Chapter 36
Thirty-Six
Henry
I swoop Tabitha into my arms and carry her to the blankets on the floor by the hearth.
Our bed for the last two nights.
Our bed…
I’m still naked, and I get rid of her clothes in record time.
She grabs my face, yanks me down, and kisses me.
The kiss is not sweet and not patient. It’s a collision of teeth, breath, tongues. She shoves both hands into my hair and drags me closer.
We stumble down onto the blankets together, a tangle of knees and shins and elbows.
I roll and she rolls with me, ending up above me, hair falling around our faces like a curtain. We’re both breathing too hard already. I slide my hands up the length of her back. She arches into it, mouth open, breath hot on my cheek.
“Henry…” she says, sliding one hand over my hard dick.
She sits back for half a breath, flushed in the afternoon light, and the sight is like looking at a fallen angel.
“Come here,” I say.
She does.
The hard wood beneath the blanket bites my shoulder blades. I don’t remember when my hands got this greedy, but they’re everywhere—her shoulders, her ribs, her lower back, the nape of her neck.
She takes my wrist and drags my hand up, sets my palm flat over her heart like she’s proving something. It’s racing. Mine matches it, thudding hard against my chest.
“Feel that?” she whispers, eyes shining. “Make it louder.”
Everything in me answers yes. I flip us and the blankets go with us, sliding and snarling around our legs. The hearthstone is cool against my palm when I brace there for balance. She drags me down by the back of my neck and kisses me like it’s our first time.
My body knows how.
We don’t say the serious words. We don’t say any words bigger than names and please and yes. Mostly we make sound. Heavy breaths sucked in, moans, groans, and that one “fuck” she says when I thrust into her.
God, her pussy…
So tight. So perfect.
I drop my head to her shoulder and bite into her flesh, not gently.
She gasps and then groans.
Heat builds. She scrapes her nails over my back, my arms. It’s pleasure-pain at its finest, and I want more, more, more…
I plunge into her, again, again, again…
“So good…” she breathes.
The cadence we find is ugly and true, and it’s exactly what I want. What I need.
I’m fast and fierce and not careful. The room blurs around the edges. Our breathing is ragged.
“Don’t stop,” she says, her voice wrecked. “Don’t—”
She doesn’t finish, doesn’t need to.
I answer by giving her exactly what we both want.
More. Faster.
If anyone saw us, they’d think we were fighting.
Maybe we are. Fighting the clock, the door, the daylight.
Fighting the part of me that wants to make a home in her body. Fighting the part of her that still wakes at a sound that isn’t there.
The blankets slide and bunch. I want to mark the floor with this. I want to mark the air. Mostly I want to mark her.
She pulls me down by my face and kisses me hard enough to hurt.
I open for it. A tear slicks the corner of her mouth—it might be sweat, might be anything—and I catch it with my tongue. She makes a small sound that I feel more than hear, and then something in her lets go.
I feel it in the wisp of her breath, the way her body clenches and climbs. I’m right there with her, the bottom dropping out from under me.
I thrust for the last time, sliding so far inside her as I release.
I empty myself. Give her all that’s mine to give.
Then…
Quiet.
Quiet except for our rapid panting. Quiet except for something that sounds like a quiet sob coming from her.
I don’t look. I can’t.
She sniffs it back.
Quiet except for Zach’s tail thumping.
She sags back into the blankets, hair spread, eyes closed. I lower myself without crushing her and end up half on, half beside her, my chest heaving, my mouth against the hot line of her throat.
We breathe together until reality returns. I feel full and emptied and a little bit wrong that anything in the world could feel this right when we have to break it in an hour.
She opens her gorgeous eyes. In the glow, they look like something I don’t deserve. I brush the hair back from her face.
“Again,” she says, voice wrecked and quiet.
It’s not polite. It’s not a request. It’s a demand. It’s hunger getting one last say.
I don’t answer because my body answers for me. We tangle up all over again, kissing, my fingers inside her pussy, her hand sliding along my length.
Moments later, I’m inside her again, this time from behind. It’s quick and filthy with need, and it steals what we’ve got left in the best way.
“God, yes!” she shrieks as she comes around me, pulsing.
She milks my cock in the best way, and before I’m ready, I’m shooting into her again.
God, again…
Quiet once more.
But this second quiet is different. Heavier. Her breath is slower against my mouth. I can taste blood where I bit my tongue and didn’t notice. The blankets are damp in places. My shoulder is going to be a problem tomorrow.
I don’t care.
None of it matters.
She curls into me.
I close my eyes and breathe in the scent of sex and musk and Tabitha. “You make me alive.”
We lie like that for a moment. Or an hour. I’m not sure.
A bird chirps outside.
Tabitha traces circles on my shoulder.
I don’t ask her to stay. I hate the honesty in me that knows she has to go.
“Shower?” I ask, just to say a word that isn’t a sentence.
“In a minute.” She nudges my jaw with her forehead. “Kiss me again first.”
So I do, slowly this time, because the animals have been satisfied and we can afford a little gentleness.
We pull ourselves up eventually. I press my mouth to a red mark on her collarbone and make a second one almost by accident. “Souvenir,” I say against her skin.
“Possessive,” she murmurs.
“Guilty,” I say.
“Shower?” I say again.
“Only if you join me.”
I kiss her lips. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
We walk to the master bedroom where I turn on the shower. Once it’s good and steamy, we get in, let the hot water pelt over our skin.
We don’t fuck again. Instead we wash each other and laugh when she gets soap in my eye. It feels like the kind of life you build, not the kind you steal on a late Sunday afternoon.
That thought hurts.
When we’re done, we dry each other off. Her blond hair hangs in damp waves around her gorgeous face, and I look at her.
Just look at her, memorizing every inch of her from her gorgeous amber eyes to the tips of her pretty little toes.
She leaves the bathroom, and once I’m done toweling my hair, I leave the bathroom and find her already dressed.
“Hey…” I say.
“I know. I have to go.”
I nod. “I know.”
I dress in a pair of lounging pants and an old Steel Vineyards T-shirt, and then I pick up her suitcase and carry it out.
At the door she pauses and looks around like she’s taking a photograph inside her head.
“Henry.”
“I know.” I grab her, pull her to me.
She kisses me once more and steps back.
“Maybe call me?” she says.
I pull out my phone as I nod. “I will.”
Then it buzzes.
And she sees the screen.
Her brow furrows. “Uh…who the hell is Francine?”