by Tracey Ward
“You’re going with me.”
“Whether you like it or not.”
He sighed, tightening his hold on my body, pulling it closer. “I have to stop sitting by the ocean with you. You talk me into the craziest shit.”
“Don’t worry,” I soothed him, smiling against his neck as I burrowed closer. “There are no oceans in Nevada. You’ll be safe.”
Kellen ran his hand through my hair, down my back. “Are you cold?”
“I’m fine.”
“We can go back.”
“I’m happy here. I like being alone with you for now.”
“For now?” he laughed, his body shaking mine.
“You get tiresome after a while.”
“I know the feeling.”
“Whatever, dude, I’m awesome and you know it.”
“You certainly seem to.”
I lifted my head to look at him, a smile on my lips and a quip coming behind them, but then he kissed me and I was lost. I was lost to his lips and his breath and his taste. To his arms tightening around me like a vise and his scent in my nose like a drug. Like a shot to my veins that sent me flying.
Kellen kissed me fervently, as though he had just realized that, yes, we were alone. No one could see us or hear us. No one was looking and he could take his time. He could take whatever he wanted.
His hand fell down my back farther and farther until it found my ass, cupping it through the thin material of the leggings and hiking me higher, harder against him. I groaned into his mouth, bringing his tongue out to taste it. To taste me and my breath going staccato as my leg wrapped around his waist and his fingers followed the curve. He pulled it higher, followed it back down, and teased over the sensitive center of my body that begged him to find it.
I whimpered when he didn’t. Instead he brought his hand up to my hip and slipped it under my shirt. Up, up, and up to my bra. Pulling it down, down, down until I was exposed and open. Until he could dance his fingertips over the peaks waiting hard and ready. Until he could hold me in his rough palm and tighten my entire body from this one point. From one hard squeeze of his hand.
“Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?” he whispered gruffly. “How fucking perfect your skin is? I can’t get enough of it. I’ll never touch it enough.”
“I never want you to stop.”
He ran a fingertip around my nipple. “Are my hands cold?”
I shivered. “Yes.”
He ran his other fingers lightly over my leggings, over my impatient core buried under too many layers. “I know where it’s warm.”
I went rigid. Unpliable and demanding, my hands groping against his clothes, looking for skin. For heat. For him.
“Stay with me Kellen,” I pleaded, my mouth moving over his face. Over the rough stubble that scratched and burned and brought me to life there in the cold. “Stay with me the way you did that morning.”
He groaned. “It wasn’t all the way.”
“I don’t care. It was enough.”
“It’s not.”
“It is. You were with me.”
He breathed hard through his nose, pulled my head close to his until our foreheads touched and it nearly hurt how hard he held me. “And when I started to feel that feeling, that fear, I bailed. I always bail. I’m a coward, Jenna. I can’t help it. I’m sorry.”
I bit my lip, wanting to scream. Wanting to cry out, but I didn’t because it wouldn’t help. It wouldn’t change anything. I could never take away the fear he had when it came to sex. No matter how sweet I was, how comforting, how helpful, no matter how much he loved me, I could never make him feel safe enough. The fear would always, always be there between us.
Unless—
Chapter Twenty-Three
Kellen
“You’re not scared when you’re in the ring, are you?” Jenna asked excitedly.
I frowned, not sure where she was going with this. “No. I’m too angry. It takes over. It blots everything else out and all I know is what I am and what I feel in that moment.”
“Then give me that part of you.”
“No,” I denied adamantly. “You don’t want that.”
“I do. I do because I want you and whether you see it or not, it’s all you, Kellen. Every part.”
Her words were echoes of Ben’s, insisting I could fragment myself in my mind as much as I wanted but I could never escape the fact that every piece of me was in fact me. I could run as far and fast as I could but I’d never outrun myself.
“The animal…” I started, unsure how to explain it to her. “It’s not nice. It’s how I vent out all the shit I can’t deal with. Everything that’s too much and too big I feed to that part of me and it burns it away in this cloud of…”
Her eyes lit up hopefully. “Passion.”
“No. Quit trying to make it nice.”
“But it could be.”
“It can’t—“
She sat up suddenly and straddled my lap, her hands on my chest and her eyes pouring down into mine. “It could be,” she whispered.
Her hips shifted forward slowly, then back, grinding her hot core on my cock. I closed my eyes against the rising of my blood. My pulse, my body. My everything. She moved again, so slowly like the tide and I remembered where we were, out in the open hidden only by a row of bushes from the road, and it only made me want her more.
Jenna leaned forward and her lips touched my ear, her breath hot against my skin. “I want you to love me, Kellen.” She licked the outside of my lobe. “Love me hard.”
My eyes opened, staring up at the gray sky. It shifted with the wind. Transformed and changed, dark clouds rolling in quickly. Running. Racing.
“Are you serious?” I asked her, my voice low and husky. Rough on every edge.
