Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
Frankie
It was almost an hour later before Chandler appeared back through the curtain, the lines on his face heavier than before.
While he cleaned up, I sat out front finishing up my inventory with the unnamed candle burning on my desk. His candle. The one that soothed my stomach…and other parts of me I didn’t want to talk about.
“I’m done,” he said, his stare flickering as if to ask, are you sure? Are you ready?
“Not here,” I blurted out, my heart thumping. I didn’t know why I felt like this—like my skin carried an electric current and my insides were made of butterflies. “I don’t want to talk here.”
I wanted a fresh slate. Somewhere private, but a place that hadn’t been tainted by all the memories my mind wanted to focus on. The way he cared for me. Held my hair back in the bathroom. Didn’t care when I puked on his shoes. Made my candles when I couldn’t. Stood up to my brother, not on his behalf, but on mine.
“Where?”
I lifted my chin. “Your hotel.”
He stiffened but agreed, waiting as I collected my things and then locked the door behind us. The next twenty minutes passed in a blink. Walking to his car. Picking up dinner from my favorite Mexican place. Driving out of town to the small hotel he’d stayed at the last time. Next I knew, I stepped into the small suite that overlooked the ocean; it had to be the nicest room in the hotel. Of course.
“You should eat,” he murmured, setting the takeout bag on the small table near the windows. “Just a little,” he pleaded, catching my wary gaze. “I’m going to shower so I don’t smell.”
It was faint—the offending scent and the way it clung to his clothes and skin—but all it would take was one too-deep breath from a little too close.
“Thank you,” I blurted out for what felt like the hundredth time today and then tried to lighten it with, “I wouldn’t want to puke everywhere and have you lose your security deposit on the room.”
Chandler reached out and trailed his finger along my cheek, a half-grin toying with the corner of his perfect mouth. “Puke wherever you want, baby. I’ll buy the whole damn hotel if I have to,” he declared, leaving me wide-eyed and gaping as he disappeared into the bathroom.
I didn’t stand a chance against him. Not then. Not now.
I took a seat in one of the chairs and opened the bag, taking a hesitant inhale of the warm tacos and then a deeper one when it didn’t immediately send my stomach into somersaults. And my memory flashed back to the last time I’d had tacos; it was the night of the storm.
While I ate, my eyes scanned the room. The colors were light—coastal, but the decor was modern. Not the typical vomit of seashells and lighthouse paraphernalia that places around here usually had. The space felt cool and comfortable. Relaxing with the stretch of ocean right outside the large windows. It could use a candle, though. A good scent to tie everything together.
“You okay?”
My head turned, and my jaw went slack. I was okay…until he came out of the bathroom wearing those sweatpants.
“Yeah.” I snapped my mouth shut. “Just taking in the view.” Of course, I was looking at him when I said it. I meant to turn toward the window, but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t tear my eyes from the broad handle of his shoulders, remembering how it felt to hold them, or the hard expanse of his chest, or the way the steel of his muscles rippled under the hot wax.
Wanting him was the worst pregnancy craving I’d experienced yet.
My tongue swiped out, wetting my bottom lip as my gaze sank to the taper of his waist and then lower, where the gray sweatpants hugged… enough.
“What happened, Chandler?” I pulled my legs up onto the chair, holding my knees to my chest.
This time, the question looked like it wounded him.
He walked to the window and bundled his arms over his chest. Here, like this, he didn’t look like an all-powerful billionaire who’d just promised to buy an entire hotel if my not-confined-to-morning sickness made me destroy a hotel room. He looked like a broken soldier. One who’d given everything to his final battle and still lost.
“My mom fell.”
Only three words, and my gasp through the room was audible. Was she okay? Was she… my throat was too tight to let any question through it, my tongue too weighted from all the heartbreaking possibilities.
“My phone started going off at five thirty that morning; she’d fallen on her way to the bathroom. It was bad.I didn’t even think, Frankie. I just left.” His jaw pulsed, the muscles working up the courage to continue. “I got there, and they’d already flown her to the hospital. There was so much blood…she’d shattered her whole leg.”
“Oh my god.”
“I went to the hospital. She was in surgery after surgery after surgery. I didn’t sleep. Eat. I didn’t…”
“Exist,” I said softly, the small word breaking his trance. His head turned slowly, his ragged gaze finding mine as he fought to swallow.
“Yeah,” he croaked.
