Epilogue #2
She pulled my shirt over my head. I let her.
She ran her hands down my chest and hooked her fingers in the waistband of my jeans and pulled me forward.
I went, because I’d been following this woman since the first morning she’d opened her eyes on a curb across the street and I’d forgotten how to breathe.
I lifted her onto the table. Her legs wrapped around my waist. My mouth found her neck—the spot below her ear, the one that made her arch into me, the one I’d mapped that first night and revisited every night since.
“We’re in the bakery,” I said against her skin.
“It’s my bakery. I can do what I want in it.”
“The front windows?—”
“Curtains are drawn. Door’s locked.” She pulled back and looked at me.
Her eyes were dark and warm and certain—no hesitation, no fear, no exit strategy.
Just Brenna, wanting me, the same way she’d wanted me on this table almost five years ago in a smoke-stained apartment while the world fell apart around us. “Gabriel.”
“Yeah?”
“Stop talking.”
I kissed her harder, tasting coffee and buttercream on her tongue. Brenna’s legs unwrapped just enough for me to unfasten her shorts and drag them down her legs, along with her underwear. They dropped to the floor with a soft thunk.
She leaned back on her elbows, watching me with dark, hungry eyes as I knelt between her spread thighs.
I pressed my mouth to her inner thigh, then higher, breathing in the warm, sweet scent of her.
The first slow lick pulled a quiet gasp from her throat.
I licked her again, deeper this time, then closed my lips around her clit and sucked gently.
“Gabriel…” she whispered, voice strained with the need to stay quiet. Her fingers tangled tight in my hair.
I worked her with my tongue and two fingers, stroking that spot inside her that always made her thighs shake. She was soaked, hot and slick against my mouth, and every tiny, stifled moan she tried to hold back made my cock throb painfully against my zipper.
I devoured her—slow, focused, relentless—until her back arched off the table and her pussy clenched rhythmically around my fingers.
She came with a silent cry, hips jerking against my tongue as she rode it out, one hand pressed over her own mouth—old habit from the early baby days, even now that the monitor was a one-way speaker.
I rose, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, and took her in—flushed skin, legs still spread, her pussy glistening in the morning light. Beautiful.
Brenna sat up, reaching for me.
“Shirt off,” I said.
I pulled her T-shirt over her head. She pulled the bralette off after it, and her breasts spilled free—full, perky, nipples tight. I groaned at the sight and palmed them both, thumbs brushing over the sensitive peaks as I shoved my jeans and underwear down just far enough to free my aching cock.
I gripped her hips and pulled her right to the edge of the table. “Look at these tits,” I murmured, voice low and rough. “So fucking pretty and perky, bouncing for me while I fuck you.”
Her legs locked around my waist. She wrapped her hand around my cock, stroking me once, twice, guiding me to her entrance. “Then fuck your wife, Gabriel. I want to feel every inch of you.”
I pushed in deep in one smooth thrust. The tight, wet heat of her pussy enveloped me completely—velvety, scorching, still fluttering from her orgasm. I groaned low in my chest at how perfect she felt around me, like she was made for me.
“God, baby…you feel so fucking good,” I rasped, starting to move in deep, steady strokes. Her breasts bounced with every thrust, the sight so erotic I couldn’t tear my eyes away.
Brenna smirked, confidence shining in her eyes—the bold, married version of her who now gave as good as she got. “Harder,” she whispered, nails digging into my shoulders. “I love the way you fill me up. This pussy is yours—now fuck it like you mean it.”
I drove into her deeper, grinding against her clit with every thrust. “That’s my dirty girl. You love getting fucked on this table, don’t you? Pussy dripping all over my cock while your cinnamon rolls wait in the oven.”
“Yes,” she breathed, meeting my thrusts. “I love it. Love feeling my husband come inside me and knowing I’ll be wet with you all morning.”
The words snapped my control. I fucked her harder, one hand on her breast, the other gripping her ass as I drove deep. The wet sound of our bodies meeting filled the warm kitchen, mixing with our ragged, hushed breathing.
Brenna came again with a shuddering gasp, biting her lip hard to stay quiet as her walls pulsed tight around me. The sensation dragged me over right after her. I buried myself to the hilt and came hard, groaning low as I spilled deep inside her, pulse after pulse, filling her completely.
We stayed locked together, breathing each other in while the aftershocks faded. The kitchen was quiet except for the soft sound of us catching our breath and the distant ticking of the oven timer she’d set for a batch of something I’d already forgotten the name of.
“We christened this table almost five years ago,” she said without opening her eyes.
“I remember.”
“It’s held up well.”
“I reinforced the legs.”
Her eyes opened. She turned her head to look at me. “When?”
“During the rebuild. Same time I reinforced the counter.”
“You reinforced my table because you planned to have sex on it again.”
“I reinforced your table because it wobbled.”
“It didn’t wobble.”
“It wobbled.”
She laughed—that surprised laugh that I’d heard for the first time at a diner breakfast and had spent years trying to earn again and again. She squeezed my hand and closed her eyes and lay there, content and unhurried, like a woman who had nowhere else to be and no plans to leave.
The oven timer went off. Brenna didn’t move.
“Your batch,” I said.
“It can wait.”
“You said you had a consult at ten.”
“I have a consult at ten,” she confirmed. “And an order to finish. And a baby who’s going to wake up hungry in about twenty minutes. And a husband who just made love to me on a kitchen table at seven in the morning, and I’d like one more minute of this before the day starts.”
I brought her hand to my mouth and kissed her knuckles. The same knuckles I’d kissed in the truck on Main Street the evening she’d let me in. She’d been crying then. She wasn’t crying now.
“One more minute,” I said.
We lay there, fingers laced, the kitchen warm around us, the smell of cinnamon rolls and coffee and the faint ghost of woodsmoke that never quite left these walls—the memory of a fire that had taken everything and given everything back.
The monitor crackled on the counter. Eliana’s voice through the speaker, sleepy and indignant.
“Mama.”
Brenna opened her eyes and smiled. “That’s my cue.”
She sat up, found her clothes, pulled my shirt back over her head because it was closer than hers.
I watched her move through the kitchen—quick, efficient, already shifting into the version of herself that ran this place—and I felt the same thing I’d felt on a curb at dawn five years ago, looking at a woman with soot on her face and fire in her chest and no idea how completely she was about to burn through every wall I’d ever built.
Scorched. That was the word. She’d scorched me—not the fire, not the smoke, not the years of walking into burning buildings. Brenna. From the second she’d opened her eyes and looked at me like I was the first solid thing she’d seen in hours, I’d been hers.
She paused at the bottom of the stairs and looked back at me. “You coming?”
I pulled on my jeans and followed my wife upstairs to our daughter, and the morning went on, and the bakery opened, and the bread came out of the oven, and the town woke up, and I was exactly where I’d always been meant to be.
Right where she left me. Every time.