Chapter 35 #3
She followed the movement with her eyes, her head lolling. She’d never felt so complete and yet so achingly empty. Her palms
still stuck to the door handle, glued there by her own sweat.
Nick finagled his pants and boxer-briefs off and flung them atop everything else. He curled over her, propped an elbow beside
her head, and reached down to line himself up.
His weight settled against her. Oh, god. She was going to weep. She was going to die.
“Look at me,” he said, gruff.
She did, so raw and shaken she had no other choice.
“I love you.” His dark gaze lanced into her, as open as she’d ever seen. “I love you so fucking much.”
He drove his hips forward. Her eyes rolled back in her head. He sank into her, and then in some more, stretching her, filling
her, and just when she thought her hold on herself would shear away, he kept going.
When he was fully seated, he buried his face against her neck and loosed a hot, shuddering gasp in her ear. “Oh, fuck. Jesus fucking Christ, I forgot how good you feel.”
“I forgot how much of you there is,” she gasped. Or maybe she just hadn’t appreciated it, before. Whatever the reason, the
first time hadn’t felt like this. It hadn’t even taken place on the same planet.
He slid halfway out and drove back in again, reducing her to a tumult of sensation. There was hot air from the vents, billowing
over them both. Nick’s scorching scent in her nose. A cave of snow piled around them, lit by the faint blue glow of the dash.
And this unstoppable, undeniable, black-haired force, on her, in her, subsuming her with one slide of pleasure after another.
He moved inside her, long and deep, and she came again almost immediately, this time with a quick, ecstatic sigh that washed
over her like a wave. Her arms abandoned the door handle and wound around him as she cried her release into his neck.
She fell back against the seat again, her mind a quivering puddle of bliss.
He cocked a brow. “Two?”
“Two,” she agreed.
“Halfway there.” He upped his pace, his breath quickening to harshness, the most bewitching song in the world.
Of their own accord, her hips rose to meet him. She didn’t know where she found the energy. They melted together, a slick
of heat and muscle and sweat, his or hers, she didn’t know and didn’t care, she just wanted to drink him up and glut herself
on the way he drove into her with such force she’d probably have to scrape herself off the seat, afterward.
Beautiful curses rolled off his tongue as he lost himself in her. Every touch, every thrust seemed to carry seventeen years
of longing behind it, and she swore he was memorizing each moment, as if he expected it to have to last him seventeen more.
But she refused to think about that. Instead, she got lost, too. Pleasure rippled through her, building and building, finally
setting off a soundless shock wave that incinerated her, a blinding starburst whiteness.
She heard her own cries, somewhere distant. Nick groaned out her name. Rapture rolled through her, took hold and squeezed
for all it was worth, then finally left her spent and exhausted on the warm, sticky seat of the truck. An equally spent, equally
exhausted bulwark of muscle lay on top of her, crushing her with his weight.
He groaned in her ear. “Three.”
A few last convulsions rippled through her.
She stared at the ceiling, wondering if her vision had always been this blurry.
If not, she would gladly wear glasses for the rest of her life in payment for what they’d just done.
She’d never had sex like that before. Probably nobody’d had sex like that before.
He finally raised his head and looked her in the eye. “Sorry.”
She blinked him into focus. Okay, maybe no glasses. His sharp beauty sliced right through the haze. “For?”
His mouth edged downward. “Not making it to four. That felt way, way too incredible.”
“You’re not allowed to apologize. Not for that. That last one . . . Well, I don’t even know what the hell that was.” God,
she sounded drunk. Like she’d had enough whiskey to roughen her vocal cords and turn her mind to smoke. “That was like a hundred
all rolled into one.”
“Still,” he said.
She let her eyes flutter closed. “No ‘still.’ I think that’s all I’ve got in me, anyway.”
He kissed one eyelid, then the other, and slid out of her, drawing a pained squeak from her lips.
“What?” he said. “Did that hurt?”
“No.” She opened her eyes to find him sitting in the driver’s seat, naked and glistening and carved from granite. “When you
come out, it just feels . . . I don’t know. Hard to describe. Weird. Kind of like you’re robbing me.”
His brow creased, as if he didn’t quite believe her. “What am I supposed to do, then, just stay there forever?”
“Maybe,” she said quietly.
His eyes shied away from hers, and she cursed herself for spoiling the moment. She might as well have opened the door and
let snow gush into the cab.
Nick cleared his throat and disentangled their clothes, handing hers over and wiggling into his in a constrained dance. She lamented the way his jacket stole his sculpted lines from view.
“Should I take you home?” he said, when she’d finished dressing.
She straightened her coat and clicked her seat belt on. “Yeah. Thank you.”
“No, thank you.” He laughed, shaky, then scrubbed a hand over his shorn hair. “That was . . . way better than anything I’ve ever imagined.”
“Likewise. I mean, you promised the second time would be better, but . . . wow.”
“Yeah. Wow.” He drove with one hand, the other loose in his lap.
“So,” Aubrey ventured, after a few blocks.
“So.” He flicked a glance at her. “You’re leaving tomorrow?”
Her stomach clenched at the reminder. “Yeah.” She told him about the database, the damage David had done to her algorithm.
“People’s actual lives depend on me being at work on Monday.”
He nodded along, as if none of this surprised him. Maybe it didn’t. “And now what? You’re asking me to look you up in two
years?”
“Yes. That’s what I’m asking.”
