Brick woke in the dark, awareness slowly creeping in through his senses. His body felt loose-limbed and well-used. The tension that had coiled within him for years was gone, replaced by something else. Something…warm. Almost glowing. Something that spread through him, waking him up and making him feel alive.
The air and sheets smelled like them. Their unique scent.
She was unsurvivable. A man didn’t just get up and walk away from Remi Ford. He stared up at the sky and wondered what the hell had just brought him to his knees.
Had he known it would be like this? Is that why he fought so hard to stay away?
There was a clear demarcation in his life. Before he’d made her his. And after. Now.
He reached for her in the dark, intending to pull her warm little body into his arms and feel the beat of her heart. To remind himself it hadn’t been a dream.
But she wasn’t there.
He sat upright and tried to peer through the darkness. The warm, glowing thing inside him gave way to fear. Sharp and claw-like. Where was she? Had she left?
An irrational panic sliced through his post-orgasmic bliss. Kicking off the tangle of sheets, he found the bedside lamp and slapped it on. Her side of the bed was rumpled. She’d been there. It hadn’t been a dream. He realized she’d slept in the dark with him and wondered if he’d made her feel safe enough.
Maybe that’s why she’d left.
He found his underwear halfway under the bed and dragged them on.
When he burst out of the bedroom door, he found her immediately, and his body reacted with a mixture of relief and longing.
She was curled up in one of the chairs in front of the dark windows over the water. Her hair was a curtain of fire that he longed to run his fingers through. Those slim fingers were wrapped around a mug. She had music playing softly from a speaker on the table. Some kind of instrumental jazz. He wondered what it looked like to her.
She studied him with an unreadable expression.
“What’s wrong?” he rasped, his voice still thick with sleep.
She smiled then. A soft kind of opening that had him by the fucking heart.
“You look awfully cute when you wake up,” she said quietly. “I always wondered.”
Self-consciously, he combed a hand through his hair. He wanted to go to her. He wanted to wrap her into his arms and never let go. She belonged to him now. And he was fucking terrified that she didn’t understand that yet.
Instead, he walked into the kitchen and helped himself to a sturdy mug of coffee. To feel closer to her, he opened the fridge and added her creamer.
“I thought you liked it black?” she said when he took the chair next to her.
“I thought you slept at four a.m.”
She took a sip of her coffee and used a bare foot to toe the chair around to face him. “I can’t sleep.”
He had about a thousand questions on the tip of his tongue. But none of them came out. Did she have regrets? It would annihilate him if she regretted what they’d done. What’d he’d done.
She was wearing the same oversized Mackinac PD sweatshirt he’d seen on her just a few weeks ago.
“I’ve been looking for that shirt,” he said mildly.
Her smile was coy, and it went straight to his gut.
“I borrowed it a few years ago.”
“Remi, are you okay?” he asked finally. “With what we did?”
Her face softened again, and she reached out with one pale hand. She gripped his arm with a strength that surprised him.
“I don’t have any regrets besides the fact that we didn’t start doing that years ago.”
Those green eyes were so earnest he could have fallen in and drowned.
“Are you sure?” His voice sounded shaky to his own ears. He hated the gnawing need he had for her. Hated the knowledge that it wasn’t enough just to share his body with her. He’d served up his fucking heart to her.
Remi rose and put her mug down on the small table between the chairs. With one step, she was standing in front of him and then climbing into his lap.
He nearly hurled his coffee to the floor to get his hands on her as she straddled him.
When her arms came around his neck, when her body settled against his chest, he let out a breath and wrapped her into his arms. Content to sit here in this chair with her and rock for the rest of his life.
“I have to tell you something,” she whispered against his neck.
He squeezed her tighter. Something was about to change.
When she said whatever she had to say, they wouldn’t be able to go back to before. To now. He wasn’t prepared for that. Hell, he wasn’t prepared for what had happened between them mere hours ago. Their lives had changed. At least his had. His course altered. And there was no going back.
“Go ahead, baby,” he said, sinking his fingers into her hair and holding her face against him.
She took a shuddery breath.
“I have to work my way up to it.”
Fuck.
“Okay.”
She pulled back to look at him. That sad smile was still there, and he wanted to kiss it away.
“Do you want to talk about what we did tonight?” she asked.
His cock stirred against her as the memories etched permanently into his brain flickered through his thoughts. She’d let him do so many things to her.
“Do you?” he hedged.
This time her lips spread into a grin as a flush tinged her cheeks pink. “I liked it. A lot. Wait, that’s not true.”
He stiffened again. Fearful that this was the moment it all came crashing down.
“I loved it.” She framed his face in her hands and pressed a kiss to his mouth. Chaste and sweet. A reward. A gold fucking star for treating her like a plaything.
“You can’t be real,” he whispered.
“I kept wondering if I was born like this. Or if it was for you. Did I sense it in you, and I wanted to be what you wanted?”
“Remi.” He closed his eyes as his erection began to throb. It was not the time for an encore. She had things to tell him. He needed reassurances. Neither of them would get what they needed if he slid his dick into her.
She shifted against him and bit her lower lip. Fuck.
He gripped her hips and held her still. “No distractions.”
“You have to admit, doing more of that would be more fun than talking,” she said, rocking against him again.
He growled, fingers finding their way under the hem of her sweatshirt to grip her ass. She was wearing some kind of silky underwear that made his fingers feel even rougher by comparison. Unable to stop himself, he gave her a quick, hard upward thrust. Then another.
