by Serena Bell
And if she’d responded to the wild passion of their middle-of-the-night encounter, this was even better. She shivered and shifted at the light touch, and a sweet little whimper broke free from her and rattled around in his chest.
But then she stopped the kiss and frowned at him.
“What?”
“That wasn’t how you kissed me the other first time.”
The other first time. Funny that this felt like a first kiss to both of them, despite everything that had already passed between them.
“No? How did I do it?”
“You held my face. Like this.”
She reached for his hands and laid them against her skin, creamy and warm.
“And you looked at me for a long time. Your eyes were really dark and you kept staring, and I just looked back at you, and it was the hottest thing ever.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Her eyes were a bright blue that possibly didn’t exist anywhere else in nature, some gray in them, some purple. He could imagine he’d wanted to stare into them for a good long time, but it wasn’t really her eyes that had his attention right now. It was all the other details of her face—the fine pale arch of her eyebrows, the bright blush of her cheeks, the way her lips parted as he stared, the lower one begging to be bitten.
“And then what did I do?”
“You kissed the shit out of me.”
“Oh?” He raised an eyebrow.
“It had been a long time coming. We’d already had a few We can’t, we shouldn’t conversations. The tension was—insane.”
“Yeah?” Because the tension was pretty insane for him right now. Like something strung tight and set to vibrate, just behind his breastbone.
She nodded and bit her lower lip. Oh, hey. He wanted to be the one biting that lip.
“You want me to do it that way again? Just like the first time?”
He was expecting her to say yes, and he would have obliged her, but surprisingly, she shook her head no. “No. I want you to do it the way you were doing it just now. Light like that. You’ve never done that before, and—”
Her face was still in his hands, and he did want to kiss the shit out of her, but she was telling him something. Something important.
“—I like that it’s new for both of us.”
She said it shyly. Like she wasn’t sure, despite that kiss, if they were really doing this.
And they shouldn’t. They shouldn’t be doing this. Every line he crossed, every line he tugged her over, he risked hurting her.
But oh my God the way she was looking at him. Expectantly. Eagerly. And oddly fearlessly. As if she’d passed beyond all her reservations.
This must have been what it was like. Last time.
And he had the quickest flash—memory? Fantasy?—of her upturned face and her eyes locked on his and the feel of her mouth opening, yielding, under his, and his body thrummed, hard, and he knew he was going to kiss her again, no matter how bad an idea it was.
He leaned close and touched her mouth lightly with his again, and her mouth and the air around them and his fingertips and his whole fucking body buzzed with the power of it. She was trembling and electric, and one part of him wanted to wrap her up and hold her tight, strap her down, even, to control the high-tension-wire sizzle. The other part of him wanted to spend all night doing exactly what he was doing right now, brushing his mouth back and forth across hers, hearing her breath catch and lurch and sigh out of her, feeling that same breath like a touch on his skin.
How long could they do this? Sit here half-kissing, a touch so light it woke up every baby hair and sleepy nerve ending, a touch that without pressure or tickle or purposefulness felt like it had traveled across the whole surface of his skin? He was impatient for more; at the same time he never wanted it to stop.
She tilted her head up so his mouth slid down her jaw, down her throat, and—when she didn’t stop him—to where the curve of her breasts flared.
“It’s all backwards,” she said breathlessly. “A year ago, you had sex with me. Last week, you made me come.”
Hearing her say it, the frankness of it, got him the rest of the way to stupidly hard.
“And now you’re—”
His lips brushed back and forth just above the lace edge of her nightgown, silencing her.
He didn’t know what they were doing. There were so many things he didn’t know—who he was, who she was, what had happened, what would happen. But there were things he did know, too. The scent of her skin, here, where lace teased curves. The satin feel of it. The hitch in her breath. And so much more he wanted to know.
“Now,” he said, “I’m getting to know you.”
Chapter 16
She’d thought she’d known him. She’d thought she’d remembered. But she’d known nothing.
That night, she got to know his mouth. How soft his lips were when he was gentle, and then, suddenly, the mood shifting, how commanding. That his tongue could give pleasure a thousand different ways. The barest touch against her lips, a ghost drifting by. A slick shift against hers, raising every downy hair on her body. A thrust that told her he wasn’t going to hold back when they were naked, her legs spread for him. A tease against her upper lip that made her want to push him down between her thighs and open herself to his kiss.
She got to know his breath. The way it moved in her hair, against the shell of her ear, the hypersensitive skin where neck met shoulder. How it quickened when her body arched and curved under his, when she moaned with involuntary pleasure, when she pressed her hips against his erection.
She got to know his voice, how he whispered, cajoled, commanded, teased. Just like that, sexy. Oh, God, I love it when you make that noise. Love it. Oh. Oh. Do that again—when her fingers slipped into his briefs and wrapped briefly around him and her thumb slicked pre-cum over the head of his cock. Does that feel good?—when his erection settled right at the juncture of her thighs and he moved, so carefully over the cloth there, the friction hard enough to drive her mad but not hard enough to burn. You want more? Faster? Or how about this? Slower? Yeah? You like that?
