Forsaken (The Secret Life of Amy Bensen #3)(40)

Alone.

It’s a word that pierces my heart with guilt. It’s what I know my sister has felt for six long years. I was all she had, the only one she could count on, even if she didn’t know I was there—and I failed her. The pain is a seed that grows and expands inside me in an instant, and suddenly, or maybe not so suddenly, the idea of being betrayed by Gia is not as biting as the idea of failing her as well. My hands come down on her face, and I stare at her. “I have money and resources to hide you, and I promise you, no one will find you. But I won’t be there with you. I’m poison to anyone near me. You can’t forget that. I can’t forget that.”

I don’t give her time to reply. My mouth closes down on hers, my tongue pressing past her lips, stroking and stroking again, in what is instantly an aggressive, searching kiss. She moans, and I swear the sound of her moan shatters a piece of my soul that is already bleeding for my sister. In this moment, it feels like all I have left is this woman.

I let go of her wrists and her arms wrap around me again and she is small and delicate and somehow brave and bold at the same time. The touch of her, the taste of her, it’s like a rush of anger, passion, and need combusting inside of me, feeding the same in her. One minute I’m kissing her and she’s kissing me. The next we are naked and on the bed, her pretty pink nipples in my mouth, my cock buried deep in her sweet, tight *, and I am thrusting into her. There was no beginning to this. I don’t want there to be an end. There is just us, and I’m kissing her and f*cking her and she’s just as ravenous. Just as needy. I am lost in this woman and her moans and soft touches, and she has become the only piece of heaven I have left.

“Chad,” she whispers, and in that instant my name matters more than her moans. It tells me that she knows who I am, really knows, because I’ve hidden nothing from her, shown her all of my good and bad and terrible self.

I answer her by licking into her mouth, softly murmuring, “Gia,” letting her know that I too am lost in the moment, but I know who I’m lost with.

Her leg wraps around mine as if I’ve given her the answer she seeks and now she’s fully committed, no holding back. My hand slides under her perfect little ass and I squeeze, lifting her, thrusting into her. Once again, I’m different with her than with the string of nameless women I’ve known, kissing her, unconcerned about the emotional bullshit that too much intimacy is to me. Gia tastes like the indescribable flavor of escape wrapped in sweet honey. And when she locks up around me, arching upward, her fingernails digging into my shoulders, her sex clenching around me, I am beyond control. I thrust into her, pushing deeper, and when her body clenches around me, spasms milking me, I too am tensing, shuddering with release. Time and space fade in and out, and I cling to that hazy, wonderful place where nothing but pleasure exists.

Like a hard slap in the face, the room returns, and with it the moment I wanted to escape that seems eternal. Reality is here, and so is the wet, wonderful feeling of being buried inside her that represents a huge mistake. “Fuck,” I whisper. “We didn’t use birth control.” I am off her in an instant, closing the space between me and the bathroom, and grabbing a towel that I toss at her before I’m back to pacing. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” She says nothing, and I glance at her unmoving, sitting with her back to me on the edge of the bed. “Why aren’t you saying anything? The last thing either of us needs is to bring a baby into this hell.”

Still she says nothing, calmly standing to retrieve her jeans. Frustrated, I close the distance between us, my hands on her shoulders as I turn her to face me. “What about this being a problem don’t you get? I am a target. I can’t raise a child.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Like hell. If you’re pregnant—”

“I’m not. I can’t . . . be pregnant.”

I blink and shake my head. “What? What does that mean?”

“It means,” she rasps, her voice quaking with barely contained emotion, “I had an infection when I was eighteen. It left me infertile.”

The pain in her confession is palpable, a deep cutting blade that clearly inflicts itself on her over and over, the way my guilt does me. And on some level, it’s the same, that sense of not having a family, of never being able to even try. “Gia—”

“Don’t offer sympathy that you know doesn’t help. I don’t want to bring kids into the hell that’s become my life anyway.” She jerks away from me and I reach for her, turning her to face me again, but somehow I lose whatever I intended to say. What am I supposed to tell her? That alone is better, when I know it sucks? That it gets easier? Because it doesn’t. It never gets easier.

“Gia—”

“I said don’t,” she snaps. “This isn’t new to me, and if anything, the ‘why me’ I’ve asked myself too many times now has an answer. A child would have made this so much more complicated.”

There are no words of comfort I can give her. They’d be false promises, lies. They’d be hope, the kind I have for my sister, despite the doubts I have of her safety. “You are going to survive,” I vow. “I’m going to make sure of it.”

“Yes. I will survive, but we both know it’s not because of you. You’re going to get what you need out of me, and then send me away with cash and a new identity. Let’s keep this real. The sex is just sex, a way we’re both coping with our situation.”