“What are you doing?” she asked with a little laugh.
“I’m too tired to do this standing, but I need to be inside of you,” I said, my voice rough with need.
We tumbled onto the bed. She rolled atop me, wet all over, her knees falling to either side of my hips. I ran my hands over her roughly, cupping her breasts, groaning when her nipples pebbled under my touch. I could feel her slick folds against my cock where she settled over me. She rose up, positioning my cock at her entrance and sank down swiftly. I’d meant to drag this out, to tease her, to make it one she’d remember. Not that I could ever forget any single moment when we were together like this. She didn’t let me though.
The moment I was inside of her, I let go. When I was with her like this, I knew I was home, precisely where I needed to be. I surrendered to her, to this magic between us. She set a rhythm, rolling her hips slow and steady, rocking against me. I held onto her, gripping her tight at the hips, feeling her skin give under my fingers. Her hair was a wild wet tangle, her eyes dark with need. Her channel clenched and throbbed around me. Too soon, I was at the edge, not ready to let go yet because I didn’t want this moment to end. She leaned forward, dropping kisses along my neck and then making her way to my mouth as her breasts brushed against my chest, the feel of her nipples taut and damp from our shower sliding against me. I reached between us, pressing my thumb against her clit. I felt her tighten and let go, shudders wracking her. She cried out into my mouth, her channel squeezing my cock.
Heat twisted at the base of my spine, and my release roared through me. She drew back slowly, nipping my bottom lip before she straightened. I looked up at her as she sat astride me. I was as close as I could physically be to her. Every so often, I wondered if that would be enough.
“I missed you,” she said, her voice husky.
“I missed you too.”
My heart pounded strong and steady. I reached up, trailing my fingers along her jawline, tracing her lips and taking a deep breath. My heart felt so full I thought it might explode. Then, my stomach growled. Her eyes crinkled at the corners with her smile.
She giggled. “Should we shower again before I go pick up Max and make dinner?”
At my nod, she eased away. I let her take me to the shower and soap me all over again. Later that night, we lay in bed with Max sound asleep in the alcove off to the side of the bedroom. It was late summer with the stars winking in the sky through the skylight. She rolled on her side, resting her hand over my heart.
“I have some news,” she said softly.
I idly sifted my fingers through her curls.
“What’s that?”
“I’m pregnant.”
A wave of emotion rocked me. We hadn’t talked about it much, but after she had Max, we had decided to just see what happened. I tried not to think about it much, not wanting to put too much pressure on our hopes and dreams.
“Really?” I asked, angling to look at her.
The moonlight falling through the skylight cast a silvery glow across her face. I could see the tears glistening in her eyes. I pulled her tight against me, breathing in her scent. I felt her shuddering breath as she nodded against me, her chin bumping my shoulder.
“Uh huh. I took like five pregnancy tests and then I went to see the doctor who thought it was pretty funny that I went there for another test. She pointed out this wasn’t our first rodeo and maybe I could relax a little.”
I chuckled when she laughed softly. She took another shuddering breath. I slid my palm in a slow pass down her back. I knew this was big for her. Before we’d had Max, she’d worried she wouldn’t know how to be a good mother because she had no memories of her mom. Just vague feelings of someone being there. She lifted her head, her eyes catching mine as she reached up to trace my brows.
“Well this is it. You’d better say so now if two is too many,” she said softly.
I knew what she was asking even though she didn’t voice it specifically.
“I told you. I’m here for the long haul. That means forever. The math doesn’t matter.”
She dipped her head and dropped a soft kiss on my lips before resting her head against my shoulder. I was still awake when I felt her slip into sleep, her breathing going soft and easy.
* * *
Thank you for reading Slow Burn. I hope you loved Maisie & Beck’s story!
Up next in the Into The Fire Series is Lucy & Levi’s story in BURN SO BAD. Get ready to swoon over this enemies to lovers story…
Levi
Where there’s smoke there’s fire, and hate can always turn into love. Lucy hates me. She especially hates how much I want her.
And sweet h*ll do I want her. But she can’t be bothered to even give me the time of day. I should give up the chase, but I can’t.
It’s more than a spark between us. It’s a bonfire. Fate rolls the dice and lands Lucy right where I want her. She needs my help, and I need her.
One taste, and I’m lost. I’ll do anything to have her and to hold her. To make her mine.
Lucy
Levi drives me crazy, and not the good kind of crazy. He’s smoldering hot and so handsome, it’s downright dangerous.
A hotshot firefighter, he nearly sets me on fire whenever he’s around. Perhaps it’s an occupational hazard.
He teases me every chance he gets and tempts me to let down my guard. I definitely don’t need a man. But Levi’s more than a man. He’s a man on octane fuel—pure masculinity practically oozes from his pores.
One night of weakness, and I tumble into his fire. It’s more than desire. It’s how I feel when I’m with him—safe and protected. I never want to let go.
ONE CLICK BURN SO BAD NOW >
Turn the page to read the hilarious and emotional romance between two divorce attornies in THE PLAYER from Denise Grover Swank. Prepare to be charmed!
