by Ruthie Knox
He should really stop.
She made a noise low in her throat and pressed her hips into him. Stopping wasn’t in his power, not when her mouth was so hot and soft and responsive, and her hands on the back of his head tugged him closer, digging into his hair to hold him in place.
Sean slid his free hand behind her again, only this time he managed to get it inside the back waistband of her jeans. A tight fit, but he made the most of it, wedging his fingers between resistant denim and … cold skin. Katie was wet and freezing.
That knocked some sense into him, and he broke off the kiss. “Is there a way for me t-to get you to take off your p-pants that’s n-not going to end with the two of us rolling around on the floor like s-sex-starved k-kids?”
She stared at him with her lips parted, her eyes slightly glazed. His hard-on upgraded from uncomfortable to painful under the influence of that look.
“Don’t you have a bedroom?” she finally asked.
“We’ve got wuh-work to do, honey.”
She unbuttoned her jeans and began pushing them down her hips. “If you want to work,” she said, “you might want to try not to look at my underwear.”
Sean caught a flash of bright red. Teeny-tiny. His balls started to ache, and he decided the best course was to avert his eyes and hold out his hand. After a few seconds, she put something pointy-edged in it. He squeezed experimentally. The condoms.
“Funny, C-clark.” He dropped them to the floor, and she gave him her jeans. Her shirt was long enough to cover her ass, but just barely.
He could control himself. Just barely.
“C-come on through to the k-kitchen. I’ll throw these in the d-dryer.”
She started to follow him, but he lost her halfway there. When he turned to check why, she was staring open-mouthed at the living room.
“Whoa,” she said.
His fist rose to his chest, rubbing at a knot that wasn’t there. “Yeah.”
“Are these all your mom’s books?”
He nodded.
“Your mom had a lot of books.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“A lot of books. I mean, there’s books and then there’s books. This is …”
“A lot of b-books, I know.”
Floor-to-ceiling shelves covered two walls, both of them overspilling with hardcover first editions and airport paperbacks, Norton anthologies and thin volumes of poetry. Even when Sean had still lived at home, the shelves hadn’t been able to contain Mom’s collection. Ten years later, there were rickety four-foot-tall piles leaning against every available surface. It looked more like a badly kept used bookstore than a living room.
“Was your mom, like, a hoarder?”
“I d-don’t th-think so. She didn’t k-keep everything. Juh-just books.”
Katie stepped into the room to get a closer look at one leaning tower of print, and he knew the moment she spotted the shrine, because she started to smile, but then the smile faltered and a crease appeared between her eyebrows.
Deepened.
She bit her lip.
Most families had a TV opposite the couch. Sean’s mom had pictures of him. Newspaper clippings. Report cards. Diplomas. The shrine was an ever-growing, never-changing record of his accomplishments, each carefully matted in acid-free stock, framed in walnut, and preserved on the living room wall.
Mike had named it. He thought the shrine was hilarious. If Katie’s first reaction was any indication, she shared Sean’s opinion that it was downright strange.
“Your mom was really proud of you,” she said after a while, running her finger across the dusty top of his framed kindergarten graduation photo.
Sean sighed. If he had a dollar for every time someone had told him how proud his mother was, he wouldn’t need to figure out a way to bail out Anderson Owens. He’d have enough ready cash to pay off the loans himself.
He never knew how to explain to people that in spite of every sign to the contrary, she hadn’t been proud of him. Not him. She’d been proud of anything he managed to accomplish, but only to the extent that it reflected her own glory. Every certificate and newspaper clipping on the wall was her way of saying, Look what an exceptional mother I am.
“You were a cute kid,” she said, poking the nose of five-year-old Sean. “But for heaven’s sake, you weren’t this cute.” She gestured at the wall. “I mean, with all due respect, did the woman have no sense of perspective whatsoever?”
He shook his head. She hadn’t.
