I stare at him, finding his last comment oddly sexy. “What did your parents say?”
“Oh they were pissed,” he exclaims before continuing on to explain how they reacted. We talked like this for the next hour. He explained what it was like growing up with his parents, filling in little stories here and there that had me laughing at both his rebellions and his shortcomings.
We fall back into a comfortable silence after a while. He reaches out and pulls the covers up my back after noticing I’ve become chilled and tucks an errant curl behind my ear. “I’m proud of you,” he says softly, my drowsy eyelids opening fully in question. “You walked into that storage closet tonight and didn’t freak out.”
I look at him, awareness seeping into me that he’s right. That I didn’t think twice about it. With him beside me, I was able to forget my fear. “Well I didn’t actually walk into it…I believe I was coerced. It’s the Colton effect,” I tease. “You had my thoughts focused elsewhere.”
“I could do that again right now if you’d like?” he suggests.
“I’m sure you could, Ace, but...” I stop and stare at him, Tawny’s bathroom conversation seeping into my thoughts. Curiosity melds with insecurity and it gets the better of me. “Colton?”
“Hmm?” he murmurs, his eyes drifting closed as his fingers draw aimless circles on the top of my hand.
“Do I give you what you need?”
“Mmm-hmm” The nonchalance of his response tells me that either he doesn’t understand my question or is lost to the clutches of sleep.
Her words echo in my head. “Do I satisfy you sexually?” I can’t help the break in my voice when I ask.
Colton’s body tenses at my words, his fingertips become motionless on my skin, and his eyes open with deliberate slowness and confusion. He stares at me as if he is looking straight into my soul, and the intensity of it is so strong that I eventually avert my eyes to watch my fingers pluck at the sheet. “Why would you ask me such a ridiculous question?”
I shrug as embarrassment colors my cheeks. “I’m just not very experienced and you—you most definitely are so I was just wondering…” My voice fades off, unsure how to ask what is in the forefront of my mind.
Colton shifts in the bed and sits up, tugging on my arm so that I have no choice but to follow suit. He reaches out and tips my chin up so that I’m forced to look into his eyes. “You’re just wondering what?” he asks softly, concern etched in his features.
“How long until you’re bored with me? I mean, I’m—”
“Hey, where is all of this coming from?” Colton implores as he brushes his thumb gently over my cheek.
How is it I can let this man have his way with me sexually, but right now, confronting him about my lack of experience makes me feel more naked than ever? Insecurity clogs my throat when I try to explain. “It’s just been a rough night,” I say. “I’m sorry. Forget I said anything.”
“Uh-uh, you’re not getting off that easy, Rylee.” He shifts in the bed and despite my protests, pulls me so that I’m seated between his thighs—face to face—my legs astride his hips. I have no choice but to look at him now. “What’s going on? What else did I miss tonight that you’re not telling me?” His eyes search into mine looking for answers.
“It’s silly really,” I admit, trying to downplay my feelings of inadequacy. “I was in the bathroom stall and overheard some ladies talking about what a God you are in the sack.” I roll my eyes for good measure not wanting his ego to get any bigger than it already is. “...And how it’s obvious that I’m more than inexperienced.” I look down and focus on his thumbs rubbing absently back and forth on my thighs. “How you’re going to take what you want, chew me up, and spit me out. They said you don’t do predictability and—”
“Stop.” His voice is stern, and I can’t help but look up to meet his bemused eyes. “Look, I don’t know how to explain it.” His voice softens and he shakes his head. “I can’t really. All I know is that with you, things were just different from the start. You broke the mold, Rylee.”
His words elate the feelings of hope inside of me, and yet I still feel the roots of inadequacy weighing down my soul. We sit here both trying to gain our bearings on the ever-shifting ground beneath our feet. “I know,” I interject, “I just—”
“You don’t get it do you?” he asks. “You may not have the experience but…” He fades off trying to find the right words. “…you’re the purest person I’ve ever met, Rylee. That part of you—that innocence in you—it’s so goddamn sexy. So fucking incredible.”