I felt the pain in his soul like it reached right out of him and wrapped its hand around my throat, so I offered him a piece of mine in return. It had been a long time since I’d felt that kind of pain. A long time since that wound had healed. But I’d never forget the memory or the pain.
“When Kit was injured at the marathon, we got the call and nothing else mattered. He had a lot of burns. Needed so many surgeries. We thought he was safe because he was home, and he almost died,” I murmured. “The weeks he was in the hospital, it was like everything stopped. Like nothing could go on until we knew if he…”
“Would make it,” he finished for me this time, his mouth pulling into a tight line before letting loose a heavy exhale.“The next time I could think about…anything, it was almost three weeks later. And then I remembered how I left…how you had no idea…” He paused and cleared his throat again. “I remembered about Lou’s offer… about how I’d agreed to it th e night before and pushed it through…and then I realized how much worse it must’ve looked…felt…when I disappeared.”
My insides felt like a tornado trapped in a washer. A storm on the spin cycle. Everything I thought—my entire perception of that morning, of what transpired, of why he left—was all wrong.
“You agreed before you left?”
He nodded slowly. “That’s what I was texting Tom about in the car as we left your mom’s house. I told him I was going to sell to your sister and to get the paperwork moving.”
“So you didn’t take the money and leave?” I murmured, my heart fluttering like a caffeinated butterfly in my chest.
“Technically, yes.” His voice cracked on the single syllable, like even the idea of it was too painful to sustain. “But I never meant to. It wasn’t my plan, Frankie. And that’s why I gave it back.”
My brows pulled tight. “I don’t understand.”
His mouth opened and shut on a muttered curse, and then he drove his hand through his hair. “I never wanted to take the money, but I never got the chance to fix it. When I realized—remembered everything that happened—it was too late. The sale was done. Lou paid what she paid. So I donated it back to her…in my mom’s name.”
My eyes went round, all the pieces clicking into place. Lou’s excitement over the massive donation had been contagious. We’d all celebrated with her for days—for everything she’d be able to do now for the inn that had previously been on a five-year plan. I could still feel the buzz of her happiness and excitement, maybe because it was that strong, but also because it had come just a few days before I took that pregnancy test.
I lowered my chin, feeling the weight of betrayal start to suffocate out the breath of hope that filled my chest. So, he hadn’t taken the money and disappeared. Not intentionally. But why…
“That was two months ago, Chandler.” Two whole months that I’d believed the worst. That I’d angered and hurt and forced a show of bravado unlike anything I’d ever felt before. “Two months…”
“I was going to bring Mom home. Get her settled. And then come…explain,” he rasped slowly, weeding through the words. “And the night before she was going to be discharged, she had a pulmonary embolism. A blood clot in her leg traveled up…” I pressed my hand to my mouth to stifleasob. “And it was everything all over again, except worse. She was already so frail from the fall. They weren’t sure…”
He couldn’t finish. Couldn’t say the words. I remembered those moments—those days in the hospital with Kit. I remembered holding myself together for Mom. For Lou. I remembered being so broken inside it was only the pain clinging to every fiber of me that acted like glue to hold me together.
“She’s back at Edgewood now. Stable,” he said after a few seconds of being unable to finish his last sentence. “In a wheelchair and on a bunch of medications, but she’s stable.”
“Good,” I choked out and swiped a tear before it blazed a trail down my cheek, my lashes fluttering quickly to clear the rest away.
When I looked back at him, his gaze was waiting for mine. Dark and warm and containing the ashes of a hundred hardships he’d held contained, letting them burn down to his very soul to protect everyone else around him.
“Frankie…” he rumbled, and my lips parted. “I’m sorry.”
A cry bubbled through my lips as I shoved out of the chair and went to him. I launched my arms around his neck, his arms instantly holding me close. The thud of his heart was heavy against my chest. Or maybe it was mine against his .
“I’m sorry,” he murmured against my neck. “I should’ve…I should’ve done so many things.”
My throat swelled tight as I tipped my head back, my hand finding the side of his face and lifting it until I found his eyes. “Me, too,” I said quietly, my voice husky with a hundred emotions, only one of them winning out as my focus lowered to his lips.
“I came back to tell you I’m not going anywhere. I don’t want to go anywhere. I want you,” he rasped low, the words, their weight making me shiver.
“What does that mean?”
“Whatever you’ll let it mean, baby.”
It wasn’t fair the way that word had become a weapon—the smallest, softest sword against my independence.
