Page 78 of Fearless

Her legs around his waist, the shifting of his abs and back caressing the soft insides of her thighs. Her nipples, hard and damp from his mouth. The salty taste of him, lingering at the back of her tongue.

“Wait,” he whispered, kissing her throat, holding so still, so sweetly still for her.

She finally pulled in a breath, and she felt it shiver through her, felt her muscles start to relax.

Slowly.

Slowly.

The pain started to become something else, some other sensation, something…

“Merc.” She lifted her spine, experimentally. Something, yeah – oh, it was something…

She felt him grinning into her neck. “Better?”

“Yes. I…yes.”

The movement started in his hips, a slow nudge, and it rolled up his back, all his muscles trembling above her with restraint. Another. Then another. Shallow, easy thrusts. Giving her time, stretching her.

She didn’t know when she started to feel it, when it became something she needed, desperately, but she realized her hands were clutching at his shoulders and her hips were lifting and she wanted more of him.

His body responded; he’d been waiting for that small cue from her. There was nothing shallow or easy about his next thrust, and it pushed her back to the cushions, reached inside her and pressed against secret places she hadn’t known existed.

“Yes,” she said again, so he’d know she was okay, that it was good.

He surged against her again, a full-body coiling and flexing of his spine, his staggering strength focused solely on the act of mating with her.

Mercy caught her arms in his hands and lifted them up over her head, pinned her wrists against the couch cushion, his grip gentle, the weight of his arms like fence posts holding her fast.

The sounds: his breathing and hers, the creak of the couch frame, the slide of skin against skin. The sight of his dark head ducking over her breasts so he could take her nipple into his mouth. And the relentless thrusting, the deep plunging.

She felt so thoroughly invaded, worked, used, taken, ravished…there weren’t words, even in her writer’s mind, for the way the fire ignited and swept over her. The way she thought she might snap in half.

She strained against him as she came, as the fireworks bloomed to life against her eyelids.

**

His bed wasn’t big enough for two, not with him in it. But she loved that, the way they were glued together under the sheets, their legs tangled, their heads on the same pillow so she almost went cross-eyed if she stared too hard at the tip of his nose. They’d left the door open – he had, after he’d swung her up in his arms and carried her in here – and left the lights off, the glow from the living room giving them just enough to see the vague outlines of each other.

Ava took immeasurable delight in the quiet intimacy of being exhausted and naked, being able to pass her hands across his bare skin. Which she kept doing; she traced her name across his chest with a fingertip, over and over, pretending she was marking him, a warning to other women.

His voice was sleepy. “Are the cops about to be at my door? Or worse, your old man?”

“No.” She tried to stifle a yawn and failed. “I told Mom I was spending the night with Leah.”

“Jesus,” he muttered, without any real feeling behind it. “I never fucked a chick who needed a signed permission slip from Mommy before.”

He was laughing before she found his nipple and gave it a hard tweak.

“Stop trying to make it creepy,” she said. “It’s not creepy; you know it’s not.”

He groaned and threw an arm across her, dragged her over so she was half-pinned beneath him and held her there with one heavy leg hooked between her knees. “Just go to sleep, Homecoming Queen, ‘fore I start getting creepy ideas again.”

She giggled, tired, but giddy off the taste of his skin where her face was tucked against his arm. “Tell me a story,” she said, not embarrassed that it was something she’d been saying to him since she was eight.

He took a deep breath – got caught a second on the old words, the memory of her as just a baby – then exhaled, ruffling her hair. “Did I ever tell you the one about Big Son?”

He had. “No,” she said, kissing the hard swell of his bicep. “How does it go?”

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