Chapter Sixteen #2
I stepped out, slung my bag over my shoulder, and shut the car door. My ridiculous grin had to look as goofy as it felt on my face. “I’m trying to play it cool, but I’m too damn excited to see you.”
He didn’t say anything. He just pulled a notecard from his pocket and held it up.
CHAPTER SIX
Cage grinned and tossed it aside. I made a mental note to get it later because I’d kept all of them, waiting for a shred of recognition to spark in my mind, but in that moment all I could focus on was his hands claiming my face then the kiss that made my legs go boneless.
The hello kiss didn’t stop. It turned into a hungry kiss that said I would be dinner. Fine by me.
Grabbing the back of my legs, he lifted me up without breaking our kiss and carried me inside. All I caught were a few blurry images through my peripheral vision as he hauled me down one long, wide hallway and then another. The impact of a mattress broke our kiss, but he still didn’t say anything.
I swallowed hard as he kept me pinned to the bed with hungry eyes while his hands stayed busy removing my clothes, and my leg. He took it off like removing my shoe, never letting his eyes leave mine.
“Nice place,” I whispered. Crazy nerves.
He shrugged off his shirt, and then unzipped his jeans.
“Thank you.” He grinned and all it took were those dimples to make me sit up and scoot to the edge of the bed.
They reminded me that three years earlier I fell in love with the boy.
The Cage before me was all man and there was nothing I wanted more than to show my appreciation for the man.
I eased his briefs down, exposing his erection.
When I looked up at him, his lips parted while his chest slowly rose and fell.
There was just something so indescribable—so erotic—about the look in his eyes as I ran my hand down his length.
It was desire mixed with pain. It said “you don’t have to,” but at the same time the darkness in his hooded eyes begged me to wrap my lips around him.
His hands threaded through my hair as my tongue eased along his warm flesh. I closed my eyes, seeing flashbacks of his mouth on me—the way he met my gaze with his tongue pressed to me and the way it made me fall to pieces.
The most beautiful surrender.
The heat.
The slow unraveling.
The seduction of tasting someone so intimately—desiring them so completely. I wanted him to feel that—all of it—all of me.
“Fucking hell, Lake …” His face tensed around his heavy eyelids.
He pulled back and finished removing his pants before trailing a path with his tongue up the inside of my legs.
I leaned back, eyelids feeling as heavy as his looked.
Within seconds I cried out, bucking my hips when his tongue found my clit.
“Cage …” I fisted his hair, pumping my hips against him.
He didn’t stay there long. He tasted every inch of my body, bringing me to the brink over and over again as I did the same to him.
There was sex and then there was making love with a desire for it to go on and on, finding unfathomable pleasure in so much more than the release.
We had the kind of sex that seemed to last for hours, and when we finally found that release, we started over again until reaching all-out physical exhaustion.
“I missed you,” he mumbled in a sleepy voice with his cheek pressed to my stomach.
My new official favorite place in the world was naked, sweaty, and tangled in the dark gray sheets of Cage’s massive, round bed in the center of a room that was far too big for a bedroom.
“I wouldn’t have guessed.” I laughed.
He dug his fingers into my sides.
“Stop!” I squealed, wriggling beneath him.
He licked my belly then bit the skin at my ribs. “Mmm … you taste salty.”
I chuckled as my fingers played with his hair. “That’s sweat.”
“It’s sex. I love how it tastes on you.”
My insides clenched. He was sex—the way he looked, the words he said, and the way he said them.
“So, am I going to get the grand tour of your bachelor pad, and can we start in the kitchen, specifically the refrigerator?”
His chuckle vibrated the bed. “Are you hungry?”
“No. I surpassed hungry over an hour ago. I’m starving, famished, withering away in the wind.”
CAGE
“New rule. When you’re at my house, you have to wear nothing but a white T-shirt of mine.”
The sexy girl with wild, black hair and swollen lips that looked like they’d been thoroughly kissed peeked around the corner of my refrigerator that she helped herself to raiding, even though I’d just put salmon on the grill.
“Mmm, I like the feeling I get from knowing the shirt that hugged your sexy chest is covering my naked body.” She winked and resumed her raiding.
“Yeah, well, imagine how I’m going to feel when I take it off your naked body to reclaim it.”
“Reclaim the shirt or my naked body?”
I honestly couldn’t remember a time in my life that I felt so completely happy.
Not when I won the Heisman.
Not when I went first in the draft.
Not when I signed my contract with Minnesota.
In that moment, I felt quite certain I’d give it all up just to watch Lake pop her lips over and over in contemplation of what would be her pre-dinner snack.
Inexplicably, she owned a part of me from the moment she was born, and it took twenty-one years for her to find me and dangle it in front of my face in an are-you-missing-this sort of way.
“Do you have marshmallows?”
I crossed my arms on the counter, my feet resting on the rung of the barstool. “Sorry. No marshmallows. I don’t eat much sugar.”
“Hmm.” She shut the refrigerator door, setting a glass bowl of red grapes on the counter. “You need marshmallows, and crispy rice.” Popping a grape into her mouth, she grinned.
“I do, huh?”
She nodded. “Flax waffles and Justin’s Chocolate Hazelnut butter.”
“Anything else?”
Tapping a grape along her puckered lips, she rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “I’ll think about it and let you know.”
I tore off a stem of grapes. “You do that. Come on, I need to check on dinner.” I walked to the deck.
“You’re in jeans, no shirt. I’m in a shirt nothing else. What if your neighbors see me?”
“Nobody can see my deck. Come on out.”
“It’s dark and chilly.”
“Come. Here.” I laughed, turning the salmon on a cedar grill plank.
“Oh…” she stepped onto the deck. “It’s warm.”
I pointed to the two heaters on opposite sides and the one mounted above us.
“About five more minutes then I’ll feed you before you ‘wither away.’” Sitting on the end of a lounge chair, I tugged her hand, bringing her to straddle my lap, trying not to focus on her lack of panties.
“Thanks for inviting me for dinner.” She placed a small kiss on my lips.
I nodded, contemplating my next words. Finding any words in the presence of the only woman who managed to leave me speechless was a nearly-impossible feat.
“You look so serious.” She narrowed her eyes.
“Lake Jones …” The words, where were the words and why was I scared out of my fucking mind to say them, but just as scared to not say them? “What would you say if I told you I love you?”
LAKE
Right then.
Right there.
In that moment.
Cage Monaghan turned his head and kissed me on the lips in a proverbial my-heart-felt-the-breath-of-eternity way. I had one goal: to make him turn his head.
I shook mine. “I wouldn’t say anything. You’d leave me speechless.”
He cradled my face. My eyes filled with tears.
“You’re that girl, Lake. Had you not disappeared after that day in Omaha, I would be an elementary school teacher.
I would not have chosen this life, because football is my life now.
I don’t know how to balance this anymore, and if I’m honest, I don’t want to balance it.
I want to give it up for you. I want being with you to be what I do every day because I swear to God I know I can do it better than anyone else.
I love you, Lake. I love you in a way that makes me uncertain of everything in my life but you.
I love you in a way that makes me want nothing but you. ”
It may have looked like my face was in his hands, but it was really my heart. He looked expectantly at me. I had nothing, so I shrugged and let big, fat tears roll down my cheeks.
He kissed away my tears.
“I love … you too.” The words caught in my throat.
They’d been there for so long, growing with each day, needing so desperately to be said.
Part of me regretted waiting for him to say it.
If there was one thing my brush with death taught me, it was the true fragility of life and the importance of saying what matters the very moment it matters.
Ben died and I lived.
And right then, right there … I knew why.