Harder (Caroline & West #2)(73)

“It’s so big,” I say. “It scares me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being scared. Being scared keeps you sharp. And anyway, you can break it down to one ballot at a time. You’ve got my vote.”

“That’s good. Only 126 million to go.”

“I have faith in you.”

I wriggle up and kiss his jaw. “You’re sweet.”

He takes my cheek in his hand and traps me with his eyes. He’s so solemn. I can see how much he wants me to hear him when he says, “I’m not doing you a favor, Caro.”

My heart is full and my lungs feel bound up tight with love and gratitude, fear and promise.

“I’m glad you told me,” he says.

“I am, too.”

I am, because now I know what comes next, and it doesn’t seem to matter that it will be hard. It’s just the thing I’ve got to do.

“I have to settle the lawsuit,” I say. “It makes me feel like shit, and it sucks up all this time and resources. I don’t think there’s any point to it. When I go home for Christmas, I’m going to tell my dad.”

He smooths his hands over my hair. “Okay.”

“And I’m going to call Paul back and tell him I’ll do the media stuff. Maybe I can do an interview for the school paper and the paper in town. I could write some pieces for online, too. Salon, or HuffPo? I’ll have to look around at where I might be able to do a personal essay kind of thing. Or else—”

He pushes on the back of my head, brings me down to his mouth, and kisses the words off my lips.

“What was that for?” I ask.

“You were getting loud. I don’t want you to wake Franks up.”

“I wasn’t getting—”

He kisses me again, and he does it so well that I’m smiling when I stop to breathe. “Liar.”

“Not to you,” he says.

“You just wanted to kiss me.”

That makes him smile. “Got me there.”

This time, it’s me who kisses him. My excitement becomes our excitement, the kiss sinuous and liberating, like running fast and falling down in the grass and looking up at the spinning sky.

I want to tell him more. Tell him everything I ever hoped for. All the ways I’ve let my ambition be taken from me, yanked from my fingers like so many papers flung onto the floor, scattered around my feet.

Sooner or later, I’ll tell him everything.

He lifts me and carries me down the hall to our room. The blanket falls to the floor when he locks the door, but I’m not cold. Not with his body over me, his eyes on mine, his words inside me. You’ve got my vote.

I think, fleetingly, that the reason I don’t need vengeance is that I have love.

Vengeance doesn’t give you anything. It doesn’t fill you up or soothe you, satisfy you or change you.

And even if it did, I don’t need that, because my heart is already full. West’s hands are on my ass, his lips on my neck, at my throat, on my collarbones, moving down. He’s teasing me, smiling and calling me “Madam President,” pulling my shirt off over my head and licking his way down my chest.

“President Piasecki,” he says to my breastbone. “That’s got a nice ring to it.”

I close my eyes.

I’m twenty years old. I have a year and a half of college left. I’m supposed to be drinking too much, partying too much, playing rugby, studying abroad and sleeping around and figuring out what I want to do with my life.

I’m not supposed to know, already, that I want to spend the rest of my life with him.

But I do know that.

I know a lot of things.

“President Leavitt’s got a nice ring to it, too,” I say.

His eyes come up, a question in them. “You’re not talking about me.”

“President Caroline Leavitt,” I say slowly.

I watch him get it. Understanding shows up on his mouth first—always his mouth—and creeps upward, over his cheekbones, into his eyes. A surprised happiness he couldn’t hide from me if he tried.

He doesn’t try. He just grins and glides his hand down my stomach, right past the waistband of my pajama pants and into the wet heat of me, making me gasp.

“You’d make a hot first lady,” I say, before he scatters what’s left of my marbles.

“Bite your lip, baby.”

I do. As he works his fingers inside me, I bite it hard enough that in the morning it’ll be swollen, but that’s fine. That little twinge of pain—that taste of blood—only heightens the pleasure.

He makes me come with his hand, and then he moves inside me and makes love to me so slow, so quiet, for so long that I feel another orgasm begin to build. That dragging sweaty sweetness swelling between us. When it’s rising up, starting to sharpen, he draws me to my knees and pushes inside me from behind.

He pulls my hair off my neck and whispers in my ear, “I’m going to f*ck you like this in the Oval Office.”

Swear to God. West.

Head in my hands, my ass in the air, I’m trying not to laugh when he makes me come again, and this time he goes over the edge with me.

I drop with my face into the pillow, heavy and exhausted, drowsy. He’s so hot and heavy and all over me, his sweaty, familiar weight, the scents of our bodies. Nothing can touch us.