Chapter Twenty-five #2
“Come here,” he demanded as he stood and pulled her to him, kissing her, his hands trailing down her body, hungry to feel her against him.
She was perfect in his hands, soft and curvy.
What they were doing felt too damned good after the long day, and he lost himself exploring her body, kissing her shoulder, her neck, back up to her lips, the tension he’d built slowly easing, giving him more time to just enjoy her without having to hold back his own orgasm.
Her hand hit his cattle prod bruise as she did the same, and he flinched, pulling him from the moment. That hurt. He was lucky it hadn’t hit his kidneys.
“Oh! Sorry!” she exclaimed and removed her hand. “That still hurts?”
He didn’t want this moment to be over, but nodded, and she made a comforting sound.
“It’s okay. Just sore. I’ll survive,” he murmured as he pushed her hair over her other shoulder and kissed her neck again.
“I’ll kiss it better later,” she said.
“I want to fuck you right here on this couch, that will make it better,” he rasped. Her hands currently roaming over his ass was quickly bringing him back to the brink again.
She pushed him and he backed up, pretending to fall as he sat, his legs splayed. She followed, climbing back on top of him, her hand flying down between them. She curled her hand around his cock again, closing her fingers and sliding up and down.
“Let’s not waste time, then,” she murmured.
“Condom,” he rasped. She reached over him to the side of the couch with her other hand, a flash of foil and a naughty look.
“Prepared, were we?” he said, and she hmmed back at him as she opened the packet with her teeth.
He hissed as she touched the cold rubber to the tip, sliding the condom down, reveling in the constriction of it squeezing his dick, twitching as it made him so hard it was almost painful.
She shifted, and as he opened his eyes, she was watching him with a mixture of arousal and curiosity as she lifted over top of him and slid him in all the way, all at once.
“This is what I wanted,” she growled, her whiskey-fire voice wavering.
He held her eyes as she began to move, the flush on her cheeks now all the way down her neck, onto her chest. He put his hands back on her breasts, the feel of her tight around him, pulsing and hot.
He held back from grabbing hold of her and taking over, because he was enjoying her like this, on top of him, taking charge, needy in the moment.
“Don’t stop. I want you to come,” he murmured, encouraging her. She bit her lip, and closed her eyes, moving faster.
“You feel so fucking good inside me,” she gasped, her head tilted up, her hair dangling behind her. Her eyes fluttered closed as her mouth opened. He ran a hand over her neck, grasping it gently to feel the cords straining, swallowing against his palm.
“Look at me,” he ordered, and her eyes flew open. He didn’t want her to look away. It was intense, it was erotic, and he wanted to watch her shatter.
She was close, and he moved with her, opening her hips, sinking her farther onto him as they met thrust for thrust, his hand still on her neck.
He circled her waist with his other arm, pulling her flush against him.
He wanted her entire body on him when she came, and he couldn’t help but let out a moan as she gripped his hair in her fingers, a small shiver erupting from her core that vibrated between them.
“Jake,” she gasped and let out that wild, animal cry that drove him nuts, as her entire body shook, thrusting hard, her knees dipping into the couch with her effort. Her wide eyes were locked to his, and he knew he was going to leap over the edge with her, he couldn’t hold it back if he tried.
“Fucking let go,” he gasped as he lifted his hips one more time, emptying himself as he held her close. Her body shook as her orgasm ebbed and all the knots in his muscles melted to nothing as he, too, slid down the other side of his own.
She hadn’t looked away and neither had he, and he steeled himself not to.
He wanted to understand her, wanted to break down her barriers, wanted to prolong the connection with her, her pulse, her scent, her heat.
His heartbeat thudded against his chest as they stayed locked into one another.
She was out of breath, her chest rising and falling, and emotions swirled in her eyes before she finally, carefully, hid them.
He could lose himself to her so easily, especially after the intensity of what they had just shared. His hand came up and smoothed her hair back behind a pink-tipped ear, wanting to memorize this moment before it was gone.
“You are so beautiful when you come,” he murmured, and with that, she closed her eyes and leaned forward, tucking her head. He circled his arms around her, kissing her shoulder as her arms went around him.
“You say the sweetest things,” she muffled into his neck. “But I’m cold now. Bed.”
They separated, and he lifted her up before she could walk away, carrying her down the hall to her bedroom, sliding her onto the bed and chucking the used condom at the wastebasket before climbing in beside her.
