabs and his cock was sliding against my center, hard and insistent, it was possible he required this moment exactly as much as I did. “Let me,” I said. “Let me take care of you. Let me love you. Let me be yours.”
“Shannon…you’ve always been mine.”
“Are you sure I’m not too much for you?”
“How could you ever be too much for me when I can’t get enough of you?” he said.
I reached between us, our foreheads bowed together to watch as he disappeared inside me. Our moans echoed around us when he was fully seated, and I held myself there, my eyes screwed shut and my hands on his neck with the beat of his pulse steady against my palms, his mouth a torment on my breasts and his beard tickling my belly, and my body moved of its own volition, knowing what we needed without conscious thought because we knew. We knew.
There was nowhere for these sensations to go but around and around, spinning and spreading out in waves that stole my words. The only sounds were of our shared murmurs and breaths, the creaking bed, the ocean.
He said my name in a long, content groan as he came, his mouth on my breast and those syllables marking me with a possession that felt boundless, eternal, permanent.
Our relationship was formed on the basis of really good sex, the types of which I hadn’t known existed before this man. We knew hate sex, angry sex, quick and easy sex, dirty sex, lazy morning sex, slow sex, kinky sex, but none of that encompassed this night.
This wasn’t sex.
This was love, and we both knew it.