by Lili Valente
“Do you still get hard again almost instantly?” she asks, lips curving as my cock answers her question for me. “Oh, good. I’m not ready to be finished yet.”
“No?” I pull back, gazing down into her hooded eyes as her finger teases back and forth across that sensitive skin between my balls and my ass, making my cock swell faster, thicker. “Then what are you ready for, Ms. Fleming?”
“On top maybe,” she says, biting down on her bottom lip. “Or from behind with your hand in my hair. I like it when you pull my head back right as I’m about to come.”
I curse again, and she laughs, a wickedly lovely laugh that I silence with a kiss, and then another as I set about marking off the items on her wish list, as well as a few of my own.
By the time I carry her to bed nearly an hour later, she’s semi-comatose with pleasure and muscles in my hips I’d forgotten I had are aching with use, but it’s a good ache. A perfect ache.
Almost as perfect as the ache that fills my chest when Dakota curls against me and falls asleep, her cheek above the heart that will always belong to her.
Chapter 6
Dakota
I’m numb, stone cold, but at the same time, my blood is lava steaming through my veins. My breath howls in my ears, and my head pulses like someone has shoved a giant splinter beneath my forehead.
All I want to do is fall to my knees in the middle of Fifth Avenue and scream until my throat is raw, but I keep my hand in Garrett’s and my feet moving one in front of the other, heading back to his penthouse where I can fall to pieces in private.
“We’re almost there,” he whispers, squeezing my hand. “I’ve got you.”
I press my lips together, nodding as tears leak from the corners of my eyes. Garrett always has me. He’s always there to catch me and talk me down when things get so intense I’m not sure where he ends and I begin, or whether I can bear the fact that we’re separate beings. That he isn’t a part of me, close as skin, dear as blood that will never leave me, no matter what.
Especially now…
Now that Bo is…
Oh God, Bo’s gone. My brother is really gone. This isn’t a dream. It’s real, and I’m never going to see him again. I’ll never talk to him or laugh with him or roll my eyes behind Mom’s back when she’s wasted and talking about all the great times we never had back in the old days.
He’s gone forever, lost to a war that’s gone on so long it doesn’t make sense to anyone anymore. Lost because the men of this world can’t stop fighting over oil long enough to realize that every soldier is someone’s baby. Someone’s father. Someone’s brother-best friend-lifeline-firewall when everything else has let you down.
I swallow hard, but the cry rising in my throat won’t go back where it came. It hums into the air, high and pitiful as Garrett puts his arm around me, pulling me against his strong, warm body.
“Two more blocks,” he says in a low voice, because he knows I hate to lose control in front of strangers.
He knows me so well, but he also knows nothing at all.
Garrett’s heard the stories, but the son of a millionaire can never truly understand what it’s like to grow up dirt poor and scared and so sad. There were times when I was so sad, and Bo was the only one who could make me see the light flickering in the darkness, even when the sun was down and the clouds filled the valley and hope seemed like a fairy tale from a kingdom far, far away.
“But if you need to cry, cry,” Garrett adds. “Whatever you need, I’m here.”
My lips part in a silent sob as I sag against him. God, this man—he’s going to break me with his kindness again, the way he always does. He makes me feel so cherished. Loved in a way I never dreamed could be real.
“He’ll never know,” I choke out as Garrett half-carries me that last block to his building. “He’ll never know you. He’ll never know I met the best man in the world.”
“He knows,” Garrett says. “Or, at least, he knew I was crazy about you. I wrote him a letter about a month ago, asking permission to ask you to marry me.”
I suck in a breath, eyes going wide as I look up at his face. “You didn’t.”
“I did,” he says, whisking me past the doorman and on toward the elevator. “I know it’s old-fashioned, but it seemed like the right thing to do. I knew you two were close, and I wanted him to feel a part of this, even though we hadn’t had the chance to meet in person yet.”
“What did he say?” I ask, my throat tight.
“He gave his blessing.” Garrett hugs me closer as we step into the elevator, and he pushes the button for the top floor. “He said he was so happy for you and that I was a lucky bastard for landing the funniest, strongest woman he knows.”