As a teenager, he’d thought it was his father’s leaving that had broken her. Unmarried and unwanted, she’d been abandoned with an infant, and rather than process her pain and disappointment, she’d bent it into love and an almost grotesque desire for Sean to succeed.
He’d thought he needed to try harder. That she was brilliant and sensitive and special, and if he figured out how to give her exactly what she needed, she would love him.
It hadn’t worked. He understood now that there had never been any possibility of its working.
Looking at the shrine made his stomach ache with the memory of how heavy her expectations had felt when he was ten, eleven, twelve years old. The way she’d checked out biographies of great scientists from the library, quizzing him after he read them. The way she’d tell any stranger who expressed the smallest spark of interest that Sean had a 4.0 in school, and he was in the gifted and talented track, but really the teachers just weren’t smart enough to keep him on his toes.
Thank goodness he has me, she would say with a laugh. He’d never reach his full potential on his own.
The memories sat on his shoulders, and the claws bit in so deep that he sank to the floor in the doorway, dropping Katie’s jeans in a damp pile beside him.
“I had her for English, you know,” Katie said, walking farther into the room to look at his middle-school science fair ribbons. “She talked about you sometimes in class. Some of the kids would get her to do it on purpose, you know, to keep from having to do any work? Because you were the one subject it was easy to distract her with. And I would think, ‘How could she possibly be this clueless? She teaches high school. She has to know she’s making her kid’s life hell. How can she not know?’ ”
She turned and gave him a look full of sympathy. “Didn’t she know?”
“I d-d-d-don’t think sso. Sh-she wuh-wasn’t completely … well.”
Backing away from the wall, Katie examined the shrine again from a distance. “How did she get everything to line up like that? It must have been really hard.”
“Yeah.” He turned his face away, unwilling to look at it any longer.
“You hate it.”
He nodded.
“Why don’t you pack it up? Get it out of your sight?”
Rubbing his temples with his thumb and forefingers, he tried to formulate a response to that question. Nothing clever or funny occurred to him. His shoulders burned, and his throat felt swollen and stuck, a gate with rusted hinges that he had to shove the words past. “I t-t-tried.” He pointed toward the far corner of the room, where a box sat empty. “I g-g-got out a b-b-box, and I c-c-c-came in here, b-b-b-but I c-c-couldn’t sssseem t-t-to d-d-d—”
Sean slammed the back of his head into the doorjamb hard enough that he saw white spears at the edges of his vision. “Fuck!”
Katie crossed the room in an instant, and he knew what was coming. Her pity would be polite, full of empathy. Knowing it was coming only made him hate himself more for being weak enough to let her see him this way.
But all she said was “I’m hungry.” She leaned way down, picked his palms up off the floor, and tugged, trying to pull him to his feet. “Why don’t you feed me, and after that you can show me this work of genius you’ve constructed.”
Sean was in no condition to be coaxed. He couldn’t seem to lock down the churning, helpless guilt in his gut and he needed to. He had to do something to prevent the unraveling that loomed just over the horizon, because it was impossible to explain how he felt, eve
n to himself.
Like he was coming apart.
Mike had been right. He should have stayed away. He should have asked somebody else to do this.
Sean yanked hard on Katie’s hands, pulling her to her knees between his legs, and kissed her.
Chapter Twenty-six
It wasn’t a sweet kiss. It was almost a punishment, almost hateful, the way he held her head and poured his frustration into her.
Maybe he did hate her. It seemed unfair that he should want her so damn much. Unfair that she still did to him what she’d always done, as if he’d never left. Never changed.
He rose to his knees, still kissing her, irritated with the way she molded her breasts to his chest and clung tightly to his shoulders. She shouldn’t want him. It didn’t make any sense. “You d-d-don’t kn-n-now who I am,” he said, putting one thigh between her legs and hauling her as close as he could get her.
“I know enough.” Her gaze was direct and certain as her hands found a new grip on his biceps.
