Chapter 14
chapter
fourteen
Oliver
My family, being the people they are, made a decision that has given Cora and me time alone. My parents brought Mimz and Pops back to their house for the night. Tonight, we’ll do whatever Cora wants to do, but I know what I want is to lay her out and explore every part of her glorious body.
“How ya doing, Mischief?” I ask.
“I’m good, Cowboy. How are you? I mean, I’ve known about our baby a little longer than you. I don’t even know if you wanted kids.”
“I want you, Cora. I want you and everything that comes with it. Of course, I want our baby.”
“You don’t have to marry me,” she says.
“It’s not about having to. And we don’t have to discuss it until you’re ready. But I meant what I said, I’m all-in.”
“What exactly does that mean? To you?” she asks.
“You and me. This baby. Maybe some more, if we’re blessed with that.
But us. Together as a family.” I glance over at her face as I drive us back to my Mimz and Pops’s house.
“I didn’t want to say this until I could look you in the eyes.
But I love you, Cora. I think I have from the moment I watched you walk into Ace’s. ”
“Oliver—”
“You don’t need to say anything in return. I’m not looking for reciprocation or to pressure you. I want to build a life with you. And building takes time. We can take it one brick at a time, darlin’, and go as slowly as you need to.”
“Okay,” she says.
We don’t speak the rest of the drive to the house. I help her out of the truck, and then we walk inside, our fingers entwined. We’ve barely closed the door behind us, and she’s on me. Pressing my back against the door as she kisses the hell out of me.
Our kiss this time is different than our first three months ago—all urgency and rain and the reckless momentum of two strangers who’d decided to stop being careful.
This is different. This is slow and deliberate, my mouth finding hers in the quiet of the living room.
The only light comes from the lamp Mimz keeps on the side table and the faint glow of the porch light through the front window.
She tastes like the hospital mint she’d unwrapped in the truck on the drive home.
I’m hard. Have been since she’d leaned into me in the hospital parking lot and whispered take me home, Cowboy, in a voice that undid every remaining thread of restraint I had left.
But I don’t rush this. I won’t. Because the last time we did this, we were strangers operating under rules designed to keep things temporary, and nothing about what I want with this woman is temporary.
I deepen the kiss. My hand slides into her hair, and I tilt her head where I want it. My tongue sweeps against hers and things shift. From careful to hungry. From slow to inevitable.
I reach down and lift her under her plump ass and she wraps herself around me.
“Bed?” she murmurs against my mouth.
I don’t even answer, I just walk us in that direction. Opening, then closing her bedroom door with my boot. I sit on the bed, which puts her directly on my lap. Her knees press against my hips and she settles her weight against my erection. The sound I make is not dignified.
The green dress rides up her thighs, and I can feel the heat of her through my jeans and it takes genuine discipline—the kind I usually reserve for fourteen-hour days in August heat—not to open my fly and slide into her here.
“I’ve been hard all night,” I admit. “Since I first saw you in that green dress. I’ve wanted to peel it off your body and see everything I missed that night in my truck.”
Her pale green eyes, close enough now that I can see the darker ring around the iris, stare directly at me. “I’ve never wanted anyone the way I want you. That night at Ace’s—I thought it was just—” I shake my head. “It wasn’t just anything.”
I kiss down her throat to the place where her pulse flutters against her collarbone. “It was everything. You are everything.”
“I want this, Oliver.” She arches into me, her fingers curling into the collar of my shirt. Then she catches herself. Pulls back slightly. “I want you.”
“You sure?” I ask.
She cups my face in both hands. Those short, dark-painted nails against my jaw. “I’m sure. I’ve been sure since you washed your plate that first night and didn’t say a word about it.”
A low rumble growls up my throat. “Take off your clothes,” I tell her as I lift her to stand in front of me.
She holds my gaze and reaches behind her for the zipper of the green dress. It slides down with a sound that rewires something in my brain.
I unbutton my shirt and toss it on the floor, then pull my undershirt over my head. Strip off my boots, my jeans, my boxers, until I’m standing in front of her with nothing to hide behind. I wrap a hand around myself because looking at her is doing things to me that require intervention.
“I want to take my time with you,” I say. “Make love to you.”
The green dress pools at her feet. She’s standing in a dark bra and underwear, and then those are gone too, and she’s naked in the lamplight of the room she’s been sleeping in—the good guest room. The one she deserved.
