18. Dove #2
Moonlight fell over his features, casting dark eyes into silver flame.
His hand reached up, trailing over my hair, tucking an errant strand back behind my ear. He dragged his knuckles over my jaw until his thumb was ghosting a carcass over my lower lip.
Each inhale was a shallow rasp as heat flared to life under my skin.
All from that one simple touch.
He’d never touched me so familiarly. So intimately.
“He didn’t satisfy you, did he?” he asked in a voice like gravel, low and deep. So deep.
I’d never heard it sound like that before.
The huskiness of his voice was reminiscent of Torrence’s in my ear, but so much better, and I realized Josh was turned on.
A tingle started low in my belly, and I pressed my thighs together. This is what I’d been trying to recreate with Torrence and failed. This hollow ache, this slow, consuming heat. This was the feeling that had haunted me since Josh’s return.
I swallowed, my throat dry, and refused to answer, although I know he knew.
He’d heard.
“If you needed relief that badly,” that ocean deep voice rumbled, “why didn’t you just come to me, Dove?”
His thumb pressed harder into to the flesh of my lower lip, and I inhaled shakily. Where Torrence hadn’t been able to make me wet enough to enjoy it, I was nearly gushing now.
“You know all you have to do is ask. I’d do anything for you.”
I did know that, but somehow the words he’d been telling me since we’d entered each other’s lives boiled my blood. This was not something I could ask for, just take .
“Don’t,” I ground out, and his thumb slipped from my lip with the movement. “Don’t make this about—about that.”
His head titled in a move I’d seen dogs do, assessing me. His eyes met mine until they dipped lower, and I shivered.
“About what?” he asked, eyes focused on my mouth.
“About duty or responsibility.”
His eyes flickered back up to meet mine, a flicker of anger deep in their depths.
“You think it’s about obligation that I know I can make you come when that little twerp couldn’t?”
The air was stolen from my lungs, and I froze in shock.
Whatever game we’d been playing since he came back just changed, the rules rewritten, and I had no idea how to play any longer.
His chest came to rest against mine as he leaned in, and I prayed he couldn’t feel how hard my nipples were for him through my shirt. He shifted and I stifled a groan. Then again, maybe I did.
“You’ve always been my responsibility, Dove.
Always will be. But this isn’t about that.
So, why don’t you let your stepbrother do what he’s always done”—I did gasp this time as his hand cupped me, all of me, his palm nudging me hard enough through my jean shorts to have my clit zinging a jolt of pleasure through me—“and let me take care of you?”
I wanted to, God, did I ever. My hips ached with the need to press forward, to ride his hand, but he’d just had to phrase it that way, didn’t he?
My anger flared hot and bright, startling me at how fast it came on.
He left us—left me . Turned his back without even a glance back and left without a second thought.
I didn’t need him, and I certainly wasn’t his responsibility or his priority.
He’d made that perfectly clear.
Even if the local boys couldn’t satisfy me, it didn’t mean I needed Josh to do it for me, swooping in like some hero to fondle an orgasm out of me.
I’d vowed to myself to never need him again the moment the dust settled after he drove away three years ago.
Vowed it with tears blurring my sight and a crack in my heart that ran too deep to ever mend.
How easy it had been to forget that vow when he came back with an apologetic smile and sympathetic eyes, coaxing my crush back into full force.
When I slipped out of his grip, surprise crossed his face. It wasn’t what he’d expected me to do.
A smirk of satisfaction curled onto my face. Good .
We may have been circling each other since he’d been back, but he didn’t know me—not like he used to.
I stomped my way past him to the barn door, throbbing with each step I took. It was just another night with me, myself, and I. Sure, I was used to it by now, but it was growing old.
“Dove!”
I heard his long strides scuffle through the dirt and hay mixed on the floor.
“Dove, stop!”
His hand gripped mine and the force of his tug spun me around.
My hands splayed across his broad chest, my nipples aching as they pressed along his hard body as he stepped in closer.
“Would you just talk to me,” he ground out. “Jesus, you’re being a brat.”
His exasperated tone just stroked my ire, as if I was being some intolerable, insolent child. Like this was merely a tantrum.
“I don’t know why you’re?—”
“Because of you!” I screamed, shoving him away as all the emotions I’d made an attempt to contain exploded out of me wildly.
“You left, Josh. You left and you never came back! Not one letter, not one text, not one call . It could have been anything, fuck , a carrier pigeon for all I cared, because all I wanted to know was if you were okay. To have just one little reminder that you still cared about me. Because I missed you, despite it all. Then when Mom and Gareth—” My voice cracked.
I couldn’t say it. It was too fresh. “You didn’t answer. ”
My vision blurred, tears prickling at my eyes.
“I was terrified I’d be left all alone,” I confessed in a whisper.
Josh swayed forward, reaching for me, but my hands pounded weakly at his chest, hardly noticing the hot tears that tracked down my face.
“You promised, remember?” I fisted his shirt. “You promised you wouldn’t leave me all alone. But you did .”
