by Edie Harris
“Don’t care.”
He nipped the tendon along her throat in warning. “This isn’t the right time or place,” he hissed, parroting his earlier thoughts, but now he needed the reminder. His hands fell to her ass, palmed those perfectly round cheeks and squeezed.
She gasped and gave a delighted little wriggle. “Time and place hasn’t stopped you before.”
“Ilda.”
“No, no. I can be quiet. I promise.” Apparently done arguing, she began to cajole, stroking over his shoulders, the perspiring skin of his nape, tunneling through his buzzed hair. “Please, Casí.” Her lips pressed to his neck, beneath his ear. “Please, I’m so confused.”
He leaned into her even more, relishing the press of her full breasts against his chest. “How are you confused?” The yearning in her voice morphed into something resembling pain, and he was helpless to not take that pain from her. It was his duty, as her husband, her right to demand it of him as his wife.
“Us. You and me, marido...we’re a mess.” Her trembling had him flattening her to the exterior wall, his bruising grip moving from her bottom to her naked thighs. She raked her fingernails gently over his scalp, her excited breaths warm at his ear. “I want to say I don’t know what to do, but it’s a lie. I do know. I’m just... I’m not ready.”
She wasn’t speaking of this, between them, but of his reappearance, his demands, how he was practically fucking begging her to leave with him. His selfishness was hurting her, but he didn’t know how to be less selfish where she was concerned. Ilda, singular Ilda, made him gluttonous for every inch of her, inside and out. He was ready. No matter what she said, he was ready, but he knew enough to realize that he had no clue what it really meant to be a husband. A father.
Reassure her. His thumbs dug into toned muscle, kneading her, forcing her to widen those thighs just a titch more. He kissed her jaw. “You have to be so quiet, baby. Not a sound, understand?” A thought struck him, worry and wonder at once. “Condoms. I...we didn’t use one the other day.” And he didn’t have one on him now.
She tensed in his arms momentarily before melting into him once more. “I can’t get pregnant.”
He shouldn’t poke, he knew he shouldn’t. But—”You can’t because...?”
Her breath shuddered out. “Because I had the doctor tie my tubes after Arlo was born.” She sighed and buried her face in his shoulder. “It was a difficult birth, and...and I don’t know what you want me to say, Casí.” Her whisper broke with her next words. “I-I didn’t want any more children if they couldn’t be yours.”
His eyes went wet, and he squeezed them shut. Now he was the one clinging, his arms banding around her as he attempted to absorb her into his pores. He simply clutched her to him, needing to lock his knees to keep them both upright. Every breath sawed in his lungs, the humid night air expanding in his chest until his entire body was a giant bruise. He could barely process all that her statement implied.
That she’d suffered so greatly in carrying Arlo.
That she’d mourned him so deeply that she couldn’t countenance carrying another child—a brother or sister for Arlo—if he wasn’t the father.
That he’d denied her the chance at future children by not watching the goddamn satellite footage all the way through four years ago. If he had, he would’ve returned to Colombia, found her, taken her, kept her. He would have been the man to help her through that difficult birth, done what Pipe had and cared for her.
In the back of his mind, he realized as he inhaled her shower-fresh scent, he had thought he would get a second chance. An opportunity for a do-over, once he got Ilda and Arlo out of Medellín. It may have been skipping seven steps ahead, but he’d been banking on another baby with her, somewhere down the road. It wasn’t anything his conscious mind had been aware of, but now that the thought had taken root, Casey struggled against the onslaught of grief.
Except he had no right to grieve. He’d barely figured out the husband thing, much less fatherhood, in the handful of days for which it had been his reality. How could he want more, already? But it wasn’t more he wanted, only all of it. He wanted the entire daddy experience, every minute of it—but there were no minutes to be had if he didn’t get his family to safety.
“You said to remind you why you fell for me.” She nodded, and he eased his grip, settling her against the wall again and sweeping his hands up her thighs to tease the hem of her tiny shorts. “I’ll never know why you approached me in the first place, Ilda, but I know why you kept coming back.” Reaching between their bodies, he yanked aside the crotch of her cotton shorts, thrilling in her lack of panties as he dipped two fingertips into her wetness. “Oh, feel that. You know, too.”
