Chapter 7
SEVEN
Dakota
If the sudden shift in my behavior surprised Roe, he didn’t let it show. He kissed me back without hesitation, turning the temperature to high the instant his tongue swept inside my mouth.
Lack of passion had never been an issue between Roe and me, and apparently sixteen years apart—and a ton of hatred and animosity, at least on my part—hadn’t changed that one damn bit.
There had always been a hunger between us that we could never seem to satisfy, but it was nothing compared to what I felt in that moment.
We weren’t just kissing. We were battling.
My lips felt swollen and bruised in a matter of seconds.
Not that I minded. I barely registered the pain before it morphed into something so delicious it made tingles burst to life between my thighs.
It felt too good to stop. The heat building in my core had nothing to do with the anger that had been coursing through me only seconds ago.
The tiny voice in the back of my head telling me this was an epically stupid idea could hardly be heard over the whomping beat of my heart in my ears.
Not that I would have bothered to listen.
Tension coiled deep in my belly, creating a sensation I hadn’t felt in .
. . God, I couldn’t remember how long. There had been times—several of them—when I thought maybe my sex drive was dead and gone, never to return.
I hadn’t expected a single kiss to prove me wrong, and I would have been lying if I said I wasn’t relieved to have it back.
Even if it only went to prove that Monroe Clifton was the only man capable of shocking it back to life.
I’d had a short—embarrassingly short—string of boyfriends over the past sixteen years.
I struggled to trust in general, but my trust of men was basically in the dirt.
And out of those guys I’d dated, the ones I’d felt comfortable enough to sleep with were even fewer, and sure as hell hadn’t been anything to write home about.
I’d let my abysmal love life cloud my judgement when it came to Adam.
One of the many poor decisions I’d made in my lifetime, but it was near the top of that list. I’d convinced myself that, just because he’d been able to give me an orgasm—even one that was only meh—he was the solution to my problem.
That being the fact I hadn’t orgasmed with another man since Roe.
I could get off by myself, sure, but there was a hollowness to those.
Something lacking that you could only get with another person.
I’d blamed my poor decision-making on a climax deficiency then, just as I would do later when I looked back on this moment with clarity.
It might have been momentary insanity driving me, but more likely it was the knowledge that the last set of hands I’d had on my body were Adam’s, and he hadn’t been using them to give pleasure.
As Roe and I clawed and pulled at each other desperately, I tried to think back on the last time I’d been touched with anything besides cruelty, and for the life of me, I couldn’t remember.
I swallowed down the knot that had suddenly formed in my throat with that knowledge and pressed deeper into Roe, using him to drive away all the ugly memories and drown out that voice of reason in my head currently screaming what a bad idea this was.
That bitch could kick rocks. I was taking something for myself. For once.
It was only fair.
This was the most alive I’d felt in too long. With each passing year, I became more numb than the one before. Like I was fading away. But then . . . right now, I felt like the world was in technicolor.
I was sure using Roe for sex made me an asshole, but I couldn’t find it in me to care. I wanted one night, a few fleeting hours, to forget the dumpster fire that was my life. And, damn it, I was going to take that.
With one of Roe’s hands kneading the cheek of my ass as the other tangled in my hair, using its grip to force my head back so he could take the kiss even deeper, nothing else existed for me.
Thoughts of Adam couldn’t penetrate the cloud of lust thickening the air around us and driving up the temperature in the room.
I yanked desperately at his shirt, trying to get beneath to all that warm skin. Just like he had back when we were together, he read me so perfectly and knew what I wanted—even before I did at times. His arm reached behind his head and he yanked the soft cotton tee over his head and tossed it away.
That was when I realized I’d made a huge mistake.
My name still sat, in beautifully stylized letters, across his chest. Directly over his heart.
He’d gotten it not long after we started dating.
I remember telling him he was crazy for doing that.
For marking himself with my name in such a distinctive area.
We were still new and there was no guarantee we would last, I told him.
He’d simply laughed that off and told me he was sure enough for the both of us. That I was his just as much as he was mine, and that his feelings for me were never going away. Seeing it there, a wave of emotion I certainly didn’t want to feel washed over me.
I clamped my bottom lip between my teeth and bit down with all I had to battle against the burn happening behind my eyes. I refused to cry. Especially in front of him.
