Chapter 18
eighteen
He bent, scooped her over his shoulder, and strode across the yard toward the house with her ass in the air and her hair tickling his back in a wild orange curtain. Her legs drummed against his chest as he shouldered open the door.
He only had tonight. He planned to make the most of it.
“Bear!” She was laughing—that wild, bright laugh that did something to his chest every time—and he didn’t ever want to stop hearing it.
He took the stairs two at a time and shouldered into the bedroom. Distantly, he heard the dogs clambering after them, but he slammed the door behind him with his boot.
King whined.
Sorry, buddy. You’re not invited tonight.
The bed was unmade. He’d slept like shit last night, worrying about her, and the blankets were in a heap. He yanked them off and dropped her onto the mattress.
She rolled to her back, kicked off her ruined jeans, and yanked her shirt over her head, not bothering with any showy undressing, just getting the damn things off so he could see her. She was glorious—breasts small and perfect, skin dusted with freckles, stomach flat and ribbed with muscle.
She propped herself up on her elbows. “Strip, Care Bear.”
He pulled his shirt up and off, jeans after, shoving them down over his hips and off his legs with zero finesse, and there was that sound again—Greta’s laugh, lower now, thickened with want and edged with a dare.
She crooked her finger at him. “What are you waiting for?”
He wanted to taste her everywhere, all at once, but he had to do this right.
He started at the base of her throat, pressing his mouth along her collarbone, biting a line down to her chest. He cupped a breast, rolled the nipple between his fingers, loving the way she arched up into his palm, already greedy for more.
She fisted her hand in his beard. “Harder, you big—”
He nipped her.
Her back bowed up. “Yes.”
He worked her harder with his mouth, dragging his beard down her ribs, nipping the lines of her abs.
She tasted like sweat and salt, and when he ran a hand down her thigh, she opened for him, heel digging hard into the mattress and her hand twisting so tight in his hair he thought she might rip it out by the roots.
He liked that she wasn’t afraid to use force on him.
Liked the way she talked to him, like he was more mountain than man, and she wanted to see if she could blow the top off.
He moved lower, mouth along her hip and then between her legs, and she hitched her whole body up to meet him.
When he licked her, she gasped—no, she made a sound that was almost a growl—and her knees locked around his neck.
She fought him for control, and he let her.
He liked fighting for it. It was honest and messy and exactly like her.
He could crush a walnut in one hand, but the firmness of her thighs around his head was a force to be reckoned with. He spread her wide and sucked hard, working his tongue until she started to shake.
She came once, hard and fast, then gasped, “Don’t stop. Don’t you fucking dare,” so he didn’t. He drew her out until she was squirming and cursing and finally had to shove him off or she’d pass out.
He pressed his face to her hip and breathed her in. “Fuck, I missed you. Don’t leave without telling me again.”
A tremble raced through her thighs. “Mm, I don’t know. If this is my punishment, I think I’ll start doing it daily.”
“You drive me crazy, Tink.” He nipped the skin of her hip, then slid up her body and braced himself with a forearm on either side of her head.
She reached down and grabbed his cock. “Oh, I haven’t even started…” Her thumb rolled lazily across his head, slicking his pre-come everywhere.
He growled and rolled her over, face down, and she made a satisfied noise in her throat as he pulled her hips up.
He lined up behind her, bracing a hand under her hips, and entered in one slow, careful push.
The fit was almost painfully tight, and it took every ounce of discipline not to fuck her into the mattress in one go.
He wanted this to last; he needed her to know he could still be gentle, even when every cell in his body wanted the opposite.
He started slow, fighting through the urge to go feral, but she rocked back into him, taking him deeper. She met every stroke, harder, rougher, until her knuckles whitened on the blanket and the slap of their bodies drowned out everything else.
He bent over her and pressed his mouth to her ear. “I don’t want to hurt you. You have to tell me—”
She jerked her head back and bit his bicep hard enough to leave a mark. “I want it. I want all of it, you dumb fuck. I am not breakable—”
He lost the rest of her sentence to the sound she made when he clamped both hands around her hips and let loose.
He pounded into her, and she took it, reveled in it, her voice echoing in the room.
