Chapter 30
Joss
He saw me.
Oh no.
I didn’t mean to linger at the window when I heard the crew. My plan had been to glare at them for starting so early and then either go back to bed or start my coffee once I decided if I was actually getting up or not. I wasn’t going to say anything, and I wasn’t even that mad. This is a smart renovation, and I’d rather it be done now when I haven’t started work on the inside. Once they get it set up and put the new entrance in, it’s going to change the whole flow of the apartment.
There’s a box in the attic Gabe will need to get down for me. It’s got outlet covers, furniture bumpers, cabinet locks. No point buying fresh when I’ve been saving them all these years for this moment.
That’s what I’m thinking about when I get to the window and look down. I see Jeff and his crew down below, attempting to dig holes in the ground, and I do feel bad for them having to do this in January, but that’s on Gabe.
Gabe appears while I’m still at the mercy of the coffee maker. I want to be pissed and go down there and yell at him for hauling lumber around when he’s a goddamn football player and taunt him for the loss for good measure, but I can’t. When I look at him, I tell myself to feel anger, but it’s only ever grief. Longing. Heartache. This desperate, self-defeating need to yell at him but only so he can hold me because the freer the people in my life have gotten with hugs, the more it’s sunk in that none of them feel as good as him.
And I hate him for that, but that’s not what I feel when I look at him.
That’s definitely not what I feel when he throws that pile of lumber down, chugs an entire bottle of water, and tugs his shirt off.
Dammit. God freaking dammit.
He’s a floor below me, but he’s larger than life. In the dead of winter, his skin holds enough of a tan still to be freckled, those little flecks sprinkled across his shoulder and chest, those biceps too big for me to get my hands around and that giant torso that looks like it would be soft until the light hits just right, revealing the grooves of dense muscle.
His hair is overgrown, his beard in need of tidying, but it makes him look like a feral mountain man standing in the snow naked from the waist up. And from the waist down, he’s wearing the jeans that I secretly obsessed over even when we were together because his ass is so perfectly formed in them. Yeah, his workout stuff is hot. The sweatpants are hot, that stupid pink hoodie is hot for being an inch too short on him, but these jeans?
This has to be a pregnancy hot flash I’m feeling.
I peel myself away from the window, fix my coffee, and tell myself to go to another room where I can properly hate Gabe, but damn my eyes for drifting right back to him swinging that axe.
Holy hell, it’s soft-core porn.
He’s shiny with sweat, every inch of him flushed, and with each swing of the axe, he grunts loudly enough I can hear it. Memories flood my mind — and elsewhere — at the sound. It’s the sound of getting absolutely wrecked on that mattress on my bedroom floor, of Gabe working out the week’s frustration in the most brutal, carnal way, of the knowledge there’s not a chance in hell I’ll be walking right the next day.
His scent, his sounds, his breath. The way he’d look up at me from between my legs or the sudden jerk when he was behind me but needing me closer, so he’d grab me by the ponytail and haul me up to him. How his cock felt pulsing inside me.
This is bad.
There’s only one thing I can do now. My rose and my rabbit have been working double-time lately, but at least they’re on the charger.
I give myself a pep talk to back away. My pussy clenches and tells me if I stay here long enough, she’ll figure the rest out, like I’m gonna grind one out on my kitchen counter.
The idea has some merit.
And then, horror of horrors, he looks up at me.
And drops his axe.
And grins wickedly at me.
Well, crud.
It’s wild how quickly we’re fighting. I tell him he’s not welcome inside, he grumbles about my lack of security and how the whole world can get in here, I tell him it’s none of his business, and then we’re screaming at each other.
“Everything you do is my business!” he roars like some monster rising from the deep.
But I’m at the top of the stairs and he’s several steps down, still a head below me. It’s loud, but I stand my ground. “You don’t own me, asshole!”
“No, but that baby is mine.”
“Through no choice of mine! You ruined everything, not me.”
“Yeah, I did, and that doesn’t change the fact that I’m the only one trying to keep you and the baby safe!”
He’s still below, staring up at me with pure, undiluted anger in his eyes. He looks like he could murder me right now. It doesn’t make any sense that he would do that, he literally just said that he’s trying to keep the baby and me safe, but this irrational fear takes hold of me.
Brian never hurt me, but he hurt so many other people. Other women. Teenage girls who were already helplessly underpowered against him before being sedated.
Gabe hurts people every day. He gets hurt, too — that hit he took in the final play of their loss against the Chargers was terrible, all the sports reporters said that — but he gets up and keeps going.