I sniffled, glaring up at him with watery eyes. “So no, I don’t want you doing anything for me. Especially this. You don’t get the right, not when?—”
A sob I couldn’t hold back escaped.
Josh made a soothing noise in his throat, pulling me into him. He wrapped his arms around my shoulders, a hand coming up to cradle the back of my head as I cried into the collar of his shirt.
“I know,” he murmured into my hair as I wept. “I know, Dove. I’m sorry .”
Despite the sincerity of his words, my tears didn’t stop coming. I hiccupped through them, soaking the front of his shirt as I let myself cry, really cry , for the first time since that fateful call. Maybe even before.
To protect myself, I’d bound myself up so tightly from the outside world. It was one of the reasons why I’d been so cold when Josh arrived. It was why I didn’t let anyone in—because I was afraid I’d end up losing them.
Like I always did.
“I’m sorry I left,” he breathed against my temple before placing a feather-light kiss across it. “I promise I had no choice. As more time passed, I worried reaching out would just make things harder for you.”
I pulled back to look at him with what I assumed was a mess of red eyes and smudged mascara.
“Harder for me?”
His thumbs wiped under my eyes as he made a strangled sound in the back of his throat. Large hands cradled my face. “I’m your stepbrother , Dove. Even if we never really call each other that… we grew up together. I’m meant to protect you, not—” He shook his head. “I can’t— we can’t.”
I shut him up with a punch on the arm so hard my hand ached.
He didn’t even flinch, damn him.
“What the hell was that for?” His hands dropped from my face, one of them curling around the spot I’d just hit.
I barely felt the loss of the touch as my tears died and my anger returned, burning my sadness into a fiery rage instead.
“You stayed away because of that ?” I seethed, years of distance crashing down on me all at once. “Because of what other people will think?”
I’d lost too much to give one damn about what other people thought of me, at least that’s what the blaze of my anger had me feeling right now.
“We could have left together,” I said through clenched teeth. “ You could have taken me with you!”
When he attempted to reach for me, I pushed him away again, stepping out of the comforting bracket of his arms. They didn’t feel comforting now—not when I was so mad at him.
“You’d just graduated, Dove. I couldn’t. I wasn’t going to force you into something when I had no idea you even?—”
Excuses, excuses, excuses!
“Don’t,” I cut in, nearly choking on the word. I couldn’t believe him.
“And our parents?” he shot back. “Were you willing to leave them? To make them deal with the fallout of us being together?”
It was a valid point—just not one I wanted to hear. I shook my head, hair flying as if I could physically fling the thought away.
“You knew what leaving would do to me. You knew how much it would hurt—how it would destroy me. But you did it anyway.”
His jaw ticked but he remained silent.
My finger trembled as I pointed it at him. “Joshua Hex, you are a coward .”
The moment I spat the word his eyes narrowed dangerously. I forced myself not to flinch. I wasn’t afraid of Josh—could never be afraid of him—but I was afraid of that look.
And how having it turned on me made me feel.
My panties were likely ruined at this point, but I couldn’t help it.
Even in anger Josh was devastatingly handsome.
“Were you ready to leave your mother?” Josh took a step closer to me.
I took a step back.
He followed.
“Were you ready to give up your home? Your plans to attend college here? Leave this town you love and never come back?”
He stalked closer, and I retreated until there was nowhere left to run. The barn doors jolted a gasp from me as they struck my back. He leaned in, bracing an arm above me like Torrence had earlier, the wood shifting behind me at his weight.
“Because that was the only way we’d have been able to be together.”
His tall, imposing frame felt even more overwhelming as he glowered down at me—every bit as furious as I was.
Even now, being in his space was more exhilarating than anything I’d felt with Torrence.
“Being with me, not being with me—it would’ve hurt you either way,” he breathed, words exhaled across my lips. “I made the choice I thought wouldn’t ruin your life.”
“You could never ruin my life,” I whispered back, our lips brushing. I hungered so badly for his kiss I ached from it.
“Dove,” his deep voice sent shockwaves down my spine, “that’s all I could possibly do. But I’m helpless to stop it if you keep looking at me like that.”
The wetness between my thighs increased at his husky whisper the same time my mouth went dry. Without thinking, I reached out with my tongue to wet my lips and gasped at the electric touch it created as I accidently swiped against his, too.
He groaned, pained, leaning his forehead against mine. “I’ve spent too long telling myself this isn’t right. I don’t want to fight it anymore.”
“Then don’t.” The permission in my words hung between us, suspended in midair, opening something both of us had been denying for years.
“Tell me you want me to.”
Every breath felt charged as we shared the same air.
I could barely concentrate on what he was saying, not when he was this close.
Not when I could smell him, that woodsy, masculine scent of his, with undernotes of alcohol that lingered on his breath from the bar. Not when his body was inches from mine.
“Want you to what?” I asked, the question nearly swallowed by the rain pounding outside the barn doors.
“Ruin you.”
All the breath in my lungs vanished at those two words.
I was furious with him. I was hurt. But I wanted him more than I wanted to hold on to that anger and pain.
I exhaled—offering him the permission he was silently begging for, with air I didn’t even have to give.
“ Ruin me.”