Page 84 of Nikolai (Kansas City Reapers)

I couldn’t hold back any longer. My hands pulled from beneath my head, one hand wrapping behind her head, finger twisting in the wild, wavy tendrils of her hair, the other sliding under her arm and up around her ribcage, holding her to me.

Her head dropped down, our foreheads touching as we moved together. With each thrust, we groaned together, panting with a desire that seemed insatiable.

“Niko,” she keened, her eyes locked on mine.

It was all too much. The look in her eyes, the way her pupils dilated as her pussy clenched around me so tightly, milked the cum straightout of me.

“Maddy,” I groaned, my own orgasm following hers. I groaned animalistically as I emptied myself inside of her, the rhythmic pumping of my cock thrumming a counterpoint to the beating of my heart as I came harder than I could ever remember cumming before. It altered the literal fabric of my reality.

We clung to one another, both of us panting for breath and trembling. I wasn’t ready to let her go. I wanted to stay right here, connected, foreheads pressed together as we both came down from the heights of our passion.

What felt like only moments later, she shifted, sitting up straight and breaking the connection I had been clinging to. The pang in my chest at the loss of her closeness nearly took my breath away again.

She rolled over to my side, flopping down on the pillow with a grin, as happy as I was. All I could think of was getting her as close as possible. The distance, even just those few inches, felt like too much. It was all too much.

“I should clean up,” she barely managed to whisper.

“Is it bothering you?” I asked. I was breathless, my heart still pounding in my chest.

“No, but it’s messy,” she chuckled lightly, so lightly it was barely audible.

“I don’t give a fuck. I want you right here.” I pulled her into my side, my arm wrapping around her, my leg hooking with hers as she scooted closer. Neither of us seemed to be ready to part, and that was fine by me. Morethan fine.

“You want me right here?” she asked, nuzzling into the crook of my shoulder.

“I’m not ready to let you go yet,” I admitted honestly.

“I think I like that.” Honestly, so did I.

We lay there in silence for a long while, long enough that I would have thought she was asleep if it weren’t for her breathing staying the same, and the way she placed little kisses along the tattooed lines of my chest almost absentmindedly.

“Tell me something,” she said after a long while.

“Like what?”

“Tell me about your friend.” She shifted, throwing her leg over me. I grabbed her thigh, helping her move to a more comfortable position, and honestly, happy to have that curvy little thigh to run my hand over as we talked.

“Which friend? I have a lot of friends.” I was being a smartass, and she knew it. She smacked against my chest lightly. I could feel her smirk against my skin. The closeness was heady, and I had been honest when I’d said I wasn’t ready to let her go.

“No, the one friend. The one you lost.” I don’t know why, but that was the last thing I thought she’d say at that moment. It took me a moment to recover and catch my breath. Talking about Martinez wasn’t something I did often, and usually only in therapy. But for whatever reason, I wasn’t afraid to tell her. Some part of mewantedto tell her.

“His name was Martinez. Javier Martinez,” I began, feeling a flood of emotion I had been successful in pushing deep down inside myself for far too long rise towards the surface.

“He was a friend of yours?” she asked softly, her fingers playing over the lines of the tattoo on my chest.

“You could say that. More like a brother. In the same way that Jax, Deacon, and Sully are. We served together,” I answered, already feeling my chest tighten with the urge to redirect the conversation and push these memories back into their little box in the back of my mind, where they belonged.

“I see.”

“He was in the first squad that I commanded as a Marine. I was nervous as hell, being a squad leader for the first time. I took the job seriously, training them to the best of my ability, right up until the day our orders came down.”

“Orders?”

“For deployment. We were shipped out for Afghanistan within a few short months after that,” I answered with a heavy, emotion-laden sigh.

“Did you stay with all the same men, the ones you had trained? Or was it a new set of people?” she asked, showing me her genuine interest in my story. It made telling it at least a little bit easier. At least I wasn’t talking to a brick wall — which was exactly how I’d felt speaking to therapist after therapist after I had returned.

“Men and women, but yes. We were all deployed together. Things went well after we arrived, all of us diving into the chaos that is deployment to a war zone.” I shifted slightly, moving her in my arms until I was in a more comfortable position, able to put my other arm behind my head and stare at the ceiling as I recounted the events of those horrible, gruesome days.

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