I look at her. Really look.
The ink I’ve been cataloging since the night we met is laid out in full now. The vine that curves around one breast and under the other. The flowers climbing her right leg from ankle to thigh. There’s a hummingbird on her other thigh.
I walk around her to see the rest. There’s an outline of a curvy woman’s body on her left shoulder. The outline is built of flowers. Just line art, find detail with black ink. It’s beautiful in its simplicity. I trace around the edge of it.
“I got that one a year after I finished radiation. When I was cancer-free, a legal adult. I had spent a lot of time being angry. At myself, at my body, at the world. This was a way for me to love myself, accept my body with all its beautiful imperfections.”
I lean forward and kiss her shoulder, right over the tattoo. “It’s perfect.”
Her body is slightly different than it was three months ago. I only notice because she feels a little different in my hands. Her breasts are fuller. Her hips have a rounder curve. The soft, roundedness of her belly is still there, but low on her pelvis, it’s firmer now.
She swallows. “I know I look different than—”
“You look incredible.” I close the distance between us. Cup both breasts in my hands, weighing them, feeling the new fullness. “These,” I say, running my thumbs across the barbells through her nipples, “have been occupying approximately forty percent of my thoughts since the night I met you.”
She shivers. Arches into my touch. “Only forty?”
“The other sixty is split between your mouth and the sound you make when you’re about to come.”
“Oliver.” Her voice is breathless.
“Yeah?”
“Lie down.”
I don’t have to be told twice.
I move to the center of her bed and stretch out. She stands at the foot of it and looks at me with an expression—heavy-lidded and hungry.
I hold out my hand. “Come here, Mischief.”
She crawls onto the bed. Starts at my feet and works her way up, her hands sliding along my legs, her palms warm and certain. She traces the lines of muscle through my thighs, across my hips, over my stomach. Learning me. Mapping me with her fingers and lips.
When she reaches my cock, she wraps her hand around me and strokes upward.
I hiss through my teeth. “Whatever you want to do, I’m yours.”
Her head dips. Her tongue traces a slow line up my length, and the sound that comes out of me is not something I’m proud of.
“Fuck, Cora.”
Her lips close around me. She takes me as deep as she can, one hand wrapped around the base, the other braced on my thigh. And she is not tentative about it. She is thorough, focused, and devastating.
I grip the sheets. My hips fight to stay still. “I need—” I reach for her. “Come here. I have a better idea.”
She lifts her head. “I wasn’t finished.”
“I know. But turn around. Let me taste your pretty pussy while you choke on my cock.”
Her eyes darken. “Your mouth is filthy, Cowboy.”
“You like my mouth.”
“I do.” She says it simply, without deflection. Then she shifts, reversing herself over me, lowering herself to where I can reach her while she bends back down to me.
I grip her hips. Pull her where I want her. And the first taste of her pulls a groan from somewhere deep in my chest because God—I didn’t get to do this last time. I knew she was hot and slick, but she tastes like she belongs to me.
The way she responds to my tongue is like a live current. The sound she makes—low and broken and vibrating through every point of contact between us.
I work her with my mouth and my fingers, finding the rhythms that make her thighs shake, adjusting when she gasps, pressing harder when she grinds against me.
She’s trying to keep working me at the same time, and the combination—her mouth on me, my mouth on her—is driving me toward an edge I have no intention of going over yet.
Her efforts slow. Stop. She pushes her core against my mouth, chasing her release, and I let her. I want her to take what she needs.
“Oh God. Oh—Cowboy—you’re going to make me—”
I suck her clit into my mouth and curl two fingers inside her, and she shatters.
“Oliver!”
Her thighs clamp around my face, and she rides it out with a sound that I will hear in my sleep for the rest of my natural life.
She shifts off me, boneless and flushed. “I’m not great at doing two things at once, apparently.”
“You were perfect.” I pull her back up to face me. She’s trembling slightly, the aftershocks still moving through her, her chest flushed under all that beautiful ink.
Her eyes drop to where I’m still hard and aching. She traces one fingertip along the length of me, and I hiss.
She bites her lip. “Do you want me to—”
“I want you to ride me.” I sit up. Then stop. “Condoms. Hold on… they’re still in the glove box of my—”
She presses a hand against my chest and pushes me flat. “I’m already pregnant, Oliver.”
I stare at her.
She stares at me.
