Chapter 5 #2
"Tell me no." His voice is barely there. Scraped raw. "Kendall. Tell me no, and I stop."
The words don't come out composed. They come out like a man with his hand on the pin of a grenade asking permission to let go.
I don't tell him no.
His mouth comes down on mine and the kiss is a claim.
His hand slides from my jaw into my hair and his fingers close, strong enough to pull at the roots, gentle enough that I know I could break the hold.
I don't want to break it. I want the fist tighter, and the wanting shocks me. I want his hand closed in my hair so I can feel the strength he's holding back.
A few days ago I couldn't tolerate a man standing between me and a door. Now I want this one pulling harder. The absurdity of my own psychology would be funny if I could breathe.
His other hand finds the small of my back. He pulls me against him, and the full length of his body hits mine like a wall of heat.
The size of him registers in a way it hasn't before, his shoulders blocking out the dim light from the doorway, his arm spanning the width of my lower back. I'm not a small woman, but against Alex Sawyer the difference in our bodies is overwhelming.
The containment should set off alarms. It sends heat flooding through me instead.
The T-shirt does nothing to disguise what's underneath, all hard muscle and radiating warmth, and the press of him against my breasts and stomach and hips sends a current straight down through the center of me.
He opens the kiss and takes it deeper, his tongue sliding against mine with a confidence that makes my knees soften.
He kisses the way he does everything, unhurried and completely in control, and the control makes me want to test it.
I bite his lower lip. His breath catches, and the noise he makes against my mouth is involuntary, almost pained, as if the contact costs him something he's been hoarding for years.
My hands flatten against his stomach. The muscle tightens under my palms.
I slide them up, tracing the ridges of him through thin cotton, and his fist in my hair tightens in response, tilting my head back so he can take the kiss deeper.
The angle opens my throat to him and I let it happen, let him control where my mouth goes. The surrender of it sends heat pooling low in my belly and settling between my thighs.
He walks me backward, one step, then another. My lower back hits the edge of the counter and the solid surface traps me against him.
His hips pin mine. The weight of him is enough to hold me in place, and the hardness pressing against my stomach tells me exactly what this is doing to him.
The knowledge lights me up. I arch into him. My fingers curl into the fabric of his T-shirt and I pull, wanting the space between us erased, the barrier of cotton gone.
He responds by pressing harder against me, one hand still fisted in my hair, the other closing on my hip with a possessiveness that sends a jolt of heat straight through me.
His lips drag along my jaw, slow and rough, his beard scraping my skin raw, then down to my throat.
He finds the place where my pulse is hammering and his mouth closes over it, hot suction followed by the edge of his teeth.
I moan. The noise fills the kitchen and I don't care.
My hips roll against him without my permission. His fingers dig into my hip, holding me still or holding me closer. The distinction has stopped mattering.
"Alex." His name comes out wrecked. My own voice is unrecognizable, and some distant corner of my brain notes that Kendall Jackson, who has maintained conversational composure through years of hell, has been reduced to a single syllable by a man in flannel pants.
He drags his teeth along my collarbone.
His breathing comes hot and uneven against my skin, each exhale landing like a brand, and the evidence of a man this controlled losing his composure is doing things to me that I will not recover from.
My hands slide into his hair and I pull him closer, desperate for his mouth back on mine, for everything I haven't let myself want in years.
He gives me what I'm asking for. His mouth returns to mine, harder now, hungrier.
His hand slides from my hip up the curve to my waist. His palm drags up my ribs, fingers spread wide.
His thumb finds the bruise.
The pain is sudden and sharp, a hot spike that runs from my ribs to my spine.
My body does the thing it's been trained to do. The flinch takes me before my mind can override it.
My shoulders come up and my breath cuts short. What escapes me isn't pleasure anymore. It's the small, choked gasp of a body remembering what hands on ribs have meant before.
Alex stops, immediate and complete. His hands leave my body as if I've burned him, and he takes a step back that puts a foot of cold air between us.
I'm pressed against the counter, breathing hard, and the shame arrives before I can brace against it.
The shame is hot and total, flooding up through my stomach into my throat. It belongs to something deeper than the flinch itself. It's the shame of being a woman whose body carries instructions she didn't write, whose skin still answers to a man who isn't in this room.
The disconnect between what I want and what my body just did is so violent I could scream.
The bruise throbs where his thumb pressed it. The throbbing is Gary's message, delivered through my own skin.
Alex looks at me. His breath is coming hard. His hands, hanging at his sides, are trembling.
The tremor is visible even in the low light, and the sight of it, this man whose hands are always steady now unable to hold them still, cuts through the shame and reaches something underneath.
He doesn't ask what happened. He doesn't ask who. He doesn't ask anything at all.
Recognition moves across his face, slow and certain. Whatever he's putting together behind his eyes, he keeps it there. His jaw works once, then stills.
"I'm fine," I say. The words are automatic, the script I've been running since the first time Gary's hand left a mark.
"Okay," he says. He lets my lie stand without contesting it.
He stands in the kitchen with his hands still—with absolutely no movement—and the gentleness of that, the absolute refusal to take what I haven't offered, breaks something loose in my throat that the kiss didn't reach.
"I'm going to go upstairs," I say.
"Okay."
I walk past him. He stays exactly where he is.
His body holds its position with a stillness that tells me he's keeping himself in place with everything he has.
At the edge of the hallway, I glance back. He's lowering himself into the chair by the fire, and his hands are still. He stares at the embers. He doesn't look up.
I reach my door. The lock clicks behind me.
I press my back against the wood and my fingers go to my mouth. The skin is raw where his stubble scraped it.
The pressure of his fist in my hair is still there, a ghost against my scalp.
His voice comes back to me, that involuntary noise against my lips, almost pained. His heat lingers on my skin, coffee still on my mouth, the phantom weight of his body pressing me against the counter as if he could hold me there and keep the world from getting in.
But the flinch comes back too, and the gasp that followed it. His hands left me so fast I felt the cold before I understood why. The trembling afterward and the not-asking held more care than any question could have.
The bruise throbs under my ribs. It was Gary's last gift, delivered days before I walked out the door because I took too long to answer a question about where I'd been that afternoon.
The shame is fading. Anger is replacing it, clean and bright, directed at Gary for putting the bruise there, at the flinch for being faster than my choice, at the years of training that followed me into a kitchen where a different man's hands were doing something I wanted.
I lie in the dark wanting something so badly it aches, and I don't know if the ache is for Alex Sawyer or for the woman I was before Gary taught my body to betray me.