by Lucy Monroe
They’d eaten naked, feeling grown-up and naughty, no clue what the future held for them both.
That weekend, they’d shared the kind of intimacy that wasn’t supposed to be possible when you were young and naïve.
At one point, Rachel had been determined to taste every inch of his body. Kadin had let her, but it had pushed him to the limits of his control.
When he’d finally snapped, he’d made love to her with near-violent passion. And she’d met him thrust for thrust, hungry kiss for hungry kiss, until they’d both collapsed into sleep so deep, they hadn’t heard their wakeup call the next morning.
She’d been so certain that weekend that this man would be hers for a lifetime.
Instead, they’d only seen each other twice more before he’d been sent to the Middle East. When he returned a year later after increasingly sporadic letters and e-mails, he broke it off with her, telling her that she just didn’t fit his life anymore.
No wonder. He’d seen her as an idealized version of herself she could never hope to be.
He, on the other hand, really had been her ideal man. Probably still was, if she let herself think about it, scars and all. His only important flaw? The fact that he didn’t love her and never really had.
But love and happily-ever-after were for other people. Hadn’t Rachel realized that finally after learning of Linny’s suicide?
She only had now, and she was set on taking advantage of it.
Her fingertips found another scar on his back, and she outlined it with a barely-there touch.
He grumbled, “Afghanistan.”
“It feels like a gunshot wound.” She should know. There was a distinctive pattern to the puckering of her own flesh where she’d been shot.
“It is.”
“There’s no exit wound.”
“The medic had to dig it out. I was out of commission for a while, but they got me back into the field. And I got my target before I passed out from the pain.”
“A Marine’s too tough to stop fighting because of something so little,” she mocked, hiding the fact that she was more impressed than she wanted to be.
He really was a hero.
He kissed along her hairline, teasing her ear with his tongue. “I didn’t check myself out of the hospital against medical advice.”
No, that had been her, but she hated hospitals with a deep, abiding passion. She could never shake the memories of that time in the hospital after her parents’ accident. Her dad had been pronounced dead on arrival, but by a cruel twist of fate, Rachel had been there, dropping off another girl who worked with her at the chain pancake house.
The other girl had cut herself after dropping a tray of glasses. She’d gotten four stitches and gone home. Rachel’s life had been changed forever by that trip to the ER, though.
She’d stood on the sidewalk, horrified as she watched the paramedics roll the first stretcher into the ER. She’d seen the blood and the broken, lifeless body and had no idea it was her dad. The second ambulance arrived, and another stretcher was rolled out, and Rachel had seen it was her mom.
Then she’d known.
The next hours were spent in a haze as she waited for her mom to wake up, agonized over knowing she’d have to tell Mom that Dad was dead. The doctors were so hopeful that, despite the extensive injuries and coma, Mom would rally and get out of the ICU.
They’d been wrong, and Rachel had never had to deliver the devastating news. To Mom. She’d had to tell Linny and their grandmother.
“Good to know,” Rachel said, pushing the old trauma away. “You still have a practical streak.”
“You still don’t.”
“You’d be surprised at how practical I can be now.”
He tugged her top off. “Maybe I’m more interested in your wanton streak.”
Chapter Seventeen
“It’s still here.” But only with him. Only for him.
He followed the line of lace along the top of her bra cup with his fingertip. “I knew this would look hot on you.”
“I couldn’t help noticing that all the undergarments you bought me are on the sexy side.”
“A man has to take his pleasures where he can.”
She shook her head, smiling. “So, you’re saying that you’re an opportunist?”
“Can I help it that it excites me to think of you looking so damn sexy where no one else gets to see?”
She looked down at his impressive erection and shook her head. “I guess not.”
“Would you want me to?”
“No.”
As he undressed her, Rachel went back to touching the marks on his skin that hadn’t been there ten years ago. He continued telling her where each one was from, and she would touch, kiss or lick them … sometimes all three.
He was shaking with need, his sex engorged and leaking steady drops of pre-come when she gave a biting kiss to the last scar on his left thigh. (That had been a knife wound like one of her own.)
She knelt before him, completely naked now, her fingers gliding over the firm contours of his thighs. “It’s hard to believe the knife could pierce your muscle—it’s like granite.”
His gaze shifted to a knife scar that marred her right side. “They’re damn effective weapons, knives.”
“Not effective enough.” She was still alive, and so was he.
“It was too damn close.”
“Was it?” she asked, surprised, because the scar on his thigh wasn’t very big and nowhere near an artery.
“Not that. Yours.” His erection hadn’t flagged, but his mind was clearly going places she didn’t want it to right this minute.
“Stop. I healed. I’m fine.”
“Show me.”
She smiled up at him, knowing he didn’t mean what she was about to do, but that just made it better. He expected her to stand, to let him do some touching, too.
Instead, she opened her mouth and took the head of his cock inside. The sweet, only slightly salty, flavor of his pre-ejaculate exploded over her palate as the scent she would never forget filled her nostrils.