And then we both start laughing. The real kind—the kind that breaks through everything else, that fills the room and makes the bed shake, that feels like relief and absurdity and the simple, human comedy of two people who got here the long way around.
“Fair point,” I manage.
“And I’m clean. Before you ask.”
“Same.” I settle my hands on her hips. “I’ve never—” I pause. “Without. I’ve never done this without.”
Something shifts in her expression. Softens. “Neither have I.”
She rises up on her knees and positions me. Then she sinks down slowly—so slowly I can feel every inch, every degree of heat, every sweet, delicious detail—until I’m fully seated inside her with nothing between us.
I drop my head back against the pillow and stare at the ceiling.
“Give me a minute,” I say. “Because you feel... “ I don’t have the word. There isn’t one. “Cora.”
“That good or that bad?” she whispers.
“So fucking good. I’m trying really hard not to come right now.”
She’s still for a moment. Both of us are. Just breathing. Just feeling the full, unfiltered reality of each other.
Then she moves.
My hands tighten on her hips, fingers splaying across her skin, tracing the ink on her thigh, the soft curve of her belly. I run my thumb across the place where the skin is a little firm, rounded, and protecting our baby. Something enormous and quiet settles in my chest.
She looks down at my hand on her stomach. Her eyes meet mine.
“You’re beautiful,” I tell her. “Every part of you. The ink. The piercings. Your softness. All of it.”
Her chin wobbles for a fraction of a second before she steadies it. “If you make me cry during sex, I’m filing a formal complaint.”
“Noted.”
She braces her hands on my chest and rides me. Her gaze never leaves mine. I cup her breasts, rolling the barbells between my fingers, and she arches into the touch.
She grabs the headboard behind me and her rhythm shifts—deeper, faster, chasing something, and I feel her start to tighten around me.
There are no more words. Just the sounds of us. Her soft gasps, my rough breathing, the creak of the bed, the impossible intimacy of two people who tried to keep this in a box and failed spectacularly.
Her climax hits, and she comes apart above me with her eyes closed and her mouth open and her whole body shaking. I have never seen anything more beautiful. Not a sunrise over the south pasture, not a clear sky after a storm, nothing.
My own release follows hers, building from the base of my spine and crashing through me with a force that takes my breath and my composure and every last wall I had left. I grip her hips and press deep and say her name again and again. Like a chant. Like a prayer. Like a promise.
“Cora.”
She collapses against my chest. I wrap both arms around her and hold on.
We lie there. Her heart hammering against mine. Her breath warm on my neck. The ceiling fan turning slowly overhead.
I press my lips to her temple. To the place where her hair meets her skin. I breathe her in.
“I love you, Cora. I really, truly do. I wasn’t expecting you. Wasn’t even looking. But there you were. Everything I ever needed, all wrapped up in one gorgeous, spectacular person.”
She presses kisses all over my cheeks, chin, and jaw.
“Oliver?” she murmurs against my throat.
“Yeah?”
“I love you too.” She looks me straight in the eyes. “It’s not too soon. You’re actually pretty damn easy to love. Your whole family is.”
“They’ll get on your nerves at some point,” he says.
That makes her laugh. “I’m glad I walked up to you that night.”
My arms tighten around her. “I’m glad you wore my hat.”
Another laugh. “I looked good in that hat.”
“You looked incredible in that hat.”
Quiet.
Her breathing evens out. Her body goes heavy in my arms, the particular weight of someone falling asleep without meaning to. The weight of someone who is, for the first time in a long time, not bracing for what comes next.
I stare at the ceiling. My hand rests on her back, tracing slow circles between her shoulder blades.
I think about the night at Ace’s. The neon green. The way she’d tilted her chin up and asked me to dance like she’d already decided I was going to say yes.
I think about the truck. The rain. The hat. The rules she’d set—no names, no expectations, no tomorrow—and the way I’d agreed to all of them while knowing, somewhere underneath, that they were already broken.
I think about the sticky notes in purple ink. The pot roast. The slideshow. The photograph of my grandparents in the hospital that she’d placed at the center because she understood, instinctively, what that moment meant.
I think about the ultrasound. The flickering heartbeat. The small miracle that brought us here.
I might not know everything about love. But I’ve grown up in a house full of it. Watching Mimz and Pops, and my parents, compromise and commit again and again. Because love is a choice you make every day.
I press one more kiss to her hair.
“Goodnight, Mischief,” I whisper.