Chapter Eight
B oone couldn’t really believe this was happening.
But he knew that he wasn’t asleep.
That this wasn’t a variation on the same dream he’d had a million times before.
He was wide awake. He’d heard her pull up and he’d steeled himself, but then she’d come in hot, clearly agitated, and he’d wondered what it would take to soothe her.
Sometimes it was a hug.
Sometimes she just liked to sit on his couch and breathe him in a little, though he knew better than to describe it that way to her.
She would deny it.
And as sharp-edged as the last few days had been, Boone knew himself well enough to know that he wouldn’t deny her.
He never denied her anything and he doubted that was going fro change.
But then it all… escalated.
And now the love of his life had her tongue in his mouth and he thought that his head was about to explode.
Was pretty shocked it hadn’t already, if he was honest with himself.
It took every bit of restraint he’d ever even dreamed of having in all his life to slow himself down.
To move carefully as he slid his own hand up to finally, after all these years, sink his fingers into all of that glossy brown hair.
He didn’t make a fist no matter how much he wanted to, though he did hold her fast.
He let her play with him.
He let her taste him the way she wanted, to approach and retreat.
When he couldn’t take it any longer—when he could feel that restraint about to slip—he took control instead.
Boone pressed her back against the door and he ate her alive.
He kissed her deep. He taught her hard and then he taught her gentle, if dirty.
He kissed her again and again and again.
Boone kissed her with all of the carnal thoughts that he’d ever had about her in his head.
He kissed that teenage version of her that had about knocked him over the moment he’d seen her in his first homeroom.
He kissed the version of her who had gone off to college—so smart, so bright, so impossibly fascinating that he’d been sure she was never coming back.
He kissed the version of her he’d seen on her wedding day, not nearly as excited as he would have thought the bride should be—though it was true he’d taken some small measure of pleasure in that.
It was also true he’d tried his best to hide it.
She had been dressed in a white dress that she looked uncomfortable, though he’d told himself he just wanted to believe that because she’d been walking down the aisle to a man who wasn’t him.
He kissed her a little harder, a little deeper, then.
Because that still stung.
He kissed her with all of the unrequited love he’d been carrying around with him and this maddening need for her—for only and ever her—that had been a part of him forever.
And Boone had wanted her for so long, in so many different ways, that the fact that he was kissing her like this at all made it easy to slow down.
To be something like content with this, because it was more than he’d imagined would happen tonight.
Or ever.
He’d never thought they’d ever kiss like this , having pull away to gasp for breath because neither one of them wanted to stop.
Kissing messy and wild and making noises against each other’s mouths, gripping each other hard, and then going back for more.
It could have been lifetimes later when he finally moved, picking her up and carrying her over to the couch.
Once he was there he sat down and pulled her on his lap, then set about kissing her some more.
She was the one who pulled away after another long while and Boone took an extreme, almost violent kind of satisfaction in how wrecked she looked.
Sierra’s mouth, swollen from his.
Her lips glossy, her eyes wide.
He’d definitely had this dream a thousand or five times.
“Are you…?” Her voice sounded raw and breathy.
“Am I not doing this right?”
He laughed, and took the opportunity to trace his fingers all over that perfect face of hers that was stamped on the inside of his heart.
But he’d never gotten to touch her like this before.
Her dark, curved brows.
That place at the corner of each eye where he could see how much she laughed.
Her outrageously soft lips.
Even her cute little elf ears.
Even her cheekbones drove him crazy.
“How could you do this wrong?” he asked her when she frowned at him.
“I’ve been dreaming about kissing you forever. Even if you bit my tongue off, I’d still like it.”
“But it’s been going on too long,” she said, with a certain quiet seriousness that landed in him, hard.
“I know that’s really difficult for men.”
Boone decided that there was no need any longer to school his expressions when she said things like that.
Things that indicated the truth about the life she’d been living all this time.
Things that told him far too much about the loser she’d been married to.
“I think you mean that boys have trouble with that,” he told her, and he held that green gaze of hers while he said it.
When her eyes widened slightly, he continued.
