The One You Can’t Forget

by Loren, Roni

  He grunted at the slow, dragging contact. “You’re gonna kill me, lawyer girl.”

  “Not the plan,” she said but lost her train of thought when he pressed his teeth into her collarbone and then licked the stinging spot.

  His hand shifted to her breast, cupping her through her T-shirt and sending tendrils of tight desire snaking downward. “Does this position hurt your leg? Being on top?”

  She shivered as his thumb grazed over her nipple. “I’m not even aware I have legs right now.”

  He laughed and tugged off her shirt, tossing it aside, and then went to work unhooking her bra with one hand. “I want you just like this then. I want to look up and see all of you while I make you come.”

  She grinned down at him as she climbed off him to shuck her pants and underwear. “So sure of yourself. Who says you can make me do that?”

  His lips curled into a devilish smirk as he undressed and then stretched out on the bed. “You worried? Maybe I should take out an insurance policy.”

  “And how would one do that?”

  He reached out and grabbed her waist, lifting her onto the bed to straddle him. But before she could sink down onto him, he slid down the mattress and positioned his head between her thighs, putting his mouth right where she was aching the most. The tip of his tongue grazed her cleft, and she gasped.

  “Hold on to the headboard, lawyer girl,” he said wickedly. “This is my version of insurance. Satisfaction guaranteed.”

  “Wes…” She’d never been in this position with a lover. The lamps burning bright and her scarred thigh pressed right next to Wes’s head, but before self-consciousness could overtake her, Wesley gripped her thighs with gentle hands and put his mouth fully on her.

  Every muscle in her body tensed as sensation rocketed through her and the sharp heat of pleasure rushed through her like a drug. Her hands grabbed hold of the headboard. “Oh God.”

  Wes hummed in response, which only made more nerve endings light up, and she closed her eyes. A hard shudder of sensation went through her as Wes schooled her on exactly what he thought of her joke about not having an orgasm. Every stroke felt like worship, every touch like sweet fire. The man knew how to savor a woman. And if she had any doubt about if he was enjoying this, it was answered when she glanced back, taking in the view of his naked body spread out on the bed.

  His muscles were flexing, his hips rocking ever so slightly, and his erection long and thick and proud. Her tongue pressed to the roof of her mouth at the sight. She’d never wanted to touch someone so badly, to make him feel as good as he was making her feel. But Wes didn’t let her get distracted by the view for long. He sucked her clit between his lips, teasing it with his tongue, and before she could even process all that sensation, a shocking orgasm zipped through her. Like a rip cord being pulled.

  She cried out, surprised by the suddenness of it, and her back arched with the tight, tense pulses of her orgasm. Her fingers gripped the bed tight as she rode the throes of pleasure, feeling every bit of Wes’s tongue, lips, and stubble against her skin. The man was feasting on her, and she was happy to be the meal.

  When the intensity eased, she took a deep breath and panted her way down from the high, her knuckles still gripping the headboard like she was hanging off a cliff. Wes shifted beneath her, leaving her straddling his chest. When she opened her eyes, she found his hungry gaze on her, his lips slick and smiling. “Insurance is fun.”

  “Who knew?” She smiled. “I’m thinking of opening my own policy.”

  “Yeah?”

  She shimmied down his body but didn’t stop where he probably expected her to. Instead, she kneeled between his legs and took him in her hand. “Yeah.”

  Heat flared in Wes’s eyes, and the tip of his tongue pressed into his lip. “This wasn’t a tit-for-tat agreement, lawyer girl. You don’t owe me anything in return.”

  “This has nothing to do with tits, chef. Focus.” She ran her thumb along the head of his cock, spreading the drop of fluid there and feeling a kick low and deep in her own body.

  Wes grunted. “Oh, don’t worry. You have my complete and utter focus. Bombs could rain down on the house right now, and I wouldn’t notice.”

  “Well, let’s hope for no bombs.” Then she lowered her head and took him in her mouth.

  The sound he made almost did her in, the utter primal pleasure in it, but the feel of him was even better. She was inexperienced in this art. Her sex life had been pretty straightforward in the past, the encounters so short-lived that she’d never gotten much opportunity to explore beyond basic missionary sex in the dark. But Wes had always stirred new urges in her. She’d wanted to lick every part of him from the beginning. Now she would lick the part of him that would get him to make those sexy, masculine sounds.

  She dragged her hands along his thighs as she caressed him with her tongue, tasting the salty maleness of him and loving the way his thigh muscles flexed beneath her fingers, like it was taking everything he had not to utterly lose it. She wanted to keep making him feel that way. Knowing she could explore and tease him felt freeing. He made her feel so comfortable that this felt like an open invitation to just…enjoy and play and savor.

  She traced her fingertips up his inner thigh and cupped him while she took him to the back of her throat. He made a choked sound, and his big hand planted on the back of her head, gripping her hair. He didn’t put any pressure, but she felt the need in the grip. He was riding his edge.

  So she eased back and took her time, playing a little more and getting herself worked up in the process. Her own desire was pumping through her again as if there’d been no orgasm at all. She shifted, pressing her thighs together tightly, trying to give herself a little relief.

