Leave a Trail (Signal Bend #7)(146)

Moving fast, he shot his arm out just as she was winding up to hit him again, and he grabbed her ponytail. It was damp from her run, and his cock swelled more. God, he loved the smell of her after a run.

So real, so hot, all woman and exertion and badass power. His hand around the long, thick fall of hair, he jerked her forward and crushed her mouth under his, shoving his tongue deep.

The heels of her hands dug into his chest at first, and then slid roughly up over his shoulders until her fingers snarled in his wet hair and pulled hard, toward her. She let out a breath like a growl, and he shoved his free hand into her tiny black running shorts and between her legs.

He flashed to the first time they’d ever f*cked. She’d been dressed just like this, in little running shorts and a tight, midriff-baring running top. He’d been waiting for her, on the redwood porch of the old Olsen place. He’d known only her name and the way her mouth tasted, the way her ass felt cupped in his hands.

She’d come back from a run around town, causing a commotion. And they’d f*cked harder than he ever had before in his life. She’d been as ferocious and insatiable as he.

Fourteen years ago. More than half their life together had now been spent apart.

They had some making up to do.

He took his hand out of her shorts, loving her visceral whine of disappointment, and instead yanked her top up, breaking their kiss to get it over her head. As he did so, she toed off her shoes. He bent then and took a breast into his mouth, suckling her, drawing energy from her writhing, arcing body, the way her hands tangled again in his hair and held him to her.

His head rocked with caroming sensations and emotions. Ever since he’d come out of the bus station, he’d been in a constant state of hyper-stimulation, the world and its people so much brighter and busier, so different and unpredictable. His world had been grey and brown for so long. For more than seven years, he’d lived a life a near-perfect routine, ruled entirely by counts and clocks, his sense of himself and the world constantly balanced on the sharpest edge. He’d been driven always by the need to both stand out and blend in at all times. To be someone who was not noticed but who was also acknowledged and respected.

Keeping his memories of his real life and the emotions that went with them fresh and close without allowing them to drive him into madness. Becoming hard enough to survive the life inside without killing the things that made him the man who belonged in the life outside.

The perpetual and simultaneous denial and assertion of self.

His whole life had been driven by the need to get to the next minute. The next hour. Day. Week. Month.

Year.

And now he was back in his real life. With friends and family who had spent those seven and a half years doing more than merely growing older.

And right now, right this second, his wife’s breast was in his mouth, and her hands were in his hair, and his fingers were inside her again, and he could see and taste and feel and smell and hear her, and she was beautiful and sweet and soft and earthy and moaning and real. She was real, and she was his, and he was with her.

When he bit down and sucked hard, she yelped and gasped, “I need your cock. Isaac, your cock. Your cock, your cock.” His mind stopped thinking and let instinct and need take over.

He spun her around and pushed her to the bed, yanking her shorts down and then shoving her forward.

She fought him and stayed standing, then shimmied all the way out of her shorts and climbed up to kneel on the bed as he ripped open his jeans and pulled himself free.

Tugging her back to the very edge of the bed, he guided himself into her dripping wet, searing heat and, her hips clutched firmly in his hands, he yanked her backwards as he thrust toward her, setting a frenetic, punishing pace. They grunted together every time their bodies collided, and he could feel the walls of her sheath contracting and pulsing around him faster and faster. She put one of her hands between her thighs to work her own clit, but he was jealous of that, wanted to be solely responsible for all her pleasure, finally again to be the one who could get her off, and he wrapped her ponytail around his fist and snatched her up off the bed with such force that her body hitting his knocked the wind out of them both.

Her whole body now at his mercy, he clutched a breast in one hand took her clit between the fingers of the other, and tucked his face in the crook of her shoulder, breathing her in, tasting her sweat and her scent as he thrust and pinched and rolled and rubbed. Her hands covered his and encouraged him to go harder, faster.

“More, more, more,” she chanted, and he gave her more and more.

She came with a guttural scream—God, he missed her screams—her * clenching, her clit throbbing, and then he shoved her back to all fours, took her hips in his hands again, and pounded into her until he was shouting “Fuck! Fuck! Lilli!” And they both collapsed forward onto the bed.

They lay there, face to face, him half on her, their legs dangling half off the bed. Lilli opened her eyes.

Isaac smiled. “Missed that, gotta say.”

She smiled back. The smile became a grin. The grin began to beam, and then she was laughing—a full-throated, raunchy sound. “I love you, Isaac Lunden. I f*ckin’ love you.”

Now he was home.



oOo



In the afternoon, Lilli drove over to Show and Shannon’s to pick up the kids, and Isaac, not yet ready again for more people than Lilli, Gia, and Bo, stayed home and wandered around, reacquainting himself with the house he’d grown up in. Kodi had decided that he was okay, and the dog padded after him, allowing Isaac to ruffle his grizzled head. He’d been only a pup when Isaac had left, not even a year old.