“Brick.” She leaned into him, drawing her lips to his and stealing the oxygen from his lungs.
“Baby,” he breathed. Fingers digging into the soft curves of her ass. “Stop.”
“I’d rather do this than talk,” she said, raising up on her knees only to grind down against his aching arousal.
He fisted one hand in the hem of her sweatshirt, holding it against her back and gave her ass a stinging slap with his other. Her intake of breath was sharp. Seeing her eyes go wide and glassy with arousal didn’t help his predicament. He wanted more. Wanted to do more. Taste more. Wanted to memorize the sound his hand made when it connected with her.
“Talk,” he ordered gruffly.
She pouted prettily, and his dick reacted accordingly.
“How can you want to talk when your erection is trying to tunnel its way into me right now?”
On a groan, he stood and dropped her in the chair she’d originally occupied. “Stay. Talk,” he said, sitting back down.
“Geez. Someone might lose an eye around that thing,” she said, admiring how his stupid dick strained against its confines.
He sat down again and picked up his forgotten coffee to take a sip.
“Well, that little slap on my ass goes pretty far in reassuring me,” she said.
He choked as he tried to swallow and inhale at the same time. “Reassuring you about what?” he asked, mopping coffee out of his beard. It was sweet with the creamer and reminded him of her.
“I thought you’d go into a Brick spiral and take thirty steps back after tonight,” she said.
“A Brick spiral?”
“When you let yourself get a little too close to what you want and then you…I don’t know, leave the island for an entire summer to make sure you don’t get it.”
He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the back of the chair. “Remi,” he sighed. “I’m sorry about that.”
Thinking about her eager hands cupping him through his jeans as he pinned her against a wall in an alley wasn’t helping him focus on what she needed to talk to him about.
How could he want her so much when what they’d just done had gutted him, emptied him, then refilled him? How could he want to do so many other things to her?
“Tell me why you left that way,” she said. “Tell me that, and then I can tell you my thing.”
He heaved a sigh and swiped a hand over his face. “Fine. When we were in that alley. When you…”
“Grabbed your cock?” she offered smugly.
“Touched me,” he corrected, shooting her a warning look. “I knew there was nothing that would keep me from touching you back. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off you. I knew I’d spend the rest of that summer worshipping your body.”
“No wonder you hightailed it,” she said with sarcasm.
“You were always going to leave at the end of summer. No matter what, you were going to pack up and move on, and I’d be left here. Without you. I wouldn’t survive that if I knew what it felt like to make you mine. If I knew what it was like to have you on your knees in front of me like a good girl or bent over like a bad girl. I wouldn’t be able to function without you.”
“So you left,” she prompted softly.
He pinned her with his gaze. “It was better if I didn’t have you. Because then I could pretend.”
“Pretend what?”
“I could pretend that what I felt for you wasn’t real.”
She let out a breath. She was back to looking small and forlorn. But if he went to her now, he’d just end up fucking her against the glass as the sun came up.
He knew her. Inside out. So he dug into his Remington Ford survival pack. “Did you really think I’d have regrets about being with you after tonight?” he asked.
She shot him her “no shit, Sherlock” look. “The thought may have crossed my mind.” She watched him over the rim of her mug, and he tried not to focus on the fact that he could see a little triangle of purple satin between her legs when she pulled her knees up to her chin. “You let yourself off your leash. You let me in.”
That he had.
“If I did anything that upset or hurt you, Remi—”
“You’re still trying to find something wrong with it,” she scoffed. “Can’t you just sit with the fact that we did something amazing and wild and wonderful together?”
“I’m not sure if I’m capable of that.” The purple satin had a streak of wet in the very center. He wanted to go to sleep with his face pressed against it.
“I just need you to understand a few things. First, whatever we do together is exactly right. I can hear your distressed inner monologue about striking a woman and leaving a mark—”
“Did I mark you?” He was appalled. Mostly. There was also a small, ugly part of him that wanted to see it. Wanted to be proud of it.
“Focus, Brick,” she said, snapping her fingers to get his attention. “I’m saying what we did together was consensual and really fucking great.”
“So you didn’t mind…” What was he supposed to say? Hey, Remi, you didn’t mind being bent over a table and taught a lesson? How about when I pinned you to a bed and fucked you so hard I saw goddamn stars?
She dropped her knees open and leaned forward. The damn sweatshirt obscured his view of her pretty purple underwear.
“I loved it. I want more. But you have to know all the facts before you decide you’re up for more.”
His dick was ready to agree to anything. It didn’t care about the facts.
“Jesus, you’re not married, are you?” The very thought of it filled him with a possessive rage. He’d hunt down the man who’d tried to lay claim to her and destroy him.
She rolled her eyes. “No!”
He relaxed.
“It’s worse than that,” she said.
“Fuck. Remi. Just tell me. Put me out of my misery so I can get on my knees and bury my tongue in you before I make you ride me while the sun comes up.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it again. “Uhh.”
It was his turn to snap his fingers. “Focus. Talk.”
She looked up at the ceiling and took a breath. “Okay. But maybe we could cover up your chest acreage so I could focus?”
On a weary sigh, Brick grabbed the knitted throw off the back of the chair and covered up.
“Better?”
“It’ll have to do. There’s more to the story about the accident,” she began.