He could hurt me in a blink of an eye, and there’s no way I could stop him.
God help me, I shove him back.
And thank god because he doesn’t fall. I know I’m being crazy right now, but he would seriously hurt himself if he fell down those stairs.
He surges forward, lifting me by the waist and carrying me back, back, back, until I’m pushed up against one of the mirrors set up around Cora’s hemming platform. I cry out at the cold, afraid it’s going to shatter, but he lets me go, gripping the frame of the mirror in his hands to box me in.
I lean against the glass, but there’s no escape. He looms over me, his nostrils flared and his breath hot against my face as his chest heaves.
“You’re going to be the fucking death of me,” he groans.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, choking on the adrenaline surging through me. “I shouldn’t have pushed you.”
“You can’t move me.” His voice is a growl, so much anger in it. “Don’t you fucking get that? You . . . can’t . . . move . . . me. So when it takes four numbers to get into your apartment, and those four digits are literally your birth year and day, you should be terrified that if someone even close to my size breaks in, you can’t move them.”
“Why are you being so mean to me?” I cry out, closing my eyes and recoiling as best as I can, but there’s nowhere to go.
“Because I’m hung over!” he yells as vehemently as everything else he says. But it’s enough for him to drop slightly, to lean his head down to mine and take a breath. “And because everything is falling apart, and I get why you hate me, but I can’t stop loving you or worrying about you or doing what I need to do, right? I can’t leave you to clean up my mess on your own.”
All that adrenaline coursing through me goes straight to my heart, squeezing tight. “Gabe—”
There’s a loud thud next to my head, Gabe hitting the wall behind the mirror. The room is wood paneled, so he leaves nothing but a minor dent no one will ever notice except me.
“Not a mess to clean up,” he corrects himself, his hand with its now bruised knuckles sliding over my stomach. “A baby to take care of. I know you hate me, Joss, I know you do. But this is my baby, and you can’t take that away from me. I have so much love to give them. You can reject my love, but it’s not fair for you to make that decision for them when you know, you know, how good a father I’m going to be. You know.”
I swipe away the tear that’s welling in my eye, that’s always there, that will never stop falling and I’m so completely exhausted with the unending tears that I’m as frustrated with myself as I am with him. “You are. But how can I possibly trust you after what you did? You’re not even willing to give me space, you’re constantly coming over—”
“I was outside!” he bellows as he pushes himself back to give himself the space to wave his hands wildly without hitting me. “Fuck, I’ve been taking care of the goddamn walkways for you and your customers so you don’t have to. This is the first time I’ve been inside, and I’m sorry, but you were the one glaring at me when the fucking ground is frozen and I’m just trying to bust the dirt up so the crew can get this deck going!”
“I mean, I wasn’t glaring at you,” I grumble.
“I saw you!”
“But it wasn’t a glare. Or, it was a glare, but because . . .” I don’t think I need to explain this, but Gabe is staring me down like he genuinely doesn’t understand why I was watching him when he was literally out there swinging an axe without a shirt on. I huff in irritation for caving to this level of manipulation. “You know my hormones are all over the place.”
Gabe blinks and rears back. He’s all over the place right now, and he’s still red, his skin still damp with sweat. I don’t understand what’s up with him. I know he’s hurt, but this is ridiculous.
Until it clicks.
It’s only been five months I’ve known him, a blink of an eye, truncated over and over again by the demands of his schedule that has him forever traveling and keeping weird hours.
But an eternity. And as much as I hate that I know this so well and that when I’ve caught it in the past, it’s always been endearing enough that I feel the ghost of that warm fuzzy welling within me again, I know exactly what’s happened.
The big dummy’s had too much coffee this morning.
“Are you okay?” he asks, panicked. “Did the morning sickness come back? Is your blood pressure okay?”
“No, I’m fine, it’s fine, it’s—” I roll my eyes up to the ceiling and grudgingly admit, “I mean, yeah, you elevated my blood pressure, probably, but . . .”
He sinks, dejected, before he straightens up with a playful ma’am that’s absolutely unfair to me.
Because I feel it settling between my legs.
I let out an exasperated sigh. “Don’t get all ma’am with me like you don’t know you’re a thirst trap.”
The idiot actually lights up like he didn’t know this. “You think I’m a thirst trap?”
“You are a thirst trap. Look at you.”
He looks down at himself like he genuinely didn’t know this. “No one thinks I’m a thirst trap.”
