Chapter 20 #2
I added my fingers. Two of them sliding inside her, curling forward while my tongue kept working, and I built her up with the patience of a man who had waited seven years for this and was not going to rush a single second of it.
She was trembling. Her thighs shaking against my shoulders.
Her breath coming in broken gasps. Her grip in my hair so tight it stung and I did not care because the sounds she was making were the most addictive thing I had ever heard.
She shattered. Her back bowed off the bed and her mouth opened in a silent scream and her body clenched around my fingers in waves that I felt in my own blood. I held her through it, drawing it out, not stopping until she was pushing at my head and whispering that she could not take any more.
I crawled up her body. She grabbed my face and kissed me, hard and desperate, and I groaned into her mouth because the raw hunger in that kiss destroyed whatever was left of my self-control.
Her hands went to my belt. Shaking but determined.
She unbuckled it, unzipped my jeans, shoved them down, and I kicked them off.
Nothing between us now. Skin against skin.
The full devastating contact of her body pressed against mine, heat everywhere, and my hips rocked against her involuntarily and we both groaned at the friction.
I positioned myself at her entrance. Her legs wrapped around my waist, pulling me closer, and I pushed inside her in one long, deep stroke that stole the air from both our lungs.
Tight. Hot. Wet. The sensation of being buried inside her was so intense that my vision blurred and my arms shook where they braced on either side of her head.
I pressed my forehead to hers and held still, letting us both feel it, the fullness, the connection, the overwhelming rightness of being joined together after seven years apart.
“Move,” she whispered. “Please.”
I moved.
Slow at first. Long strokes that pulled almost all the way out before sliding back in deep, each one dragging a sound from her that I felt in every nerve ending in my body.
I watched her face while I moved inside her.
Her eyes fluttering. Her lips parted. Her expression shifting through shades of pleasure that made me feel like the most powerful man on earth, not because of my strength but because I was the one making her look like that.
I increased the pace. Harder. Faster. I hitched her thigh higher over my hip, changing the angle, and the next thrust hit a spot that made her whole body seize.
“There,” she gasped. “Right there. Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”
I gave her what she wanted. Over and over, driving into that spot with a focused intensity that was beyond thought, beyond everything except the feel of her around me and the sounds she was making and the need that was building in both of us like a storm.
She matched me stroke for stroke, her hips rising to meet mine, her nails clawing down my back in lines of fire.
“Harder,” she breathed against my ear. “I want to feel you for days.”
Something inside me snapped. I gripped her hips, lifted them off the bed, and drove into her with everything I had.
Deep, relentless thrusts that made the headboard slam against the wall, and she buried her face in my neck and bit down on my shoulder to muffle the scream that ripped out of her as her orgasm tore through her body.
The clench of her around me was almost too much.
Her body pulsing, squeezing, pulling me deeper, and I groaned against her hair and my rhythm broke.
I was moving on instinct now, chasing the release that was building at the base of my spine, and she was whispering in my ear, come with me, let go, Sawyer, let go.
I rolled us. Put her on top. She braced her hands on my chest and looked down at me, hair falling around her face, and the sight of her above me in the moonlight, flushed and breathless and wild, was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
She rolled her hips. Slow and grinding and devastating.
Taking control of the rhythm, finding the angle that made her gasp, and I gripped her waist and let her take what she needed.
She rode me with an intensity that left no room for self-consciousness, her head thrown back, her body rising and falling, and I watched her with a hunger that would have scared me if I had the capacity to feel anything other than her.
I sat up. Wrapped my arms around her. Pulled her chest against mine so every inch of us was pressed together.
She locked her legs around my waist and her arms around my neck and we moved together, foreheads touching, breathing the same air, and the rhythm we found was less about technique and more about desperation.
Two bodies trying to get as close as physics would allow.
She came first. I felt it in the way her body tightened, the way her breath stopped, the way her nails dug into the back of my neck.
She cried out against my mouth and I swallowed the sound and then her body was clenching around me in waves that pulled me over the edge with her.
I came with a groan that I buried in her neck, my arms locked around her, my body emptying itself into hers with an intensity that left me hollowed out and filled up at the same time.
We stayed wrapped around each other. Breathing. Hearts pounding in a shared rhythm that slowly, slowly came down. Her forehead against mine. Her fingers tracing lazy circles on the back of my neck. The room quiet except for our breathing and the distant sound of wind through the pines outside.
I pulled back just enough to see her face.
“I am serious, Chloe,” I said. My voice was wrecked. Low and rough, scraped raw. “This is not just tonight. I want to pursue you. I want to do this right.”
She looked at me. Her eyes were bright with tears that were not sad. Her lips were swollen. Her hair was a mess. She had never been more beautiful than she was right now, sitting in my lap in the dark with my arms around her and moonlight on her skin.
“Make sure you level up to how I pursued you before,” she said.
And there it was. The challenge. The fire. The absolute refusal to let me off easy, to make anything simple, to give me anything I had not earned. The thing that had made me fall for her the first time and was finishing the job right now.
“You brought me cookies,” I said.
“I showed up every day.”
“I can do better than cookies.”
“You better.”
I kissed her. Slow. Deliberate. A promise made with my mouth instead of words because I had never been good with words and she knew that. She kissed me back, soft and certain, and when she pulled away she was smiling.
I laid her down beside me and pulled the blanket over both of us.
She turned into me, her back against my chest, and I wrapped my arm around her waist and held her close.
Her body fit against mine the way it always had.
The same angles. The same warmth. Like she had been built to occupy this exact space beside me.
But it was different now. Better. Because there was a six-year-old girl sleeping down the hall who had my eyes and her mother’s heart and a stuffed dinosaur she refused to sleep without, and the three of us were under the same roof, and for the first time in a decade, this cabin did not feel like a place where I went to hide from the world.
It felt like home.
I fell asleep with Chloe in my arms and the forest settling into night around us, and for the first time in seven years, I did not dream about the road in Kandahar.
I dreamed about tomorrow.