Chapter 23
Twenty-Three
Now
CJ
So far, Wyatt’s done everything right.
He drove me to his place in a car that smelled so much like him, he practically had to pry my nose off his upholstery with an ice scraper.
He carried my bag inside and hung my coat next to his in the hallway closet—he may have had to physically prevent me from burying my face in all of his coats, too—before showing me around his surprisingly cozy house and grabbing us waters from his fridge.
Then he goddamn picked me up and carried me into the bedroom, where he undressed himself and then undressed me.
And now I’m sitting on the edge of his mattress in my bra and panties—go to hell, shapewear, you weren’t needed tonight—and am trying not to come undone as he stands in front of me in all his devastating hotness, wearing nothing but a smile.
I flop backward on the bed with a wail. “Why am I nervous?”
“You’re nervous” he says, resting gentle hands on my thighs, “because this is important.”
The stampede of butterflies in my stomach settles the slightest bit at his touch.
“This is important,” I tell the ceiling. “And we waited so long for the rest of our first night.”
He crawls onto the bed next to me, and I roll my head to face him.
“So very long.” He cups my face and brushes the lightest kiss across my lips. “But let’s count the positives.”
“These back muscles are a real positive,” I tell him as I trail my fingers down their lovely length.
“Okay, we can make that number one.” He kisses a spot behind my ear. “Number two: your soft skin right here.”
He licks along my neck and down to my throat.
“Number three: We already know we’re good at this,” he says.
I nod. “Extremely good at this. Number four: Your family thinks I’m great.”
“They do.” He kisses the tops of my breasts where they meet my bra.“I mean, Mom and Phil haven’t had the chance to weigh in yet, but—”
He twists away when I try to pinch his nipples in punishment.
“Number five,” he says, laughing. “My friends adore you.”
“And I adore your friends.”
“That’s number six.” He kisses the soft squish of my stomach. “Number seven: My body catches fire when it’s in the same vicinity as your body.”
I like the sound of that so much that I wrap my legs around his torso and pull him as close as I can.
“I love you,” I say.
He goes so still that all my nerves come rushing back. “Oh, I didn’t play the game. Sorry.” I laugh awkwardly and try again. “Number eight: I love you.”
He’s still not moving, so I let my thighs fall open, giving him the chance to escape.
“I know it’s too soon,” I say. “And I guess we haven’t spent that much time together, when you add it all up, so do we even know each other that well, really? If you’d rather pretend I didn’t say th—”
“Fuck, I love you.”
He presses his face to my stomach when he says it, so his words are muffled and tickly against my skin. But I almost levitate off the bed anyway.
“Say it again.” I bury my fingers in his hair.
He lifts his head and looks up at me, laughter and affection and happiness and, yes, love shining on his face. “Charlotte Jane,” he says. “I love you. It’s not too soon. We do know each other. I fucking love you.”
Then he’s a blur of motion, crawling backward off the bed and falling to his knees, literally ripping my panties off with a mumbled “I’ll replace them,” then pulling me to the edge of the mattress and slinging one of my legs over his shoulder so he can drag his tongue through my pussy.
I jolt and cry his name at that first wet stroke, and it knocks the rest of my fears loose.
“What if we’re not okay together?”
He barely pauses. “We’re more than okay together.” As if to prove it, he gives a languid suck to my clit that makes me buck against him.
“But,” I say on a gasp. “Don’t you ever get so mad that you float above your body to watch yourself acting like the worst possible version of you?”
This time he does hesitate, the tips of two of his fingers teasing my entrance.
“I’m familiar with the concept,” he says in a strained voice. “Mostly when I’m around you.”
This makes me tense up, and he must feel it in my body because he settles back onto his heels as if we’re not both naked. “Talk to me, honey.”
I sit up to search his eyes for similar fears, but all I see is calm steadiness.
“I love you,” I say. “But what if we keep saying and doing terrible things to each other? Like we just can’t help it? Maybe all we know how to do is fight.”
He rests his cheek on my thigh and strokes his hands down the backs of my legs.
“What if I told you that fighting with you gets me off?” He leans his head down and gives me a gentle bite where I gave him a much less gentle one earlier tonight.
“You’re so hot when you’re mad. And smart.
I didn’t know that fighting with a smart woman could be so much fun. ”
“You might be underestimating how much I hated you for lots of the past decade,” I say softly.
I try to roll away from him, but he pushes me back onto the mattress, and he’s quiet for a beat before he kisses the spot he bit moments ago.
“I used to make decisions to spite the CJ in my head,” he says, moving his mouth to a different section of my thigh, giving it another gentle bite. “Like, if I improve the division’s ROI or save a client from a catastrophic investment, that’ll show CJ.”
He kisses the bitten spot, and my lower body clenches at the sensation.
“Succeeding out of spite?” My question comes out thick and languid. “I approve.”
