Harder (Caroline & West #2)(65)

This is the only thing I ever wanted for myself.

“Let your hair down,” I say. She unwraps the elastic she’s got it bundled up in. It falls down over her back and shoulders, and I gather it in my hands. “It’s so long.”

“I’ve been thinking of cutting it.”

“I like your hair.”

“You want me to leave it long?”

“I’ll buy you some pearl combs.”

She smiles, resting her hands on my shoulders.

I lift the hair away from her neck and kiss where it makes her shiver. Kiss her throat. Cup her breasts.

She feels so good against me. I’m too full, and touching her helps—just the weight of her pushing my thighs down, the sight of her bare tits and her skin, her big brown eyes right on me. “What else do you want?” This time when she asks, it feels bigger, and my throat gets full and tight because I don’t have any way to know.

Other guys my age—they’ve been figuring out the answer to that question for years. They’ve got interests and hobbies and talents and goals. They’ve got fantasies, ambitions, resentment when the world doesn’t fall at their feet.

I have no idea what I want, not beyond this moment, but this moment is expanding around us. This moment is endless. It ripples out, broadening with every movement of her hips as she rises and settles, rocking against my thighs.

“I want you to look at me,” I tell her.

She brushes her lips over mine. “I’m looking at you.”

“Right at me,” I say, gathering up her hair again, brushing the feathered ends up and down her shoulder blades, the column of her spine, making her arch and shiver. “The whole time.”

Her smile is shy, her cheek warm against the back of my hand. “ ‘The whole time’ implies duration.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

That smile. “Duration of what?”

“The whole time I’m f*cking you.”

She lifts her breasts in her palms and rubs her thumbs over the nipples, offering them to me. “All right.”

“Stand up.”

I peel off her socks and her tights. I ease my fingers beneath the elastic of her panties at each hip bone and slide them around and down, following the curve of her ass, tickling across the top of her upper thighs.

Her pupils are bottomless black. She watches as I kiss her navel. As I lift her hands off my shoulders, link our fingers together, pull her arms behind, and capture her wrists loosely at the small of her back in one fist while I work her panties down to the floor.

I stop wherever I want to test her flesh against my tongue. Firm and lean over muscle, stretched over bone, soft and yielding at her inner thighs.

Her ribcage lifts under my hands, her nipples harden under my palms. I love her body, her face, her smile, the breath moving in and out of her—love her heartbeat and the way it quickens, the way she gasps when I lick over her nipple.

I love her. Caroline Piasecki.

I always will.

“Keep your hands there.”

Her mouth is slack, her gaze soft, her hair falling all around her. I pull it forward from the back to make a curtain around my head. Kiss her stomach. I hold her ass in my hands, wrists brushing her knuckles, suck her nipple into my mouth and draw on it, flick my tongue over it, rhythmic and fast, relentless.

I can smell what I do to her.

If I weren’t in the shadow of her hair, I could see the desire in her eyes on mine, the warm pink spreading across her upper chest, the flush on her thighs. I grip the backs of them. Move my head into the light so I can lick into the heat and the wet and the mess I’ve made of her.

Lick into the heart of her, thinking she’s mine, she wants to be mine, and whatever it is she sees in me, that’s who I want to be. The best in me. The version of me that deserves a woman like her, fierce and strong and smart and loyal.

I could make her come, but I stop short of it, her hamstrings trembling. If I let her, she’d buckle at the knees, drop her hands to my shoulders, slump into me.

If I asked her to, she’d lie back on the carpet. She’d move to all fours and turn around and present.

She’d suck me. Pull me tight and hard until I came against her belly.

She’d let me take her from behind with a tight grip on her hips even though she never comes that way, not unless I touch her clit. She’d let me shoot over her low back, striping over her spine, her ass, the whitest skin of her body.

Thinking of everything Caroline would give me, I think of Rita Tomlinson. How she would direct me. Talk dirty to me, talk down to me, like I belonged to her—my fingers and my mouth her tools, the same muscles I used to carry her husband’s golf bag available for her pleasure.

Do it, she would say. Touch me. Take me. Harder. Faster. Now.

I was never a person to her.

The first girl I ever f*cked took me in a shed behind the trailer park laundry. She stuck her hand into my shorts, and her palm was clammy-hot. Her breath smelled like watermelon gum.

I was hard and willing, but it wasn’t like this.

I liked it, what that girl did to me. What Rita did, I hated it, and I liked it, but I didn’t choose it. Later, when I did choose, it was always fast and hard and impersonal.

Caroline’s the only woman I’ve ever touched like this. The only one who’s been my choice.

I don’t want to see myself as the loser of a series of battles, all the odds stacked against me from day one, but it’s hard not to wish I’d had more of this along the way.