“Oh God.” I tuck my head to his chest, tears flowing. “I miss him so much, Garrett. I miss him so much already.”
“I know, baby,” Garrett whispers, the pain in his voice mirroring mine. “I know…”
I wake with a sharp intake of breath to find my head on Garrett’s chest and his hand smoothing over my hair. “It’s okay,” he whispers. “I’m here.”
I sit up, clutching the sheet to my chest as I realize I’m naked. I don’t remember falling asleep. I’m not even exactly sure how I got into this bed. The last thing I remember is an embarrassing amount of orgasms.
An embarrassment of orgasms…
Probably worse than an embarrassment of riches, and absolutely too much of a good thing if I’m experiencing a blackout without having taken a single drink of alcohol. Not to mention the memory dreams. I only have dreams like that—so real and so fucking painful—when I’m utterly exhausted.
“Sorry,” I mutter, wiping the tears from my cheeks.
“It’s okay.” Garrett scoots back, propping up against the headboard. The glow from the nightlight across the room is too dim to make out all the details, but it looks like there are people carved into the wood. People and animals and a few in-between things that are strange but lovely all the same.
Kind of like ending up in bed with a man I assumed hated my guts.
“Do you dream about him a lot?” Garrett asks, the compassion in his voice making the memories hurt a little more. It’s something he taught me—that empathy often makes things worse before it makes them better.
I shake my head slightly. “Not so much anymore. I think it’s just being here. In Harry. The ghosts are everywhere.”
“I can imagine.” He exhales long and slow. “I guess this is the wrong time to say that I find the town charming.”
“Yeah. Probably not the time.” I swipe my cheeks again, a grim smile curving my lips as I look up at the silk canopy overhead. It’s a grand, heavy thing, fixed to the ceiling above the bed by a chiseled stone medallion straight out of the Greek exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “This place is pretty fucking fancy, huh?”
He shrugs almost imperceptibly. “I try. Especially with the penthouse. But this one only has four rooms. We kept it more restrained than usual.”
“People from town would still shit themselves if they saw this place.” I glance around the bedroom. It’s bigger than my entire studio apartment in D.C., and it’s only one room in the suite. “The furniture in here probably costs more than most of them will earn in a lifetime.”
“Maybe. But I think we both know money can’t buy the things that matter.” He brushes a hand across the top of the dark gray duvet, getting closer to where my bent leg forms a mountain range under the covers. “I’ve missed you, Dakota.”
I stiffen, hugging the sheet tighter to my chest as the ache there grows even more intense. “It’s been four years Garrett.”
“I’m a slow learner, I guess.”
“Bullshit,” I whisper, meeting his gaze, grateful for the shadows keeping his soulful, resolve-melting brown eyes from cutting straight through to my heart. “You’re one of the smartest people I know. You run a Fortune 500 company, for God’s sake.”
“Intelligence in business doesn’t necessarily tr
anslate to other areas, I’m afraid.” His hand completes its journey, coming to rest on my knee, the touch making me burn, even with the covers between us and no erogenous zones involved.
But then, with Garrett, just about every zone is erogenous.
“It took time for me to learn from my mistake,” he adds. “I’m sorry.”
My throat locks up, the way it did the first time he insinuated that he wants me back. But this time I’m able to get over the shock quickly enough to ask, “So what spurred this change, Mr. Lawler?”
He hums softly, his brow furrowing. “Mr. Lawler? All those orgasms aren’t enough to get us back on a first name basis?”
My lips pucker, not liking the reminder of how easily I tumbled back into his bed.
“There’s no reason to feel embarrassed,” he says in a softer voice. “I’m every bit as helpless to resist you.”
I roll my eyes with a huff. “Right.”
He wasn’t the least bit helpless the night I left New York for good, after standing outside his apartment for hours, crying in the rain, calling his cell every few minutes to beg for a chance to explain. But he didn’t give me a chance, and I spent the train ride to D.C. shivering in my drenched clothes, feeling like one of those stupid people who wake up in a warehouse in Queens with a kidney missing after signing up for a bargain basement facelift.
