Page 22 of The Challenger

“Hang on,” he says, his voice sounding far away and somehow so close. “I’m almost there.”

His eyes flutter shut, and he crushes my hands to the point of pain.His relentless, vicious strokes devastate my clit until the destroying course of nature rips through me like a strike of hot lightning.

“I can’t hold on," I cry out.

The speed of it.

The force of it.

Jesus Christ.

My feet burn and curl. The flash of light behind my eyes blinds me before I shatter into a thousand blazing white pieces. Shuddering waves slam me senseless, and I think one of us is screaming or moaning, or maybe it’s all in my head. I’m only dimly aware of his face crumpled in agony, his body tight like glass. And those two cherubs have nothing on Chavez because he’s unloading a pool’s worth of love onto his dark torso with deeply savage thrusts.

Finally, the bubble in my brain pops, and it’s not me screaming, but him.

Fuuuck!

And everything cuts to black.

ChapterEight

There is no beforewithout an after. No sunset without a sunrise. No crashing out of heaven with any degree of delicacy. Not with scorched wings and adrenaline coursing through me so violently I’m seeing double. Chavez’s chest heaves like a bellow beneath me, and he’s a man searching for answers, his eyes dazed and deeply confused when they land on mine.

“What the hell just happened?”

“I’m … I’m sorry.”

“For what?” he asks, incredulous. “That was the hottest thing ever.” He frees my hands, still clamped around his, smears his love juice until it’s worked into his skin, and says, “You gotta lie beside me, Flynn. Please.”

I slide off him with the grace of a cow on ice and land with a softthud. Limbs like jelly, I lower into the space beside him, and he snugs me close until the drumbeats of our hearts play as one. It’s been a long time since anybody held me this fiercely and it triggers strange, conflicting feelings. The prospect of a new and very different future shimmers somewhere on the horizon, but I shut my eyes as a way of shielding my heart.

Peace is something I’m always chasing and never expect to find.

I’m not getting my hopes up.

* * *

My eyelids flutter open,heavy from a sleep that went on too long. Chavez snoozes lightly beside me, the wall of his back ridged with muscles. A heady primal scent that exists only in the afterglow hangs between us, and I feel like I’ve slipped off earthly chains and woken up a profoundly changed woman—dissolved into something bigger and more powerful. With nothing but the sound of tinkling cherubs, my mind drifts like a balloon until I notice the shadows of the trees stretching long over the pool.

I jolt upright with the taste in my mouth fouling.

Dammit! Dr. Bradford.

Nothing in the cabana indicates the time, so I bum-slide off the daybed and rummage for the phone in my bag as quietly as possible. But with the deep silence interrupted, Chavez rouses from his slumber. His half-lidded eyes brighten on me with an adorable smile.

“Hey," he says, voice groggy with sleep. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing. I have to be somewhere at four." I find my phone and curse softly at the screen. Three-thirty.

His smile dims. “What about lunch?”

“I’ll have to rain check,” I say, searching for where I left my dress.

“Can you come back later?”

“No. I’m seeing my girlfriend tonight before she leaves for Canada. The one who does start-ups.”

He wipes the cobwebs from his eyes and sits up, silently watching me yank the found tennis dress over my head and tie my hair into a messy bun while jamming my feet into my sneakers.

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