“I’m a grown man, Sierra. I’m in control of my body. Always.”
He could see her thinking that through.
Putting the pieces together.
Good , he thought. That could only move things in the right direction.
Because he still couldn’t believe that this was finally happening.
That she was here, on his lap, and not calling him her angel.
Not scared off that he’d dared show her that he wasn’t the celibate monk he was all too aware he actually thought he was.
“Do you not want to have sex with me?” she asked, baldly.
Boone groaned at that.
He could have told her the answer to that, but instead he lifted her up and shifted her so she was sitting on top of him, straddling him.
That put her head just a little bit higher than his, so he reached up slightly to hold her face between his hands again.
Then shifted so she could feel how hard he was.
“Oh,” she said, her face going red and hot.
“Baby,” he said, his voice low and intent, “I want everything with you. Things that haven’t been invented yet, I want. Everything that two people can do to each other, I want. I want you here in any way you want to be here. I’ve always wanted you. No part of me isn’t excited by you, wild for you, and as madly in love with you as I always have been. Nothing’s ever going to change that. You have nothing to worry about. Ever.”
“Oh,” she said again.
He felt her relax as he held her, but in such a way that he wasn’t sure that she knew she was doing it.
Like she still didn’t fully understand how much she trusted him—but that was okay.
This was newer for her than it was for him.
“I guess I thought that the whole point was to hurry up with this part to get to the other part.”
“I don’t like to hurry,” Boone told her.
“You know this about me already.”
“But—”
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” he told her, taking control again.
“This is a big night. No need to put too much weight on it. Why don’t we just hang out, I’ll make you come a few times, and we’ll see where we are.”
She went stiff at that, and looked serious again.
“You should know up front that I don’t do that,” she told him, very matter-of-factly.
He grinned. “You don’t hang out?”
“Not that.” And he watched, fascinated, as Sierra blushed the brightest shade of red he’d ever seen on her.
“The other. I… Well, I just don’t. Ever.”
So many things ran through his mind then that he was slightly concerned that he might actually explode.
And not in the fun way.
Part of him wanted to leave immediately, so he could drive down the hill and finally punch Matty in the face a few dozen times for being even more useless than Boone had imagined he was.
Yet still another part of him felt a little vindicated to discover that good old Matty was exactly as much of a selfish asshole as he appeared to be.
Not the biggest surprise in the world.
But he couldn’t get too excited about it.
Because at the end of the day, there was Sierra—whose entire perfect body was sleek and hot and humming simply because he’d kissed her—telling him that she couldn’t reach a climax.
Not that she hadn’t .
That she couldn’t .
“If that’s a requirement,” she said when he didn’t say anything, and she sounded a little less matter-of-fact, “then you need to know that you’re going to be disappointed.”
“First of all, nothing about you could ever disappoint me,” Boone told her, even more matter-of-factly than anything she’d said to him.
“Second of all, why don’t you let me worry about that? That’s my job. Your job is to hang out. That’s it.”
“I don’t really mind,” she told him brightly, making it better.
Tying it in a bow. If he hadn’t actually been holding this dream of his in his arms right now, he would absolutely have gone hunting for shitty ex-husbands down in Marietta.
“I like being this close to you. That’s what really matters.”
“What I’m really going to like,” Boone told her, intently, cutting her off before she could finish yet another sentence that was going to drive him up the wall with the injustice of it all, “is when you scream my name until you go hoarse.”
“…when I what?”
She looked dazed, but he could feel the way her whole body heated up with that, and he smiled.
“You’ll see,” he promised.
And then he showed her.
Boone shifted her so she was pressed up hard against the hardest part of him, then watched her as she got hot and started moving, rocking herself against him as if she couldn’t help herself.
And when she did, he could see her nipples begin to poke against her shirt.
He slid one hand to the small of her back to encourage her to keep moving, to keep rocking herself against him.
With the other, he guided her closer to him, so he could get his mouth on her while she did it.
He found those nipples through her shirt and her bra, and he sucked on them.
He used teeth a little.
