Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Jessa
I tilt my chin at the hall mirror and press my thumb under the bruise. It’s gone yellow-green at the edges, which beats last Saturday, when it was black.
It’s been ten days since Jared Nowak put his fist into my face.
I’ve worked most of the week from the kitchen table.
I went in twice, and both times somebody touched my arm at the coffee machine and asked how I was holding up, and nobody asked what happened.
Everyone knows that the town’s favorite firefighter attacked Marcus Steele’s girlfriend, her daughter, and his niece.
I didn’t realize how much pull Marcus had in this town till the news started trickling into my ear.
Out on the lawn, my daughter misses the ball three times running, and she doesn’t seem to mind one bit.
Marcus jogs it back to her the third time, talking the whole way down the lawn.
He drops into a crouch beside her, taps the inside of her ankle with two fingers, then squares her shoulders with a hand on each.
Mia nods so hard her ponytail whips her own cheek.
When he rolls the next one in slowly, she plants her standing foot exactly where he put it, swings, and skids the ball past Bella into the hedge.
Bella throws both arms up. My daughter shrieks, sprints three steps in celebration, catches her own heel, and sprawls on the grass.
I’m at the glass before I know I’ve moved. Marcus reaches her first, and he’s got her sitting up with one hand cupped behind her head while the other turns her knee to the light. Whatever he asks her, she answers by laughing, her whole face tipped up at him.
My hand stops against the glass as my stomach knots. It isn’t jealousy, I try to tell myself. So why does my throat close every time she looks at him like that? I go back to the sink and run the water to give my hands somewhere to be.
Marcus has been strange all week. He hovers now, up before me, driving the girls to and from the academy himself, doublechecking the locks every night.
He’s also installed tracking in my car, ignoring my protests.
To appease me, he showed me how I can disable it if need be.
I know something’s up, and I want to ask, but the dark look on his face when he gets a phone call and heads outside to go near the tree line to answer stops me.
Whatever it is, he doesn’t want me knowing.
I will ask him eventually, but the girls are also shaken, and I can’t have both of us on edge. And I have the feeling that whatever it is will put me in a worse mood than him.
Yesterday I saw Jared across the road from the pharmacy.
He’s thinner through the face now, his hand is strapped, and being arrested hasn’t slowed his drinking.
Rachel is back in her apartment with a new lock and a new lawyer who’s handling her divorce.
All Marcus told me was he’d handle it, and he did.
I don’t know how to feel having somebody this dependable around. Being near him makes me feel secure, but it’s more than that as well. He’s chipped away at my walls so steadily that there seems to be nothing. All my resistance to him has crumbled, and I don’t know what to do about that.
There are still some dishes from breakfast left, and I begin washing them, my thoughts scattered.
Children scratch. Hell, Mia used to be a biter when she was a toddler.
But never once—My hands go still as I recall the sharp grooves on Jared’s arm.
The way Mia’s fingernails were replaced by something else, something deadlier.
Claws.
I set down the dish heavily, my hands on the edge of the sink as I lean against it, muttering, “I have to have imagined that. There’s no way that was real. It can’t have been.”
My gaze flicks over my shoulder to where Mia is playing soccer with Marcus. There’s no way. I imagined it. That’s my baby. I know her.
The screen door bangs open.
“Mom, did you see?” Mia’s halfway across the tiles, grass down one shin, sweat plastering her hair to her forehead. “I scored on Bella.”
“I saw.”
“You did not score.” Bella troops in after her, pink and outraged. “The ball went in the hedge. There is no hedge in soccer.”
“It went past you to get there.”
“Uncle Marcus.” Bella spins on him in the doorway. “Tell her.”
“I’m not getting in the middle of this.” He grins.
“Upstairs, both of you.” I point with the pan. “Go and shower. You both stink.”
As Bella walks past me, she looks up at me, pouting. “She didn’t score.”
I take her face in my hands and kiss her forehead. “All right then. She didn’t score.”
“I did too!” Mia exclaims, and the two go up arguing over whether a hedge counts as a goal. That leaves me at the sink and Marcus in the doorway with his shirt hooked over one shoulder.
He’s still breathing hard from the lawn, his chest slicked, a smear of dirt across his ribs from where he went down after her. It’s hard to force my eyes away from his chest. Heat curls down my spine and pools low in my belly.