She muffled her moan against his jaw.
He couldn’t keep from talking. “I want my mouth here, baby,” he whispered, stroking along her slick folds. “Want my tongue dipping in, fucking you.” One of his fingers slid deep, and she made the best noise. “No, no, you can’t whimper like that. God, it makes my cock so fucking hard, but you can’t.”
Her teeth scraped along the stubbled line of his jaw, the hot, wet clasp of her a temptation he had no hope of denying. “Want another finger? Can you take another for me—? Oh, you good girl.” He had two fingers buried in her now, pumping slowly in and out, the rough pads of his fingertips pressing and petting against the spot on her inner wall that made her clench and gasp and scrape her nails aggressively over the back of his neck.
His cock hurt, he was so hard, and he shifted his hips to thrust against her, bumping his knuckles and her clit. He was uncoordinated, constrained and limited, but she didn’t seem to care. Hell, neither did he.
Sliding his littlest finger through her wetness and between the taut cheeks of her bottom, he circled her entrance there. “Remember when you gave up this perfect ass to me?” He tongued the spot beneath her ear as he applied pressure with his finger. “Nod if you remember.”
Ilda nodded, her breath catching audibly, and Casey felt another piece of his control dissolve into nothingness. “Yeah, I remember, too. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten off on the memory of taking you here. That night on the roof of your building, when I slid in deep, filled you good and fucked you slow and hard. And you loved it.” He slipped inside then, effectively penetrating both of her exquisite holes. “So fucking hot, baby. God, I want it again. I want this fine ass now, Ilda, but I want to take my time, and time’s what we don’t have.”
Her moan this time was loud—too loud. Covering her mouth with the hand not busy pleasuring her, he leaned into her, using his weight to pin her to the wall, leaving her no chance of falling or escaping. Yet her writhing form kept rubbing him right, so right, and he reveled in the friction created by this new angle. “Look how wet you are, just from three fingers filling you.”
Her breaths puffed against his hand, her tongue darting out to trace a pattern on his palm. To stifle his own needy groan, he sank his teeth into the side of her neck, uncaring whether he left a mark behind this time, laving the skin with his own tongue. “You taste so sweet to me, Ilda. Especially here.” He thrust his fingers deeper inside her. “I could get down on my knees right now and settle you in for a ride on my tongue. Is that what you want?”
She didn’t speak, but her eyes, when he lifted his head to study her face in the shadows of the night sky, pleaded with him for something else. Something more.
Withdrawing his fingers from her body and removing his hand from across her mouth, he gripped her backside firmly, tipping his forehead to hers. “If you let my cock inside you again, Ilda, it’s because you want a future with me, understand? Can’t just scratch an itch, even if the scratching is the best we’ve ever had. I love you too much. God, I never stopped loving you.” He swallowed around the lump in his throat that told him the truth of it, even as he spoke the words. “I will always love you.”
“Casí.”
“If this is only fucking, I can’t do it again.” He bit back the na
me he wanted to give her. His fénix. “It’ll destroy m—”
Her lips sealed to his, cutting off his words with a kiss that stole his breath and shredded his heart. That soft mouth, that teasing tongue, she drugged him, dragging him under until his head swam. Only a single point of clarity pulsed in the darkness, but he couldn’t, wouldn’t put name to it again if she wasn’t willing to meet him halfway. Damn, even a third of the way would work for him. Just so long as she let him into her body, her mind, her heart and allowed him to be the husband and father he so desperately needed to be.
She broke away and settled her lips against his ear. “When I met you, when I looked into your eyes, I thought you were my missing half. Until that point, I hadn’t known half of me was missing, but it was. It was.” A gentle kiss to his ear, so soft as to be barely tangible. “That’s why I married you, Casey Faraday.”