A vital organ had been ripped out of my core, and I hadn’t been sure if I could survive without it.
I close my eyes, taking a deep breath.
No, I’m not going to talk about that. I’m not going to think about it, not while I’m trapped here with Garrett, with no way out until the blizzard blows through and the plows make it up the mountain.
“I asked you a question. Are you going to answer it or not?” I slip out of bed, picking up the first article of clothing I step on. It turns out to be Garrett’s undershirt, and as I pull it over my head, tugging it down to cover my bare ass, it smells deliciously, heart-breakingly of him.
I turn back to the bed, arms crossed and jaw tight, refusing to dwell on his perfect smell or how stunning he looks with his chest bare and the soft sheets draped around his waist. “So?” I arch a brow.
He holds my gaze for a long moment before nodding. “All right. But I think it’s better if I show you.”
He tosses off the covers and crosses to the bedroom door, as shameless in his nakedness as ever. And, as ever, the sight of his broad shoulders, powerful legs, and thickly muscled ass does things to me that are beyond my control. Simply watching him walk across a room without clothes on is enough to make my blood rush and my breath come faster. To make my breasts ache and my pussy so slick I could take him again right now—fall to my knees and present myself for something hot and dirty without a single second of foreplay.
He pauses in the doorway, turning back to me with a little smile that leaves no doubt he knows exactly how he affects me. “Coming?”
No, I’m not coming, but I could be. The implication is clear in his voice. We could leave the questions and answers for another day and get back to what we do best—pleasure and pain and the magical things that happen when we mix the two together.
But I’ve already had enough magic tonight. If I let myself have any more, I’m going to end up like Sleeping Beauty, spelled into a sleep so deep I won’t wake up until it’s too late to defend myself from the prince circling my bed, deciding what he’s going to do with my helpless body.
The first time I jumped head first into love (and everything else) with Garrett, I was young and vulnerable, ignorant of the risk I was taking. But this time I know better. This time, if I dive in and cut myself on the rocks hidden beneath the waves, I’ll have no one to blame but myself.
And so, even though I hunger for him with an intensity no number of orgasms can begin to slake, I force myself to nod and move across the carpet. “But put some clothes on for God’s sake,” I mutter as I pass, ignoring his soft laugh in response.
“Yes, ma’am,” he murmurs. “Be right with you.”
And I’ll be with him. For now.
But how far we travel together depends entirely on him.
Chapter 7
Garrett
Even as a child, I wasn’t the type to put off unpleasant things.
I did my homework right after school, and I ate my green beans before moving on to the pork loin our chef, Maggie, made just the way I liked it. When I was a freshman in college, I broke things off with my high school girlfriend before I accepted my French teacher’s offer to join her at a retreat she and her husband were hosting at their house on Martha’s Vineyard, where I was first introduced to the delights of power exchange in the bedroom.
But now, as I open my laptop and pull up the saved links, I wish Dakota’s nightmares had left her in peace tonight. I wish she was still asleep in my arms and things had stayed relatively simple for a little longer. I would rather be hate-fucked by this woman than know I’ll never have her in my bed again.
That’s how much I want her back in my life, how much is at stake as I move aside and motion for her to sit down at the desk that looks out over the darkened hills.
Outside, the snow is swirling madly, but so far, the power is still on. Heat still puffs quietly in through the vents, and the high-speed internet connects our isolated mountaintop to the rest of the world in an instant.
“Here,” I say, gesturing for Dakota to take the chair. “Everything’s there.”
Still watching me from the corner of her eye, Dakota sits, tucking my undershirt beneath her ass as she perches on the edge of the seat. Knowing she isn’t wearing panties beneath the tee would be enough to get me hard again if the situation were different, if she weren’t sitting down to view the evidence of how far into hell I had to descend before I learned my lesson.
“What’s this?” She nods toward the screen.