He rests his forehead against mine, pulling my body further into his. He sighs and laughs softly, his breath feathering across my lips. “You know, a couple of months ago, I might have answered you differently. But since you fell out of the damn storage closet, nothing has been the fucking same.” He pauses momentarily, his fingertip trailing down the bare line of my spine. “No one’s mattered before. Ever. But you? Fuck, somehow you changed that. You matter,” he says with such clarity that his words delve into places deep inside of me I thought could never be healed. Places and pieces now slowly stitching themselves back together.
I still as Colton’s warm arms wrap around the chilled skin of my back. He pulls my hair to the side and presses his lips to the curve of my neck. The scrape of this returning stubble sends shivers down my spine. “What is it with you and jumping to conclusions tonight?” he murmurs, keeping his lips pressed against my skin. The vibrations of his lips ricocheting across hypersensitive nerves.
I shrug without explanation, suddenly embarrassed at confessing my moment of blatant insecurity to him when he so obviously showed me tonight that I’m the one he wants. Silence settles around us for a bit as we breathe each other in. “If there’s something you’re not getting from me—that you need—you’d tell me right?” He leans back to look at me, his hands resting on my shoulders, thumbs brushing absently over the dip of my collarbone, question in his eyes. I continue, “When Tawny said—”
Colton’s eyes snaps alert. “Tawny?”
“She was in the bathroom,” I confess and see irritation flicker across his face.
“Fuckin’ Tawny,” he mutters dragging a hand through his hair. “Look at me, Rylee,” he commands. I raise my eyes up to meet the raw intensity in his. “Tawny’s just jealous that she doesn’t have a tenth of the sex appeal that you have. And the best part about it—about you—is that you don’t even realize it. Do you remember that night at the Palisades?” he asks and all I can do is nod, mesmerized by his words and the soft smile ghosting his lips. “That’s what I was struggling with. Why I was such an ass. How could I bring you there and treat you like everybody else when you were like no one I’d ever been with before? And then I walked over to you, and you were standing there trying to figure out what my problem was, looking so goddamn beautiful and unintentionally beguiling. And even though I’d been a dick, you stepped toward me and gave everything of yourself to me without a single explanation.” He reaches up and traces a line down my forehead and nose and then stops on my lips. “It’s such a fucking turn on, Rylee. Like no one else I’ve ever been with. No one.”
I draw in a ragged breath, afraid to believe what he’s really telling me. That I give him what he needs. That things between him and I are different for him. A first of sorts for him. I swallow loudly before clenching my jaw. If I speak right now, three words he doesn’t want to hear are going to come tumbling out of my mouth. It’s been an emotional night, and I’m more than overwhelmed. All I can manage is a simple nod.
“I’ve never had to work so hard to get something I never thought I wanted,” he confesses and the words feather through me and embed themselves in my swelling heart and transparent soul.
How is it possible to feel love this intense when I thought the ability for me had died with Max?
I lean in and express the words my tangled tongue cannot, by pressing my lips to his. “Thank you,” I whisper to him for the many things I don’t
even think he could understand even if I told him.
He pulls back and I can’t miss the smirk on his devilishly sexy mouth. He raises and eyebrow at me, amusement in his eyes. “A God in the sack, huh?”
I can’t help the laughter that bubbles up and spills out, not surprised he didn’t forget. “Did I say that?” I tease as I run my fingertips down the ridges of his abdomen. I can feel his thickening arousal pulse beneath me from my touch. “Must have been a slip of the tongue.”
“Oh really?” He asks with a playful grin on his lips, and a look in his eyes that tells me his sated needs are no longer fulfilled. “Tongues are funny things don’t you think?” He leans in and traces my lower lip with his tongue. “They can lick like this,” he whispers. “And they can kiss like this,” he says branding his mouth to mine, his tongue parting my lips and dominating my mouth. He shifts us backwards on the mattress so that his weight presses deliciously on top of me.