She got her arm twisted back far enough to snake a hand between her legs and finished herself off, thrashing under him.
Her second orgasm set him off, and he emptied into her, groaning her name.
He collapsed half on top of her, careful not to crush her outright, every muscle in his body singing with the relief and the violence and the rightness of it. He ran his nose up the side of her neck and just breathed her in.
“Jesus,” she said eventually, voice muffled in the pillow. “You really are a Grizzly Bear.”
He laughed, feeling loose and light for the first time in months. “Never stop calling me those stupid nicknames.”
“Only if you stop calling me Tink.”
“No deal.”
She rolled under him and yanked him down for a kiss. This one was softer, slower, her hands gentle in his hair.
She nipped his lower lip, then let her head fall back, face naked with happiness. He tucked her in close, pulled the blankets over them, and just lay there, holding her, until her breathing evened out and she started drifting.
He watched her fall asleep and let himself believe, for one night, that maybe some people really did get a second chance at this.
At some point, they got out of bed to get water and feed the dogs. She made sandwiches, and they ate them at the kitchen counter, bare-assed except for his flannel over her shoulders, and then she pulled him back upstairs and rode him until he saw god.
There was no graceful way for a man his size to collapse on a bed with a smaller woman without threatening to snap her spine, but Greta just wrapped herself around him and held on like she was never letting go.
When dawn came, it spilled in, gray and rainy, through the window.
“No,” she groaned and buried her face against his chest. “Not yet.”
He shifted his weight to draw her closer, but then froze at the sight of the dark finger-shaped bruises at her hips, the constellation of reds and blues along her waist, the crescent bites at her shoulder, the band of abrasion at the inside of her forearm, right where he’d pressed her hands down.
He pulled his hand back like he’d touched a stovetop.
Shit. No. No, no, no—
He rolled off the mattress, the floor cold under his feet. His heart went hot and wild behind his ribs. He tried to breathe quietly so he didn’t wake her, but she was already shifting, eyes open in a slit.
“What are you doing?”
He stared at her hip. The bruises there. His own fingerprints, clear as any evidence photo, and backed up until his back hit the wall.
The rain came down on the window in long, uneven waves.
He’d always been so careful with his strength, but then she’d been there with her hands and her mouth and her voice in his ear, saying don’t hold back and he had listened to her, and this was the result.
Bruises all over her in the shape of his hands.
“Bear?”
She sat up on the bed with the sheet pooled around her waist, her hair loose and tangled, watching him with an expression he couldn’t read in the low light.
When he didn’t respond, she got up and crossed to him.
“Dane,” she said his real name, softer. “What’s wrong?”
“I hurt you.” His voice came out flat and wrong.
“You didn’t.”
“Those are my handprints.”
She glanced down at herself. “I know whose hands they are.”
Christ, he should’ve known. It never mattered how careful he was. That was the lesson he’d been trying to teach himself for twelve years, and then he’d fucking forgotten it the moment she’d told him not to hold back.
“I knew,” he said, low and shaking. “I knew I was too big, too strong. I knew I’d hurt you. I knew—”
“Stop.” She put her hand flat on his chest, right over his sternum, and reached up to cup his cheek and make him look at her face. “I am not hurt. I have bruises. Those are not the same thing.”
He opened his mouth.
“I liked it. I liked your hands on me. I liked how hard you held on.” She held his stare. “If I hadn’t, you would have known, because I would have said so, and you would have stopped.”
She reached up and took his hand off the wall, where it was plastered. Held it in both of hers—it was enormous next to hers—and she looked at it for a second, then pressed a kiss to his palm.
“You would have stopped,” she repeated, enunciating each word. “Let me show you how much I liked it.”
Then she pulled him back to bed and did just that.
When he surfaced again a few hours later, the rain was coming down harder. He lay on his back with her head on his pec and her hand flat over his heart, her sleeping breaths tickling his skin.
The room was quiet except for the water against the glass.
He watched the rain fall and thought, fuck.
He’d been avoiding this for two years, but there was no denying it anymore, no pretending she just irritated the hell out of him.
He was in love with Greta Dougherty.
And he had no fucking clue what to do about it.