“Dakota?” Roe’s low, gentle voice pulled me out of my head and back into reality.
I fought against the tears trying to push through and ramped up the pressure on my lip.
I blinked up at him, the concern swimming in those dark blue depths sending a bolt of agony through my chest. I slammed my eyes closed, unable to look at him for another second.
“Where’d you go, baby? I had you a second ago, then I lost you.” His thumb stroked across my jawline, the touch so feather-soft and affectionate I struggled to breathe. “Where are you, Honeybee? Come back to me.”
Those whispered words pushed me over the edge.
Releasing my lip, I threw myself at him again.
Pushing all the emotions as far back in my brain as I possibly could, I focused only on the way my body was reacting.
“I’m right here,” I breathed out against his lips, even though I knew that wasn’t how he meant it.
But if I told him the truth, if I told him he didn’t have me in the way he really meant, that he never would ever again, he’d put a stop to this.
I knew him well enough to know that as fact, and I couldn’t let him stop, not when I felt alive for the first time in years. “Fuck me, Roe.”
It wasn’t a request. It was a demand. One I only felt safe making because it was him.
My heart might not be safe with him, but I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that my body was.
My heart would forever stay locked away behind the impenetrable wall of steel and razor wire I’d built around it.
But he was welcome to my body. At least this one time.
Everything that came after was a blur. Clothes disappeared in a matter of seconds, and before I knew it, I was flying through the air before landing in the middle of the inn’s cozy bed.
Roe didn’t hesitate to slide over me, pressing me deeper into the mattress with his weight as he dragged his tongue up my sternum and eventually fused his mouth with mine.
Pressure built deep in my core as I writhed beneath him. Roe’s chest had been smooth the last time I saw it, but at some point in the past sixteen years he’d developed the right amount of chest hair to scrape across my sensitive nipples as they hardened into tight peaks.
“God, you’re still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” Roe breathed into my ear before tugging the lobe between his teeth and giving it a gentle nip.
My body stiffened involuntarily at his honeyed words I didn’t want to hear.
I wanted his cock, sure. His body. But I didn’t want sweetness.
It pulled me back into my head, back to the past, when all I wanted was to forget it all for a while.
I wanted rough and dirty. So hard I couldn’t possibly think about anything else other than the pleasure he was wrenching from me.
Wriggling out from beneath him, I managed to turn him onto his back and I kissed my way down his thickly-muscled body.
I kept my eyes screwed closed so I didn’t have to see the tattoo of my name or the tattoo I knew from memory he’d inked into his ribs.
The same tattoo I’d once had. I tried desperately not to think about those three short sentences that had once meant everything to me.
Six words that had once been a balm to my soul, so important we’d both chosen to etch them into our skin permanently.
It’s you.
It’s me.
It’s us.
We used to chant those words to each other so often they felt as natural as breathing. I could still recall the conversation that started it all with perfect clarity.
“I love you,” I whispered to him through the darkness of the room, snuggling deeper into his chest as he held my naked body tightly against his.
We’d just made love for the first time. I’d given him my virginity, knowing he was the only man I’d ever want to have it, and the words just poured out without thought.
My body stiffened at his silence, panic clenching like a tight fist inside my chest. I was about to take the words back when Roe finally spoke.
“Love doesn’t feel like a strong enough word for how I feel about you.”
I hadn’t thought it was possible to love him more than I already did, but in that moment, I felt myself fall even deeper. “Then what word does?”
His chest rose and fell on a deep breath as he thought that over. “I don’t know. A single word doesn’t seem like enough. I feel like you’re a part of me now. And I’m a part of you.”
That’s when it came to me.
“It’s you. It’s me. It’s us.”
He shifted then, rolling quickly and taking me to my back so those deep blue eyes could stare down into my soul. “That’s it, Honeybee. That’s exactly it.”
From that moment on, whenever we felt that heaviness that was even more intense than love, that was what we would say to each other.
It’s you.
It’s me
It’s us.
I shoved that memory into the box in the very back of my mind and shut off my brain from everything but what was happening in that moment.
As soon as I got to his cock, I fisted it at the base and swallowed it down as deep as I could go, ripping a string of curses from deep within Roe’s chest.
If my mouth hadn’t been so full, I would have smiled in victory. Monroe Clifton would never have that part of me. But this? Well, this I could handle just fine.