His own unique fragrance, strongest right at the base of his penis. It was a clean scent that drove her crazy with need.
She’d read about pheromones, but he was the only man whose scent caused her body to prepare for his.
He gave a harsh groan, tilting his pelvis toward her. “So good, Rachel.”
She knew. He loved this. She hadn’t done it for anyone else. Ever. Didn’t know if it was easier with a smaller penis. Didn’t care.
She liked the way her jaw stretched around him, the way only the head fit comfortably in her mouth. She always pushed farther, but he’d never pressed her to go so far that she gagged.
And he never made her feel like it wasn’t enough. She wrapped her hand around the long, thick shaft, stroking him in time with the movements of her head. He reached down and enclosed her hand in his, helping. Exciting her so much, she could feel the wetness between her legs.
“Shit, angel … that’s too good.” He sounded like a man in pain, but she knew it was the opposite.
She would have laughed if her mouth wasn’t too busy.
“I’m going to come, Rach,” he groaned out.
She didn’t let up on her suction, or the movements of her hand.
He didn’t pull his hand away, either, showing what he wanted to happen, even if he was giving her the out.
She reached up with her spare hand and tugged gently on his balls, something else she remembered he loved. Kadin shouted as he came, his salty essence shooting down the back of her throat.
She always forgot how strong the flavor was—so different from pre-come. Or maybe it had been the intervening years, but she swallowed quickly, feeling a primeval joy in taking him inside her this way.
It didn’t have to make sense. Even he didn’t need to understand.
She only knew she liked it.
Still half hard, he pulled back. The satiated pleasure in his gaze in no way d
iminished the desire there. “Your turn, angel.”
“I …” She hadn’t let anyone go down on her, either. Not in a decade.
The sex she had had was accomplished with rubbers and efficiency, at her instigation. And maybe that was one reason it had never come close to comparing to this.
It didn’t matter.
Kadin never let her pull back. He would give her pleasure until she screamed from it. And she would revel in the sensations only he could wring from her.
He lifted her to her feet and then swung her into his arms and carried her to the bed.
“I never realized what a caveman streak you’ve got going,” she teased.
“You bring it out in me.”
She believed him but had no breath to say so as he started touching her in ways guaranteed to bring her to the brink before his mouth ever closed over her sex.
He played her body with the confidence and expertise of a master. The master of her pleasure.
By the time he pushed her legs wide and up, she was shivering with unsatisfied desire. He smiled as he took in her sex. “Still so pretty down here, all dark pink and swollen, shiny with wetness.”
“It’s just skin.”
“Shaped into kissable lips and a tasty morsel I like sucking.” His words alone sent electric bolts of sensation zinging through her.
He dropped down until his mouth hovered over her mound and inhaled deeply. “Mmmm … you smell so good, too, so sweet.”
“I smell like sex.”
“Yeah.” That one word was laced with enough satisfaction for a soliloquy.
His tongue darted out, flicking her clitoris with unerring accuracy before he licked the highly sensitive flesh, tasting her as only he had ever been allowed to do. He played with her clitoris, alternating between using the tip and flat of his tongue, enhancing her pleasure with every tiny movement but never pushing her over to orgasm.
“Kadin … please,“ she groaned.
He lifted his head, their gazes meeting, his lips slick with her wetness. “Please what, angel?”
“You know.”
“Why don’t you tell me, anyway?”
“Make me come!” The demand would have been more forceful if it hadn’t sounded so much like a plea.
He smiled, and a thick finger slid inside her. She contracted around it, whimpering and squirming, needing more.
“You are the most beautiful women alive when you are like this.”
Back in the day, she might have teased him about thinking she wasn’t beautiful all the time. Instead, she whispered, “I’m glad you think so.”
He nodded, his brown eyes so dark with passion, they were almost black. Then he lowered his head again, and it wasn’t his tongue that scraped against her swollen bud. It was his teeth. Oh, so gently, with exactly enough pressure, his teeth worried her clitoris with devastating effect.
She nearly came off the bed, her body bowing in intense pleasure. “Kadin!”
His only answer was to slide his other hand up her body until he could reach one of her nipples. He tweaked and played, alternating between plumping her breasts and teasing the oversensitive buds at their tips.
Her climax came roaring out of nowhere, the scream that accompanied it a pure release of passion so primal, she didn’t care about the twinge it gave her throat.
She was still shaking with aftershocks when he surged up over her, sliding between her legs with his newly engorged sex. He stopped with the head pressing against her entrance.
“Okay?” he asked, his skin flushed, his muscles rigid with the effort it took to control himself.
She nodded, knowing it should be too much, but somehow it wasn’t. His possession stretched her swollen, tender flesh to a point just short of pain.
This feeling that she knew no other man could ever give her had less to do with climaxing than the sensation of completeness during coitus.
