Chapter Seventeen
What did he just say to me?
Nick’s expression looked like he was asking himself the same question. He took a deep breath and blew it out slowly like it was keeping him balanced.
“You—” I began. “I saw—”
Complete sentences weren’t happening.
“You saw good-bye,” he said.
Breathe. “What?”
“She was leaving,” he said. “Tara was leaving. She probably left as I ran out the door. And she had some things to—I don’t know, get closure on I guess. I told her.” He paused, his eyes boring into mine like the second time took more strength. “I told her I loved you.”
All my blood rose to the surface.
“She knew,” he said softly. “She said she saw it on me. She recognized it. And yeah, I kissed her good-bye,” he said, as if he’d said they threw a football around. “We have eighteen years and a kid between us. It seemed right.” He wiped a tear off my cheek with his thumb. “But not if it made you cry.”
All the rage and the hurt and the anger and the retribution of five minutes ago tumbled around inside me like lottery balls in a cage at his touch.
“I’m fine,” I said, blinking free the rest and wiping them away. God, I couldn’t think.
“Why did you come home early?” he asked. “What did you come to tell me?”
What had I come to say? What he’d already said twice.
“I got the job in California,” I blurted.
He tilted his head as if he hadn’t quite heard right. He’d just spilled his guts. And I said—that.
I deserved to rot somewhere really bad.
No-the-hell-wonder I sucked at this.
“You—what?” he asked.
“They just called me,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest, letting them drop, crossing them again. “Offered me the job.”
Nick just nodded. His eyes started to glaze over; he was shutting down the portal he’d just blasted wide open. The one that exposed his heart and soul and everything he was afraid, like me, to do. The one that trusted me for about two-point-five seconds. Well, I’d trusted him too.
“So,” he began, crossing his own arms. “What does that mean?”
“I—I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, once upon a time, it was all I wanted, it was everything I thought I’d never get, but—”
“But what?” he said, his tone flat. “Now a rickety old house with bad plumbing means more? Or were you coming to tell me you were leaving? That the gig was up?”
I shook my head. Everything was happening too fast. Nick was jumping to conclusions before I even fully grasped what the questions were.
“No,” I said.
“And if that was the case, why the hell would you care who I was kissing?” he said, his voice low. He turned to walk back to the house.
It was going south for the second time and I hadn’t even caught up to the north part.
“No, Nick,” I said, pushing my legs forward to catch up to him now. My hands were on his arms. “I came to tell you that I—” Say it. Say it! The words that felt so ready just minutes ago stuck in my throat, cowering behind hurt and fear and justification. “They’re giving me the two months, so—”
“Good for you,” he said, just above a whisper. His eyes weren’t blinking. They were angry. And hurt.
“No,” I said. Again. It seems that was the only word I could keep saying without reservation. “I can’t imagine any of it. Going, staying, anything—without you now. I—give a shit.” I gave a weak smile. “A lot.”
“We’re past give a shit,” he said.
“Wasn’t that just yesterday?”
“This isn’t a game anymore, Lanie,” he said, pulling free of my hands. “It’s real. I don’t know when or how it got that way, but it is. And if you’re not there with me, then okay. I get that.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “I don’t get why you just stormed off crying and spouting all that crap if you’re not, but okay. There are so many things about you I don’t understand, I could—”
I pulled his face down to mine and kissed him with all I had. There was only a second’s pause where he inhaled sharply, and then he groaned into it. My hands shook as I slowed us down, kissing him softer, deeper. With my heart. Five seconds later, hands cradling my face, he pulled back and gave me a leery look.
“Don’t play,” he said, his voice scratchy.
I didn’t realize my eyes were full of tears again until I opened them. Kissing him like that, with every emotion and intimate feeling I had—it was gut-wrenching. It was exposing and revealing and felt like my heart was being laid wide open. I wasn’t familiar with that. It was terrifying. But I felt like I would self-combust if I didn’t have more of it.
“Does this feel like play to you?” I asked, my voice not more than a whisper and wobbly as two tears fell over his hands. I pulled him back to me, needing to feel his lips against mine. “I don’t know what the future brings, Nick,” I said, kissing his lips again and again, tasting the salt from my tears. “But I know I can’t imagine one without you.”
Covering my mouth with his, he dove deep, one hand fisted in my hair and the other traveling my body, pressing me hard against him as he went. I wrapped both arms around his head and let it take me. God, kissing him was like leaving the planet and going to Disneyworld and the best food and the best wine and the best of everything all in one. I wanted to keep it loving, to show him my feelings that my mouth wouldn’t spill, but my body was on fire for him.
All the foreplay from two days ago hadn’t been forgotten. It was like it just lay dormant, waiting to take up where we left off, except there were suddenly all these clothes in the way and my God I needed them gone.
Nick responded the same way, his breathing going erratic as his hands traveled me, pushing up my breasts and meeting my cleavage with his mouth, kissing, tasting, swiping under the fabric with his thumbs to find my nipples and making me arch against him. He reached around to unzip but there wasn’t one, and I could feel the need buzzing off him.
“You kill me in this dress,” he moaned against the inside of my right breast.
I lifted his head, lightheaded with desire. “Sit against the fireplace,” I breathed.
He backed up the step to the bench and sat, his hands running up the outsides of my thighs to grip my ass and pull me against his face.
“Lift your dress for me,” he said, his voice thick with desire and his eyes so deadly hot I could have come right there.
I let go of him to lift my dress up and took it all the way over my head before tossing it on the ground, bra too, as he gazed heatedly at my body and curled two fingers into my panties without hesitation.