“That’s why I married you, Ilda Almeida.” His cheek pressed against hers, he adjusted his hold on her, one arm looping beneath her bottom as he tore at his fly, desperate to relieve his aching erection from its confines and find freedom in her gorgeous cunt. Another tug at the crotch of her shorts, and he tested her entrance with his blunt, heavy head. “You ready for me?”
“Always, marido.” Her eagerness coated him, coaxed him. “Don’t let go.”
“Never.” Covering her mouth once more with his palm, he filled her with a single, smooth stroke, his forehead falling to the stable wall above her shoulder. “Oh, God, baby, it’s so good.” When they’d had their reunion in the hotel room days ago, he had been too out of his mind to appreciate just how glorious it was being bare inside her, but now. Now. Her heat was unlike anything he’d ever known, the silky slick grip of her clutching him so sweetly he could hardly breathe.
Each thrust of his hips threatened to jar her body against the wall, but he scrabbled for control because he knew the risk they took, joining like this in a frenzy, unprotected from the elements, from eyes and ears and terrible discovery. He could stop it, he knew he could, but it felt imperative that he not. Every time he entered her, again and again and again, this...this thing between them grew. It cemented, soldered, forged itself anew, and that was why he could not, would not ever stop in this moment.
Her moans were captured within his palm, her wriggling body a live wire as it met his. Her arms clung, fingers gripping with punishing strength for one so petite, but he loved it. Loved her. She responded to him as no one else, a match for him in all ways. His missing half. “Being inside you,” he panted, harsh, “it fixes all the grief, the pain. It makes everything right again.” Another thrust, another delicious dig of her fingernails along his shoulder blades. “Tell me it feels right to you.” But just as he was about to lift his hand, he hesitated. “On second thought, not gonna let that pretty mouth say a word. Don’t want you to break my heart.” And to hear her deny them would break his heart, fragile thing that it was.
Every slide was perfection. “I need this, need you, for the rest of my life, Ilda. Like it would’ve been, if...” He felt no shame in admitting this weakness for her, nor any regret in bringing up what he would have given her if only he’d known she still lived. The arm securing her tightened as his movements grew jerky, frenetic. “No future exists for me where we’re not together, baby. Tell me you know that.” And he lifted his hand from her mouth, bracing himself for whatever torture fell from between her lips.
Her inner muscles fluttered around him, hurtling toward the end, the very end. “I know it, Casí. I know it.” When she came, she dragged him along with her, into the abyss he craved only with her.
Gasping into the crook of her neck, he waited for his pulse to slow and his brain to clear. He was aware of the sound of her unsteady breaths, the sweat dampening their skin, the lingering aftereffects of her orgasm wringing him dry. When he felt relatively under control, he surrendered to temptation and nuzzled a meandering path up to her temple, where he pressed his lips in a tender kiss. His heart pounded painfully, filled to bursting with what he felt for her—his love for her.
For Ilda, and for Arlo. “I meant what I said,” he murmured as he withdrew gently, fumbling to right both his appearance and hers but making no move to release her. “You’re my future. You always have been.” His hands stroked down her back before he adjusted their position, until he alone carried her weight, the wall no longer propping them upright. “But I need to be clear about something.”
In his arms, his wife tensed, but said nothing to stop him.
“There is no world in which I don’t have a relationship with my daughter.” The truth of those words lay heavy in his whispered warning. “Do you understand? If that means I risk my life to fly down here every week and see Arlo in secret, I’ll do it. If it means I stay embedded in the Marin cartel indefinitely, then fine, I stay.” No matter that his days were already numbered so long as Pipe lived.
“Why aren’t you just...just trying to take her from me?” Ilda’s voice trembled in his ear, making him want to pet her, soothe her.
But despite the intimacy of the moment and the stark honesty of his emotions, he couldn’t soften. Not when his future with Arlo was at stake. “Because she’s your daughter, and I’m not a monster. I won’t lie, protecting you—both of you—is my first priority, and I’ll protect you better outside of Colombia.” Giving in, he wrapped his arms around her fully in an unyielding embrace. “Let me take care of you, as I would have if we’d all been dealt a better hand four years ago.”
