“Yours.” I kissed his lips, soft and wet and open.

“Yours.” His cheek, stubble, sweet sandpaper.

“Yours.” I squeezed his cock, swollen and throbbing in my hand.

“Mine,” he growled, rolling me on top of him, my panties gone in an instant. He opened my thighs wider with his palms, thumbs spreading my labia, looking at the soft, pink flesh inside. “Mine. Oh fuck, Sara, you’re so beautiful, I can’t stand it.”

The way he looked at me made me feel faint.

“Yours,” I whispered, reaching down to find him, thick and throbbing in my hand. “Take it, Dale. Take me.”

He grabbed my hips, guiding me, sliding my sex along the underside of his shaft. With just one shift of his hips, he impaled me. I cried out, hands flat on his bare chest to keep myself upright, to keep from collapsing on top of him at the overwhelming sensation. He took a deep, shuddering breath, gaze dipping between my legs, watching himself slide up into me.

“Yes.” I touched his cheek, drawing his attention back up to me, eyes locked with mine. “Yours. I promise. Yours.”

He moaned, reaching for me, folding me up into his arms as I rocked on top of him, rolling my hips, grinding my pelvis as we kissed, tongues plunging. I’d never felt so safe, so held, as when we were joined this way. There was nothing in the world like it, nothing I had ever experienced.

It wasn’t just sex—it was beyond that basic, animal drive. This man knew me. I didn’t have to tell him anything. He just knew. The way we rocked together, the way he kissed me, the way he looked at me when he thought I wasn’t watching, the way my world suddenly revolved around him like my body had found its core, the center of the universe—it was everything.

Coming together with him like this wasn’t some quick fizzle and pop, like I’d experienced with other guys. It was a long, sustained, glorious stretch of energy, as if together, we created our own plane of existence, far above the world we walked around in every day. It was like magic, like the joining of our bodies transcended everything, even our selves, until we were floating together as one out among the stars.

Dale cried out beneath me, his arms tightening around my back, pulling my breasts down, flattening them against his chest, hips thrusting up, doing all the work now. He was taking me, fucking me from underneath, moving toward that final moment, as if he could thrust up through me and burst me right open, like a sunburst exploding on the surface of the sun.

“Come for me,” I moaned for him, just like he had for me, grinding my hips into his, meeting him, wanting it too. I wanted to feel him blast off inside of me.

Dale stiffened suddenly, groaning and driving up hard, hips bucking under mine, and I felt the white-hot burst of him deep inside my belly. He shuddered with it, his mouth capturing mine, the moment one long sustained ride of pleasure so beautiful I cried, bursting into tears with the flood of emotion, unable to contain it.

He held me close, whispering my name over and over into my ear, kissing my tears. I wasn’t sad. I tried to tell him. I tried to open my mouth and say the words, but only more tears would come. I clung to him as he pulled a blanket from the sofa over us, my breath hitching as the heat in my chest and belly began to ebb.

“Are you okay?” he murmured as we snuggled under the Christmas tree and stared up through the branches at all of the lights and decorations.

I nodded, still not able to speak, my tears drying on my cheeks.

I was feeling something so big and so foreign to me, I couldn’t quite identify it at first. Like Dale, with Dale, it had come into my life out of nowhere and had taken over. When had it crept in? While I wasn’t looking or paying attention? It happened as quietly as the snow falling outside, blanketing everything.

I sobbed, letting him hold me and wipe away my tears, and knew, finally, what it was.

I was happy.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Do I look fat in this?” Aimee turned sideways in the bathroom mirror.

“You know better than to ask me that question.” I looked over at her from where I was leaning over the sink, touching up my mascara, moving aside when another girl came out of one of the stalls and wanted to wash her hands.

“I just…” Aimee smoothed her hands down over her dress and her practically concave stomach. “Matt’s mother said something at the wedding.”

I gaped at her. “About your weight?”

“No. About Leslie. You know, the bride.”

I snapped my mascara closed and tossed it back into my purse. “What does that have to do with you?”

“Nothing I guess.”

“What did she say?”

“That a woman should be at her thinnest and most beautiful on her wedding day.”