“Please,” he groaned, his lips grazing the tender skin as he lowered them.
Words left me as his mouth followed them down, lingering where I needed him most. He let the panties drop as he gently picked up one of my legs at the knee and held me as he hooked it around his neck.
“Oh God, Nick,” I mouthed without sound as he kissed me there the same way he kissed my mouth. Without boundaries. With abandon. Teasing, tasting, making me tremble in ways I hadn’t in a really long time. His fingers joined the party and I had to let go of his head and grab the rusty metal handle on the side of the fireplace. My legs weren’t going to hold me. Nothing was going to hold me. My bones were going liquid as heat and everything molten built up, taking my words away, my breath away. I bucked against his mouth as the earth shook under me and the world as I knew it exploded in light and waves, and if fireworks were a good thing for me, they’d have been there too.
Nick held me as I came down from on high, and looked up at me unblinkingly as he slowly wiped his lips on my thigh and unwrapped my leg from his neck. Breathing hard, I lowered on very shaky knees to the ground in front of him.
“That was the hottest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said, his voice strained.
“You’re damn lucky I didn’t snap your neck,” I said, bringing a chuckle from his throat.
“What a way to die.”
“Your turn,” I said, running my hands up the legs of his jeans to the boulder residing at the top.
Nick shook his head. “I doubt that.”
“And why is that?” I asked, kissing his stomach as I unbuttoned his jeans and unzipped very slowly, letting him out inch by excruciating inch. I looked up to see his jaws flex and his eyes shut tight as he sprang forward. Commando. God help me. “Mmmm,” I sighed, running my tongue up the length.
He started as if given an electric shock, and grabbed my head.
“Fuck, that’s why,” he said, tangling his fingers in my hair as I dropped wet sloppy kisses on it, working my way up, and when I took him in my mouth and made love to it the way he had, Nick moaned. “God, that’s so good.” Then he pulled me off. “Too good,” he breathed. “Keep that up and I’ll never make it inside you.”
“Tell me what you need, baby,” I said, repeating his words from last time. His eyes, heavy-lidded with need, winked at me.
“You,” he said. “All I need is you.”
Everything wrapped around my heart and squeezed. It was the perfect time to say the words. To tell him everything that was beating down the walls of my heart.
“How do you want me?” I asked instead. Because—me.
In one move, he had his shirt off and on the ground, and his jeans followed when he stood. Sweet Jesus.
“Lie down,” he said. I didn’t move, standing across from him. “What?” he asked.
“You are—breathtaking,” I said, drinking him in.
He crossed the inches and touched my face with one hand, kissing me slowly, maddeningly, letting our bodies melt together without groping. We fit. We fit so well. By the time we broke the kiss, we were both shaking.
“Please lie down,” he said against my ear. “I need you so fucking bad.”
I dropped slowly, kissing my way down until his cursing sounded painful, and then I lay on his clothes and he came with me, kissing my nipples one by one. He raised my leg as he kissed his way up my neck.
“This the position you want?” I whispered, my whole body on thrumming mode.
“I want all of them, Lanie,” he said against my lips. “But right now I just need deep.”
Fuck balls, he was going to kill me yet. All the blood left my brain on his words, and anything that was left departed when his fingers found me. When the head of his dick played at the opening. And when he sank so deeply inside me that I couldn’t tell where one of us began and the other ended.
“Nick!” I exclaimed on an inhale, arching off the ground as if I could get closer, be a part of him somehow.
The primal growl that shook his whole body emanated through me. His fingertips dug into my thigh and he raised my leg higher, over his shoulder, giving my thigh a playful nip with his teeth.
Nick sank into me again, closing his eyes as he started a rhythm.
“Jesus, you feel so good, Lanie,” he breathed, barely forming the words. “So fucking tight.”
I wrapped my free leg around him and used my hands on the ground as leverage, moving with him. He hit everything, filling me so completely there was no way to say anything back. I had no words that would do it justice. He was everything I’d never experienced. Including the burning look in his eyes as he watched me. Watched me as he made love to me, because that’s what it was. I knew that’s what it was because I’d never done it.
“Are you okay?” he asked as we moved faster, exertion popping the muscles in his neck. “Are you comfortable?”
I could have done this on a bed of nails and been just fine. I was riding a wave. A beautiful, building, crescendo of a wave. When he put my other leg over his shoulder and increased the pounding, the wave took steroids and began to lose its mind.
I arched off the ground, fisting handfuls of grass in my hands. “Oh God, Nick, keep doing that, I’m—”
I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t talk. I could only feel my mouth wide open, and if I was dead, then hallelujah.
“Fuck, Lanie,” he forced through his teeth. “I can’t stop, I’m gonna fucking blow.”
Freaky sounds came from my throat at the same time the most majestic roar came from him. Loud and feral and branding. He was marking his woman. And I liked it. As the second mind-blowing orgasm of my day shattered me into a million pieces, I liked being marked as his. That had never been me. What did that say about me now?
That I’d just been truly and thoroughly fucked for one thing.
And that I was head over heels in love.
Holy hell.
We came down in a tangle of limbs, heaving oxygen into our lungs and holding each other for dear life. It didn’t get more basic than that. Two naked creatures mating in the woods. There was something weirdly comforting about that.
When we could breathe, I felt it, and I knew he did too. That moment. The awkward thing after first time sex when the adrenaline calms down and you don’t know what direction to go.
Nick lifted his head from my shoulder and looked into my eyes, and warmth spread throughout my insides. It was still there. Sex hadn’t changed it. He was going to say something profound, and this time I was going to say it back. Because I could now.
“Marry me again,” he said. “For real.”