He didn’t want to go yet, even though the exhaustion in his bones was almost rendering him useless.
It had been a long, wild, impossible day. But being here, with her, was making it all seem like a dream. He pulled the covers up as she let out a sigh and stretched, fitting herself in beside him.
“Was that good?” he asked quietly, and she nodded into his chest, an almost catlike purr rumbling out of her.
“Totally a great way to end today,” she replied. “Makes up for all the chaos.”
“Today was nuts,” he supplied. She tensed briefly, then relaxed again, running her hand up his chest, stopping over his heart.
“I was scared. I never—” she blurted, and he shifted so he could look at her.
He saw it again, the emotion she battled with, the vulnerability she was trying to hide.
He didn’t want to rock the boat, so he pulled her back down to lie against him, sliding down onto the pillow beside her.
They had opened up to one another tonight, comfortable with each other’s bodies.
Maybe now she’d open up to him this way too.
“It’s okay to be scared. I was terrified.
I’ve faced muggers and drunk assholes in bars that were less dangerous than what I waded into today,” he offered, looking up at the ceiling.
It was true. He’d been held at gunpoint, knifepoint, all kinds of shit.
But it had been a different kind of feeling when he’d launched himself off his horse today toward the men who were stealing the West Line cattle.
His family’s cattle.
“I wondered—how in hell did you learn to punch like that?” she asked. “It was wild to watch. You dropped that first guy like he was a bag of feathers.”
“I started boxing about ten years ago, maybe more, I can’t remember when exactly,” he replied. “I needed an outlet when shit got real.”
“What does that even mean?” she asked, her body shaking with a suppressed giggle. “How does ‘shit’ get real in New York City?”
He caught that she would find it funny, taking the saying literally, and he smiled, enjoying the moment.
“We lived in some crappy places when I was younger, which meant I had to learn to throw a punch to stay on the good side of people. I didn’t do that very well. Got my ass handed to me a lot.”
“Oof. But you were likely a big kid. Tanner was. I imagine when you got bigger it stopped?”
“You’d think. But I was a scrawny kid with a short fuse, and I had a huge target on my back until I was a bit older.
There were good people in all the places we lived, New York has some great communities, but some of them could be pretty rough,” he said, wishing he could soften the image of the city.
Truthfully, it had been rough. He had a brief thought as he lay there, that he would love to take her to New York and show her everything he loved about it, show her who he was away from here.
Which would send her screaming in the other direction. She’d been so tense in Calgary; he’d seen the distaste for the busy traffic and people everywhere.
He missed New York and his friends for a brief moment but let it go. He could wallow later.
“So boxing kept you safe,” she said, her thumb moving over his skin. She was making it easy to talk about his past tonight, and he let out a big breath, trying to shake off the twist in his chest that remembering his childhood raised.
“I started when I was in my late teens, maybe nineteen? I had a lot of attitude I didn’t know what to do with.
I was a bouncer while I paid for school, and working both at a bar and as a prep cook meant I got used to shady shit happening at the back door every night no matter where I was.
I picked up boxing at a local place to give myself an edge to handle what it threw at me. Byproduct was it made me less angry.”
“Shady. Like drugs and stuff?” she asked, sitting up a bit. “Did you do that stuff?”
“No. My mom was, no, is an alcoholic and a drug addict. I’ve never touched any drugs.
Saw what it did to people,” he replied as lightly as possible, even though his chest was tight as he said it.
He hadn’t talked much about his mother to anyone here; it had felt disrespectful to Peony.
It had only come up tonight in the study when he saw her blanket.
“Oh,” Liz breathed, and settled back down. Her hand wrapped over his neck, and she shifted to kiss him softly on the cheek, her fingers digging into the hair at his nape.
The gesture undid him, and he turned toward her, giving in to the moment to just feel. Intimacy was one thing she didn’t want, but here they were, instinctively comforting each other as he threaded his arms around her.
He didn’t want tonight to be heavy; he wanted to lose himself in her body and let today’s stress go.
But here she was filling a need for more.
More connection. More healing. This was more than just sex with a willing woman, and he felt powerless to stop what he was feeling as they locked eyes in the semidarkness.
Liz gently slid her hand over his cheek, running her thumb over his cheekbone. The emotion was back in her eyes, and he swallowed the lump forming in his throat as he knew that she was seeing the same damned thing in his.