He got his hand on one and his mouth on the other, until she started making little catchy noises in the back of her throat.
She sounded guttural and greedy and astonished—the best sound he’d ever heard—s so Boone kept going.
On and on until she was arching her back and making noises he’d only daydreamed about hearing from her.
She got closer and closer, until suddenly, she stopped.
Her head shot up. She found his gaze and she was trembling all around him, her eyes wide.
“I feel…” She shook her head.
“It’s almost like—”
“I know what it is,” he told her.
Boone kissed her on her forehead, each cheekbone, her lips.
“I got you, Sierra.”
And she trusted him.
He could see how she trusted him.
Those wide, haunted eyes met his, and changed.
They got greener as he felt her relax against him.
And then, still holding his gaze, she began to move again.
This time, he built the fire up quicker, hotter.
He put his mouth to the crook of her neck and got his hands on her hips, so he could move her against him a little bit harder.
A little bit faster.
So he could make sure to find that perfect friction, and let her ride it out.
He finally felt her stiffen.
She was suddenly strong tight like a bow, with all that electricity vibrating through her.
Her head fell back. Her hands fell to the side in fists.
Her mouth was open and she was making the wildest little noises.
Boone had never seen anything so beautiful in his life.
And he kept rocking her against him, until she broke.
She didn’t just break, she shattered.
She shook, on and on, then she collapsed against him, and cried.
That didn’t scare him any.
He held her. He cradled her against him and kissed her on her temple, and he didn’t ask her what was wrong.
If he had to guess, nothing was.
He was pretty sure she just released…
a whole lifetime.
He thought about picking her up and carrying her into his bedroom, but he thought that might be a little much.
Tonight, anyway.
The last thing he wanted to do was spook her.
Or make her think she had some duty to perform for him.
Boone decided there and then, with Sierra curled up in his arms and his fingers stroking through her hair, that this was not the time to think about Matty any more.
She cried for a long time.
When she started to settle, he shifted her off his lap.
He went down the hall to the bathroom and ran some water over a washcloth, nice and cool.
Then he wrung it out and brought it to her, and when she stared at it as if she didn’t understand its purpose, he laid it over her eyes himself.
He watched the long, shuddering breath she took.
“I can’t imagine what you think of me,” she said.
It actually took Boone a minute there to realize she wasn’t joking.
“Why would you think that anything that happened tonight would make me think badly of you?” he asked, and he was still trying to adjust to the new reality of this.
They’d sat on this couch together a thousand times.
But tonight, she was pressed up against him, leaning into him, and everything was different.
Hell, he’d just watched her come apart in his arms. “I keep telling you. There’s not anything you can do that could change the way I feel about you, Sierra. Believe me.”
She lifted the washcloth after a while and wiped her face with it, then leaned forward to put it on the coffee table.
Boone braced himself for her to bolt.
But instead, Sierra settled back into the couch.
She turned to face him even more, gathering her legs beneath her the way she often did.
Though this time, he did something he’d always wanted to do, reaching over and pulling her legs over his lap.
And he enjoyed it when he heard the way her breath feathered out.
“I guess we have a lot of things to talk about,” she said, her eyes wide as she studied…
the corner of his shoulder.
Like she was afraid to look at him.
“But the only thing I can really think about is that I’m pretty sure this is how people ruin friendships.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen here,” Boone said, easily.
Almost lazily.
“Why not? I think there’s a reason that best friends are afraid of becoming something more. It’s usually because when they try, it ends badly.”
“Funnily enough,” Boone told her, “I’ve thought a lot about that. I think it comes down to fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of change. Fear that altering the relationship will ruin it. But I think that if our relationship is that fragile, then it wasn’t much to begin with.”
Sierra reached over, a sort of wondering expression on her face, then traced her fingers over his jaw, her fingers finding his mouth.
Then she shook her head.
“Not everybody in the world is as sure as you are. Nor do we all have the power to bend reality to our will. I think only you do.”
Boone captured her hand with his, then pulled her fully onto his lap again.
“Clearly not. Or the past sixteen years would have looked a little different.”