Her cheek rubbed against his. “I have to make the best decision for Arlo.”
“I am the best decision for Arlo, I swear I am. And for you, too.”
Pulling her head back, she frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
Casey’s already-aching heart wrenched sideways. “I mean that you’re allowed to choose what’s best for you, too. You can be selfish.” He watched his words penetrate. “You deserve to be selfish, Ilda, amor—it’s the rest of your goddamn life.”
Please, God, let her be selfish.
Chapter Fourteen
London
Tobias lay on the bed, trailing his fingertips up and down Chandler’s naked spine as she sprawled atop him. Perspiration gathered on his skin, and he smiled smugly against the top of her head, a cloud of honey-blond hair mussed from his desperate hands and soft along his jaw. “You’re going to kill me one of these days.”
“I’m glad you’re at least aware I’m trying.”
And he couldn’t imagine dying happier than he was in this instant, sated but still inside her body, feeling her clench around him as the aftershocks of her orgasm faded away. “All I said was that I would stop having the jeweler send over engagement ring options.”
He felt her grin against his bare chest, right over his heartbeat. “I know.”
“And that made you jump me?”
“You’ve made me look at fifty rings, Cheekbones. I’m bored.”
Except he knew better. “You’re overwhelmed. I’m pushing too hard.” His fingers paused in their stroking, and he frowned at the ceiling overhead. He simply didn’t see the point in putting the brakes on their life together just when it had picked up real momentum. They were in the flat he’d purchased, the flat decorated by her twin sister, Pippa, to reflect Chandler’s tastes; Tobias had wanted her to feel utterly at home in this space, in her city. The city he had chosen to make his home, as well, for as long as Chandler’s work was here.
He wanted his ring on her finger, and hers on his. He wanted to give her his name, his family, his protection—not that she required any of that, but it didn’t stop him from wanting to offer her these things regardless.
Shifting in his arms, she flattened her hands over his sternum and propped her chin so she could stare straight at him. “No. I want you to push.” Her brandy-brown eyes crinkled at the corners as she pursed her lips, obviously unwilling to smile fully as she set him back on his heels. “What I don’t want is for you to continue trying to distract me with shiny
objects.”
“Distract you from what?”
Her gaze narrowed. “You don’t actually believe I’m buying this innocent act you’ve got going.”
Sometimes the best defense was silence. Were he his own client, he’d definitely advise himself to keep quiet at this particular juncture. Instead, he spread his hands along her lower back, reveling in the smooth, warm skin that seemed to melt under his touch. Touching her was the craziest privilege, something he’d never dared imagine in all his years of devoting himself to Faraday Industries. All those years of eating, breathing, sleeping solely for the work he did, and what that work meant for his parents, siblings and the thousands of employees who depended on them for a paycheck every other week.
He didn’t resent his responsibilities, not in the least, especially since he still intended to take on even more responsibility in the coming months. Tobias needed his siblings to step back from the business that was consuming their souls and keeping them from living full lives, and he was fully prepared to absorb the future fallout from their lessened leadership.
Mostly, he knew he could do this—take over Faraday Industries—because he’d have Chandler by his side. Someone who belonged to him and him alone. Someone who would challenge him, soothe him, love him...and protect him. More than anyone else in the world, he trusted her to have his back when the chips were down. No doubt the chips would be down more than once in their life together.
Which, of course, explained why he’d had the jeweler deliver engagement rings—in sets of seven, wrapped in black velvet—to their flat every other day for the past two weeks, hoping she might find something she fancied amidst the glittering array of diamonds and platinum. Because he was having a tough time keeping his mouth shut about the thing that it wasn’t his place to share.
“Toby.” Her fingernails dug into his chest then, hard enough to make him wince, sharp enough to remind him that no matter the uncomfortably domestic fantasies he sometimes had surrounding her, Chandler would never be a tame house cat. Honestly, he didn’t know if he’d be quite so fascinated with her if she was. “You’re keeping things from me.”