She reached for my hand, pulled it between us, and pressed my palm to the thin material of her leggings. It was wet.
“Do I feel serious?”
She felt like everything. Every sweet, delicious thing the world had ever known was rolled up in Jenna Monroe and as she ground herself against my hand I wondered if she wasn’t every wicked thing as well.
I fluttered my fingers just barely, only vaguely touching her, and her mouth fell open on a languorous sigh that cut the brakes and barreled me forward.
If she wanted to try this, I’d try it. If she wanted all of me, I’d give it to her.
If she wanted the animal, I’d give her the animal.
I let it take over the way I always did it – slow and by degrees. I ran my free hand up her side, reaching under her shirt gently and tickling her skin, making her squirm. She smiled down at me, her long hair framing her face, cascading over her breasts, and I watched it move as my hand found her bare under her shirt and cupped her delicately.
She sighed, running her hands up over my chest as she leaned into my touch. I was gentle with her. Patient. I let her come to me, let her set the pace, and slowly she started moving against me again. I kept my hand underneath her but I could feel the pressure everywhere. It built inside of me. It took hold in my gut, in the itch in my hands as I moved them over her, never able to get enough.
I squeezed her breast hard, pulling to the point. Molding that peak that was so sensitive and ready. It made her shudder. Made her moan. I moved my hand against her pussy, forward and back in the opposite direction of her thrusts to make them longer. Make them work her harder. She whimpered in the back of her throat, incoherent words surrounding my name tripping past her tongue.
I stepped out of the animal’s way.
It wasn’t the same as it was in the ring. It felt different because I was different. Jenna was different from my opponents. But what was the same at the core, what made it work, was the tension. The buildup, the burning inside of me that screamed for a release. That looked up at Jenna in all her beauty and glory and demanded that we destroy her. That we shatter her into a million pieces hoarsely screaming our name.
My name.
I flipped her over onto
her back, taking her by surprise. That was familiar. That sent a roar of excitement through my chest – the round, shocked eyes staring back at me. I got that look a lot in the ring and it made it all so much easier. It made it feel right.
And it made me feel sorry for her because she hadn’t seen anything yet.
I knelt between her legs, reached down to where her leggings kept her from me, and I ripped the seam straight up the middle.
She gasped in astonishment, her eyes going even wider, but she didn’t protest. She didn’t complain.
I ran my hand down the open, tattered material, feeling the soft purple cotton underwear underneath. She was closer, so much closer, but still too far away. I slipped my finger under the elastic band near the inside of her thigh and I pulled it aside, opening her up to me. I drug my finger through her slick slit, listening to her breath stop dead in its tracks. Watching goosebumps explode over her arms. Her legs. A patch of exposed stomach where her shirt rode up to show me her milky white skin. I leaned down to kiss it as I opened her wider. I nibbled at her hip as I thrust a finger inside. Then two. I bit harder when she bucked and yelped. I pushed her to the ropes, backed her into a corner where she was defenseless and breathless, all strategy lost and control slowly slipping away. But before she could fall apart I retreated. I gave her space and a fighting chance and she glared at me menacingly.
“You fight dirty,” she breathed scathingly.
I smiled, but I didn’t speak.
Instead I slowly unbuttoned my pants. Lowered the zipper one notch at a time, letting her watch. Letting her know. I showed my hand because it was a winner. Because this was my round to lose.
Just as I reached for her the clouds let loose. It started to rain in a fine mist that wetted her hair, her face, making her skin glisten with a dewy sheen that soaked her white shirt and showed me everything she was hiding underneath. The outline of her bra, the swell of her breasts, the brilliant colors of ink on her skin muted by the veil of fabric. She half-closed her eyes against the falling drops and I leaned over her to protect her. I shielded her from the rain and the wind, from the world, and I gave her my heat and my heart as I lowered myself down on top of her. Inside her.
The sound of her breath rushing out as I rushed in made me insane inside. It made me wild. It pushed me to do it again, to land that blow and hear her react. To milk every sound and screech and whimper from her throat that I could manage and throw it like gas on the fire. I sped up, taking her with me, and when she pushed her hands inside my shirt and dug her fingers hard into my back the wheels came off my control. I fell headlong into the fight. I wasn’t gentle. I wasn’t soft and loving. I was possessed, obsessed, but it was over her. It was Jenna and no one else. It was the love I felt for her, the desire I always carried when I looked at her, and not another woman on earth could have made me wild the way she did there on that cliff.
“Kellen.”
She groaned my name, bringing my eyes down to hers and I could see the question there. I could also see the desperation. The pleading. She was close and she wanted that release but more than that she wanted to know if I was still there with her.
I put my hand on the side of her face, pushing it back slowly into her hair and wrapping my fingers up inside it the way I did when I was about to fall apart. I held onto her and I promised her.
