Hitched(41)

“You make me feel things I shouldn’t,” she says as she continues to stroke me, making my eyes cross while I resist the urge to thrust into her touch. “But I don’t want to fight it tonight. I’m tired of fighting.”

“You never have to fight it again, baby. Not with me.”

“I believe you,” she whispers, and then she takes the condom from me and rolls it down my length before swinging her leg over me and bending to kiss me while she takes me deep inside her.

Fuck, this is heaven.

Sheer fucking bliss.

I groan against the intense need to come just from being buried in her slick pussy.

“God, I missed this,” she gasps as she lifts up and slides down me again.

“So much,” I agree.

“Can’t get enough.”

“It’s been too long, but never again.”

I cup her breasts and press them together, then lick the seam as she rides me, and I can already feel her body gripping my aching cock.

I’m so ready to come, but I hold out until I feel the first spasms of her orgasm squeeze me tighter, and we come together in a sky full of fireworks, Hope straining, her neck long and her head tilted back, giving me the most glorious view of her ecstasy and making my release so powerful, I don’t know if I’ll ever quite recover.

She collapses onto me, panting, as the last of her tremors leave her, and I wrap my overcooked spaghetti arms around her. “I love you,” I whisper to her.

Probably not the best timing, I realize, as she immediately goes stiff.

Fuck…

But I get it.

She’s scared. I’m not sure why, but I want her to know she can trust me.

“Blake—” she starts.

“Shh.” I stroke her back. “Don’t say it. Don’t feel like you have to. I just want you to know…I’m here for you. I don’t need it back to give it. And you can pretend I didn’t say it if that helps.”

“Really?”

“Really.” I stifle a yawn as she starts to relax against me again. “I just want you to know…that you’re perfect. To me.”

She is.

She always has been. Even when I was pissed as hell at her for bailing on our first marriage, when I had to come to her rescue doing odd jobs and pretend like it never happened, when I thought I was nothing to her, I still wanted her. Loved her.

But I’m not nothing to her.

I never have been, or we wouldn’t be here.

She just needs time.

And I’ll give her all the time—and orgasms—in the world.

For as long as she’ll let me.





Sixteen





Hope





* * *



I wake up, and for a moment I have no idea where I am.

But my mind, accustomed to racing to fill in the blanks when I wake up in an unexpected place, quickly pops answers into the gaps in my sleep-fogged memory.

I’m on a wooden floor with only a thin barrier beneath me, my shoulder half numb from being smashed against the hard boards.

So there’s only one place I could be—curled up in the pantry in my childhood home, the only place far enough away from my parents’ master suite that I can’t hear them scream when they had one too many old-fashioneds at a charity event or I broke a remote control again, causing their quiet feuding to erupt into something more violent.

Instantly I’m flooded with the hot-cold feeling of shame and anger mixing together beneath my skin and a sour taste floods into my mouth.

Because even though I know it’s not my fault my parents seem to loathe each other, or even if it’s my fault that I’m clumsy, I don’t really know that at all.

I’m an only child, and not because Mom has fertility issues. I’ve heard her grumble beneath her breath often enough—wishing she’d waited until she was older to become a mother—to know I was probably an accident.

Or at least a less-than-welcome surprise.

And then, there were no more surprises or accidents.

No brothers or sisters.

Just me, alone, the only kid in a house filled with priceless treasures I was terrified to touch since I couldn’t even look at a radio without it malfunctioning, and parents who apparently felt the same way about me.

The therapist I saw for a while, after I fried one too many university-owned computers, failed out of vet school, and was so low I couldn’t see a way forward that wasn’t tainted by failure and regret, thought my parents were probably scared to mess me up. That’s why they were so distant.

Neither of them had easy childhoods—Dad’s parents were even chillier and more withdrawn than mine, and my mom’s dad was an alcoholic so violent and unpredictable I was never allowed to meet him.

So they really had no idea how to do the happy family thing right.

But as a kid I didn’t know that. I only knew that I was rarely held, rarely touched at all, and that it created a bone-deep hunger inside of me that could only be filled by one thing.

I was four years old the first time I held a puppy in my arms, a poor, wormy little thing I discovered crying in the ditch near our front gate.

Dad was sure someone had dumped it there on purpose, hoping a well-off family would take pity on the starving creature, and resented being targeted. He hated being manipulated, and neither he nor my mother had a soft spot for animals—Gram didn’t start her farm until later in life, and I never knew for sure if she liked the animals or if it was just a passing hobby—but for some reason I still don’t quite understand, they let me keep it.