“So goddamn tight. How can you possibly be this—” He breaks off the question as if afraid I’ll give him the answer. Dark brows pulled down in a fierce frown, with arousal staining the skin above his beard in slashes of red, he eases his finger out of my clasping, quivering flesh. Then plunges it back inside. Another cry, sounding strangled and so, so needy, peals out of me. “Offer me what you did in the shop,” he growls.
He doesn’t expound, and I don’t ask what he’s referring to. I know.
Releasing his shoulders, I grab the bottom of my shirt and jerk it up my chest. Without needing to be told, I yank the bra cups down, and my breasts spill out. The cool air whispers over my flesh, and my nipples draw tighter. I guess I should be at least a little embarrassed or shy. And maybe I would if his finger wasn’t fucking me. If a low, deep, animalistic rumble didn’t roll from him at the sight of my bare breasts. If I didn’t stand on the crumbled edge of an orgasm.
If he didn’t bend over me and suck my breast hard and deep into his mouth.
Oh. God. I swallow the wailed words before they can bust past my lips. But they echo in the arch of my back, the unrelenting grip on his bound hair, the buck of my hips. It’s as if the nerves in my nipples are connected directly to my sex, and each tug, stroke, or lap sets off sparks deep inside me. And the finger I’m riding is stoking the flashes of fire higher, pushing me closer to the release that I need so damn bad, it’s become my sole source for existing.
“Please,” I beg on a cracked, hushed plea, breaking my own rule about not speaking and ruining this moment. My fingers flex in his hair, and he glances up at me, his harsh angles even harsher, his mouth damp, swollen. “Don’t stop,” I whisper, uncaring how desperate or panicked I sound. “Please, Knox, don’t stop.”
With his gaze refusing to let me go, he parts his lips and delivers a slow, long lick with the flat of his tongue. And below… Oh God, below, he curls his finger and rubs a spot high inside me. A spot that makes a keening wail erupt from me seconds before I explode. Detonate. Shatter.
“Fuck,” he swears, the guttural curse a hot puff of breath across my skin as he drives into my spasming flesh over and over, not gentle or merciful, but dragging the orgasm out until all I can do is whimper and wilt against the wall. My knees are a useless waste of joints, and only his solid, big body holds me up. Ripples of pleasure ebb through me as I return to myself. The short, heavy rasps escaping me eventually ease to soft pants.
But with the return of sanity comes…more sanity. I shiver, the sweat dotting my chest, throat, and face turning slightly clammy on my skin. The last of the lust-thick haze evaporates, and like mist parting on the dawn of a cold, stark morning, reality greets me. Reality and an overwhelming sense of grief and guilt that almost crushes me to the floor.
No longer can I say that the last man I was intimate with was my husband. I was a virgin when I met Connor. And before that, growing up in a house with an alcoholic who loved to party? When the drinks flowed, so did the unsound decisions. My introduction to sex had been at ten, walking in on my father fucking my mother’s “best friend” on the living room couch, empty bottles of alcohol littering the floor. In contrast, Connor taught me sex could be beautiful between two people who loved each other. He’d been the only man I’d trusted with my body…until now.
Dark, twisted sorrow wraps around my chest like barbed wire, tightening, drawing emotional blood. It feels like I’m snipping another string, another tie that binds Connor to me. And a small part of me screams and rages for picking up the scissors and willingly slicing it.
I hadn’t experienced this sadness when Knox had touched me in the shop the first time. Maybe because it hadn’t gone as far. Maybe because he hadn’t beeninsideme. Turning me into this sexual, moaning creature I didn’t recognize.
Giving me a cataclysmic, mind-bending orgasm when release had only occurred a handful of times with Connor.
That’s the betrayal.
How dare my body, my mind explode for him—a man I care for, but don’t love—the very first time he’d penetrated my body, when it’d taken over a year of being together before I reached it with the man I adored. And even then, not very often. But there’d been intimacy, affection, commitment, and love between us. Here, with Knox, it’d been purely physical except for a familial love that had just now been conspicuously absent.
A part of me reverts to the devastated, raging widow I’d been right after Connor’s death. And that part resents my body—resents the need that even now stirs as Knox slides his finger free, and my sex clenches around it, already feeling empty and aching to be filled again.
Tears scald my eyes, my head a noisy, confused blender of grief, anger, guilt…and desire.
Gentle hands zip and button my jeans, then rearrange my bra and shirt. I stand there, motionless like a doll, unable to meet his gaze. How can I explain to him what I can’t grasp myself? I wanted,hungeredfor the pleasure he gave me, never expecting this barrage of emotion to flood me. Never even suspecting it was there. How can he even look at me now?
How can I look at myself?
“Knox,” I say through a dry, constricted throat.
“You should be leaving for home before they start wondering where you are,” he interrupts me, his tone flat, detached, as if we’d never touched. As if he’d never made me come so hard, I shook and screamed for him. His hand, though… It’s tender as he strokes my hair down my back. Brushes rough, calloused fingers across my jaw. “Let me pull a shirt and my shoes on, and I’ll walk you downstairs to your car.”
He stalks away, and only then do I lift my head, stare at him when he can’t return the favor. The sleek muscles in his wide back flex, tapering down to a lean waist and firm, tight ass I didn’t have the chance to grab or dent with my fingernails. Some midnight, silken instinct whispers Knox would like that. To be marked.
I whirl around, squeezing my eyes shut.
Resignation creeps into the maelstrom of emotion. Because even though guilt has a stranglehold on me, a flicker of heat still kindles low in my belly. Just one look at Knox stirred and poked the embers.
Knox’s heavy footfalls echo on the hardwood floors, but I don’t turn to face him. He pulls the door open, and I follow him out to the landing, down the stairs, and out into the dark Sunday night. The muffled chords of a guitar and the thump of drums pour from the live music venue across the street. The laughter of patrons echoes in the cool air as they enter and leave the building as well as the café next to it. But on our side of the street, it’s quiet, nothing or no one occupying the shadows but us.
It’s the safest—and most dangerous—place for me to be at this moment.
Bending my head, I approach my twelve-year-old Nissan, the same car I drove from my childhood home in Tampa, Florida, to Chicago all those years ago. The key fob has long been lost, so I slip the key into the door and open it. An urgency is riding me hard. An urgency to drive away and return home so I can lock myself in the room that became my sanctuary after Connor died, and sob until my throat and eyes feel like sandpaper.
“Knox,” I say, gathering my courage and lifting my head. His hair, still tousled from my fingers tangling and clutching the dark strands, falls around his face, mingling with the coarser hair of his beard. Those green eyes seem to absorb the shadows surrounding us, and they suck the moisture from my mouth. A pit yawns wide in the bottom of my stomach because I know I contributed to that darkness. My lips part, but all that comes out is, “I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for.” He steps back, farther into the shadows. “Drive safe.”
He’s wrong. I initiated what happened upstairs between us; I wanted it. And staring at him, the very recent memories of how he’d stroked me, sucked me, finger-fucked me, gave me such unbelievable pleasure…I still want it. In spite of the emotional storm battering me, I can still feel the heavy, heated brand of his length between my legs. And I crave more of it.
