CHAPTER NINE #3
Victory lit the darkness lingering in his gaze as he stared down at me.
“Then I still get one of your firsts, sweetness. I’ll teach you what it’s like to sleep with someone and have a real relationship.
I promise. How to wake up in my arms and be kissed until you're dizzy at daybreak.
Show you that you deserve to be spoiled and worshipped and the center of a man's attention.
" He trailed kisses across my jaw line and along my throat until I arched and moaned. His other hand worked the buttons on the borrowed shirt of his that I wore until the material lay spread open with me bare before him. “Fuck, you’re as beautiful as ever.”
I shook my head, staring up at the ceiling. I tugged my hands free, letting them drift across the swell of my tummy that had never been there before. The scar that ran beneath.
Knox gently pried my arms away. “Don’t hide from me, Flick,” he murmured, licking at my skin. He stopped at my scars, then leaned down and kissed those, too. His knees spread my legs wide even as I let out a soft gasp that might have been a sob, or maybe it was the other way around.
“This was why you didn't graduate college.”
I nodded, unable to talk. My scars told their own story. A story he knew as well as I did.
“Him?” Knox growled when I said nothing. He traced the swell of my belly.
My eyes shuttered. I couldn’t look at him for this part, even though he knew everything as much as I did. But even though he’d been in the hospital during that time, we hadn’t been together.
“Three days. She was…too small. I think that’s why he can’t sleep with me.” The truth I'd never voiced to anyone else, not even Garrett, weighed like a decade of sins in the cavity of my chest.
“Fuck him, wherever his soullessness exists. If it still exists,” Knox muttered into my hair.
“He doesn’t deserve the woman who gave everything for him.
For your girl.” Knox cradled me to him. “You’re fucking beautiful, you know that?
Every scar makes you beautiful.” He paused. “I wish I’d known her.”
I shook my head, my heart beating too fast to draw a beneath. I couldn’t speak. I sure as hell couldn’t move.
Knox slid up my body to claim my mouth again. His kisses were soft this time, healing that final bridge between us. One breath, then the next, whispered between us. The release I'd never been able to give myself previously. I shuddered in his arms, clawing at him, and suddenly I wanted more.
All those nights we could have spent together. The hours sleeping and waking in each other’s arms. Simple things like meals shared—-breakfasts before training, cheering him on at games. Celebrating wins, small and big together. The chance of our own family never realized.
What started as a light kiss burned. Fire lanced across my lips, and he mumbled something I didn’t understand.
Knox’s touch spoke its own language, refusing to take no for an answer.
Not that I gave him one. Whatever he wanted, that's what he got.
It was always that way with him, had always been. But now…I wanted that, too.
He rolled us so I straddled him, but he levered up, lifting me onto his hips, kneeling tall. When he wrapped my legs around his waist, I clung to him, suspended two feet above the mattress.
“I’m gonna make love to you later, sweetness. Right now, you’re mine and I’m gonna fuck you the way I’ve dreamed of having you for the last ten years. Hard and rough so you know whose name is branded on your insides. You understand me?” Knox pulled back, staring hard into my eyes.
“Yes,” I breathed, suddenly wanting what he wanted, what I’d denied us both. “Yes, I want that, too–”
My breath stalled, the scream building in my throat cut off as he notched at my entrance and thrust deep.
Knox let out a satisfied male sound as he drove balls deep inside me, plunging all the way inside. My scream tore from me as a tortured whine that left him laughing darkly. “Fuck me twice over, sweetness. I need to stretch this tight little pussy out, otherwise I’ll break my new favorite toy.”
His dirty words left me hot and gushing. I moaned fresh as he withdrew only to slam back into me on repeat. All I could do was cling to him, my legs knotted around his waist as he railed me into oblivion.
Pleasure flared through every nerve ending.
Even when I'd played on my own, sex had never felt like this before.
Knox pounded into me, reaching places I didn't know I had.
My nails dug into the muscles around his neck, marking him right back.
The orgasm that started low built fast, cresting as his movements became erratic.
I buried my head into his shoulder, screaming his name as he gripped my hips and plunged deep.
My name on his lips was the last thing I registered before we toppled onto the bed together, his thick cock still pulsing deep inside me, searing me with a decade of denial.
Knox levered up, the softest smile on his lips, at complete odds with the filthy scent of sex that permeated every inch of our skin.
“I love you,” he whispered. “I never stopped."
“Me neither," I whispered back, licking at a bead of salty sweat from his shoulder, enjoying his shiver far too much.
Knox growled, gripping my hip as he rolled me beneath him, already moving, thickening inside me again. Every thrust claimed me in a primitive, primal way that suited us to perfection. Who we were then, and who we are now. But his kisses?
Those promised me the sort of future I’d wished for with him back when dreams once meant the nice guy I always crushed on asked me to the school dance.
And I said yes.