Nine
Ishowered, and under the hot water, I calmed, settled.
I changed into pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, and I was standing in the kitchen, looking out the window, when the front door was thrown open and Sam Kage came through.
My eyes were all over him—the jeans; the cotton T-shirt stretched across his wide, muscular chest; and the slate-blue eyes, now dark with anger.
Slamming the front door closed, hurling his keys across the room at me, he growled, “What the fuck were you doing at that club?”
I stood there and just stared at him. I had known the man for over five years, and still, he made my heart stop.
“Did you fuckin’ hear me?”
Yes, I’d heard him, and, yes, he was breathtaking. I smiled at him.
“Jory.” His voice cracked on my name.
I ran toward him. He met me at the couch, grabbed me, and we fell down together in a tangle of arms and legs. As soon as I had some wiggle room, I got my hands free and on his shirt. It was coming off.
“Who was that woman the other night? Tell me!”
“For fuck’s sake, Jory, she’s undercover; she’s a Fed. That’s all that was,” he grumbled, his hands all over me. “You know me. There’s nobody else but you.”
I knew him.
“Put your leg over—”
“I missed you,” I said, arching up, wanting to be closer.
“Look at me.”
My eyes locked on his.
“Every part of Cristo Liron’s life is bugged—his phone, his car. Everyone heard you tell him you loved me the other night, confess it all, and while I love how honest you are, you basically took me off the front line of my own case.”
I stilled under him.
“You know, we were this close to being derailed the other night with Dorian Ducal almost making Cristo call off his deal with Adrian Miller, but you—just you—put everything back on track. Crosby Holt—he’s the agent in charge of our task force—must’ve said a million times that my husband was brilliant, the way he kept everything going. ”
I reached up for Sam’s face. “I thought you didn’t want to come home.”
He turned his head in my hands, kissed my left palm, and made a noise in the back of his throat.
“Sam?”
“I always want to come home, and you should know that instead of coming apart.”
The undoing had been all me; he hadn’t changed at all. I was the one, all by myself.
“I was scared.”
“Shame on you,” he said as he lifted up off of me.
“Sam?”
“You should never doubt me. I don’t deserve that,” he muttered as he sat down beside me.
The absence had screwed with my mind. I had no one to blame but myself.
“Do I?”
Did he deserve me doubting him?
“No,” I answered truthfully.
“We’re fine, J. Everything’s fine.”
And it was. I’d just needed reassuring, and that probably made me weak, but that also made me kind of human.
“Could you please stop looking at me, all heartbroken, and come here already?”
Moving fast, I stood, pulled off my T-shirt, then my pajama bottoms, and kicked them both away before scrambling, naked, into his lap. His hands were on my hips, yanking me forward. When I pressed my hardened shaft against his stomach, he groaned, deep and sexy.
“Sam,” I said, my voice cracking, “I missed you so bad.”
His hands framed my face, and I could see in his eyes the love, the joy that touching my skin gave him, the wonder of looking at me.
“Talk to me.”
“I … I’m so sorry. What I did in that club wasn’t right. I just—”
“Oh, no,” I soothed him, leaning forward, tasting him, deepening the kiss after the first one.
“Sam …” I rubbed my tongue over his, wriggled in his lap, and wrapped my arms around his neck.
“I wanted that. I wanted you. I still do. Let’s go to bed.
I wanna be under you, have you deep inside.
I need … I’m gonna come, just thinking about it. ”
He rose easily to his feet, my weight of no concern at all, holding me with one arm, then the other, dropping his leather motorcycle jacket on the couch, kicking off his boots, letting them stay wherever they fell, and walked me down the hall toward our bedroom.
He pinned me to the bed under him, and his weight on me made me shiver.
“Miss me?”
“You have no idea,” I whispered, my hands digging into his back, feeling the hard muscles, loving the heat of him, the strength.
“You’re so fuckin’ beautiful.”
I loved to hear the hitch in his breath when he was feeling his words as he spoke them.
“And I’m an idiot.”
I kissed his eyes and didn’t contradict him.
“No argument?” He chuckled deeply.
“Sam,” I said, wiggling under him, “take off your clothes.”
“Wait,” he ordered, looking down at my face. “I’m sorry. Forgive me.”
“For what?”
“This was stupid.”
“What was?”
“Being away from you,” he said as he kissed my forehead. “I thought I needed to do this to secure my spot with the marshals, and I didn’t, and I just … I will never ever leave you again. It doesn’t work for either one of us.”
“But your career and—”
“I’m gonna leave the police force, J, and do what I’ve always wanted and become a deputy US marshal.
I got my paperwork, and it cleared. We can stay right here in Chicago, and even though it ain’t an eight-hour-a-day job, it’s not a three-months-away job either.
I will protect people, and I’m good at that. You know I’m good at that.”
I nodded, so happy, so relieved. My life could stay as it was. “I got a new job too.”
“Yeah?” He smiled at me and then groaned as I moved, pressing my hardened cock against his groin.
