Chapter 45
45
Max
This was different to the mud room; Max felt it in her bones. Now there was nothing between them – these were their rawest, truest forms, crawling out of the exoskeletons they’d built around themselves to defend against the rest of the world.
Now it was just the two of them.
Grey knew where to kiss her as though the parts of her skin glowed, ready for his lips. They’d somehow fallen to the couch, her straddling him in her (Nella’s) pyjama shorts. His hands moved seamlessly from her back up under the flimsy lace of the top, brushing over her nipples and stroking the warm underside of her breasts. She shuddered, but it wasn’t because she was cold.
‘You drive me crazy,’ he whispered in between kisses as his mouth tracked down her middle. ‘You’re so beautiful, it’s hurt me every day.’ His journey brought him to the soft part of her stomach above her underwear, his lips pausing over the thin white scar on the right side of her abdomen. ‘Knife fight?’ He grinned up at her.
‘Appendicitis, age six.’ She pushed him back so he was lying flat across the couch. Together they shucked off his shirt and she started mapping her new territory. Running and fixing the odd vine pole surely did not sculpt this kind of ridiculous form on its own. Every part of Grey was perfectly curated and controlled, down to the angle of his abdominals.
‘Ridiculous.’ She shook her head as she traced the dips and planes of his golden brown skin.
‘What’s ridiculous,’ he said, although his mouth was curving in satisfaction of her approval, ‘is that you’re not kissing me anymore.’
‘I need a minute,’ she growled, hands pawing and cataloguing. ‘You’ve kept me away from this ’—she traced her fingers over the ridges of his stomach, up to the plateaus of his chest, a landscape she’d never dreamed she could visit, let alone return to—‘for too long.’
He dipped his head, shy or humble or just plain ignorant of the effect his meticulously sculpted body had on her. She didn’t care.
‘Is it just so you look big and scary?’ she teased, drawing herself down his legs so she could kiss a trail from his belly button to the edge of his jeans. ‘So everyone will think twice before throwing a punch at the Barbarani Fixer?’
‘No,’ he grumbled. ‘I like lifting weights.’
‘No one likes lifting weights.’
‘It’s for everyone else’s safety,’ he said. ‘It’s a way to release—’
‘Feelings?’
‘Annoyance.’
‘There are other ways to release,’ she said, undoing the button of his pants, her fingers shaking, her body alive like she was made of thousands of electrical sparks.
‘Max.’ His voice was hoarse as his hand covered hers, stopping her from going further. ‘Not yet, I’ll ... I don’t want it to be like in the mud room.’
She leant back on her knees, feeling her lace top fall slightly. His eyes glazed over as he took in her exposed skin.
‘It was over too soon,’ he said. ‘I need to take my time with you. And if you ... I won’t be able to control myself.’
‘I don’t want you in control,’ she said. ‘Not with me.’
His frustration had reached its peak. He dragged her back down and that rough stubble – he hadn’t shaved since the night of the gala – felt like the sharp, hot sensation of licking salt from the rim of a margarita glass on her lips.
She drew a breath and circled the round red mark on his bicep. ‘Gang war?’
‘Dog bite.’ He took her breast in his mouth. ‘Nine years old. Why the tattoos?’ he asked, circling the thorny rose on her bicep. His touch was curious and gentle but his mouth returned, hungrier than ever.
‘Why no tattoos, really?’ she countered.
‘I hate needles.’ He held her at arm’s length, his face so full of admiration it made her head spin.
‘I thought they would make people leave me alone,’ she said. ‘I thought they’d be a cage I could hide in, after my parents died. My mum always said tattoos were for people who’d been in prison or ugly people who were trying to paint themselves pretty. So it was partly because I was mad at her too – for dying.’
‘You screwed up big time, Conrad,’ he whispered, his lips pressing a trail of flames on a part of her upper arm she didn’t even know could be turned on. ‘They just made you even more fucking irresistible.’
