Thick & Thin (Thin Love, #3)(33)
With my decision made, I didn’t feel obligated to tell him what I’d just decided. I’d leave him for New Orleans and submerge myself with turning Leann’s studio into something that was solely, utterly mine. I’d need the distraction. I’d heard recently from my doctor, and it was disappointing. While not life threatening, it had me thinking about what the future held for me as a woman, and a potential partner. My priorities had gotten jumbled and I needed time to sort them all out.
It was time to leave him. God, even thinking about it had made me nauseous.
His back was so wide I had to lean over him to work out the knots along his shoulders. He wore only a pair of boxers and smelled like the shea butter soap Keira had sent from their vacation to Maui a few weeks back. Ransom’s skin was drawn tight, as though the muscles underneath were clustered with knots. I worked my palms and thumbs up the long thick stretch of his deltoids, to his traps and smiled when he groaned, wincing when a particularly large knot just underneath his shoulder blade took more effort to smooth away.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” he moaned, moving his head to the side. “Are you?”
“Just a little tired is all.”
Ransom went up on his elbow, tilting his head as he glanced toward the closet. Several of my suitcases were pushed inside with laundry scattered on the floor around them. “Are you ever going to unpack? That trip to New York was a month ago…”
It wasn’t time. Not just yet and so I distracted him with my mouth in the center of his back, nibbling over that slightly protruding spine and the thick muscle until I leaned over him, using my nails to scrape along his shoulders and down his sides as I kissed his neck.
“Damn, nani, that’s good.”
And it was—the way he reacted to me, how responsive he was. Stretched out on his stomach, Ransom let me play, sprawling out so that his arms were at his sides, palms flat on the mattress. I used my teeth, kissing a path over those wide shoulders, turning his head to bring his ear between my lips.
“I love the way your skin feels on my tongue.”
“There’s even more to taste on the other side.”
And he showed me, turning over in a quick twist so that I straddled him and he could get at my hips, those long fingers dancing up my back, lifting my shirt, tugging off my shorts and thong until I was in only my bra and Ransom palmed me everywhere.
“I never get tired of tasting you, Aly.” He demonstrated with his lips pulling at my nipple through my bra before he took that off too. He cupped the heavy weight of my breast. “All this smooth, nani skin, damn baby, you taste like cotton candy and you’re just as sweet.”
He could never stand just the feel of me for long. Foreplay was great, but it wasn’t enough and Ransom was an impatient man. A few more strokes of his tongue and teeth up my ribs and his fingers inside me, driving deep, making me fly higher and then those greedy hands went everywhere, grabbing, holding me down onto his dick, him filling me inch by torturous inch. He was so big, the feel of him stretching me, filling me, sliding, making me feel tight everywhere.
“God, baby, I’ll never stop wanting you.” Deeper then, with me squatting over him, me watching his eyes, that lingering worry over his injury distracting me only until he moved me harder, faster until he held my thighs, stretching me further so I’d go deeper. “Not ever.”
“Me…me either…” and I’d meant it. It didn’t matter that I’d soon break his heart. It didn’t matter that I’d sign contracts to buy Leann out by week’s end. It was all impulse. It would all be done with an immediacy even I didn’t understand. I hadn’t told him. I wouldn’t until we were spent and all the tension had left his body. It wouldn’t be forever, I didn’t believe. Just until he left the league. Just until he was safe and I could breathe again. Maybe then, being gone would open his eyes, make him realize that I wasn’t just a body. Maybe then, he’d realize I needed him to see me, all of me. Until that time, we’d be separated by a few more miles. But no matter where I laid my head, or what city got to claim Ransom each night, I’d never stop wanting him. Even if I had to for his own sake, and mine.
“Makamae,” he said, flipping us over so that his hips sped, grip squeezed down on my ass, holding onto me as he chased that orgasm and brought me closer and closer to my own yet again. “You’re mine. Only mine. No one loves you like I do. I won’t let them. They can’t have you.”
My pillow was damp and the heavy scent of sweat collected in the center. My bed shook, the headboard jerking against the plaster walls of my condo when I jerked awake from the dream. It hadn’t been a memory, I didn’t think. Ransom had never made that promise to me. Not then anyway.
I lay back, trying to get my heartbeat to slow, trying to convince myself that the dream had not been real. That wasn’t Ransom’s skin I tasted in my mouth. It wasn’t his fingers that had filled me over and over. Not that night. Not for a long, long time.
Not anymore.
But no matter how often I tried to convince myself of the truth, alone at night in that Elysian Fields condo, sometimes I still felt him. Sometimes it was so real, so potent that I could close my eyes and paint a picture of his body, recalling every detail and know that it would be a perfect copy of the man. I could feel him. Dear God, I could feel every inch of him.