Chapter 21 #3
"God, I missed this." His mouth was on my ribs now, moving down, his tongue tracing the dip of my waist. His hands gripped my hips and his thumbs pressed into the hollows beside my hip bones.
He kissed the soft skin below my navel. My stomach muscles clenched and my breath came out in a shudder.
He looked up at me from there, his mouth against my belly, his eyes dark and half-lidded, and the sight of Clay Blackwood between my thighs looking at me like that made my whole body throb.
I pulled at his belt. My hands were shaking.
He helped me — buckle, zipper, both of us clumsy with urgency — and when I pushed his jeans down and wrapped my hand around him, he was hard and hot and pulsing against my palm.
His forehead dropped to my stomach, and he groaned — deep, gutted, his hips pushing into my hand.
"Fuck, Callie." My name through clenched teeth. His whole body rigid, trembling, fighting for control.
I stroked him harder, and his breath stuttered. His fist closed in the sheets, and I felt powerful in a way that had nothing to do with courtrooms or law degrees. This man. Shaking apart under my hand. Because of me.
He pulled my hand away. Pinned my wrist to the mattress and kissed me hard. His other hand slid between my thighs and found me wet and swollen and ready and the sound he made against my mouth — low, raw, almost pained — sent a jolt straight through my core.
His fingers moved, and my back arched off the bed. He knew exactly where. He knew exactly how. Slow circles that made my toes curl, and my thighs clamp around his hand. He watched my face while he touched me, and his eyes were black, focused, completely undone by what he was doing to me.
"Please," I gasped. My hips were rocking against his hand, and I couldn't stop them. "Clay, please."
“Please, what?" Low. Rough. His thumb pressed harder.
"I need you inside me. Now. Please, now. "
He didn't make me ask again. He settled between my thighs and I felt him there, the tip of him pressing against me, and when he pushed inside I cried out, and my nails dug into his shoulders and he swore against my neck — a raw, guttural fuck that I felt in my chest.
We both went still. His forehead against mine. His eyes open and so were mine. Full. Connected. The stretch and the heat and the overwhelming rightness of his body inside mine after seven days without him. My walls clenched around him and his jaw locked.
"I love you," he said into the space between our mouths. Barely a whisper. Like he was telling a secret he'd been keeping for seven days.
"I love you." My voice cracked, and I didn't care. "I love you and I'm sorry and I'm not going anywhere."
He brushed the hair from my face with fingers that were shaking. Then he moved, and I stopped thinking.
Slow at first. Long, deep strokes that made me feel every inch of him.
My body opened around him, and the friction was exquisite, and I heard myself making sounds I didn't recognize — broken, breathless, desperate.
He watched my face with every thrust, reading me, adjusting, learning what made my breath catch and what made my eyes roll back and doing it again and again until I was writhing under him.
"Right there," I breathed, and he stayed right there, and his pace changed — still deep but harder now, more urgent, his hips snapping against mine.
The bed frame creaked. His hand slid under the small of my back and lifted me into him and the angle shifted.
I cried out and my legs locked tighter around his waist to pull him deeper.
"Fuck, you feel —" He couldn't finish. His jaw clenched. His rhythm stuttered. I could feel him thickening inside me, could feel the tension coiling through his body, and I raked my nails down his back and he hissed and drove harder and the headboard hit the wall.
"Don't stop." I was begging, and I didn't care. My skin was slick against his, and the muscles in my stomach were tightening, building, every nerve ending lit and screaming. His mouth found my neck and his teeth grazed my skin. His hand gripped my thigh and hitched it higher, and I shattered.
It ripped through me. Waves of it, clenching, pulsing, Clay's name torn from my throat.
My body arched into his, and I gripped him so hard I'd leave bruises, and I felt myself tighten around him in waves and watched his face — jaw locked, eyes squeezed shut, every muscle in his neck corded — as he tried to hold on.
"Let go," I whispered against his mouth.
He buried his face in my neck and drove deep one last time and came with a groan that shook his whole body.
I felt him pulse inside me, felt the heat of it, felt the tremors racking through him as he emptied himself, and I held him through it, my arms around his back, my legs around his waist, my lips against his temple.
Silence. Both of us breathing hard. Sweat cooling between us. His weight on me. My arms around him. His heart slamming against mine.
He didn't move. I didn't want him to. I held him there, my fingers tracing slow lines down his spine, and felt his breathing even out against my neck. His lips pressed against my shoulder. Then my collarbone. Then the hollow of my throat.
"Don't move," I said.
"Wasn't planning on it."
I smiled against his hair. He smiled against my skin.
He kissed my forehead and eased out of me and I made a small sound at the loss and he brushed his thumb across my cheekbone and said, "One second" and disappeared into the bathroom.
I heard the tap run. He came back with a warm washcloth and sat on the edge of the bed and parted my thighs gently and cleaned me.
Slow. Careful. His other hand resting on my hip, his thumb stroking the bone there.
It was the most intimate thing anyone had ever done for me.
Not the sex — this. The quiet attention of a man who thought about what came after.
Who touched me like I was something precious even when the urgency was gone.
I watched his face while he did it — the concentration, the tenderness, the way his jaw was soft now instead of clenched — and my throat ached with something I didn't have a word for.
He tossed the cloth toward the bathroom and lay back down and pulled me into him.
I curled against his side, my leg over his, my hand on his chest, my cheek against his shoulder.
He pulled the sheet over us and wrapped his arm around me, and his fingers found my hair and started moving through it, slow and absent, the way you touch something just because you can.
The house was quiet. Maisie asleep down the hall. The porch light throwing a warm stripe down the hallway from the front door.
"I started a law school application," I said.
His fingers stopped in my hair. His chest went still beneath my cheek — a held breath, the full-body pause of a man absorbing something enormous.
"Say that again," he said.
"UT Law. Part-time program. I can do it while I work. It might not — "
His arms tightened around me so hard I lost the end of the sentence. He pressed his lips to the top of my head and held them there, and I could feel his breath stuttering against my hair, the effort it was costing him to keep it together.
"You're going to be terrifying in a courtroom," he said.
Savannah's words. But from Clay, they sounded like a promise.
I pressed my face into his chest and smiled, and the smile was wet because I was crying again — not the airless grief of the kitchen floor but the specific, disorienting relief of a woman who had walked back into her own life and found it waiting for her.
The boots would be back by the door. The mug on the counter.
The man in her bed with his fingers in her hair and his heartbeat under her ear.
"I'm going to be terrifying everywhere," I said.
He laughed. Low, quiet, the laugh I'd been missing. His chest rumbled under my ear and his fingers resumed their slow path through my hair and I pressed closer and tangled my legs tighter with his and breathed him in.
I fell asleep in his arms. In my bed. In my cottage in Copper Creek with the porch light on and the law school application saved and the man who'd waited. Who'd waited even when I told him not to. Who'd waited because he meant it.
I didn't check the locks. I didn't dream.
For the first time in a week, the house felt like home.