“What are you talking about? You have a whole goddamn thirst trap club, just like Blaise and Merrick!”
“The Angels? They’re just making cookies for me because they’re nice ladies.”
“Are you absolutely insane? Are we actually talking about this right now? They make cookies because they think you’re the marrying type, so they figure it’s better to get your attention with baking than boobs. Do you really think Rachel went to the game in Minnesota because of the team? She went because of how great your ass looks in the white pants!”
Gabe is quiet for several seconds as he takes this in. He’s quiet for long enough that I’m thinking he truly didn’t know this before and I’ve opened his eyes to this whole new world.
Stupid me, because when I see that grin start to form and those eyes start to twinkle with joy, I get mad. Now he knows all those women are waiting for him to sweep them off their feet. “So, you can drag your lying ass over to their houses,” I grumble, turning toward my bedroom to get dressed for the day. I’m out here arguing with Gabe in an oversized tee-shirt, for god’s sake.
Gabe boxes me in with his arms again. “You miss me.”
“Do not,” I spit out, perhaps too quickly and vehemently to be believable.
“You miss my dick.”
“Get over yourself.”
He smirks and drops his eyes down, blatantly checking me out. “You’ve got all those pregnancy hormones begging for a good fuck.”
I look him dead in the eye, fully aware that I am poking a bear when I say, “If I need to get laid, I’ll get laid. Plenty of guys think I’m hot.” The words taste like ash on my tongue. It’s an empty threat.
And Gabe doesn’t even have the courtesy to act threatened. “Yeah, everyone thinks you’re hot. But they’re not going to fuck you. They know you’re mine. And you’re not going to the bars or getting one of those hookup apps. You want my cock.”
He pushes his body against mine, reminding me of exactly what I want. To prove his point.
I swallow a lump in my throat. “Stop.”
He brings a hand to my shoulder, tracing the path where my throat just bobbed. “Saw that,” he says more softly. Darkly.
My breath hitches.
His hand travels down to my chest. “Saw that, too.”
I frown, irritated with my body for craving him despite what he’s done to it. “I mean it, Gabe, stop.”
“Ma’am.” He slides that devilish hand of his down, down, down my thigh and up the hem of my shirt, pausing at my mound to clutch the curls there between his fingers and give them a slight tug.
I whimper. My brow creases as my toes curl. “Damn you.”
He leans down enough that his lips graze my ear. “Yes, damn me for giving you what you need. You’re so wet it’s soaked into your bush. Is that from watching me or from fighting me?”
I turn away, refusing to answer that.
His laugh is husky. “Both, then.”
His fingers winnow between my labia, teasing at my clit, making my knees wobbly. I grab for what I can to balance myself, but it’s all Gabe. His arm and his pants. I tell myself not to grind against those fingers, but I can’t help it any more than I can help the whimper of disappointment when he abandons my clit.
He skewers my pussy with a finger, and my body pulses around him.
“You need my cock here?”
I shake my head.
“Yes, you do.”
“No,” I whine, but my eyelids flutter back.
He adds another finger, forcing my stance wider as he pushes his knuckles between my thighs to dig deep. “No one needs to know. This can be our little secret.”
My head rolls back on my neck as my pelvis rocks forward, forcing his fingers to rub inside me. “Damn you,” I hiss, refusing to say I do need this. I don’t need him, but I need this. I feel like I’m about to combust internally. “You son of a bitch.”
“I won’t tell a soul that you let me fuck you. You won’t need to forgive me. You won’t need to get over your mad. Let me fuck you, Joss.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, not that it does anything to block out his voice or the complete nightmare of the logic.
“Tell me to stop now,” Gabe says once he begins to move his fingers rhythmically inside me, once he knows he has me snared, “and I’ll walk away.”
I’m going to curse him to the end of the world and back, I know this and he knows this, because I’m digging my nails into him as my pussy clenches and my pelvis digs into his palm, and he knows I can’t say anything now.
He unzips his jeans, hoists me up, plasters my back to the mirror, and slams his cock into me.
I cry out in pain — sweet, succinct pain — and my mind goes quiet, the concern for the mirror the only gray thought I have as he fucks me way too hard, possessing me in the most primal way, driving into me over and over again like I’m nothing but a toy for his pleasure. Every glorious thrust has me forgetting why this is bad, why he shouldn’t be doing this, why I regret every time I believed his pretty words and ignored every single filthy truth he purred while filling me with his cum and stuffing it back in when it tried to escape.
“Harder,” I whimper even though I really should be concerned about the mirror. “Fuck me harder.”
