Skin Deep (Station Seventeen #1)(96)
“Do you feel me now?” she asked, lifting her hips to draw his cock deeper inside.
Kellan thrust back. “Yes.”
“Then don’t stop.” Her heart pounded, but she didn’t hold back. “Please, Kellan. Don’t stop until you feel everything.”
His hands dug into the bed sheets beside her shoulders as he pressed forward to fill Isabella to the hilt. He pumped faster, harder, swiveling his hips in a motion that tempted her to scream. Grabbing the backs of her knees, she lifted up, until his cock was so deep inside of her, she was certain she’d fly apart. Kellan pistoned his hips, thrusting over and over until his body went bowstring tight against hers. He pressed inside her pussy, closing all the space between them as the tension in his muscles came undone on a guttural moan.
Isabella’s breath returned slowly, and Kellan lowered his forehead to hers.
“You feel like everything,” he whispered, and she wrapped her arms around him even tighter.
* * *
Isabella lay in the shadows of Kellan’s bedroom, her body exhausted but her brain refusing to go slower than warp speed. Logically, she knew she could blame her insomnia on the combination of a high-stress, high-risk case and the wheelbarrowful of great-sex endorphins running amok in her system. But logic had very little to do with what she felt deep beneath her breastbone right now.
Everything. You feel like everything.
Kellan trusted her. He had her back. He was close.
And even though it scared her shitless, close was exactly where she wanted him, because she trusted him too. Maybe even enough to fall for him.
“Hey.” He stirred from behind her, turning to his side to press a kiss between her shoulder blades. “It’s almost one. Awfully late for you to be awake.”
Shit. Isabella’s belly tightened with guilt. He had enough trouble sleeping as it was. “I’m sorry,” she said, sending the whisper over her shoulder without turning around. “Am I keeping you up?”
“Nope.” He slid his hand over her hip, his fingers tracing light circles beneath the covers, and how could such a simple touch feel so purely, deeply good? “You thinking about the case?”
“Not exactly,” she hedged.
Kellan’s pause held no small measure of concern. “You okay?”
Isabella exhaled, her pulse pressing hard against her eardrums in the quiet, moonlit room. “Not exactly.”
“I see.” He moved his hand from her hip to her back, his touch never faltering. “Tell me something about you, Isabella. Tell me what’s making you not okay so I can help you.”
She hitched, her heart in her throat. But he’d trusted her enough to let her in tonight, to let her see things he’d kept locked away for a decade.
She trusted him, too.
“Do you remember the story I told you? About my cousin Marisol?”
“Yeah.” Confusion clung to his tone, but God, now that she’d started, Isabella couldn’t stop the words.
“She was abducted eleven years ago, a couple of weeks before her fifteenth birthday. The man who kidnapped her kept her for three days, sexually assaulting her multiple times before strangling her and leaving her body in the basement of an old apartment building.”
Kellan went utterly still behind her. “Jesus,” he whispered after a minute. “Isabella, I’m so sorry.”
Despite the shock in his voice, his breath was warm on her neck, his chest so strong and solid and there behind her that everything she’d tried so hard to forget just kept coming out.
“I remember thinking it had to be some kind of mistake. That she’d walk through the front door at any minute with a big smile on her face and ask why we all looked so worried. But instead, the police came to her parents’ house on that third day. They’re the ones who knocked on the door, and they weren’t smiling.”
“That’s why you became a cop, isn’t it?” Kellan asked, understanding dawning in his voice. “Why you throw yourself into the job so hard? You want to protect people like Marisol.”
Protect. The irony rang in Isabella’s ears hard enough to hurt, and she followed them with a bitter laugh. “I became a cop because I didn’t protect my cousin at all. Her death was my fault.”
A pause opened between them, lasting for a full breath before he said, “What are you talking about?”
Guilt rushed up with the memory, heavy enough to crush her chest, but the rest of the story—the part that no one knew except for her family and the detectives who had investigated Marisol’s murder—poured out of her on a tide of sadness.
“We were supposed to go to a party that night, some high school thing to celebrate homecoming.” God, how stupid it had all seemed in hindsight. How easily she could have made a thousand different choices that would have led to a different outcome. An outcome that wouldn’t have ripped out her family’s heart. An outcome where Mari would have lived.
Closing her eyes, Isabella continued. “I’d been invited by this guy I really liked, but my parents made me promise to take Marisol, too. She was so excited. She’d just started her freshman year, and a party like that was a big deal. I was supposed to pick her up.”
She could still remember the night as if it had been a minute ago, the feel in the air that wasn’t warm enough to be summer anymore, but not quite chilly enough to be fall. At the time Isabella had thought that night would be perfect. How stupid she’d been. How careless.