“Detective,” I said softly, my voice low, deep, sensual, “please, take off your clothes.”
He scrambled off the bed, which made me laugh, and I watched the man get naked as fast as he could. I enjoyed seeing all the sleek skin, the rippling muscles, the body I knew that housed the man I loved, all power and strength.
When he was naked, he dived back onto the bed. I was laughing as he grabbed me, and I was crushed in a vise, covered in warm, silky flesh.
“Grab the lube. I want you buried to your balls in my ass right fucking now. Hurry up.”
So fast. He moved so fast and had the long, hard, thick length of him coated in slippery lubricant in seconds. I lifted my legs, and he rocked forward so my knees draped over his shoulders before, without any preparation, he slid inside my needy, waiting hole.
I didn’t clench up. Instead, I relaxed my muscles because it was the second time in one night, and I hoped to God it wouldn’t be the last.
His head fell back as he filled me, thrusting, driving, his rhythm like it had been earlier, hammering and hard. He was still frantic trembling with desire, and I loved how necessary I was. I grabbed my rigid shaft, which was already leaking, and tugged, feeling how close I was all over again.
Sex with us wasn’t normally so hungry. It was more about love than passion, but I remembered when it had only been frenzied and ravenous, and so I responded.
We would get back to the bonding that it had been before he left, but I would take the rutting, the primal animal claiming, as well.
I would always accept whatever Sam Kage gave me.
“Mine,” he growled, his voice deep and husky.
And even though I knew I was, it was still so good to hear.
He was done.
The man I loved was passed out in our bed, and I was so happy that I would have flipped cartwheels down the hall if I knew how to do one. When my phone rang, I left the room to answer it because I didn’t want him to wake up and leave me.
“Hello?”
“I’m downstairs, and I wanna see you,” Cristo Liron said.
Shit.
“I’m going to bed.”
“I want,” he said, enunciating the words, “to see you.”
But I couldn’t. If he saw me at that moment—lips swollen and red, hair tousled, covered in hickeys, scraped from stubble—he’d know I had not simply had a tryst in the back of a club.
Sam left marks—always had, and I hoped always would—and because they were fresh, they stood out sharply on my skin. I looked debauched, and if he came up …
“You already judged me once tonight. I think that’s enough.”
“Whatever you needed, I could have given it to you. We’re friends, aren’t we?”
“I’m not that kind of friend—never have been, never will be.”
“I wanna come up.”
“Not at one in the morning,” I told him. “And not after how you were at the club.”
“I was mad.”
“Fine, be mad, but that doesn’t make me want to let you up.”
“I fuckin’ hate this, Jory. Do you have any idea how frustrating you are?”
“Why? Because I won’t sleep with you? Give it a rest already. Go find some hot twink who wants to be your boy and set him up with a condo and an expense account.”
“Jory—”
“Don’t be a dick to me just because you need to get laid.”
“I assure you, I can get laid anytime I want.”
“Then do it and quit trying to make me feel shitty that it’s not me,” I snapped at him.
“Who the hell do you think you are?”
“Bye,” I said and hung up.
“Are you kidding?”
I had enough time to turn before I was grabbed.
“Jory, what the fuck?” Sam barked, fingers digging into my arms with how tight he was holding me.
“Cristo Liron is a dick,” I told him.
He just stared at me.
“What? He is.”
“Jor—”
“What?”
“Jory, you gotta stay the fuck away from Cristo Liron!”
“Oh, I will; don’t worry,” I promised, but the way he was looking at me, something was up. “Spit it out, Kage.”
“The only reason you’re staying away from him is because you think he’s an asshole!”
“He is an asshole.”
“But that’s not why you should stay away from him!”
“Don’t get all worked up,” I soothed him.
“Jory!”
“Volume, Kage. It’s late.”
He raked his hands through his thick now-black hair and pulled it back hard from his face.
“You realize that’s gonna take, like, weeks to grow out,” I moaned, grimacing from just looking at his hair.
“Baby—”
“And that color does not match your skin tone,” I assured him. “Jet black, Sam, really?”
“Jor—”
“Unless we buzz it all off,” I said thoughtfully, remembering what Sam had looked like years ago when he was a new recruit in the Marine Corps. I had seen pictures, and he had been so young and hot and cocky.
“Jory!”
“Jesus, what?” I had been caught with my mind wandering.
“Fuck,” he snarled, grabbing me again, shaking me hard. “Cristo Liron is mad because he knows you fucked someone, but it wasn’t him, right?”
“I didn’t fuck anybody,” I told him, smiling up into his eyes. “I had you in my bed, Detective, and that’s always way more than fucking.”
He gave up and hugged me, arms around me, crushing me against his big, hard body. I wrapped my arms around his neck, and as he bent to really hold me, I sighed deeply.
“You drive me nuts.”
I did it to everyone. “I want your ring back on.”
“I know. I figured that was coming.”
“When you’re a marshal—”
“It won’t ever come off, I swear.”
I exhaled sharply. “When will you come home for good?”
“Soon, baby. Very soon.”
But I was already missing him.