“You need me to come inside you, don’t you?” he growls.
“Please, Gabe. Oh god, I need it. I need you. I—” I tighten up, nearing the edge of detonation.
But then Gabe stops, groans low in his throat, and pumps twice more, giving me the dopiest grin.
“Did you just come?” I whisper, attempting to keep grinding on him, to get my fix, even though the snug hold he’s suddenly got on me while he peels me off the mirror makes it all but impossible.
“Yup,” he says, absolutely pleased with himself. “That’s not how you’re going to come today.”
“What? But you—I—oh my god, you’re such an—”
My curse is cut off unceremoniously when he dumps me on my ass on the platform and forces me to lie down.
“What are you doing?” I shriek, although my outrage is cut with far more excitement than it should be. Whatever he’s planning, I want right now. I won’t later, but it’s hard to be against him manhandling me when he does it oh, so well.
“Getting what I want.” He takes hold of my ankles in one hand and pushes them up, folding me in half, before jamming two fingers back into my swollen, desperate core and crooking his fingertips.
Oh no.
Oh no.
“Stop!” I beg as his stroking goes from nothing to way too hard immediately and my insides twist up. He knows this too well, knows how easily it is to take me over completely with a flick of his fingertips. He digs in hard enough I swear I can feel the rough grain of his fingerprints against my G-spot.
In another second, I’m thrashing and panting, bearing down like I could possibly reject him even though if he removed his fingers from me now, I’d kick him in the nose for rejecting me.
“That’s it,” he croons at the growing tension in my abdomen, the tremors consuming my whole body as he claims my pussy so roughly. “Give it to me, baby. Make a mess for me.”
He flicks my clit at the right moment, the moment he’s spent months honing in on, timing it like it’s an exact science, and I explode. I hear my release splashing on the floor next to the pedestal as the electric current rushes through me. I want it to be a quick jolt that leaves my hair standing on end and my heart pounding; instead, I get a car battery clamped to my core, sending an unending surge into my pussy that can’t be stopped.
I writhe beneath the hand he settles on my pelvis to keep me from thrashing too hard as I come with the rhythm of my heartbeat, leaving my ass and everything else soaked.
“Oh fuck,” I gasp on my first caught breath and the heady feeling that follows, the blessed satisfaction that makes it all worth it even if I’m going to be pissed about this later.
Gabe looks smug as he eases my knees apart, exposing me in a way that seems so much bigger than a rough fuck against the mirror or the detachment of blocking the rest of my body with my legs. As though to prove the point, he pushes my shirt up to expose my nipples to the cool air. “There we go.”
I sink down, feeling done in the most glorious way. I don’t even think anything of it when Gabe crawls between my legs. We already fucked, we may as well cuddle at this point.
Except he’s hard again, and he’s stroking his cock against my slit.
I squirm against him.
He slides himself into me and holds himself there.
I squirm more as my muscles work along his length, needing less and more and none at all and everything all at once.
“Shhh,” he whispers like I’ve said something, but I know he’s speaking to my body.
“Gabe,” I whimper as claustrophobia settles into my chest.
He lowers his lips to mine, a single, gentle kiss, nothing more than a damp press and a pause to feel each other. Even when I can’t resist and my lips begin to move, he doesn’t insist on more.
He moves over me, staring me hard in the eye as he forces my body to rock with his. I try to look away, not wanting any of this, and he won’t let me. His hands go to either side of my head, leaving my eyelids as my only escape.
It’s not enough.
I keep looking at him.
At my heart.
At the one person I was willing to share my life with again.
At the man I was so damn excited to make a family with that I thought there was no way I could be fooled again.
“Shhh,” he says yet again, this time talking to my mind or the tears pooling or the whole cosmic disaster this is.
And again, it teases words from me. “Why couldn’t you have been the one?”
“Why can’t I still be?” he counters, but it’s not a challenge.
It’s a release.
He leans down and kisses my neck below my ear, trailing down to nibble my shoulder, releasing me from anything but the heady sensation of our bodies joining the way they join best, deep and hot and at all points.
We come together this time, and it’s enough that if this had been a decade ago and I’d never been destroyed by Brian, my foolish heart would be ready to forgive Gabe.
Maybe he gets that. Maybe I do something that makes it clear even if I don’t catch myself doing it. Or maybe Gabe’s a bit salty still or making good on his promise. Whatever it is, Gabe stands up, stretches, fastens his pants, and says, “You can clean up your own mess this time,” before heading back downstairs.