She was closer to him now, her face level with his.
“It’s like I never saw you until tonight,” she whispered.
“How is that possible? How could I be so blind?”
He smiled.
“Because you wanted to be. It was safer that way.”
Sierra didn’t like that.
He could see it on her face, but she swallowed it down.
“I thought everyone was ridiculous and, honestly, insulting,” she told him.
“Always asking when we were getting together. I thought they were just limited people who couldn’t understand that it was completely possible to be friends like we were without the faintest shred of romantic feelings. Was I lying to myself the whole time?”
Boone didn’t want to answer that.
Not tonight.
So he kissed her instead and she melted against him, and soon enough they were sliding down to lie horizontally on the couch.
She wrapped herself around him, then groaned when she felt him hard and ready between her legs.
“We can—” she began.
“Absolutely not.” Boone looked down at her, trying his best to seem reproving.
“We have some ground to cover first.” When she looked like she might argue, he grinned.
“For one thing, I need to taste you properly.”
“I think you have.”
Boone laughed.
“I most definitely have not.”
Then he shifted, moving down the length of her body and then reaching up to shift her around so she was slumped down in the seat while he knelt before her on the floor.
He held her gaze as he went to unsnap her jeans, then smooth them down her hips.
Her breath hitched, her eyes glassy and wide, but when he began to gently tug the denim off her body, she lifted her hips to help him.
When he slid closer to her, moving her legs so he could drape them over his shoulders, he watched in fascination as she turned that bright red shade again.
“You doing okay?” he asked, hearing that undercurrent of laughter in his own voice.
She was breathing hard.
Fast. She stuck her hands over her face and shook her head.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” she said.
“You’re Boone . And I don’t think I like this.”
“Which part?” Given that he could see the arousal all over her body, he wasn’t particularly concerned that she meant all of this.
Still. He waited.
“I just… I’ve never… I just always thought it seemed so… unsanitary —”
And he really did laugh that.
“Sex isn’t supposed to be sanitary , Sierra. It’s not surgery. It’s supposed to be hot. Messy. Wild.” He studied her.
“Let me guess. This is the first time someone’s put his head between your legs with the express purpose of licking you until you come all over his face.”
“Oh my God,” she whispered.
“Yes or no, baby?” he prompted her.
Though he already knew the answer.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“That has simply never occurred.”
“Then all I need from you is to tell me what it doesn’t feel good, okay?” He pressed a kiss to her inner thigh and bit back a smile as goosebumps shivered all over her thigh, telling him all kinds of things he doubted she could.
“Okay…”
But she said it as if she was doing him a great favor.
And really, she was, so he was happy to accept.
It was possibly the greatest favor of his life, he thought a moment later as he settled in, slid his hands under her body to finally grip that fine butt of hers— finally —and then, without even removing the lacy panties she wore, took her in his mouth.
And then everything went wild.
She bucked against him.
She cried out his name.
He used suction and heat, and soon enough she was sobbing, writhing against him until she fell apart.
While she was handling that, he snuck those panties off of her, got her back into position, and licked his way into the softest part of her at last.
This time, he made it last even longer before he let her break.
The moment she did, he built her back up again—and higher this time.
He experimented with her to see what she’d like.
He made her jolt against him.
He made her reach down and sink her fists in his hair.
He made her moan and sob and best of all, come for him.
Yet again.
And again.
Only when she went completely limp against him did he let up.
She was like a ragdoll sprawled out on his couch, her eyes closed, her skin flushed, and her chest moving with the effort of her breathing.
And she was so beautiful that he was surprised it didn’t kill him.
He slid her panties back into place.
He found the blanket that she always used when she came here and tucked it all around her, then stretched out on the couch himself so he could hold her close.
And then had yet another exquisite pleasure in a night full of them, as Sierra finally fell asleep in his arms.
Boone stayed awake a lot longer, taking it all in, like he was afraid it couldn’t last. That like any other dream he’d had—and he’d had so many—it would disappear overnight and float away into the daylight.
So he kept a vigil through the night, just in case.