He drove in silence for a minute. Only after he blinked back whatever emotion that summoned did he answer. “Okay. I can do
that. I’ll come find you. I don’t care if you’re in Timbuktu, I’ll come. But I want you to know I don’t expect anything. In
the meantime, you should date. Go meet people, go—”
“Stop,” she cut in. “Don’t ruin this.”
Because she already knew she wouldn’t date. She wouldn’t even look at another man. She understood now that she never really
had, that she only loved this one and always would, until the day he came to claim her again.
Still, she could tell by the set of his mouth and the slope of his shoulders that he didn’t believe in them the way she did. He didn’t trust that she’d be waiting for him.
She’d just have to show him, then.
After another block, she cleared her throat. “How’s Paige doing, by the way? Is she okay after . . . everything?”
His mouth bent up at the corner. “Is it weird that I like it when you worry about her?”
“No. You care about her. It makes sense that you would like me caring about her, too.”
“I do,” he said. “I really, really do.”
“So? Is she okay?”
“Sort of.” His smile dimmed. “We haven’t talked about it, yet. I mean, she knows I’m not her dad. She’s figured that out.
But I don’t know if she wants to know who the real guy is, and I’m not going to dump it on her unless she wants me to. So
we’ve just been kind of . . . dancing around each other, knowing we have to talk and not knowing how to do it. Though I did
get an incredibly awkward phone call from her biology teacher after she finally turned in her assignment. He said he’d had
no idea that Paige was adopted and he felt like an idiot for not realizing he shouldn’t be handing out assignments like that
one.”
She reached for his hand. “That sounds unpleasant.”
He squeezed her fingers. “It wasn’t fun. I barely held back from telling him he’d fucked up my entire life. But I’m pretty
sure he got the idea, anyway.”
The thunk of wipers filled the ensuing silence. “Do you wish you hadn’t found out?”
He blew out a long breath. “I don’t know. The truth hurts, but maybe pain’s better than ignorance. It’s not new, anyway. And
I like knowing I didn’t cheat on you. Thinking I had tortured me. You have no idea.”
She gazed at him. He caught her eyes for a brief moment before returning his attention to the road.
“So you weren’t with Tansy that night?”
“No. Apparently she tried, and I told her no.”
A dark, hollow ache rose inside her. Some part of her almost respected what Tansy had done for her daughter. Almost. But the
rest would hate her forever.
“What about you?” he said, after another block of silence. “Are you okay? With the whole Gallant thing?”
She barked an acid laugh. “No, not really. He was writing me love letters. Letters he hired some guy on the internet to write.
Which . . . maybe sounds familiar?”
Nick froze, drifting halfway into the other lane before correcting the truck’s path. Luckily, there were no other cars on
the road.
“Are you kidding me?” The words leached out of him, low and smooth and dangerous, a knife sliding through the dark.
“I wish I was.”
“He’s John? MontanaBirder81?”
“Yep.”
“You’re Jane?”
“’Fraid so.”
He unstitched his hand from hers and clenched it around the wheel. The tendons of his hand stood out like blades. “That motherfucker.
That absolute motherfucker. Now I have to kill him twice.”
“Twice? Why twice?”
He shook his head, his jaw hardening. “Forget it. I just . . . Did he use those letters to get you to . . . Did you . . .
Fuck, I have no right to ask, but—”
“No,” she said quickly. “No, thank god. I figured it out before it got that far. You’re the only person I’ve been with in
months. Many months. Close to a year, actually.”
That calmed him some, but he still gripped the wheel like he wanted to rip it into halves.
“I never would’ve written those letters if I’d known.
Jesus, I never should have, anyway. I just didn’t think it would turn out the way it did.
I thought I’d be helping someone. The only reason I even came up with that stupid idea was because Paige had this internship thing—”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to explain. I read the emails. I know you didn’t know.”
He ground his teeth so hard they creaked. “That’s not an excuse.”
The rest of the drive passed in silence. When Nick parked in her cul-de-sac, she hesitated, not wanting to get out. They would
have to part before morning, but she couldn’t bear it just yet.
“Why don’t you come inside?” she said.
He stared at her, an inferno raging behind his eyes.
She chewed her lip. “You do still owe me number four.”
“What, you want me like this?” His look only burned hotter. “All pissed off?”
A flutter came to life between her thighs. “God, yes.”
“Well.” He killed the engine and tore the keys from the ignition. “I won’t argue with that.”
He followed her into the house, a brooding wall of muscle and sinew. She’d barely gotten a fire going in the living room before
he stripped them both naked, hoisted her against the wall, and wrapped her legs around his waist. Her vertebrae pushed indents
into the plaster.
Heat and anticipation rocketed through her, bringing all her sated nerve endings to life again. She cradled the back of his
silky head, studying the way the firelight caressed his angular features. She would miss him, come tomorrow. She would miss
him every second for two years.
“I want to have you right here,” he said.
“Then take me.” She mustered a crooked smile. “Walls have kind of always been our thing.”
“You’re kind of my thing.” He tilted his head and set his teeth against her throat, the same way he had weeks ago, only this time,
the bite turned into a long, bone-melting kiss that made Aubrey splay her hands against the backs of his shoulders. When he
looked up again, his gaze had sharpened to laserlike intensity.
“But this time,” he said, “I am going to fuck you.”
She closed her eyes and tipped her head back, pressing the button inside her mind that would allow her to record every detail
in the most permanent section of her memory. She would replay this, over and over, until she held him again. Unless, of course,
the worst happened and he met someone in the next two years. But she couldn’t think about that right now, didn’t want to.
“For the love of god,” she said. “Please do.”