  But Wes’s grip tightened. “Can’t. Bec. Too good. I want you. On top. Let me feel you.”

  The broken commands made her blood run hot. She eased her mouth off him and looked up. His gaze collided with hers, and the impact of how he was looking at her almost knocked her backward. Never had she seen such naked desire directed toward her. It felt raw and real and like a drug.

  He reached out for her, capturing her wrist and guiding her upward to sit astride him. When she smiled down at him, his hands moved to her waist, his thumbs tracing over her hip bones. “You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

  “I think you’re out of your head right now, but thank you.”

  He didn’t smile. “I’m out of my head over you.”

  And then he guided her lips down to his and filled her both with his body and his words.

  I’m out of my head over you.

  She closed her eyes and let herself free fall into the moment.

  But a while after they’d made love, when she was curled up in the crook of Wes’s arm, the words drifted back to her and poked at the dozing monster inside her, the one that she’d tried to hush earlier in the kitchen, the one that breathed the hot, horrible truth down her neck. I’m out of my head over you.

  As Wes gently stroked her scalp with lazy fingertips, a desolate sadness welled up in her, making her want to cry. She couldn’t ignore the facts anymore. This was getting too serious, too real, too dangerous for them both. Part of her wanted to shut down her mind and just get absorbed in how she felt when she was with Wes, to tumble into the way he was looking at her and forget about everything she was dealing with, forget about the consequences. Pretend that fairy tales existed and people were meant to be and that a month of knowing each other wasn’t too short when it was destiny.

  But those were little-girl dreams. Fantasies she’d believed when she was too naive to know better.

  In the real world, a mother could leave her daughter without looking back, the best friend you thought was your prince could fall in love with someone else, and the places you thought were safe and true could become a tragic news story.

  So even though this felt like the fantasy, the thing she’d hoped for, she knew it couldn’t be trusted. This was real life with tw
o real people who had real issues. There would be consequences.

  Wes was coming off a terrible time in his life, a time of instability and drama and danger. Before that, he’d been married to a woman who acted first, thought second. A girl with few boundaries and a wild streak. Rebecca represented the opposite to him, a sanctuary from everything that had torn his life apart. Calm, steady, lawyer girl.

  But she was anything but that. She was selling him and everyone else around her a bill of goods. She was the staid mountain that had swirling magma just beneath the surface, ready to crack and explode, a disaster waiting to happen. She could feel it in every near miss. The mugging. The meltdown during the speech. The tense moments with Steven today.

  She didn’t have it all together. She couldn’t let Wes get deeper into the quagmire with her. He’d be too far from shore by the time he realized they were both drowning. She’d seen the look on his face, heard his words. I’m out of my head over you. He was sinking already. As much as she wished she could give him what he was asking for—a relationship, a commitment, their whole stack of poker chips placed squarely on their future—she couldn’t.

  She would mess it up. And if she let him get in too deep with her, she’d mess him up, too. Just like she had with Trevor. She’d been selfish then, too. She’d made it about her.

  What she felt. What she was going through. What she needed.

  So even though the thought of starting something real with Wes made her ache down to her very cells with want, she couldn’t go down that road. Wes had hungry demons in his past as well. If she took this too far, let feelings develop into something more rooted and then hurt him, she’d be leading him back to all those temptations.

  Or, maybe he would beat her to the punch. If she opened her heart and really let herself feel those emotions again like she had when she was young—that yearning for love and commitment and romance—and then Wes walked away because he got bored or realized she was just a rebound phase or too screwed up to deal with, she wasn’t sure she’d recover.

  Wes could be her kill shot.

  A normal guy walking away was one thing. But Wes had cut deep tracks into her life already, and it’d only been a month. She couldn’t imagine how entrenched she’d become if she let it go on much longer. He would not be a man easily gotten over.

  When they’d started this thing, she’d thought he’d be an ideal choice to keep things light with. She’d expected a smooth-talking guy, the good-looking chef who knew how to have a good time. That was what she’d signed up for. But she hadn’t expected all the other sides to him. The mentor who had endless patience for troubled kids. The friend who held her after a panic attack and didn’t interrogate her about it. And the man who hadn’t been scared to tell her how he was feeling about what was going on between them.

  He was slipping right past all those guards and gates she’d had in place.

  So the offer he’d made tonight left her with no choice. She was going to have to say goodbye. End this before they both got burned up in the blaze of it.

  “I can feel you thinking, lawyer girl,” Wes said softly, the words drifting into the darkness of the bedroom. “What’s on your mind?”

  She swallowed past the knot in her throat. “Nothing. I’m just lying here.”

  Lying to you.

  Wes shifted a little beneath her, dragging her cheek along his chest. Only then did she realize her face was wet. His muscles tensed beneath her. “Bec, are you crying?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to herd her emotions back into the corral. “I’m fine. My eyes are watering.”

  Wes grunted and slipped from beneath her, leaving her on the edge of the pillow. He reached over, turned on the lamp, and then propped himself up on his elbow to look down at her. Whatever he saw on her face had his expression falling. “Hey, you are. What’s the matter?”

