“Starting now?” I ran my hands up his back, pressing until he lay on top of me.
“Starting an hour ago.” The next kiss was tender, clinging. “I love you, Daley.”
Again. Gentle. Passion held in check, obvious in the tightness of his back and his thighs between mine, his focus on the words and their meaning rather than the physical evidence of them. “I will love you forever.”
“I love you, too, Adam.” I cradled his face in my hands so I could meet his eyes and make sure he knew I meant it. “You have all of me. Nothing held back. No fear.” Even as I said the words other, darker things protested them.
Adam wasn’t my whole world, couldn’t be. Specters of past mistakes and anticipation of future horrors lurked, seeking a gap they could squeeze through. But I fought them off. They were for tomorrow, or next week. They couldn’t be allowed in here, to mar the joy we’d finally found.
I slid my hands down to Adam’s hips and he nudged me. I throbbed and opened to him, lifting my hips and panting with the need to have him inside. It had to be skin on skin, no barriers. From this moment on, I would never regret what happened between Adam and me.
He held back, and I knew he was going to ask. I shook my head and pressed upward until he’d penetrated the barest amount, the only depth I could get without his cooperation.
“Please, Adam.” The love and need and happiness welled up in me and spilled over, tears trickling out of the corners of my eyes and ridiculously into my ears. “I need you. Now, like this. Please.” I remembered Ian telling me I’d projected my emotions during sex. Why had that disturbed me? I wanted to share what I was feeling with Adam. Needed him to really know what he meant to me.
He gave in, sinking deep into me with a long sigh and burying his face in my neck. I wrapped my legs around his and thrust upward as he pushed down, and we rocked in a slow, tight rhythm, our arms wrapped around each other, our bodies closer than I’d ever thought bodies could be. I lost awareness of the temperature of the room, the color of the light, the softness of the bed or rough texture of the comforter on my back. I wanted him there, deep and hard, forever.
But it was too good, and I couldn’t hold back. The orgasm rolled up through me, out to my toes and fingers, making it impossible to hold on. I gasped and squeezed around Adam as he slid in and out. He cried out and lifted his head and shoulders, changing the angle suddenly and picking up the pace as he neared his own release. I exploded, the shock of it making my lax muscles clench. I felt my nails dig into his shoulders, my heels denting his calves, as he burst into me and I throbbed in the deepest pleasure I’d ever felt.
Slowly he relaxed, still rocking. His chest scraped over my nipples. I let out a whimper, overcome by the sensitivity of my entire body. His eyes locked on my face, seeing something I couldn’t imagine. He reached between us and pressed his thumb to my clit as he rocked and I went up again, this time hovering on a sharp, intense shard I could barely stand. I sobbed and bit his shoulder, realizing that he’d hardened again. He moved faster, rubbed harder, and I screamed a scream as long and as thin as the orgasm piercing me. He shook, groaning, and then collapsed against me. Fine tremors went through us both and I couldn’t stop crying. Adam kept stroking my hair, long, soothing strokes, but I felt raw, exposed, and even as my heart swelled with unbearable love, it ached with everything else.
I couldn’t hold the rest at bay any more. Evan, Charles, HQ, but mostly Summer, and I cried for a long time before I fell asleep.
When I woke up, Adam was still there.
Chapter 23
We didn’t go to the family picnic. Summer’s funeral was held the same day. My interlude with Adam felt more and more like stolen time as we dealt with the aftermath of the attacks and struggled to define a new existence for HQ and each of us within it.
I stood between Adam and Evan while the minister droned on about her heroism and her release from her earth-bound host. To my right, Adam put his arm around Kirby as she sobbed. On my left, Evan comforted his mother, who’d lost two of the people she loved most without getting a chance to tell them. Frank stood by himself on their other side, and despite the problems he and Summer had had, his loss was strong enough to incapacitate him.
I couldn’t move for the weight of grief around me. My own raw pain made it impossible to put up shields. Dark emotions pressed in on me from either side. Even Trace’s grounding hands on my shoulders, his solid support behind me, weren’t enough. Charles had freed me from my old emotional shackles, but he’d also created new ones that even my relationship with Adam couldn’t release.