He breaks the kiss and the lust in his eyes has desire unfurling in my belly. “And they can lick like this,” he whispers before grazing his way down my neck to tease the tightened bud of my nipple. “They can tease and pleasure like this.” His tongue caresses one then another before trailing down my abdomen at an achingly slow pace. My muscles flex in anticipation as he stops at the top of my sex.
He looks up at me and I catch a flash of a grin. “And they most definitely...” He blows against my seam, the heat of his breath feathering over my sensitive flesh. “...love to taste like this.”
His tongue laves over me and my sharp intake of air followed by a soft moan is all I can manage. My words are lost and mind is clouded from the soft slide and adept skill of his tongue.
As he consumes me. Pleasures me. Undoes me.
GOD, SHE’S FUCKING GORGEOUS. I can’t help but reach out and pull a curl off of her cheek. The feeling—that fucking foreign feeling that’s not so foreign any more—courses through me, grabs me by the balls and then hands them back to me on a platter.
Makes fear shiver at the base of my spine in a constant state of reverberation.
My fingers linger on her shoulder, touching her to make sure she’s real. There’s no possible way that she can be. She scares the hell out of me. That not so foreign feeling scares the hell out of me. But I can’t force myself to walk away. From that very first encounter I haven’t been able to. Shit, at first it was definitely the challenge. That smart mouth, those violet eyes, and the sway of that ass—what red-blooded male would have?
Christ. Tell me I can’t have something, I’m sure as shit going to go after it until I get it. Game on. I’m in it until the motherfucking checkered flag.
But then, that first time I showed up at The House—that look in her eyes that told me to get the hell out and to not mess with her Zander or she’d take me down herself—everything changed. Shifted. Became real. The challenge ceased to exist. All I saw in that moment was myself as a kid. Myself now. Knew that she loved the broken in us. Was okay with the darkness because she was so full of fucking light. Knew she’d understand so much more than I’d ever be able to say.
That selfless soul of hers and come-fuck-me body just pulled at me, twisted through parts inside of me that I thought had died and would never regenerate. Made me feel when I’ve been so content to live in the blur around me. I mean who really does the shit she does? Takes fucked up kids—lots of fucked up kids—and treats them as her own. Defends them. Loves them. Fights for them. Is willing to make a deal with the devil such as myself for their benefit.
That day in the conference room when I trapped her into my little deal, I could see the trepidation and the knowledge that I’d hurt her in those bedroom eyes, and as much as she knew it, she agreed for the sake of the boys, regardless of the damage it’d cause to her personally. And of course I’m a selfish bastard for wondering the whole time how sweet her pussy would taste. I mean if her kiss was that goddamn addictive, then I couldn’t even imagine how the rest of her body would drug me. She’s sacrificing herself for her boys, and there I was thinking of my end game.
And that in itself screwed me up, forced me to keep my guard up. I knew she was going to let me have her, but had no fucking clue that first time together—when she looked at me with such a definitive clarity afterward—that she’d be able to look right into my goddamn soul. It freaked me the fuck out, stirred things within me I never wanted churned up again. Things I had accepted living a lifetime without. No one knows the things I did—the things I allowed to be done to me. The poison living inside. How I loved and hated and did unimaginable things for reasons I didn’t understand at the time and still don’t understand now.
And I fear every minute of every damn day that she’ll figure it out, learn about the truths inside of me and then leave me so much worse off than she found me. She’s unlocked things in me I’d never intended to allow to see the light of day again. She pushes the concept of vulnerability to a whole new level.
But I can’t push her away. I can’t stop wanting to for her sake. But every time I try—every time I crack and she sees a glimpse of my demons—I’m scared shitless. God, I try to make her leave—even if it’s only in my fucked up head—but I’m never successful. And I’m just not sure if it’s because she’s stubborn or because it’s a half-assed attempt on my part just so I can tell myself I actually tried.