“I’m a mess, and I c-c-can’t ffucking t-t-talk.”
“I like messy. I don’t care how you sound. I think you’re hot.”
“I’ll hurt yuh-you.”
She gave him a cynical smile. “You’re big, but I survived okay last time.”
“That’s n-n-n-not wuh-what I m-m-m—”
“I know. It was a joke. You’re not in much of a joking mood, are you?”
“Fuh-fuh-fuck n-n-n—”
“Right.” She pulled his forehead down to hers. “You’re not going to hurt me. I’m not a baby. We’re adults. Now quit trying to be noble and take off your pants.”
He gave up trying to make sense of it. His hands found their way to the hem of her shirt and pulled it over her head, and then he had her hot skin under his palms, and he kissed her again. His hands cupped the sweet flesh of her ass, his fingers dipping down between her thighs to find her already damp and hot.
He wanted her wet and needy, wanted to use her and tease her until she felt the same broken yearning that she kept unlocking in him. It fucking hurt to keep answering her questions, to keep opening his mouth and spilling ugly secrets he didn’t want to share.
It made him want to punish her, but she refused to be punished. She just wrapped her arms around him and let him do what he wanted. She hitched up his shirt so her silky skin rubbed against his stomach. She moaned against his lips, and what kind of punishment was that?
Slowly, she pulled him back to reason. She counted his ribs with her fingertips, sighed in his ear, tipped back her chin to expose her throat. His anger dissipated in passion, his displeasure turning to curiosity, the assault a seduction.
No matter what he did to her, she liked it. Her nails bit into his back, his fingers explored her slick folds, and she gasped her satisfaction against his lips.
“Sean,” she said.
“Get this off. I need to see you.” With his free hand, he pushed the straps of her bra off her shoulders, and she unhooked it and shrugged it off, dropping white lace to the floor.
He eased back, his hand still beneath the scrap of red fabric at the juncture of her thighs, teasing and caressing. Katie had her head tipped against the doorjamb. Jet hair brushed her shoulders. The room was dim, the weak bulb in the overhead light no match for small windows and the gloomy winter twilight outside, and it threw shadows over her body, drawing his eyes to the dip of her waist, the dark peaks of her nipples begging for attention.
Katie’s body. Not model-perfect, but his kind of perfect. Real.
With his fingers at her hips, he urged her to her feet, made her stand against the wall so he could bury his nose in the crease of hip and thigh and breathe her in.
He’d wanted her before he’d even known what to do with her. Now that he had her again, had space and time, he would do everything he’d ever wanted. He nipped and kissed and licked his way along the edge of her panties. He took them off, and then he ran his hand up one shapely calf and lifted her leg over his shoulder, inhaling her sexy, womanly smell so deep he could almost taste her. Almost.
“You don’t have to—”
He didn’t wait for her to finish the sentence. Gripping her hips with one hand, Sean angled her toward his mouth and parted the seam of her pussy with his tongue.
Salty-hot, womanly. Sex. Katie.
“Incredible,” he murmured. If she had anything to say in reply, he didn’t hear it. He was too busy memorizing her. All the ways she responded to the brush of his lips, the stroke of his tongue, and the movements of his hand. What made her shiver. What made her beg. What made her buck, and what made her go from wet to wetter to writhing and whimpering, soaking with pleasure.
She tensed around his finger, and he gave her another, nibbling at her clit and listening for the keening sound she’d already made once. The sound that told him she was starting to lose control.
That was good. Every whimper she made gave him a little more power back, a fraction more command of himself.
He bit her, rocking her nub between his tongue and teeth. She bucked and gasped, and when she said his name, he heard the edge he wanted. The knife’s blade that told him he’d knocked her out of the driver’s seat.
“Sean. Holy—Oh. Sean, I’m going to come.”
“Do it,” he ordered. “I want you to.”
Another soft bite. When he sucked her clit into his mouth, she tightened like a vise around his fingers, crying out his name before she lost language altogether.
