‘Evie,’ Kye gasps, his hand tightening around the back of my neck. ‘I need to fuck you right now, or I’m going to come all over you.’
I stop what I’m doing and crawl back up to his side. ‘Promise?’ I say.
He growls and flips me over so that I’m lying on my back. Then he straddles me, his hands clasped around my wrists. I thrust up my hips, brushing myself against him and making clear what I want.
Kye lets out a sharp breath, then climbs off me to sheath himself in a condom. When he returns and crawls between my legs, he presses his hands to the backs of my thighs and pushes them up. He lines himself up and enters me fully, making my back arch and my lungs expand as pleasure washes through my body.
‘Yeah, that’s it, baby,’ he encourages. ‘Show me how good you feel when I’m inside you.’
At first he’s rough and wild, the headboard smacking against the wall with every forceful punch of his hips. But at some point, the energy between us starts to shift, and the pace of his movements begins to slow. By this time I’ve been on my back, on my knees, sitting on Kye’s lap. But now I find myself on my back again, my fingers entwined with his as he buries himself inside me. His eyestangle with mine and we silently gaze at each other, our bodies so tightly fused that it would be impossible to tell where one of us ends and the other begins.
Suddenly, the world tips on its axis as Kye does something so completely ordinary, yet all my attention zeroes in on it. He reaches up to brush a wayward strand of hair off his forehead, and a crushing, yearning feeling steamrolls through my body.
I’m falling in love with you.
I don’t say the words aloud, but I’m sure that Kye catches the blush spreading over my cheeks. Emotion takes hold of his features as he lowers his mouth to mine once again.
‘Come for me, Firefly,’ he whispers. ‘Shine for me.’
I sit up on my elbows, chasing another blissful kiss, and then give him what he wants. Twice, but who’s counting?
Afterwards, we take a shower together, and he slips back into his boxer briefs. I wait for him to continue dressing and tell me he’s going home, but he just sits on the edge of my bed and combs his fingers through his sex-tangled hair.
‘Could I stay over, Evie?’ he asks softly.
Smiling with relief, I pat the space beside me. We lay down, and he drags my back against his chest and drapes a protective arm around my torso.
The exhaustion in my body surfaces quickly, ready to claim me. But as I teeter on the verge of sleep, I can’t shake the thought that this feels every bit as intimateas what we just experienced—maybe even more so to someone as guarded as Kye.
He once implied that he doesn’t trust anyone, including me. He seems deeply afraid of getting hurt. I don’t know if it’s because of what he went through as a kid, but he’s kept his defences up since the beginning … pushing me away when I started showing interest in him, using Austin as an excuse to avoid getting close, even trying to sabotage things by telling me I was too good for him.
Yet, for the second time, he’s lying beside me, his chest rising and falling with the slow, steady rhythm of sleep. Isn’t the act of sleeping next to someone the purest form of trust? Of closeness?
A desperate, almost painful feeling of want elbows its way into my chest, and my eyes spring open.
I’m not falling in love with him; I’m already there.
I love him.
I love Kye.
If there’s anything that life has taught me, though, it’s that just because you want someone to love you, it doesn’t mean they will.
A surge of anxiety rises over the longing in my chest. What if Kye’s fear of getting close pulls him away? What if, in the end, it’s not him who gets hurt, but me?
CHAPTER 21
Kye
A ball of tension sits heavy in my gut as Mike pulls into the Long Bay Correctional Complex visitor carpark and switches off the engine of his silver Kia. Through the windscreen, a string of bored-looking visitors stretches from the security office, past the boom gate and around to the other end of the carpark.
‘You better get in that line,’ Mike says.
I try to breathe, but my lungs feel empty. ‘Okay. Fuck, wish me luck.’
‘Good luck. You’ve got this. Now, get going.’ He reaches across the console to take off my sunglasses.
‘Shit, thanks. Forgot about that.’ The list of rules I received specified no sunglasses, no hat, no hooded jumpers—I’m not even allowed to wear shorts, and it’s hot as hell today.