He pressed forward so their bodies touched from the juncture of her thighs up to the point where her breasts pressed against his hairy chest. Covered in a fine sheen of sweat, they slid against each other, the extra load of sensations of that simple movement impacting her sensitized body with tsunami-like power and making her post-orgasmic aftershocks into mini-cataclysms all their own.
His big, soldier’s body shuddered as her vaginal walls contracted around him over and over again. “Oh, yeah, angel … just like that.”
She smiled, feminine power surging through her, and repeated the involuntary movement voluntarily, squeezing so tightly, she gave herself another mini-climax.
“Shit …” His voice trailed off as he thrust deep inside her. “Nothing else like this ever.”
And there wouldn’t be. For either of them. Because this kind of sex? It was like worship, and it only happened once in a lifetime. She was sure of it.
“We fit here,” she said on gasping breaths as he moved against her, his big body covering her and filling her with sensual delight and that ephemeral sense of safety she knew better than to ever take for granted again.
“Yes, angel. I never should have walked away.”
Sex confessions didn’t count. They weren’t real. Everybody knew that, but her heart still liked hearing him admit the mistake. Even if he wouldn’t feel the same when his dick wasn’t buried as deeply inside her as it could possibly go.
“I loved you, Rachel.”
“Yes.” For a long time, she’d convinced herself it had all been a lie, but life wasn’t that black-and-white.
And she knew it now.
“You loved me, too.”
“I did.” Enough not to have cared that he’d become the kind of man who did things he thought her idealistic self couldn’t have handled.
But there was no point in saying that now.
“You’re all I wanted in a woman,” he said against her neck, the words achingly sweet and sad at the same time.
She turned her head, brushing his lips with her own. “Shh … no more talking.”
No more lies, even if he thought he meant them.
He kissed her, saying things with his mobile lips and surging body she couldn’t believe any more than the words he’d spoken out loud.
They’d both climaxed once already, so the pleasure built slowly, and Rachel let herself get lost in the slide of their bodies, the devouring of their lips. The urgency increased so subtly from one moment to the next that, once again, she was on the edge without realizing it.
But he wasn’t ready to let her go over. He wanted more. She remembered him in this mood, and she let him have his way.
He pulled out, maneuvering her onto her stomach and then up onto her hands and knees before slamming back into her with one long, powerful thrust.
Mewling sounds fell from her lips, and she felt no shame in that. “You feel even bigger this way.”
He went deeper, bumping her cervix, completely claiming her body with each tilt of his pelvis.
He reached around, pressing his middle finger into her slickened folds, caressing her clitoris and heightening her pleasure until her second, mind-shattering climax exploded through her.
She cried out, the aftershocks so intense, it was like a string of orgasms devastating her body and rocking the very foundation of her world.
“Yes, Rachel, my angel!” he shouted as he came inside her, coating her channel with his seed.
Hot moisture tracked down her face to drop below her onto the bed. She would never have let anyone else see those tears, but when he turned her head to the side to kiss her, she made no effort to hide her reaction to what they’d just done.
His dark eyes filled with an emotion she would never trust again but that warmed her all the same. “It’s almost too much, isn’t it?”
He understood. Someone else might have thought she was crying with regret or pain, but not him.
He understood that it was part of a release so intense, her body needed more than a scream to acknowledge it. It needed tears.
Kadin brushed his hand
down Rachel’s cheek. She was so beautiful in sleep, peaceful in a way she never could be awake. She’d fallen into slumber almost before he’d pulled out of her earlier but had snuggled right into him as he tucked them both under the light blankets.
Her tears after climax had nearly unmanned him. Damned if he hadn’t felt moisture burning in his own eyes, as well. The sex had been that good.
Powerful. Miraculous, even.
He didn’t know how he was going to live the rest of his life without it, but one thing had become very clear when they talked before making love. Rachel blamed him as much as she blamed herself for Linny’s death.
Maybe even more.
She might have been able to forgive his stupidity as a twenty-year-old kid thinking she was better off without him. She might even have forgiven his weakness in walking away rather than facing her rejection. But she could never let go of the resentment she felt for the loss of her baby sister.
How could she? Linny was gone, just like Rachel’s parents, leaving her alone in a world that had taken so much more from her than it had ever given.
And he’d been part of that loss, making everything worse when he’d convinced himself he was protecting her, giving her a chance at a normal life.
He’d been twenty and, yes, an idiot.
He was older and wiser now, but his window for happiness with Rachel was closed, and he was the one who’d pushed it shut.
Regret rode him harder than a Humvee trip through the mountains of Afghanistan, and there was nothing he could do to alleviate it, either.
No magical mix of words that would make it all better. Not when his weakness had cost Rachel the one person she’d always wanted to protect above all others.
Rachel stirred beside him. He forced the sadness from his expression, giving her a smile as her pretty pale eyes fluttered open.
She didn’t return it, further emphasizing the yawning gap between them.
“What time is it?”
“Time for dinner.” Spazz had knocked on the door a few minutes earlier.
Rachel nodded, moving to get up.
He pulled her back to him. “Hey.”