“Read, and then we’ll talk.” I turn to watch the chaos of white churning outside the windows, giving her privacy but staying close enough that she can ask questions if she needs to.
There’s a chance she won’t remember Alyssa. They never met, and I doubt I mentioned my sister more than once or twice. By the time Dakota and I were together, Alyssa and I had been estranged for years, my only sibling the first victim of my inability to see all the perfectly respectable shades of gray between black and white.
Dakota, of course, was the second.
“Oh, no, Garrett.” Dakota’s breath rushes out. “I’m so sorry.”
“I’m surprised you remembered her name.” I keep my focus on the storm. “I didn’t talk about her much.”
“No, but I could tell she was important to you. I had no idea this had happened. Truly, I’m so sorry.”
“Me, too. Even though it’s as much my fault as her husband’s.”
Dakota makes an outraged sound. “No, it isn’t. Not even close.”
I lift a shoulder and let it fall.
“No,” she insists. “You can’t honestly believe that, Garrett. That man promised to love and honor her for the rest of her life and then he killed her. You’re nothing like that.”
“Maybe I am,” I confess, my throat tight. “If I hadn’t cut her out of my life, maybe she wouldn’t have gone back to him. Or maybe we would have stayed close enough for me to see things were getting worse and get her out before it was too late.”
A shushing sound—wheels on thick carpet—whispers behind me. A moment later, Dakota’s hands are on my shoulder and my hip, warm through the tee shirt and pajama pants I pulled on. “You can’t blame yourself.”
“Of course I can.” I glance down into her big blue eyes, eyes that are so much more guarded than the ones I used to know. “After Alyssa was murdered, all I wanted was revenge. I was so angry that Roger had shot himself, too. I wanted him alive so I could make him suffer, so I could terrorize him the way he terrorized her.”
Dakota’s forehead furrows. “That’s normal, Garrett. I know how scary it is to feel that way, but it is,
I swear. After Bo died, I used to dream about finding the man who put that bomb on the side of the road, and all the things I would do to make him pay for taking my brother away from me.”
“But you didn’t actually go looking for him,” I say, wishing I could skip to the end of this, but knowing she needs—and deserves—the whole story. “You had the sense to keep your revenge fantasies in your head where they belong.”
“Oh, honey…” She rubs her hand back and forth between my shoulder blades, but her touch offers no comfort.
But that’s as it should be. After the things I’ve done, I don’t deserve comfort.
“I tracked down Roger’s brother, the one who bailed him out of jail the day before he killed Alyssa,” I confess, getting the words out as quickly as possible. “And I beat the shit out of him.”
Dakota makes a pained, sympathetic sound I also don’t deserve, so I hurry on. “Then I called in some favors at city hall to get the officer who told Alyssa a restraining order wouldn’t do her any good fired. After that, I went to visit Roger’s mother, the one Alyssa said used to whip him until he was bloody and bruised when he was a kid. I told her she was the reason her son became a jealous, wife-beating, murdering psychopath. I kept at her until she was sobbing, and then I sat there and I watched her fall apart, hoping maybe her tears would fill up the hole inside me.” I shake my head. “But they didn’t.”
“Of course they didn’t.” Dakota kisses my shoulder. “But you were in terrible pain. You’d lost someone you loved to senseless violence. What you did is understandable, Garrett. And it’s forgivable.”
I swallow hard. “You know I’m not great with forgiveness.”
“No, you’re not.” She kisses me again, this time closer to my heart, making my entire body ache with regret.
She is the same kind, generous person she’s always been, even now, with a man who showed her absolutely no mercy.
“Things got worse after that,” I say, the lump in my throat growing thicker. “When I ran out of people to punish, I started blaming myself. And drinking. A lot. I reconnected with some old college friends, who also enjoyed drinking a lot, and we spent the summer dividing our drinking between Manhattan and the Hamptons. Until one morning, I woke up with a raging headache, in bed with a woman I couldn’t remember fucking, and realized what a piece of shit I was.” I exhale sharply. “And at that moment, looking into the mirror at that stranger’s house, all I could think about was you.”