He takes his time crossing the kitchen with his shirt hooked over one shoulder, chest still gleaming from the lawn. The ridges of his stomach flex with each step. I trace the sharp V that vanishes into his shorts, and I don’t stop myself.
“Like what you see?” His voice drops low.
“What?” My voice cracks. “No.”
“Really.” He catches my wrist, turns my palm up, then presses it against his chest. His heart thunders under my fingers. Mine answers hard enough to make me dizzy. “Stop it,” I whisper, though I don’t pull away.
He doesn’t step back. “You’re right. I should go shower.”
“You should.”
“Come and reach my back for me.” His mouth brushes the corner of my jaw, then trails down my throat. I tilt my head and give him more skin. “I can never reach my back.”
“I’m sure you’ve managed for thirty-odd years.”
He bites my shoulder, careful with his teeth, and heat shoots straight to my core. “You’re so mean to me.”
His hands brace on either side of my hips, pinning me against the island. Nothing touches me except his mouth, and it’s devastating. “Stop it, Marcus. We’re taking it slow, remember?”
“We’ll go slow.” His hand slides up my thigh, pushing the hem of my shorts and my panties aside. Two thick fingers glide through my soaked folds and sink into me in one stroke.
I gasp. The stretch is perfect, his fingers rough from work. He curls them and strokes that spot inside me until my knees buckle. Wet, obscene sounds fill the kitchen while he pumps them slowly in and out.
“Quiet, baby.” His voice goes dark against my neck. “Cover your mouth.”
I slap my free hand over my lips just in time.
My moan vibrates into my palm while he finger-fucks me at that same lazy pace, his thumb circling my swollen clit.
The squelch of him working inside my pussy echoes off the cabinets, and I can’t make myself care.
Pleasure coils tight in my belly. I rock my hips into his hand and chase more of him.
He watches my face throughout, his eyes hooded. Then he draws his fingers out, glistening. Without breaking eye contact, he brings them to his mouth and licks them clean, sucking each one with a low groan.
“Fuck, you taste sweet when you’re dripping for me.”
The build starts again, slower. His fingers come back, scissoring gently, stretching me, teasing me open until I shake. I’m right there, one hand fisted in his hair, when he stops.
“Marcus.” My cheeks burn. “We can’t. What if the girls come down?”
He kisses the tip of my nose. “If you want me to finish the job, you’re going to have to wash my back.”
I hesitate. When he lifts me, I don’t resist, and I lock my legs around his waist with my shorts still shoved aside.
“Your room is upstairs,” I hiss into his shoulder. “They’re upstairs.”
“Then you’ll have to be quiet.”
He carries me up, and my whole body goes rigid at the third step because I can hear water running behind Mia’s door.
He doesn’t slow down. His hard cock rides against my bare pussy through his shorts with every stair he climbs, and I bite down on his shoulder to keep from making a sound.
The girls’ bathroom passes on our left. Bella is singing in there, off-key, something about a horse.
His door shuts behind us, and he turns the lock.
He lowers me onto the edge of the bed, the mattress bouncing under me, then hooks his fingers into my shorts and drags them and my panties down my legs.
Then he stops. He takes my jaw between his thumb and forefinger and turns my face into the light, and for a long stretch, he says nothing at all. His thumb hovers over the yellow-green stain on my cheekbone without landing on it. A vicious hunger moves through his eyes, and it leaves me aching.
He leans in and puts his mouth against the bruise, so gently I barely feel it, and he stays there.
“Don’t,” I whisper.
My bottom lip quivers, and I press my teeth into it to make it stop.
He kisses it again, then the corner of my mouth.
He shoves his own shorts off, kicking them away, and his cock springs free. Then he picks me up again. I lock my legs high around his waist while he lines himself up, and he drives in every inch of himself with one stroke.
A long, broken moan tears out of my throat while my walls stretch around his girth.
The fullness burns. My toes curl, and my vision sparks white at the edges.
I feel every vein dragging along my inner walls as he settles inside me, his cock throbbing.
The stretch borders on too much, and my head falls back anyway.
“Feel that?” His forehead presses to mine, his breathing wrecked. “Every night this week. This is all I’ve thought about, having you stretched around my cock.”
Everything else drowns under the pleasure, and my protests go with it. He holds me against him, my arms looped around his neck, my legs locked high on his hips. Then he starts walking toward his bathroom, bouncing me on his cock with every step.