After the coffin was lowered into the ground and her mother and brother dropped fistfuls of dirt onto the gleaming wood, the small group allowed near the grave started to disburse. The crowd of general public, who had flooded the cemetery but were held back several hundred feet, was eerily silent as everyone walked away.
I couldn’t follow. As the others moved off, I stood at the side of the grave, unable to believe she was in there. I couldn’t see her broken, empty of the spirit that had given her life. Instead, I saw her laughter as she sparred in the gym. Her grim determination in taking out the jewel thieves who’d dared to kidnap a child. Her belief in her brother despite their issues, and her love for all of us. It couldn’t be gone.
Summer had been my reason for joining HQ. She’d been the person who made me feel special for not being normal. I couldn’t see my future without her place in it.
Alone, hating it and nevertheless feeling like it was the way I should be, I stood without knowing how much time had passed. When footsteps swished on the grass to my left, I didn’t look, even when I smelled Evan and sensed him at my side. Guilt joined the pain. He’d lost more than I had, so much more. I could drive an hour out of the city and be surrounded by my family, including a mother who’d never abandoned me even though she felt I had abandoned her, and a brother who understood what it was to be like me. He’d lost Summer, and it was my fault, and he’d blame me for it.
I had Adam, too, and Evan didn’t know that. I’d insisted on meeting him when his department finished his debriefing. I’d taken him to my apartment and told him about Summer, how it had happened, and held him when he broke down. He let me, and never laid the blame on me, as if he sensed my self-recrimination was more than enough.
Now, he urged me to turn and enfolded me in his arms. I buried my head against his chest and suppressed my tears. He felt me shudder and whispered in my ear, urging me to let go, that it was okay to feel my own loss. We stood and cried together, and I wished we hadn’t started because I didn’t think we were ever going to stop.
At one point, I opened my eyes and saw Adam watching us. He was blank, both expressionless and unreadable. But I knew he understood.
Evan took a deep breath and wiped his face with his sleeve. “Thank you, Daley.”
“Don’t—”
“Shut up.” His voice was rough but not harsh. “Don’t tell me not to thank you. It wasn’t your fault she died. It’s the nature of this business. Both our businesses.” He let out another long breath. “Thank you for helping me get her back. And for showing me there is happiness out there for me. Even if it’s not here.” He touched my chest, so lightly I barely felt it, and his lips curved a little.
“Evan . . .”
“I know you’re for Adam,” he said, and the sadness in his voice, even if I couldn’t see it, cracked my heart. “He deserves you, and now that he’s proving it by fighting for you, I’m not going to.”
My tears, which hadn’t completely stopped, flowed faster. “I’m so, so sorry, Evan.”
He shook his head. “Just tell me one thing, okay?”
“Okay.” I sniffed and blinked and tried to stop crying.
“Could you have loved me? If things were different?”
Though I would have lied, I didn’t hav
e to. “I was already halfway there.”
He pulled me into his arms again, burying his face in my hair and holding me even more tightly than he had before. “Be happy,” he whispered, and released me to walk away. I watched him go. He stopped and said something to Adam, who nodded and looked grave as he shook Evan’s hand and clapped him sympathetically on the shoulder. A minute later, Evan had disappeared into the crowd.
Adam was next to me then, his hand wrapping around mine and watching me watch Evan going away. Then we stood by the graveside, staring down at the white lilies on top of Summer’s coffin.
“We should go to the picnic,” he said. “She’d want us to.”
“I’m not so sure. She’d probably gripe about us forgetting about her that easily. She’d say we should go to a martini bar and toast her all night, crying and laughing at every story we can remember to tell.”
I heard him smile. “Yeah, you’re probably right. Is that what you want to do?”
I tore my eyes away from the hole in the ground and sought Trace and Kirby, who stood a few feet away, both with red eyes and wet faces.
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I want to do.”
We walked across the grass, and as we caught up to Trace and Kirby and started walking together, our steps in unison, I was less aware of the gap of Summer’s absence than I was of the bond between the four of us. Charles had said those bonds were fragile, easily broken, but he was wrong. They were unbreakable. He’d made sure of that.
And I’d make sure they stayed that way.
The Color of Courage Page 30