  She turned her head and swiped at her disobedient tears. “Sometimes people cry after sex. It’s a thing.”

  “It’s not your thing, though,” he said, pushing her hair away from her face. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Please…” she said, a plea in her voice. Not now. She didn’t want to do this now. She wanted a few more moments before she had to let it all go.

  Wes let out a breath. “I scared you.”

  She closed her eyes, her skin somehow hot and clammy all at once.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” he asked. “I said too much tonight, and I freaked you out. I shouldn’t have said—”

  She shook her head. “You can say what you want.”

  “Not if you’re not ready to hear it. Goddammit. I should’ve waited. I got all caught up, and I should’ve—”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered,” she whispered, the words like glass in her throat.

  “What?”

  She opened her eyes to look at him, finding that handsome face looking confused, concerned, caring. She hated herself in that moment. Hated that she’d done this to them both, that she’d let it get to this point. “That’s the thing.”

  “What is?”

  She met his eyes, more tears slipping silently from hers. “I’m never going to be able to hear it. There will never be a right time.”

  Wes stared at her as if the words hadn’t registered, but then his eyebrows lowered like storm clouds over the sun. “Oh.”

  “This thing with us, I can’t… This wasn’t supposed to be like…” The words weren’t coming out in any kind of logical way. She couldn’t make them cooperate. “With you. I’ll never…”

  Something chilled in his expression, a hardness sliding in place. “You’ll never want a relationship with me,” he said flatly. “Did I translate that right?”

  Yes. No. It’s not like that. “Wes…”

  He pushed up to a full sit and reached for his shirt, which was at the end of the bed. “No, it’s fine. I’m not that slow. I think I got it. I told you I wanted more. You have no interest in that. Message heard.”

  “Wes,” she repeated.

  But he shook his head. “Don’t. I get it, Rebecca. I was just supposed to be a distraction. I was supposed to be fun. I changed the game tonight without permission. My mistake. The lawyer just wanted a fling.”

  She sat up, pulling the covers up to cover herself, her heart pounding hard. “Please, don’t leave like this. It’s not you—”

  He scoffed and gave her a derisive look. “Please don’t do that. Don’t do the It’s not you, it’s me speech. You’ve told me from the start that I’m not your type. You told me you didn’t want anything serious. I’m clearly a bad listener.”

  Everything inside her was folding in on itself, collapsing as Wes climbed out of the bed to pull on his pants. She’d known this had to happen, but she didn’t want it to happen like this. “Wes, you know this never would’ve worked. I’m your rebound. And I’m—”

  “Ha! Fantastic. Now you’re fucking psychoanalyzing me, too? You and my brother should open a practice. Poor, addictive Wes is on the rebound or getting addicted to a girl or setting himself up for another failure.” He zipped up his pants with enough force to risk injury. “But no one seems to realize that I’m a grown-ass man. Yeah, I screwed up. Big time. I’m the first to admit that. But I also have been through enough now to know my own goddamned mind. I know what I feel. And unlike you, I trust those feelings.”

  He held his arms out to his sides. “So yes, this has been quick. Yes, I haven’t been in a healthy relationship probably ever, but that’s how I know what’s special when I see it now. This—how I feel, how things have been between us—is not normal. It’s been abnormal in the best possible way. Which is why I was willing to take the risk and tell you that tonight. Because I didn’t want to let it slip through my fingers.”

  Tears were flowing freely down her cheeks now, and she hugged her knees to her chest.

  “And you may not want a relationship with me,” he said, his voice bouncing off the walls, “but I’ll be damned if you try to tell me this w
as just physical for you. Because that’s bullshit. You know this was good. You know this was different.”

  Was. The past tense rang in her head. Was. They were now a was.

  She wanted to agree, to tell him he was right, but all she could say was, “I’m sorry.”

  He stared at her and then shook his head. “Right. You’re sorry. Me too.” He walked over to the dresser to grab his phone and keys. “Thanks for the food truck, Rebecca. I guess I at least got paid for my services, even if I had to take off more than my shirt.”

  She stiffened like he’d slapped her. But before she could respond, he was out the door.

  Gone.

  Like so many other people she’d loved in her life.

  She listened for the slam of the door and then, wrapped in her sheet, barely made it to the living room to lock up. She curled in the fetal position on her couch and let the tears have their way. Knight trotted over from his spot by the door and laid his head on her thigh, whimpering, which only made her cry harder. When she stroked his fur, he jumped onto the couch and curled up next to her as if to tell her she wasn’t alone. But she was. Again. Always.

  At least it was now and not one year, five years, ten years into something with Wes where she wouldn’t be able to recover. At least this pain was familiar.

  She’d gotten good at goodbyes.

  chapter

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Wes leaned on his elbows at the bar, watching the light catch the facets of the crystal lowball glass and the amber liquid inside. He’d ordered the most expensive whiskey on the menu and could smell the smoky scent even over the food scents in the bar. His knuckles were bloodless against the glass and had been that way for the last twenty minutes.

  “Something wrong with your drink, sugar?” the female bartender asked as she grabbed a few bills from the vacated spot two stools over.