Chapter 3
three
. . .
Clayton
I call in a personal day. First one in three years.
My captain doesn’t question it. Probably assumes I’m finally cracking after fifteen years of night shifts and bad coffee and watching people break in ways that can’t be fixed. He’s half right. I’m cracking. Just not the way he thinks.
I’m cracking open around an eighteen-year-old girl asleep in my bed, her dark hair spread across my pillow, one hand curled under her cheek like a child’s.
While she sleeps, I work.
I pull the case files on her parents’ accident. Read through the reports. Two-vehicle collision, other driver at fault, both dead on impact. No foul play. Just shitty luck on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. Winny was at school. Came home to an empty house and a patrol car in the driveway.
Three weeks ago. She’s been alone in that house for three weeks.
The thought makes something vicious twist in my gut. I close the file and move on.
I install extra deadbolts on my front and back doors. Check the security system twice. Call a buddy who does private security and order motion-sensor lights for the perimeter. By noon, my house is a fortress. By two, I’ve cleared out half my dresser drawers and made space in the bathroom.
She’s not going back to that empty house. Not tonight. Not any night.
She wakes up around three, disoriented, those honey eyes blinking in the unfamiliar light of my bedroom. I’m sitting in the armchair by the window, case file closed on my lap, watching her.
“Hey,” I say, and my voice comes out softer than I mean it to.
“Hey.” She pushes herself up, the sheet pooling around her waist, and my eyes catch on the thin strap of her sleep shirt sliding off one shoulder. “This is really happening, isn’t it? I’m really in your house.”
“You’re really in my house.” I set the file aside and cross to the bed, sitting on the edge. Close enough to touch. Not touching. Not yet. “How are you feeling?”
She considers this. Her eyes are clearer today. Less of the hollow, shell-shocked look from last night. More of…something else. Something that makes my chest tight.
“Safe,” she says finally. “Which is weird, because I barely know you. And you’re...you know. A lot.”
I bark out a laugh. Can’t help it. “Yeah. I’m a lot.”
“You’re also the only person who’s touched me in three weeks.” She says it quietly, looking down at her hands. “Besides the coroner. Who had to identify my parents.”
Fuck. Fuck.
I reach for her without thinking. My hand cups her cheek, thumb brushing under her eye, and she leans into it the way she did last night—that trusting, unconscious tilt that wrecks me every time.
“I’m going to touch you a lot more,” I tell her, and my voice has that rough edge, the one that comes out when I’m trying to hold back and failing. “If that’s what you want.”
Her eyes find mine. Hold. “Yes,” she whispers. “That’s what I want.”
The day stretches. I make her breakfast. Show her where everything is. Let her shower in my bathroom while I sit on the bed with my back to the wall and my jaw clenched so tight it aches, listening to the water run and imagining her small body under the spray.
By nightfall, I’m fucking desperate.
She’s wearing a pair of my sweatpants rolled at the ankles and one of my t-shirts that hangs to her thighs.
She looks small. Young. Mine. She’s curled on my couch watching something mindless on TV, and when I sit beside her and pull her into my lap like it’s the most natural thing in the world, she goes willingly.
Her ass settles against my thighs. My hands span her waist. I can feel every breath she takes.
“Clayton,” she says, and my name in her mouth does something to me. Something low and possessive.
“Baby girl.” My hand slides up her back, under the t-shirt, feeling the warm skin of her spine. “I need to know if you’re sure. About this. About me.”
She turns in my lap, knees bracketing my thighs, and her hands find my face.
Her thumbs trace the scars—the one above my eyebrow from a knife fight six years back, the one along my jaw from a perp with a ring.
She touches them like they’re something precious instead of evidence of a life spent in the wrong places.
“I’m sure,” she says. “I’ve never been more sure of anything.”
I carry her to the bedroom. Set her down on the edge of the bed and kneel in front of her, pushing the sweatpants down her legs with careful hands.
She’s bare underneath. No underwear. The sight of her—that neat triangle of dark hair, those slim thighs—makes my cock throb against my zipper hard enough to hurt.
“Virgin?” I ask, though I already know the answer. I need to hear it.
She nods. “Yes.”
“Okay.” I press a kiss to the inside of her knee. “We go slow. You tell me if anything hurts. You say stop, we stop. Understand?”
Another nod. Her eyes are huge, fixed on my face.
I stand, stripping off my shirt, and her breath catches. Good. I want her to see what she’s getting. The scars. The muscle. The body of a man twice her age who’s seen too much and carried too much and wants, suddenly, desperately, to carry her.
I’m gentle at first. So gentle it fucking kills me.
My mouth on her breasts through the t-shirt until she’s arching and whimpering.
My fingers between her thighs, working her open slow, one then two, watching her face twist with pleasure.
She comes on my hand with a broken cry, her inner walls clenching around my fingers, and the sight of it—her head thrown back, her body trembling—nearly undoes me.
“Ready?” I murmur against her neck.
“Yes. Please. Now.”
I line up. Push the tip in. And Jesus Christ, she’s tight. So tight I see stars, my forehead dropping to her shoulder, a groan tearing out of me that sounds wounded.
“Okay?” I grit out.
“More,” she whispers. “Please, Clayton, more.”
I sink deeper. Slow. Careful. Feeling every inch of her take me, her body stretching around my cock, her nails digging into my shoulders. When I’m fully seated, balls-deep in that perfect heat, we both stop breathing.
“Look at me,” I say, and she does. Those honey eyes glazed, mouth parted, completely gone on me. “You’re mine now. My baby girl. My good girl. Taking my cock so fucking perfect.”
She whimpers. Her hips shift, seeking more, and the movement drives me deeper and I lose it.
The careful goes. The feral takes over.
I fuck her with long, deep strokes that have her crying out with each one, my hand cradling her face, my thumb on her lower lip, telling her how good she is, how perfect, how I’m going to fill her up and keep her full and breed that sweet pussy until she’s round with my kid and never alone again.
She comes with my name on her lips, her body clenching around me so hard I nearly follow, and I manage to hold back—barely—driving into her through the aftershocks until she’s boneless and trembling beneath me.
Then I come. Deep. Hard. Pulsing inside her, my cock jerking with each shot, filling her the way I promised, and the sound she makes—this broken, overwhelmed whimper—sends another pulse through me.
I don’t pull out. Can’t. Won’t. I stay locked inside her, forehead pressed to hers, both of us breathing hard, my come leaking around my cock where we’re joined.
And that’s when the fear hits.
“Winny,” I say, and my voice is wrecked. “I need you to know something.”
She blinks up at me, dazed, satisfied, her fingers tracing lazy patterns on my chest.
“I’m terrified,” I admit. The words feel like gravel in my throat. “You’re grieving. You have no one else. And I just—” I swallow hard. “I just took your virginity in my bed after knowing you for less than twenty-four hours. If this is me taking advantage?—”
Her hand covers my mouth. Soft. Small. Certain.
“Stop,” she says. “Just...stop. You’re the first thing that’s felt right since they died. So don’t you dare take that away from me.”
I kiss her palm. Then her mouth. Slow, now. Tender in a way I’ve forgotten how to be.
“Okay,” I murmur against her lips. “Okay, baby girl. I’ve got you.”
And I do. For better or worse, I’ve got her.