Or if you’ve already read that one, skip ahead to the dark and dangerous world in MERCILESS by Willow Winters. A powerful man with a beautiful woman at his mercy…
THE PLAYER
Denise Grover Swank
Divorce attorney Blair Hansen is convinced that marriage should be based on practicality, not passion. But as her own wedding approaches, she finds herself remembering her law school boyfriend, the only man she’s ever loved, and regretting what might have been. Then a twist of fate lands Garrett back in her life, and the man who loomed large in her past is suddenly casting a shadow over her wedding, making her question everything. To complicate matters further, the job she loves is in peril, and she can feel the ‘perfect’ life she’s fashioned for herself start to crumble under her feet. Could everything she’s believed about life and love be wrong?
Garrett Lowry is a divorce attorney who’s ready to settle down. The problem is that he can’t find a woman who suits him nearly as well as the one he loved and lost. He broke her heart by playing the field after their break up—something he’s always regretted. But after months of pining for Blair, Garrett stumbles across her in a freak coincidence—and then destiny keeps throwing them together, the coincidences becoming ever more unlikely. He’s convinced it’s a sign they should give their love a second chance, but Blair is engaged to another man—a man who is absolutely wrong for her.
Can Garrett convince Blair that a player once isn’t a player forever, and that happy endings aren’t just for dreamers?
Chapter One
Blair Hansen had always heard that near-death experiences made people reevaluate their lives. She’d spent nearly thirty years sure about what she wanted in life, but all it had taken for her to start questioning everything was some severe turbulence on a 747.
She picked up her whiskey and took a healthy sip. No girly drinks for her. Blair had forced herself to drink whiskey until she liked it. Being tough—and letting other people know it—was how she’d gotten to where she was in life. Which was currently in a hotel bar in Phoenix, Arizona, waiting to hear if they had a room for her to spend the night.
Of course, she wasn’t supposed to be away from home at all, let alone in Phoenix. She was getting married in five days, so her bosses had agreed to let her have a short four-day workweek in their office in Kansas City, but then the senior partner had called her on Sunday afternoon with instructions to board a plane to Los Angeles. And that’s exactly what she had done—despite the fact that she had a million and one things to do for her wedding. Robert Sisco Sr. didn’t want to hear excuses. Sisco, Sisco, and Reece only wanted to hear yes and see lots of dollar signs on checks, and her understanding of that fact was one of the reasons she was so close to making junior partner. They didn’t want her wedding to interfere with her work. Even if they were the primary reason she was getting married in the first place. Partners were typically married, which probably had something to do with the illusion of stability and maturity. It was all a bunch of hooey, but Blair Hansen really wanted to be a partner.
She took another gulp of her drink, the ice clinking against her glass because of her shaking hand.
The thing was, she’d realized something. Her future life had flashed before her eyes in those awful minutes on board the plane, and she hadn’t liked the look of it.
Now she wasn’t so sure she wanted to get married after all.
On paper, Dr. Neil Fredrick was perfect for her. Educated, personable, stable. Conservative politically and fiscally. Neil was a firm believer in playing it safe. And stability was exactly what Blair wanted after bearing witness to her parents’ chaotic marriage—her father’s affairs, her parents’ subsequent divorce, and finally her father’s death, which had practically bankrupted the family.
But lately, she found herself wanting something…more.
She blamed it on her best friend Megan. Megan had gotten married two months ago, though not to her original groom. Their story was the kind of gushy, too-cute-to-be-true, fairy-tale romance that wasn’t supposed to happen in real life. But for Megan, the impossible had happened. The weekend of her wedding, she’d boarded a plane home to tell her parents that she and her cheating asshole fiancé had broken up. After imbibing several drinks and a large dose of Dramamine on the plane, she passed out and was carried off-board by her gorgeous seatmate, who filled in as her substitute fiancé. By the end of the week, Josh had become her real husband, and the two were still nauseatingly happy.
Gag.
Still, Blair couldn’t dismiss the fact that their wild and crazy love had put a crack in her belief that she had the perfect arrangement—a crack that was starting to spider web. She and Neil had separate apartments, and although Neil had begun spending more time at her place, he remained surprisingly stubborn about keeping his after they were married.
A memory from a couple of months ago intruded on her, tapping directly on that crack in the glass.
“My apartment is closer to the hospital, Blair,” Neil had said matter-of-factly, sipping his morning coffee. “It will be easier for the nights I’m on call.”
It was hard to argue with his logic—and his stoic logic had always been one of his more attractive traits—but it still seemed…wrong. If they were unifying their lives in other ways, why keep separate places? And she knew how it would seem to everyone else.
“But the money—”
“The mortgage on my condo is more than covered by my salary, and the neighborhood is up-and-coming,” he had said, his eyes still glued on his newspaper. “If I hold onto it for another five years, there’s a chance it will double in value. It makes financial sense to keep it.”
At the time, she’d wanted to point out that he could rent it, and anyway, her condo was only twenty minutes from the hospital. He’d already vehemently nixed the idea of sharing his place. According to Neil, the loft was a bachelor pad, and they needed to have a home worthy of entertaining their friends and colleagues. Not that they were known for their dinner parties.
