Chapter 16 Caleb #2
My lips crash with hers. I slip my tongue deep into her mouth and devour every inch of her as I tear off her clothes. I can’t undress her fast enough, my fingers itching to get her butt naked and bent over the couch as fast as humanly possible.
“The kids,” she says against my lips, gasping for a breath that I’m not allowing her to take. My lips are back on hers before she has a chance to breathe. “They’re still awake. I don’t want them to—”
I walk her backward into the kitchen and shut the door, hoisting her up onto the island. She’s level with my eyes now, and the bright light in here illuminates everything. The flushed color of her cheeks. The wanton look in her eye—no longer hiding behind the innocence.
“I don’t want them to hear.”
“They’re distracted enough,” I assure her. “Trust me. A quickie won’t do us any harm.”
Won’t it?
I sense that question on both of our lips, so I dive in for another kiss before one of us brings that question into being. Thinking logically about situations sometimes does more harm than good.
“My foot,” she reminds me, lifting it into the air. The bandage around it brings me back to earlier. Seeing her hopeless and with blood streaming down her face almost broke me. She went out into the forest to clear her head, but instead got too stuck up inside of it.
Those old hiking trails hold more memories than hard drives.
I position myself between her opened legs, lowering kisses to her neck. She plunges me between the valley of her breasts.
“There’s no time quite like the present,” she pants, removing her bra before I get the chance. “You tease me enough in that stupid uniform.”
Knew it.
I do as the lady insists and tear down her sweatpants. She lifts her ass, doing all she can to help, leaving the pants puddled at her ankles along with the lace pair of panties that come down second.
“No time,” she reminds me, as I work on discarding the sweatpants.
I leave them be and work off my belt. It lands buckle down on the kitchen floor with a clatter, but the sound rings faraway, as though I’m hearing it from the other side of town.
Desire manipulates a person’s senses that way, distorting everything until you’re completely out of touch with reality.
It’s dangerous to reach this level when the kids are still awake upstairs, but the want I have for Piper has consumed each and every one of my cells. There’s no more time to think.
I plunge into her, my cock venturing deep into her warmth. Piper moans, her eyes fluttering closed. The pleasure has consumed us both.
I hold her in place. My thrusts are so forceful that they could send her flying to the other side of the kitchen.
I bring my face close to hers and plant a hurried kiss to her lips, craving her tongue once again.
Her walls are slicked wet, just like the rest of her.
She finds my eyes as we fuck, and they turn a new shade of black.
This is another mistake I’ll wake up regretting tomorrow, but god does it feel good. My mind has been turning over thoughts faster than the emergency room turns over hospital beds. I’m plagued by thousands of thoughts each day, and I can never catch a break.
Not until I’m nestled deep inside of my Hart.
“That was a bold move from you,” I purr in her ear. “Sending me a picture of your naked pussy, wide open and wet for me. What were you hoping to achieve with that image?”
Piper replies between moans, “I think you know.”
I’m hit with a sudden wave of jealousy, reminded of when we exchanged nudes a few weeks back before we knew who each other were.
Who else has she sent naked pictures to?
She has the freedom to send pictures to whomever she likes. But the thought of another man receiving an image like that enrages me.
I thrust into her deeper, hoping for it to kill the thought. Piper Hart is an oddity that every single man on the planet would kill to spend a night with. Somebody else already has—Sonny’s father.
“Are you okay?” Piper slides her hand up the corner of my jaw, capturing my attention. The hand doesn’t need to be there. Her eyes stun me all on their own.
“Yeah.” I kiss her on the lips and pick up the pace, this time driving home.
Her fingernails dig into my shoulder blades through the T-shirt I had no time to remove. I feel the sharp edge of them dig deep into the surface of my skin, and come alive at the sensation.
I bite hungrily at her lower lip. The feral need to devour all of her takes me by storm. My hands travel all over her body, feeling her breasts, letting my hands take the lead, squeezing and pinching to pull as many sounds out of her as possible.
“Careful, darling,” I growl in her ear. “It pleases me to hear that you’re having fun, but we can’t let it be known that you’re having too much.” I bring my mouth back to hers and nibble on that beautiful lower lip.
When I release the animal within and spill everything I have into her, she finishes at the same time, her entire body tensing around my length.
Energy fizzles through me, causing me to bite a little too hard on the lower lip I still have clamped between my teeth, but Piper moans out in ecstasy, like she could go another round.
“All of that felt amazing,” she sighs, sagging her shoulders.
I disappear from her legs and dab the first clean washcloth I can find over her skin, mopping up the mess we made. We didn’t smash anything, but the torn bra will have to be trashed.
“You were tense there for a moment,” she says.
I toss the cloth aside after wiping the underside of her thighs. “Was I?”
“Your shoulders.” She demonstrates by hitching hers all the way up to her ears. “They were like this.”
I return the panties and sweatpants to her hips and let her take care of the rest. Locating my belt, I redress, trying to find the right words to answer her question.
“Do you send nudes to a lot of men?”
She closes her mouth and looks at me, astonished. “What have my nudes got to do with anything?”
“Nothing.”
A lie, obviously. I look at Piper for less than a second and get this inexplicable urge to protect her for a lifetime.
“Sorry if I’m prying. But I just thought I’d ask as a—”
“Friend, right?” She bites the lip I just busted. “Because friends totally ask each other how many nudes they’ve sent.”
“Is it so bad if I look out for you?”
The astonishment dissolves on her face, replaced by a more deflated feeling that has me regretting I ever asked.
“Yes. It is bad.”
“It’s only the same as me looking out for you on the James Taylor case.
Every man on this planet would kill to have you in bed with them for a night.
” I feel something twinge in my jaw as I contain the jealous feeling.
It’s back, and now it’s even worse than before, since I can no longer rely on the sex to numb everything. “Just…be careful.”
“I’m not back on the dating site, if that was your roundabout way of asking if I was.” Her eyes turn shrewd again. “Are you?”
“No.” I come away from the island and lean back into the worktop opposite. “It wasn’t my intention to pry, although it’s good to hear that there’s nobody new on the scene.”
“With the investigation underway, there’s no time to date. Besides, Sonny keeps me happy. He’s all I need in my life.”
Silence drifts between us as we both register yet another similarity between us both.
No time to date because of the kids…
But enough time to fit in a quickie at the end of an exhausting day…
“You’re jealous,” she says.
“I never said that.”
“You’re controlling your voice more than normal. You always used to do that.”
Damn the woman for knowing me better than I know myself. This was supposed to be a friends with no benefits type situation, but I could not contain my libido when she sent me that picture.
The same way no other guy would be able to contain theirs if she sent them something similar.
“It surprises me that you’re still single. Surely every man in this town is trying to win you over.”
“I think you’re paranoid, and are being way too overprotective. I get it—you had to rush back for Ellie. But you lost your chance by not telling me the full truth. How can I be sure that you’re being honest with me now?”
“I know.” I dip my head in understanding. “But maybe it was meant to be like that for a reason. Maybe what we needed was closure.”
Her eyes are coated in a glassy sheer that makes it look as though she’s about to cry. That’s how she looked when she was telling me about her father leaving. “If closure is what we needed, why do things between us still feel unfinished?”