My whole life I’d planned on being alone. And then I met Chandler, and I wanted something…else. And then I got pregnant, and now everything was off course. Or maybe it was on course.
“I don’t know what I want it to mean,” I admitted. The temptation was strong, but so was the fear.
As a general rule, I wasn’t afraid of much. Even realizing I was pregnant…I was shocked, but I wasn’t afraid. I loved kids. I was in a good place in my life. I had a good support system. I wasn’t afraid of being pregnant or having a baby or even the change it would bring to my life. But Chandler…I was afraid of him. Afraid of how I felt about him and how easy it was to feel more.
“Well, I’ll be right here waiting until you do.”
I didn’t want to think about the future. I didn’t want to think about how one week of taking care of me and one heartbroken apology seemed to be all it took for me to want to hand my heart back over on a silver platter .
It wasn’t characteristic Frankie…or was it? To leap heart first into a situation without concern for the consequences?
I swayed into his heat, relishing the hum it sent through my veins. “Chandler…”
I didn’t know what I wanted for the future, but I knew what I wanted in this moment. Him. His mouth. His hands. His cock. I wanted to feel again—to be on fire. I wanted to let go of all my tightly-clutched strings of control and be the only puppet of his pleasure.And he felt it, too, this magnetic pull that neither of us could escape.
I wasn’t afraid of being alone. I was afraid of being without him.
“Tell me,” he muttered, his nose nuzzling mine. “Tell me what you want.”
“You,” I breathed instantly. I wanted him. I wanted him here. In our baby’s life. In my life.
“I’m yours, Frankie. For however you’ll have me.”
My throat tightened, panic seizing its familiar hold. “I want you,” I repeated. “But I want to go slow.”
“I’m not going anywhere, Frankie,” he murmured like he could read my thoughts.
But when Chandler started to step back, I tightened my arms. “Not slow for this part.”
“No?” He lifted a brow.
“No.” I framed his face and pulled his mouth down to mine.
The kiss was everything. From the sweep of his tongue to the growl from his chest to the way it wasn’t just my body that sighed into his embrace but my heart, too. It was nourishment after months of starvation. It was fire after weeks upon weeks in the cold.
His kiss felt like coming home, and it sprouted the seed I’d tried to keep buried: I was falling in love with Chandler Collins.
My head swam, and my body swayed, the whole of me on fire with ache. It ate at my cells. It devoured my breath. It feasted on my racing heart. And it was ravenous for more.
“Please, Chandler,” I whimpered, afraid I’d go up in smoke if he didn’t do more than kiss me.
“I’ve got you, baby,” he rumbled, kissing along my jaw and neck.
His hands went to my top first, lifting the soft long-sleeve tee over my head, and then he lowered to one knee. I tried to stop the cartwheels my heart rounded in my chest. He looked up at me as he hooked his fingers in the elastic waist of my linen pants and brought them along with my underwear to the ground.
I didn’t know what I expected next, but it wasn’t for his hands to sink into my ass and haul me to his face, his tongue spearing straight for the nub of my clit.
“Chandler!” I gasped, and my eyes rolled back as I grabbed for his head, clutching his sinful mouth tight to me.
And then, on his knees, he backed me up to the bed, his lips and tongue latched onto my pussy as he pushed me back.
“Yes, Chandler,” I whimpered, melting onto his tongue as he hooked my legs over his shoulders.
“You taste so good, my little flame. So fucking good.”
I almost came at the endearment I thought I’d never hear again. And then he growled and doubled down between my thighs, licking and sucking until I couldn’t catch my breath.
“Don’t stop,” I begged. Cried. Pleasure constricting around me until my hips bucked. I didn’t know how starved I was for this—for him—until now. Until I was right on the edge of orgasm, his tongue sliding and sawing over my clit .
“More,” I whimpered, grinding my hips up toward his mouth.
And then the world went upside down. Or I went right-side up and right on top of him.
Chandler flipped us so I was sitting on him, my legs framing his face that was buried between them. Gasping, I tried to lift up on my knees, but his hands on my waist stopped me. Held me. And then, holding my gaze, he let out a growl and set his tongue back on its path of complete clit destruction.
Between licks and sucks, I melted onto his tongue. I’d never felt pleasure like this before. So consumed. So powerful. My head tipped back, and my hips began to grind against his mouth, hard and demanding. Air scissored out of my lungs as I moved faster and faster, needing more. Needing it all.