But pointing out those facts would only have instigated an argument. And one of the best parts of their relationship was that they rarely argued. Her job was taxing and full of dissent; when she came home, she coveted peace. And if she were truly honest with herself, a small part of her approved of the living arrangements. Now that he was staying at her apartment on a more consistent basis, she’d begun to find his presence surprisingly suffocating and his previously cute quirks—like the precise way he chewed his food or how he had to have the remote control positioned a very exact way on the coffee table—irritating as hell. But that was normal. As a divorce attorney, she knew better than to expect that marriage would be a roller coaster of excitement.
In fact, if she’d learned anything from her work, it was this: the couples who ended up divorcing after just a year or two were usually the ones who’d been head-over-heels, drawing-hearts-on-everything in love when they approached the altar. Megan’s delirious happiness aside, there was no such thing as true love.
If there were, she would still be with Garrett Lowry.
She clanked her now-empty glass on the bar to get the bartender’s attention. “Another, please.”
He shot her a grin as he poured her drink. “Must have been some kind of Monday.”
She grabbed the glass out of his hands. “You have no idea.”
The deposition had run nearly two hours longer than planned, and she’d barely made it to LAX in time to catch her plane. Her feeling of relief had been short-lived; the severe turbulence had convinced her and most of the other passengers that they were about to meet their maker. By the time they landed in Phoenix, many of the connecting flights had been canceled or delayed, and Blair discovered she was stuck overnight in Arizona. The airline had sent her to this hotel, but there had been a problem at the check-in desk.
Half her whiskey was gone before she realized it. There were so many things she needed to do in Kansas City, and she wouldn’t get back until at least mid-morning, which meant she’d have to rush to get to her morning deposition. To make matters worse, the damn airline hadn’t even confirmed her on the six a.m. flight. They’d only made a vague promise to text her around four in the morning to confirm if she had a ticket.
So now she was well on her way to getting drunk in the bar of an Embassy Suites, playing another round of This Is Your Life, Blair Anne Myers Hansen, and she wasn’t too happy with what she saw.
Practical, pragmatic, sensible Blair wanted a heart-stopping, butterflies-in-her-stomach kind of love.
All that turbulence must have rattled her brains.
But she couldn’t deny the fact that she’d been thinking of Garrett a lot over the last two months—much more than the asshole deserved. Truth be told, he was the only man she’d ever loved. And look how that had turned out. Five years later, she could finally admit to the role she’d played in their breakup, but that didn’t make it suck any less.
The rift had formed the night Blair had received word of her estranged father’s death. Rather than share the news with Garrett when he came over, she had lashed out at him, picking a fight over some nitpicky complaint. Anger had always been her go-to reaction, and Garrett had weathered many a storm, but that night he’d responded with a fire equal to her own. The fight had spiraled out of control, and before she realized what was happening, Garrett had packed the toiletries and clothes he kept at her apartment into a duffel bag. And then he was gone.
She had spent the next day drowning in an emotional fog of dismay, grief, and loss, and even skipping classes—something she never did. After hours of stewing in her turbulent emotions, she had realized she felt an intense ache for Garrett. For the first time ever, she had truly needed someone. She had decided to swallow her pride and go to him, ready to beg for his forgiveness and ask him to go with her to her father’s funeral. Never in a million years would she have guessed the surprise that she had found in his apartment.
Jody Stewart, a fellow second-year law student, who’d made no secret of her lust for Garrett, had opened his door wearing cheap superstore lingerie. Neon green, to make matters worse.
Blair
had turned around and never looked back, not even when Garrett had run after her. Or when he’d pounded on her apartment door for an hour begging and pleading with her to let him explain. Not even when he’d tried to approach her in class every day for two solid weeks.
When he’d begun to single-handedly plow his way through nearly every available woman in law school the next year, not to mention a couple of not-so-available ones, she knew she’d made the right decision.
Garrett Lowry was a player.
He may have taken a momentary side-stop with her, but he’d wasted no time before jumping back into the game. She was better off without him.
Still, the memories chafed.
Between Garrett’s betrayal and her father’s bad behavior, it had been easy for Blair to decide what type of law to practice. In fact, she should thank them both. Maybe she’d take daisies to her father’s grave when she came back from her honeymoon. He’d always hated daisies.
She was motioning to the bartender to bring her another drink, wishing the hotel staff would finally give her a damn room key, when she noticed him—a man was standing in the entrance of the bar, his gaze fixed on her. She did a double take, certain the Embassy Suites was now including hallucinogens in their drinks, because standing in the doorway was the player himself—Garrett Lowry.
She stopped the bartender as he grabbed her glass. “I’m going to need you to make that a double.”
Chapter Two
Garrett Lowry wondered if he should just divorce his family and be done with them. Unfortunately, while he’d seen quite a few unusual divorce cases in his four years of practicing law, he’d never seen anyone divorce his mother and aunt.
Modern Fairy Tale: Twelve Books of Breathtaking Romance Page 132