“Of course you do.” Another spot on my thigh.
Another bite. Another kiss. “Then it sort of became me talking to a version of you in my head that I wanted to make proud of me. But every time we saw each other, you weren’t the CJ in my head.
Or worse, you actually were, but you weren’t mine. So I took it out on you, the real you.”
“This isn’t actually helping ease my fears, Wy.”
“Shh,” he says, giving my clit the lightest pinch.
My back arches at the pleasurable shock, but he’s already moving on to my other, as-yet unbitten and unkissed thigh.
“Funny thing is, I also used that audit to help me make decisions over the years. Your audit.” Bite.
Kiss. A quick stroke of my clit. “You’ve always been her.
The woman making me better, the woman I wanted to make proud. It’s always been you.”
Bite. Kiss. I’m close to tears now from his mouth, his words.
“We fought,” he says, “because it was the only way to be in each other’s lives. And how much worse would it have been not to have had each other at all?”
Bite. Kiss.
“Worse,” I say on a shaky breath. “I never want to be without you again.”
His hands land on the apex of my thighs, his thumbs parting my flesh.
“You won’t have to be.” His eyes drift to the hidden parts of me he’s just revealed, and a look of such dark hunger crosses his face that I feel the first flutterings of my orgasm. “And if we need to call each other filthy, nasty names from time to time, I’m extremely fucking down for that.”
“Yes. Okay,” I whisper as he lowers his mouth to my clit and sucks. “Try to make me come, you smug asshole. You absolute dick. I dare you. I—oh fuck, baby!”
His fingers slide inside me, and I’m so wet that we both groan.
“That’s right, my slutty elf.” He works his fingers in and out of me as his tongue paints circles around my clit. “The demon bitch from my nightmares. The woman I dreamed about for years. My brilliant girl, my other half.”
He wraps his lips around my clit and sucks again, and I press my palms into the mattress as the orgasm fully overtakes me, babbling, “Wyatt, yes. God, that’s good, you sweet man. You good, kind, brilliant evil genius. Fuckkkk.”
He strokes and licks me as I come down, but it takes a little longer to regain the ability to hear. When I do, it sounds like he’s been talking to me the whole time.
“My heart, my whole heart,” he’s saying. “Call me any names you want as long as I get to hear the sweet names too.”
“Come here,” I gasp, and he crawls up my body and crashes his mouth into mine, kissing me until we’re both out of air and I have to catch my breath before I can say, “My heart. My love.”
When he’s finally able to pull himself away, he reaches for a condom and rolls it on. “Will you ride me, sweetheart? Because we never did get to number nine on my positives list, and that’s definitely your breasts.”
I laugh and push him back on the mattress, positioning myself so I can sink onto that fat, hard cock of his. We both groan as I take him, and once I’m fully seated, we hold still and look at each other.
“I would’ve called you.” He moves now, fucking up into me, and I feel my insides start to throb again. “If I’d gotten your note. And even though I didn’t, it was so hard not to find you and beg, too.”
He repeats that thrusting, driving motion, but this time he licks his thumb and rubs it across my clit as he does it. I fall forward to rest my hands on his chest so I can work myself up and down his length, against his thumb, along his body.
“I don’t ever want it to be like that again, Wy.”
“It won’t,” he promises as I start to come again. He watches me with wonder in his eyes until the clutch and pulse of my pussy pulls him with me into the dark. The cords in his neck tense as he empties himself into me.
“You’re mine.” He pants it into my ear once I’m sweaty, boneless, and draped across him. “I’m yours. That will never change.”
“I’m yours,” I say sleepily. “You’re mine.”
I don’t know how long we lay like that, but when I start to shiver, he kisses my shoulder and says, “Don’t move.”
“As if I could,” I call weakly after him. “Unless you want me to text your sisters with the current condom count.”
“Not funny.” He’s rummaging through the bottom drawer of his dresser, allowing me to enjoy the shifting and flexing of his very fine, very naked ass. “Aha!”
A folded bundle of pink fabric lands on the bed next to me, and I shake it out in confusion. “What’s this?”
I look from the robe to Wyatt, then back down to the robe. Realization dawns slowly, and he squints at me, like he can’t bear to see the expression on my face in case it’s bad. “Yeah, I saved it. A part of me wondered if maybe someday…”
He waves his hand at me, naked in his bed, and I launch myself at him, desperate to hug him while simultaneously desperate to slide my arms into the robe I haven’t seen since the polar bear plunge all those years ago.
“I love you,” I say as I wrap my robe-covered arms around him. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
He walks me backward until we’re both flat on the mattress and curled into his blankets. “I love you too. Now drink your water and catch your breath. I want to show you a position I’ve been dreaming up. It’s called the partridge in a pear tree.”
“Intriguing. Am I the partridge or the pear tree?”
“Honey,” he says, “depending on the night, you could be both.”