She got to know the way his biceps bunched when he rose on his arms above her, how that position brought out his pecs and the cords in his neck and forearms. They were things she might have known before, but they were different now, because the look on his face was full of wonder and awe.
She had never known how many ways there were to kiss. Hundreds. Thousands. Softer. Harder. Faster. Slower. Just the corner, just this lip, just the tip, mouths falling open so wide, so deep, you could fall in, you could drown, you could swallow each other up. Teasing, inviting, yielding, giving up, giving in, throwing yourself away, getting lost, coming back and rising up and rolling over and being in charge, first him, then her, then him again, because she loved that, his weight on her, the bossiness of his kisses, the demand of his hands on her body, the insistence of his cock against her belly.
God. God, God, God.
Does it feel good? Can I make it feel better?
She got to know everything about his cock, the heat, the softness of the skin, the way velvet clung to steel. The cut head, smooth as silk from how tight the skin stretched. The slickness, the heft, the taste of him against her tongue when she ducked down, before he brought her back up to lick the taste of himself from her mouth. The way he rolled against her, first top to bottom, then side to side, like he couldn’t get enough, his breath panting hard now, his pupils blown wide and dark.
She got to know what he looked like when he started to lose control. A flush rising in his face. What he felt like against her, his rhythm going ragged. What he sounded like, a growl, a groan, kiss me again, keep kissing me, if you keep doing that I’m going to come, are you?
She kissed him and kissed him and kissed him. That was all it took. That and the way their bodies sought each other, through all the layers of clothes, through all the wrong turns and folds of time and memory.
She recogn
ized, long before he made the last thrust against her, long before his face contorted with it, before she cried out with it, before he tucked his head into her neck and lay spent and wrecked beside her, that this would be the first time. That even though he’d laid her bare, even though in the dark only days ago he’d taken her apart, even though he’d watched her lose herself in pleasure before, this was the first time, the only time. And that sense of wonder you can only have once—look what he did. Look what we did. Look—
That was how it felt. Like it had never happened before.
And it hadn’t. She’d never been taken apart so far she couldn’t be put back together again. This was the first time.
Chapter 17
“Hunter. Hunter!”
She was shaking him.
“I’m awake. I’m awake.” His mouth was dry, his heart pounding. In his mind’s eye, the dream was still sharp against all his senses. The oppressive, looming dark, the ache in his lungs from breathing the fine particles of dust, and—as he tried to clear his way through—those eyes peering from the blackness, shocked and accusing.
“Hunter, what is it?”
“I think I—I think I remember something.”
“You don’t think it was just a dream?”
“No. It was a memory.”
And, just beyond the dream, his mind knew there was something more to see and know, something crucial.
Something terrible.
What had the doctor said?
It’s also possible to have some retrograde amnesia even in response to psychological trauma. I’m sure you’ve heard of childhood abuse victims or even adult rape victims with no memory of the incident?
For all this time, since coming home to Trina, he’d wanted to remember the missing pieces. At first for his own benefit, because the lost time felt like a wounded place in his psyche. Then, last night, he’d wanted to remember so he could give himself back to her, whole. But now, suddenly, he wondered.
Did he want to know everything that was missing?
What if, in that gap between past and present, there was something he’d been so unable to grapple with that he’d chosen to elide it?
What would seeing it do to him?
What would it do to what lay between him and Trina?
“Hunter,” she whispered.
As his eyes adjusted to the light, he could see her a little bit, and the fear on her face reflected the fear that had suddenly sprung up in his heart.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “There was a building. It was supposed to be empty. But—it wasn’t empty. There was someone in it. And something terrible was about to happen.”
Her eyes were wide, startled. He’d frightened her. Not, he thought, with his words. He’d infected her with his own fear.
“But that could be any dream. Right? No reason to think it was a memory.”
He couldn’t explain why this felt different, why it felt—real. Why it felt like the truth, an unwanted truth. There was something, a dark shape, forming from the dread in his belly, like a golem forming out of riverbank mud, and it would rise and come for him. He knew that now. And—
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
If there was something there, and it was destined to surface, it would have the power to change who he was, just as he’d been changed by the discovery that he’d forgotten Trina and all she’d meant to him. And what men saw during war did, he knew that well.
If he remembered…if it changed who he was, changed what he believed—
“Hunter.”
She was calling to him. Trying to call him out of the dark place he’d slipped into. And God, he wanted to follow the sound of her voice.
“Talk to me.”
“What if—what if the thing I forgot is something I can’t live with?”
“Like what?” she asked.
“What if I did something, or didn’t do something, and someone died because of it?”
She closed her eyes. “That would be terrible,” she said. “But you would live with it. You would find a way to live with it.”
“What if you couldn’t live with it?”
