48. Chapter 48
Jake
I was determined to make sure Seren knew exactly how much I loved her this morning, and that started with me kissing my way up the inside of her thigh while she buried her face in the pillow, trying and failing to stay quiet.
“Jake,” she mumbled, voice raspy with sleep.
Morning light spilled through the curtains, catching against her bare skin and the messy tumble of blonde hair across the sheets. She looked like something I’d spend the rest of my life thanking the universe for.
I hooked my arm around her thigh and pulled her closer with a grin against her skin. “Good morning to you too, mama.”
Her laugh broke apart into a gasp when I kissed her sex again, letting my tongue peek out, taking my time like I had nowhere else to be. Because I didn’t. Not really. Nothing in my life had ever felt as important as this woman with sleepy eyes and swollen lips from my kisses.
Her fingers slid into my hair, tugging lightly. “You’re smug this morning.”
“Mhm.” I glanced up at her from beneath my eyebrows. “A girl told me she loved me last night.”
“Are you gonna tell me about her?”
She gasped, hips shifting against my mouth as I parted her and sucked on her clit.
A laugh rumbled out of me. “Baby, you know you’re the only one for me.” I leaned forward, licking her, swirling my tongue over and over before adding two fingers inside her.
“Oh my god.” She covered her face with one hand while laughing into the pillow.
Another helpless laugh escaped her before it dissolved into a breathier sound, her fingers curling tighter in my hair. I loved this version of her. Sleepy and soft. Actually, I loved every fucking version of her.
My favorite thing in the world was how quickly Seren unraveled once she stopped trying to hold herself together. The woman spent every second of her life composed for everybody else. Strong for everybody else. But here in bed with me, she let go.
And I loved that more than I knew how to explain.
Her fingers tightened in my hair as her thighs shifted around my shoulders, not pushing me away in the slightest. Encouraging. Needy.
“Jake,” she breathed again.
The sound shot straight through me.
I flattened my hand against her stomach, holding her gently against the sheets while I curled my fingers inside her and watched as her mouth parted every time I swirled against her clit. She was so fucking warm and wet.
“That’s it,” I murmured against her skin. “Lemme take care of you.”
Her eyes squeezed shut as she nodded quickly. I could’ve stayed here forever. Between her thighs in morning sunlight while she came apart for me, piece by piece. Nothing in my entire life had ever felt this good. This intimate.
“Please,” she whimpered, thighs tightening around me harder now. “Please.”
I looked up at her then, completely wrecked by the sight of her flushed cheeks and kiss-bitten lips and the way she was already falling apart beneath me before the day had even really started.
“Tell me what you need, mama.”
“I need to come.” She exhaled. She made a helpless sound when I touched her again, and I kept my eyes on her the entire time she fell apart on my tongue, gripping my fingers like a vise.
When she was catching her breath, I kissed my way up her beautiful body. I wanted nothing more than to sink inside her, but the rustle of Cai’s monitor and his little voice thwarted that plan.
“His timing is impeccable.” She sighed.
She didn’t move yet, my cock leaking between us, and I couldn’t resist putting just the tip inside her. My head dropped toward her shoulder with a rough laugh, every muscle in my body fighting itself. Her heels pressed into me like encouragement and temptation.
“You’re so bad, baby,” I breathed against her neck, kissing the soft skin there before I lost the ability to think straight altogether. I moved carefully, barely giving either of us enough, but it still felt like torture in the best possible way.
Her breath caught harshly beside my ear, fingers sliding into my hair as her body arched toward mine on instinct. The reaction alone nearly finished me.
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered with another rough laugh, forcing myself to still before I completely lost the battle. “You feel way too good for me to be behaving myself right now.”
She made this frustrated sound, somewhere between a whine and a laugh, and the combination of that and the way her walls tightened around me almost snapped the last thread of restraint I had left. So I pulled all the way out of her, not risking the desire to fuck her into the mattress.
“I need you to acknowledge the amount of restraint I’m currently displaying,” I said, sitting back on my heels, cock hard and bobbing between my legs.
She licked her lips once, and it was like a direct hit to my balls. “Me too. This is torture just looking at you.”
Delayed gratification would have to wait.
“Come on, baby, let’s get ready,” I said, leaning forward long enough to steal one more kiss that almost undid all my good intentions. “And later, I’m gonna take my time with you. Fuck you nice and slow.”
Her smile turned dangerous as she slid her feet from the bed to the floor. “Promises, promises.”
I grabbed her around the waist before she could escape, dragging her back against my chest for a second. “Oh, that’s not a promise I’d ever break.”
She grinned over her shoulder, pulling away from me to grab my shirt from the floor and tugging it over her head, all messy hair and pink cheeks and sleepy amusement.
Fuck, I loved her, and as much as I wanted this, we both had full-on days ahead of us.
She was back on training for the morning, and I had a game later today, my first one without Nate.
The realization hit me hard as I sat upright.
I dragged my pants on slowly, staring vaguely at the floor as tried and failed to remember the last time I’d played without him.
“Jake?” Seren broke the trance.
“Yeah?”
“I just asked if you wanted coffee.”
“Oh yeah, that sounds good.” I stretched out my muscles, standing upright. Her eyes roamed over my face, assessing.
“You sure you’re okay?”
“I just thought about the game later,” I said, and her eyes softened.
“About Nate not being there?”
I nodded, and my chest expanded with a sigh. “Gonna be weird, is all.”
“You won’t be without him,” she said, pressing one kiss to my cheek. “And you won’t be without us either.”
It was exactly what I needed to hear to get through the rest of the morning.
***
Coach Knox finished the last of his prep talk near the whiteboard before clapping his hands once. “Right, let’s fucking smash it tonight, boys.”
The room answered automatically with a few cheers and chairs scraping backward, but before anybody could properly move, Connor stood.
“Hold up.”
The room quieted almost immediately.
Connor looked around, hands braced on his hips, jaw tight in a way that told me he’d been thinking about this speech for a while and hated every second of it. Public emotion wasn’t exactly his preferred hobby.
“Our boy Nate should be here tonight.” Connor swallowed roughly before continuing. “But he’s not. So we do what teams do. We carry him with us until he can get back where he belongs.”
A low murmur of agreement rolled through the room.
Connor pointed toward the Knights crest painted across the floor, an addition that Teddy insisted on at the start of the season. “Nate would tear strips off us if we went out there playing scared. He’d call us soft. He’d tell us to get our heads out of our arses and do our fecking jobs.”
The energy shifted instantly.
“You wanna know what we do instead?” Connor’s voice rose now, rougher. “We make sure when Nate’s back on his feet, we win this game and all the others coming our way. At the end of this season, we hand him the trophy he should’ve been there to win himself.”
A roar ripped through the room, the air thickening with something feral and focused.
We stood shoulder to shoulder. “Fucking right.”
“Alright, boys,” Connor said finally. “Let’s do this for him.”
Just before we headed out, I saw Seren had messaged me, and I couldn’t resist checking it.
Seren: Number 15 still has a very devoted crush in the stands, fyi. We love you x
I was gonna fucking win this for my favorite Davis family.