He laved her with his tongue, tasting her release, and then lowered her leg and kissed his way up her torso. She opened her eyes when he planted a light kiss between her eyebrows.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she said in a breathless voice. “But ohmigod thank you for doing that.”
He kissed her mouth and leaned forward to whisper in her ear. “Want to go upstairs?”
She buried her hands in his hair and tugged his head down for a deep, searing kiss.
Chapter Twenty-seven
He picked her up. Picked her up and carried her, as if she were Scarlett O’Hara and he were Rhett Butler, if Rhett had been the kind of guy to go down on Scarlett in a doorway. Which, let’s be honest, he probably was.
Katie was no petite southern belle, but he lifted her as if she weighed nothing. It was off-the-charts sexy. Sexy enough to make her knees wobble if she’d still been standing up, which she wasn’t, and if they hadn’t already been wobbly since the second he yanked her down between his legs and kissed the living daylights out of her.
Which they had.
Sean picked her up and carried her upstairs as though people actually did this kind of thing, and he laid her on a bed in a room she didn’t even begin to register the details of, because she couldn’t see anything but him. He took off his shirt and covered her with his body and kissed her again, and she could only say his name.
Every time she remembered to inhale, she smelled his soap. His hips pinned her in place, his hands stroking over her, less insistent than before but still compelling her to respond. Which she did, gladly.
She was a dozen different temperatures, but he was hot all over. His hands, his mouth, his nose. The heat of his thigh through his jeans. Overwhelming. Intense. So focused, so determined.
His mouth worked its way downward, those talented hands sliding up her back as his lips found her nipple, and she lost the thread for a while, too busy making noises she’d later find too mortifying to even process the details of the experience.
Then he backed off and looked at her, his eyes performing a slow scan down her body. Lingering on her breasts. Passing over her belly button. Hovering between her legs until she accepted his silent demand and parted them, and he inhaled. He’d already touched her everywhere, but this was more intimate. More naked.
If he saw anything he didn’t like, he didn’t show it. His stern face, the need in his gaze—he was the most arousing thing she’d ever seen.
He wanted her. This man, this handsome, hard sla
b of a man, with his lean, powerful body and his hungry eyes. This man with his flaws and his scars and his house full of unpacked boxes and bad memories.
He needed her.
“Come here,” she said.
He ignored her. He wasn’t done looking yet, but she wanted to see him, too. He had a fighter’s body, lean and defined. The body of a man who’d refused to soften into the middle of life—who’d grown harder instead, pushing himself with the discipline Sean brought to everything.
She wanted to feel his weight and watch him poised over her, the muscles of his stomach flexing as he thrust inside her. She wanted to be what he needed.
“Let me see you.”
He stripped off his pants and briefs in one efficient movement without taking his eyes off her.
“Oh,” she said. She’d seen him before, of course, bare-chested in Buffalo and again in the back of the car, but this was different. This was everything, all at once, and that look in his eyes …
She caught her breath. “Get over here.”
Sean smiled for the first time since she’d arrived at his house. Slow and inevitable as the arrival of the dawn, the smile stole a piece of her she’d been holding apart.
A crease appeared between his eyebrows. He stood up and took a step away from the bed. “Hang on,” he said. “Don’t move.”
He disappeared, and she heard the stairs creak as he descended. Alarm bells started going off in the back of her head, self-doubting voices whispering unwelcome questions like Where is this going? and What’s all this about ‘need’? and Do you have any idea what you’re getting into?
But before the mind-fuckery could work up much steam, Sean returned and dropped the condoms on the mattress. He moved right up over her and pressed her into the bed and kissed her until her head went quiet.
He kissed her until her breasts grew heavy and her stomach tightened and her hips lifted and every inch of her skin started to plead, For the love of all that is holy, more. More. Now. More.
When she said it aloud, he kissed her throat, her chest, her stomach.