I know what’s best for her is not me. Shit, last night…last night was…fuck. I handed myself to her. Told her I’d try when every part of me screamed in protest from the fear of being ripped to shreds by allowing myself to feel. I’ve always used pleasure to bury the pain. Not emotions. Not commitment. Pleasure. How else can I prove to myself that I’m not that kid I was forced to be? It’s the only way I know. The only way I can cope. To hell with the therapists who had no clue what happened to me. My parents wasted so much money on people telling me how to overcome the issues they thought I had. That I could use hypnosis to regress and overcome. Fuck that. Give me a tight, wet, willing pussy to bury myself in momentarily and that’s all the proof I need.
Pleasure to bury the pain. So what do I do now? How do I cope with the one person that I fear can give me both? And she does, yet I still hurt her last night. I have a feeling I always will in some way or another. At some point she’s just going to stop forgiving or coming back. Then what, Donavan? What the hell are you going to do then? If I’m broken now, I’ll be fucking shattered then.
I stare at her sleeping, so innocent and mine and fuck all why I can’t stay away from her. I’m scared shitless and she did this to me. She fucking grabbed hold, forced me to listen to the silent words she spoke, and really hear them. Now what the hell am I supposed to do?
My God the way she looked at me last night with eyes filled with naivety and jaw set with obstinance, asking me if she was enough for me. First of all—fucking Tawny—and then secondly, enough? I’m the one that’s not enough. Not hardly. I’m drowning in her, and I’m not even sure I want to come up for air. Enough? I shake my head at the irony. She stays despite, if not because of the darkness deep in my soul. A saint I’m not worthy of, shouldn’t taint.
She makes a soft noise in her throat and rolls onto her back. The sheet slips down off of her chest exposing her perfect tits. Fuck me. My dick starts stirring to life at the sight. It’s been what, like three hours since the last time I was buried in her, and I’m already ready to have her again. Addictive voodoo pussy. I swear to God.
She whimpers again and rocks her head back and forth on the pillow. I hear Baxter’s tail thump at the sound and the possibility that someone might be up already. My eyes trail over her lips and back to her tits. I groan at the sight of her pink nipples pebbling from the morning chill. I really should cover her back up, but fuck me, the view’s pretty fucking fantastic, and I don’t want to ruin it just yet.
Her shriek scares the shit out of me. It’s a piercing keening that causes my chest to tighten. She cries out again and it’s a tortured sound followed by her throwing her arms
up to block her face. I sit up and try to gather her against me, but she bucks back.
“Rylee. Wake up!” I say, shaking her shoulders a couple of times. She finally wakes with a start and struggles out of my grip to bolt up in the bed. The sound of her gasping for breath makes me want to fold her into my arms and take the fear and pain that’s rolling off of her in waves away from her. I do the only thing I can think of and run my hand up and down the bare skin of her back—the only comfort I can offer. “You okay?”
She just nods her head and looks over at me. And in that one glance I’m paralyzed. Fucking paralyzed. As a guy you’re supposed to have that instinct to protect and care for. You always hear about how that’s your job. It’s ingrained. What-the-fuck-ever. Besides the few times when Q had some bullies at school mess with her, I’ve never remotely felt that way. Never.
Until right now. Rylee looks at me and those violet eyes are pooling with tears and filled with such absolute pain and fear. I do the only thing I want to even though I know it’s not enough for her, it’ll assuage my needs. I reach out pulling her toward me and onto my lap before leaning back against the headboard. When I wrap my arms around her, she lays her cheek over my chest. Over my heart. And despite the calm that the feel of her bare skin on mine brings me, I can’t help but keep feeling the single connection of her face over my heart.
The one place I never expected to feel again just quickened at such a simple, natural gesture. I swear that her pulse and breathing are evening out and mine are accelerating. I run my fingers through her curls, needing to do something to combat the panic I feel setting in.
First I feel like I need to protect her, take care of her, covet her. And then the simple notion of her getting comfort from my heartbeat freaks me the fuck out. Can you say pussy, Donavan? More like pussy whipped. What. The. Fuck? This shit is not supposed to happen to me. Telling her I’ll try is one thing. But this goddamn feeling taking hold of me like a vise grip in my chest? No fucking thanks.