‘You resisted pretty well.’ She tried to keep the vulnerability out of her voice, but he caught it, as he always did, and growled in protest, gentle hands rough as he rolled on top of her. The indents of his unnecessary arm muscles deepened, turning her blood to molten syrup.
Necessary. All of them.
‘There were a lot of cold showers you didn’t know about,’ he said. ‘And if you’d stayed on top of me for any longer after we fell from the trellis you’d have known exactly how much I wanted you, even if it was against my will.’
She rolled her hips, warmth pooling in her abdomen, hunger shaking through her bloodstream as the animalistic need to touch him, have him, to keep him here against her, forever, overcame her in a surge of power.
They’d never been allowed to want each other before.
His fingers slipped inside her in an explosion of heat and pleasure. She arched against the couch, her body pressing against him as he answered every one of her silent pleas.
‘Bed,’ he managed, teeth scraping against her neck as he worked her harder, faster – she was a star, building with cosmic, molten pressure, about to explode at the end of its life.
‘Couch,’ she murmured, breathless.
He didn’t slow, even as she became nothing but light and heat and sparking energy beneath him. ‘We’re doing this right,’ he said. ‘No mud room, no kitchen bench, no couch.’
‘Don’t you dare stop.’ She reached for his jeans, not bothering with the zip that felt like it was going to split anyway. She took him in her hand, fingers blistering against the hard, hot heat of him.
‘Max.’ She wished she could bottle that sound – her name, straining like the last grips of fingertips on a cliff’s edge, his final hold on his willpower. She worked her hand up and down the length of him, his control edging out of his skin with every stroke.
‘I don’t care, Greyson,’ she said. ‘I don’t care where we are. I just want you and I’m not letting you go so unless you—’
He picked her up, wrapping her legs around his waist, and stood, his teeth sinking into her neck as he growled, ‘You never listen.’
‘Your bed better be that fucking coffee table or I swear to—’
His mouth caged her flimsy protest, their tongues fighting against each other. Even kissing was an argument, but one she didn’t care about winning, as long as they could fight like this forever.
The bed was in the room she’d tried not to look in lest she humanise the evil beast who’d locked her in his cottage. And this time, she cared even less. There was a mattress, that much she knew as she fell against it, Grey pulling off her shorts and underwear before she could register she was no longer vertical. The earth could have started spinning in the other direction and she wouldn’t have noticed because he was kissing the inside of her thighs, marking her as his, even if he didn’t know it.
‘I love you,’ he said again. ‘It makes no fucking sense, but I love you.’
That was when she realised if his heart hadn’t been broken by Frankie and Giovanni’s secret, it might not have ever been in the right shape for her own jagged one to fit against. Their broken pieces fit together in a way they wouldn’t if they were whole.
‘I love you too,’ she said, her fingers in his hair, her heart fractured, splintered but beating stronger than it ever had.
He snapped the condom on, her body seething at the absence of his touch. She watched him – Greyson Hawke, untethered, uncontrolled, completely hers – drinking him in like expensive wine she’d been forbidden from tasting properly until now.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said as he tilted his head, watching her wanting him. ‘I still want to fuck you over the kitchen bench. But I also want this.’ He kneeled between her legs like he was bowing before an altar. His hands splayed her thighs apart, rough thumbs rubbing circles over her hip bones. ‘Do you want this, Max?’
She caught the vulnerability in his question.
Do you want a life here with me?
‘When will you learn,’ she said, ‘to stop asking stupid questions you already know the answers to?’
The corner of his mouth twitched, a crack of sunlight through his dark, drawn shades. She knew that full sun was just for her; she conjured it, she wielded it.
This time, she guided him in, pulling him down so their hands intertwined above her head, crucifying their bodies together. He thrust in slow, long movements, filling her and breaking her apart at the same time.
The moment before she came she had one final, coherent thought before her mind was obliterated: there were no plans, no plots, no storylines other than the two of them – the main characters in each other’s lives. This moment was theirs only.