Page 150 of Hold Me Until Morning

“You’re hurt,” I warned between the necessity of his kiss.

“Don’t care,” he muttered as he gripped me by the back of the neck to control the angle.

There was nothing I could do. No way to resist. No way to stop this.

I dropped the washcloth to the floor and held onto his wrists, silently begging him to hold me up.

Which was such bullshit when he was the one who’d suffered because of me.

He’d taken the brunt.

And here he was, this man who I’d once thought so selfish who was pouring every ounce of who he was into me.

Beauty and light and belief.

Offering it.

Giving it.

Energy lashed, and that connection pulsed and pulled, seeking a way out from the fractured places inside me.

Ribbons that weaved through the cracks and wound within.

Filling the cavities and depressions with a paradigm unlike any I’d ever known.

“Fuck, Hailey. I think I forget how to breathe without you,” he rumbled between the frenzy.

His lips passion.

His touch devotion.

His tongue greed.

I was so close to falling over the edge. So close to this heart sitting fully in the palms of his massive hands.

Hands that slipped down my back until he was taking me by the backside and dragging me against the solid planes of his body.

Flames erupted at the contact, and I gasped.

Cody only kissed me deeper.

Harder.

Possessive in his consuming.

He pulled me from the wall and walked me backward out of the bathroom. He peeled my shirt over my head as we went, and I did the same, my fingers racing up his abdomen, his chest, careful as I worked the ruined fabric over his head.

He didn’t wince, he only groaned as he urged me farther into my room.

He jerked at the buttons of my jeans, then he was shoving them down. I was quick to work the rest of the way out of them, kicking them off my ankles as I tugged at his fly.

He stepped away long enough to wind out of them, then he was pushing me back onto the bed, gone for the flash of a second as he grabbed a condom from the drawer before a second later he was climbing over me.

Cody Cooper was normally the brightest light. Warmth. The sun.

Tonight, he was a storm.

Shadows and desperation.