Chapter Fifty-Two. Holden
FIFTY-TWO
Holden
The pounding on my front door surprises me. My eyes are bleary and I’m tired as fuck. Apparently sleep came—somewhat—if my ass nodding off in my office chair behind my computer monitors is any indication.
I scrub a hand over my face and shake my head, closing the door to my office behind me out of habit. “Just a minute,” I call out and look around for my phone.
Where did I leave it?
Knock. Knock. Knock.
No good ever came from someone knocking on your door at—I glance toward the clock and yawn—four in the fucking morning.
Christ.
There is another insistent knock.
“What?” I snap, but then startle when I see Rowan standing on the other side of my door. I open it and before I can say a thing, she falls against me, arms going around me as she collapses.
“Rowan?” I wrap my arms around her, my lips finding the top of her head immediately and pressing a kiss there.
“I needed somewhere to go. I needed … you.”
“What’s wrong?” She doesn’t budge but her shoulders hitch a sob and she just holds on tighter. I walk back a few steps, our bodies moving as one, so that I can shut the front door. A million thoughts race through my mind, the most important one being, she came to me, to my house.
She needed me.
“You’re scaring me, Sunshine,” I say as I lean down to pick her up and move her with me to the couch. I expect resistance. Her to tell me she’s not helpless. That’s who she is.
She doesn’t do either.
So I carry her to the couch and sit down with her cradled there, her face in the crook of my neck, and need emanating off of her.
“I’ve got you,” I murmur as I hold her there, against me, uncertain why she’s here, but willing to give her whatever it is she needs. “I’ve got you.”
Selfishly I breathe her in. I memorize the feel and smell of her, the weight of her body on mine, because nothing I love stays. Nothing I care for matters more than the endgame.
“Talk to me, baby.” I run a hand over the back of her hair and love the way my fingers get caught in its tangles. “Tell me who hurt you.”
Tell me who I’m going to have to fucking kill.
“There was an accident,” she mumbles and my heart drops.
Mason.
There was an accident.
“My dad. He was hurt but they think he’ll be okay.
” She rambles on for a few seconds about the ICU and internal injuries and donating blood.
All things I hear but don’t process because she’s okay.
She. Is. Okay. “I couldn’t stay there for another second.
I couldn’t breathe. I just … you’re the only place I wanted to be. ”
She looks up at me with red-rimmed eyes, a sadness that guts me, and a clarity that has my chest constricting in a way I finally understand.
I finally acknowledge.
I reach up and cup the side of her face, my thumb resting on her lip. My smile is soft and my heart is pounding. “I’m here. Anything you need me to be for you, I’m here.”
She parts her lips and kisses my thumb. “I’m numb, Holden.
I can’t feel anything and I need to feel.
” She leans forward and brushes her lips against mine.
“Make me feel.” Another kiss. “Make me forget.” And then another where her tongue slips between my lips and the salt of her tears hits my tongue. “Make me yours.”
I hesitate for the briefest moment as a fear like I’ve never felt courses through me.
The kind that tells you this is the point of no return.
This is a moment that will make or break you.
This is what I’ve never allowed myself to have.
“Holden,” she whispers and takes matters into her own hands by she shifting to straddle me, the heat of her pussy on my cock through the thin fabric of her panties.
“I need this.” Her slip of a dress comes off over her head, treating me with an unhindered view of her beautiful tits. “I need you.” Another kiss.
Need grows into greed but uncertainty remains.
I frame the side of her head to tear our mouths apart and to look into her eyes.
“This is all wrong, Rowan.”
My words encompass so many things. All of them are why she’s going to hate me when all is said and done, but she hears them to mean this, right now, with her dad in the hospital.
She shakes her head free from my hands. “Everything with you has been wrong from the start. Don’t you see that?
” She kisses me again. It’s long and consuming and so fucking hot that I struggle with what’s right and wrong because all I see is her.
All I want is her. She leans back and meets my eyes again.
“But if you’re what wrong feels like, Holden, I don’t ever want to feel right. ”
I hold off. Resist. Count in my head. Reason poorly.
And fail.
I initiate the kiss this time. My hands on her breasts and her pussy soaking my sweats beneath her. She’s cool skin and warm tongue. She’s soft curves and hard nipples. She’s what I’ve always wanted but never allowed myself to have.
She’s Rowan. Plain. Simple. Extraordinary.
There is no rush to our movements. No fervent urgency. We make a slow dance of pulling her panties off one leg. Of us lifting up so I can shove my sweats down so that my cock springs free.
And when she lifts up, when I grab my cock with one hand and line it up at the entrance of her pussy while fisting my hand in the back of her hair with the other, our eyes meet.
They hold.
And they never break as she sinks, inch by violently pleasurable inch, down onto my cock.
It’s the sweetest kind of burn. The most torturous type of restraint. The most intimate kind of communication where no words are spoken but our bodies and gazes are talking.
“Hold…” she murmurs as her eyes fight closing from the pleasure.
My god the woman feels incredible. Tight. Warm. Wet. Just fucking incredible.
I pull her head to me. I take from her lips. The kiss is slow and sensual as my cock remains buried as deep as possible in her. As her arousal drips down my balls and her fingernails tighten against the skin of my chest.
I can’t do this anymore when it comes to her—pretend it’s just sex without emotion. It’s the polar opposite.
Sure, I’m making her feel to help her forget.
But I’m also spiraling out of control.
Because all there is in this moment is emotion. All we do is feel. And not just the orgasm that we’re chasing. Not just the touch of her hand on my skin and her pulse beneath my fingertips. Not just the closest two people can fucking physically be.
There’s so much fucking more here.
We move in the quiet of my condo. With soft sighs and pleasurable moans. We talk with fingertips and angled hips. With stuttered breaths and eyes falling closed. With giving ourselves—every single fucking thing—and not holding back.
She takes what she needs from me. I take what I’ve always pretended I didn’t.
“Holden. Please,” she finally mewls, the tears still sliding down her cheeks.
“Take what you need, baby. Take my fucking cock and take what you need,” I murmur as my head falls back and pleasure washes over me.
Our orgasms hit. The slow build to the dizzying free fall that has her burying her head against my shoulder as I keep moving beneath her to draw out every last sensation for her.
To do what she asked of me—to make her feel.
And when I feel her teeth nip into my shoulder and feel the wetness of the tears on her cheeks against my skin, I allow myself to fall with her.
Off the cliff.
Into bliss.
Into her.
We sit like that, connected with her knees on either side of me and her cheek resting on my shoulder. I trail my fingertips down the length of her spine and let her hair tickle my cheek.
And when our heartbeats decelerate, when her eyes become heavy and the weight of the events wear her into slumber, I carry her into my bed.
I lay her down between the down comforter and the luxury sheets in a place I’ve never let anyone else into before.
But her hand remains on mine the entire time. On my hand, on my thigh, on my fingers. “Don’t go,” she murmurs in her sleep.
And I don’t. Not like I’d planned to do anyway.
Instead I sink down into my bed and stare at the sleeping, incomparable Rowan Rothschild.
Sworn enemy.
Salve to wounds I won’t acknowledge.
Gasoline to the fire I’m starting.
We lie like this in the silence of my place in a position we’ve never been in before. One of us seeking comfort from the other. One of us needing more than just the physical.
It terrifies me.
I tried to put this back on even footing. I attempted to piss her off so she stepped back some. I tried to sabotage whatever this was.
And now she’s here, like this, needing me and proving to me that I need her, and I don’t have the slightest fucking clue what to do or say or how to get us back to where we should be.
Tomorrow.
I bargain with myself when I know it’s a lie.
There’s no going back.
Not when it comes to her.