“That wouldn’t happen.”
She sounded so certain. The same way she had when she’d told him his scars could never be ugly to her. He envied her certainty. The ground under his own feet was rutted, potholed, ready to trip him up. Things weren’t where he’d put them—neither real things in the real world nor his own thoughts.
“Shh,” she said, and kissed him. Her mouth was soft and warm, and that single kiss contained everything that had passed between them last night. God, she’d been amazing. Her mouth, her hands, her body against his. The sounds she made, how good she’d made him feel.
All he had to do was believe she was right. There was nothing in his head that would trip him up and bring him down. There was nothing ugly hidden in there, waiting to spring out of the dark. There was just Trina, beautiful in the light, and she was looking down at him patiently, waiting for him to come back from the nightmare so he could kiss her again.
He could believe her. He could.
He reached for her, then froze as a creak came from the hall. A door.
“Oh, shit,” she said. One of the girls was awake. His eyes found the clock. Six a.m. Probably too early for her to be up for good, but it was possible.
They lay still in the dark as the bathroom door opened and closed. The length of her, the heat of her—he was suddenly aware of his morning wood. He pressed himself against her and she giggled.
The toilet flushed, the bathroom door opened, footsteps receded down the hall, and the girls’ door creaked again.
They were undiscovered. For now.
“I should go back downstairs,” she said.
“Do you have to?”
“I think—I should, right?”
“Probably. Before the girls wake up.”
It was hard to think straight, with his mind still cloudy from sleep and the nightmare, with her thigh exerting enough pressure against his cock that he didn’t think it was accidental. She was leaving Saturday. Or—
Or he would ask her to stay longer.
But he couldn’t do that, could he? Couldn’t ask her to give up the opportunity to do what she’d always wanted to do. That thing that lit her up when she talked about it. Couldn’t ask her to bait-and-switch Phoebe again. Couldn’t ask her, not when he literally didn’t know his own mind.
She drew away from him, taking the caress of her leg, the heat of her body, with her.
She hesitated with her hand on the edge of the bed, her fingers close enough that if he’d moved his hand just a little, he could grab them.
And then she was gone.
—
It was hard for her to fall back to sleep. Her bed in the guest room was cold. A hard knot of anxiety formed in her chest. This was exactly what she wasn’t supposed to have let happen. She wasn’t supposed to let herself want and hope and have.
It could be so much worse now. Because he’d done it knowingly and willingly, and so if he took it away, that would be knowing and willing, too. And it would hurt that much more. And that sure as hell looked like what was happening. Last night, everything between them had been pure, easy, beautiful. And then this morning, he’d been panicked, ready to run away from her.
What the hell was she supposed to do? With two days to go, what the hell made sense? Nothing.
She didn’t know which man she’d find when she went downstairs, the one who’d begged for stories and then brought her new, better fantasies to life—or the one who’d woken up panicked.
And she didn’t know which man she wanted to find. Maybe it would be easiest if he turned away from her, refused to acknowledge what had happened. Pushed her away and let her go without drawing her in further.
God knew, the further in she got, the harder it would be to walk away.
And she had to walk away. Right?
> Unless—
Unless he could give her some certainty. Something like a promise. And she couldn’t expect that from a man who was hurt and confused.
Fuck.
She got up, pulled on her clothes, and went out to the kitchen. He was there, frying eggs on an electric griddle. The girls were nowhere in sight.
He raised his gaze and smiled.
Oh, hell, she thought, because she’d almost fainted from relief, and that told her how doomed she was. She could lie to herself all she wanted, tell herself it would be better if he pushed her away, but deep down, at the fifty-second level, she knew what she wanted.
“Hello, sleepyhead. Something keep you up late?”
She wanted to glare at him, but all she could do was grin like a schoolgirl.
He looked her over, his eyes lingering over her breasts, where she could feel her nipples tightening under the soft knit. She should have put a bra on. Or not. She liked the color rising in his cheeks. And the way his gaze wouldn’t let hers go.
“How do you like your eggs?”
“Over hard.”
“I would have said just hard enough. Didn’t hear you complaining.”
She shot him a glance and found him smirking at her. “Have you been waiting for me to show up so you could make that joke?”
“Just thought of it, actually.”
“What would you have said if I’d said ‘over easy’?”
He flipped an egg and tipped his head, thinking. “Probably, ‘Mmm. Yeah. That’s the way I like it, too.’ ” He loaded the words with innuendo.
She shivered. He probably could have said just about anything in that voice and had the same effect on her. “ ‘Sunny side?’ ”
He laughed. “ ‘Honey, both sides are your sunny side.’ ”
“You would not have.”
And yet, as utterly ridiculous as the words were, the way he was running his eyes over her, the rough edge in his voice—that probably would have worked, too.
“No,” he admitted. “I wouldn’t have. You just happen to have served me up the best straight line ever.” He tossed two pieces of thick-cut ham onto the griddle. “Come here.”