“ Chandler! ” I exploded, my body trembling and almost tipping over as pleasure whipped like a hurricane through me.
I didn’t know how long it took for my breath to finally catch, but he held me the entire time, his mouth gently coaxing every drop of my release onto his tongue like a man who’d never get enough of the taste.
I looked down at him, his dark eyes tangling with mine from between my legs. His face was wet with my want, and heat warmed my cheeks. I carefully slid off to the side of him, and he reluctantly let me go.
“Sorry,” I murmured, fairly certain I almost suffocated him there for a minute.
“You’re carrying my baby, Frankie,” he growled. “You can fuck my tongue any time you need.” And to prove his point, his tongue dragged over his sinful lips to make sure to claim every last drop.
I slid my gaze down his torso to where his sweats were massively tented around his arousal, and a fresh wash of want flooded through me.
Should I? Should we? Was it too fast when I said I wanted slow ? —
“I don’t just want to fuck your tongue.”
Instantly, the ease of his expression was gone, replaced by raw hunger. “Frankie…”
I reached for the stiff ridge, and his deep groan was melodic as I palmed his arousal.
I lowered his sweats just enough to free his cock, trailing my finger along the thick vein that stretched up his massive length. I shuddered as a wave of need went through me. Damn, this pregnancy made me horny.
“Frankie,” he groaned.
“And what about this?” I asked huskily, rising back up on my unsteady knees and straddling him. “Can I fuck this any time I need?”
“God yes,” he swore on an exhale as I dragged the head of his cock along my slick seam.
I felt like a goddess as I tipped my head back and let myself sink down his length. Inch after inch. I went slow, letting my tight muscles adjust to him.
“I forgot how big you are,” I murmured, and then let out a small sigh when he was fully seated.
Chandler was quiet for a second, his jaw ticking, before he muttered, “Don’t worry, I won’t let you forget again.”
I bit into my lip, but my moan escaped anyway as I began to ride him. Like this, the tip of his cock bumped against my womb every time I bounced. It hurt and felt so good at the same time. Just like the wax.
Before long, the grip of pleasure had me in a chokehold again. I lifted and rocked my hips, the friction heightening on my clit as he somehow sank deeper.
“That’s it, baby. Take all of me,” he growled, his hands tightening on my legs, or maybe he was helping them because I didn’t feel steady enough to know how I kept moving. “I’m yours, Frankie. Yours.”
At that, I gasped and faltered.
Without warning, he flipped us over, his hand tangling in my hair as he found my gaze. “I’m not going anywhere, Frankie,” he swore with such bone-deep sincerity it made my breath catch.
And then he started to move. Long, punishing thrusts all the way to the center of me.
I was so stretched, so full, but I whimpered unintelligibly for more. And Chandler understood. He thrust deep and hard, hitting some buried pleasure point that either only he could reach or that only existed for him. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t move.
“That’s it, baby. Come again for me.”
I couldn’t do anything until he begged, and then my body orgasmed again, so hard this time I saw stars.
His ragged curse followed me over the edge as he drove himself through my release once—twice—and then came, his cock jerking roughly inside me, filling me with his cum.
“You okay?” he rumbled, placing soft kisses along my neck to my ear.
“Oh my god,” was all I could say. “That was…”
“Incredible?” he suggested.
I moaned. “Dangerous.”
He chuckled and pressed his lips to mine. I whispered, “I don’t…I can’t move.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything.”
He would. I knew he would. He always did. Not because he had the money to or because I needed him to, but because I wanted him to. Because I trusted him. Because I… no, Frankie.
Too fast.
Too reckless .
Too real.
I curled under the covers, eagerly wading along the shores of sleep as Chandler cleaned us, then cleaned up from the takeout. I was almost out—maybe I was out when a low buzzing woke me and I turned, searching for the source.
“It’s mine,” he said, striding quickly to the nightstand where his phone vibrated. “Dammit.”
“Is it your mom?” Alertness sprung like ice water into my veins.
“No.” His head shook. “Just the GC Holdings acquisition; it’s coming to a head.” His jaw flexed. “I’ll take it in the hall. I’ll be right back.”
I sagged back into the pillow, listening as the door opened and shut. I didn’t know how long it was that I slept or that he was on the phone, but when his weight dipped the mattress next to me and his arm reached over to rest protectively over my stomach, I opened my eyes long enough to think he had to have been on the call for a while because it was completely dark outside. But then he pulled me close, and the thought didn’t matter anymore.