Better When He's Brave (Welcome to the Point #3)(79)

But then it changed and I was being chased. I was running for my life and I woke up with a scream stuck in my throat and tears silently running down my face. I sat up in the bed and looked down at Titus. Bright blue eyes were watching me carefully, full of sympathy and rage. I pushed my hair out of my face and put a hand to my racing heart. He lifted his hand up and brushed his knuckle across my damp cheek. It was an achingly tender gesture and it was so unlike him that it started me shaking all over. Titus had looked at me with a lot of different emotions since I burst back into his life, but I refused to have pity be one of them. I understood the risks . . . all of them . . . and he needed to know that.

I leaned over and gave him a stinging kiss on his frowning mouth. “I’m fine. At least I will be.”

I saw his eyes skim over the cut on my neck and the tender and bruised skin around my eye. “You are not fine.” He sounded like a cop, and not the very naked and very sexy man that could so easily replace all the bad memories with much better ones.

It might not make sense but I wanted his hands on me. I wanted my heart thundering and chasing itself around my chest for him and not because I was scared and shaken up. Everything that was bad, everything that was tragic and senseless, Titus was there to give meaning to. He was the good and I needed all of that in me.

“I will be. Make me fine, Titus.”

He scowled at me in the early morning light but he could never hide the way his eyes shifted, and since we were both naked, there was no missing the way his body reacted. I kissed him again and this time he curled his hand around the back of my neck.

“I’m not sure that’s a very good idea. You had a rough night.”

“You and I together is always a good idea. I need this.” I knew he would never deny me when I told him I needed him. He was too giving to say no.

With a sigh he kissed the battered side of my face. His lips touched the side of my neck where my pulse thudded heavily in a mixture of anxiety and desire. His scruffy face brushed across my tender skin as he moved steadily downward across my bare chest and along my quivering tummy.

My skin was humming with tantalizing pleasure and my heart was sprinting to catch up to the way my body moved against the one that was pressing it down into the soft mattress under my back. I was caught in the middle of a cloud, floating on love and sex. It really was the best cure for any kind of bad dream or awful memory ever, and as cold air hit that hypersensitive place between my legs and the covers shifted away from the tangle of naked limbs, I was ready and aching for a kiss that was far more intimate and far more serious.

“Titus . . .” Just saying his name made me feel better, stronger.

He chuckled against my most sensitive place and it brought my hips up off the bed. I tugged on his hair to let him know he was headed in the right direction and he squeezed my ass in return.

His head disappeared between my splayed legs and I gasped as he used his clever tongue to distract me. His fingers tickled the back of my knee as he started to devote his attention to all the slippery and needy flesh in front of his face. He licked. He sucked. He bit. He chuckled again the more anxious I got and the harder my hands grasped his hair. He used his hands and mouth in tandem until I couldn’t see straight, and when I was a quivering mass of nothing but pleasure and completion under him, he started all over again.

After the second orgasm I was sure I would never move again. Titus let my legs slide back to the bed and then stopped to kiss his way along every scrape, every cut, every bruise, every mark or imperfection that hadn’t been there before I tangled with Conner’s man. The sweetness of the gesture got me all choked up, and once he was braced over me, his biceps straining as he held his considerable weight over me, I couldn’t stop from wrapping my arms around him and pulling him down so that he covered me like a sexy security blanket.

He kissed my chin and my black eye. He kissed his way across the angry red mark the knife had left at my throat. He nuzzled his nose into my ear and whispered, “I’m so sorry I wasn’t there.”

I could feel the remorse in his massive body. I could feel the way his regret and anger made his muscles tight. But honestly, I cared more about whether he’d stay once I revealed what I’d been planning for that Glock than I did that he wasn’t there to protect me from Zero. I rubbed my cheek against the roughness of his, held him close to me so that our hearts jumped and leaped to touch one another through our chests, and told him, “I can take care of myself and take care of you, Titus. No one should underestimate me.”

He sighed into my ear and it made my hair flutter. He curled his arms underneath my shoulders and shifted so that his lean hips settled into the cradle of my own. We were touching as much as two people could touch. I had never felt so much a part of another human being in my life. It seemed like I would die if he were ever to be torn away from me. So much of Titus was now woven into the fabric of who I was and who I knew I deserved to be.

He lifted his hips and let them drop back down, rubbing his erection between my swollen and sensitive folds. It was a breathlessly sexy tease that had me pulling my legs up along his sides and lifting my own hips to follow his movements.

“I never underestimated you. I overestimated myself. I thought I could play this game, let you risk everything for the end goal, but I was wrong. You are more than more to me, Reeve. You are everything right now.”

If his light caresses and reverent touches hadn’t been enough to make the tears spill over again, those words and the way they were growled at me out of the man and the beast’s mouth were. They were both staking their claim and I couldn’t have been happier.