“Je suis la, Nonpareil.”
Her smile was the sun. It was poetry. It was every love song ever written, every kiss ever given, ever taken. It was love. Pure, true love and I knew it because I felt it. Even as my body seized and her eyes fluttered, both of us careening toward an inevitable end, I felt it. All of it.
In every beat of her heart and breath in my body I felt love.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Jenna
We were packing for our trip home three days later and still I hadn’t heard from Laney. I stared at the bulky black cell phone I’d borrowed from my dad and I resented it for not ringing. I blamed it for making her angry at me and I forbid myself from touching it because if I did I would call her and grovel. That was the love I had for my sister. Unbreakable and self-destructive.
I wished hard as hell that she loved me like that. That just once she’d consider putting my happiness before hers the way I’d done for her our entire lives.
“Stop staring at it,” Kellen scolded lightly. “It’s a watched pot. It’s not going to boil if you hover over it.”
“Scientifically that’s bullshit and you know it,” I replied distractedly.
I sat on the bed in front of him watching him pack. Well, saying I was watching him pack but what I was really doing was watching the phone. It drove him so crazy he’d offered to pack for me to pull me out of my funk. It hadn’t helped. I took him up on it, I was sad not stupid, but even as he went through my clothes and folded them way more neatly than I ever would have into my suitcase, I wanted to stop his hands and beg him to stay. To let me stay.
“How does she have the willpower to not call and go off on me?” I asked. “When did this happen?”
“I don’t know. A few hours, half a day, that I can see her waiting to torture you, but days? It’s weird.”
“It is, isn’t it?”
“Have you talked to your parents recently?”
“Not since the day after. I asked if she’d said anything and they said she hadn’t. I asked them to tell her to call me, I put the phone down right there, and I haven’t touched it since.”
“You haven’t even looked at it?”
“I’m looking at it now.”
“No, I mean you haven’t checked it to make sure it’s on?”
I hesitated. “No, but it’s on. I haven’t used it. It’s on.”
“You should check.”
“Should I call it from the house phone to make sure it works and then panic, wondering if she tried to call in that one minute when it was in use?”
“Do what you want, smart ass.”
I chewed on my lip as I watched him bundle up the rest of my clothes. He picked up my leggings, the ones he’d destroyed on the cliff over the water, and I smiled at the memory. At the thought of him looking down at me, into me, as he stayed with me from start to finish. It had been intense and astonishing, his body finding mine with a fervor I’d never seen in him before but it’d made me breathless and desperate. I was starving for him as he hunted and devoured me, sent me flying out over the sea only to crash down inside its depths, dark and mysterious like his eyes. Endless and deep like his voice as he whispered to me that he was there. That he was with me. That he’d never left me.
Kellen caught me looking at the leggings smiling like an idiot, and grinned down at me mischievously.
“Do you want me to throw them away?” he asked.
“I want you to buy me a new pair. They were my favorite.”
“I’ll write you a check. What were they? Ten bucks? Twenty?”
I snorted. “Try eighty.”
He scowled at the thin black fabric that looked so insignificant in his large hand. “Are you kidding me? This was eighty dollars?”
“They’re James Perse.”
“Who?”
I rolled my eyes. “Never mind.”
Kellen eyed the leggings, clearly rethinking throwing them away now that he knew how much they cost.
Over two million in the bank and he was stressing an eighty dollar pair of pants.
I took them from him gently and placed them in my suitcase. “I can fix them. It’ll be fine.”
“You know how to sew?”
“No, but Sam does. She’ll help me.”
“Are you anxious about the store?”
I smiled. “She’s probably renamed it by now. Something dark. Mephistopheles Boutique or some shit.”
“Might get you more business.”
I lightly ran my fingers over the tattoo on my chest. A compass rose, the emblem for my store. My reminder to be my own person and chart my own course.
“I like the name
I chose,” I told him.
He stopped to lean down and kiss me chastely on the forehead. “Me too.” He stood up, snapping my suitcase closed and dropping it to the ground on its wheels. “If you’re going to call her you better do it now. We have to leave soon.”
“I’m not going to call her.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yes.”
Kellen went to the phone and pushed the power button on the side, holding it out to me. “Jenna.”
“No.” I stood up off the bed abruptly, grabbing the handle of my suitcase. “Ball is in her court. I’m not going to come begging, asking her to forgive me. I haven’t done anything wrong, not this time. We’ve apologized for everything else so many times and she said before that we were okay. I’m not going back to square one every time you and I move on with our lives. What will we do? Apologize again when the wedding comes around? Will I have to come crawling to her asking forgiveness and permission when we have our first kid? No, enough is enough. If she wants to be petty and angry then she can do it on her own time. I’m not going to stress it anymore because I’ll spend my entire life worrying about her and not enjoying a damn thing in my world. It’s selfish and unfair and I won’t facilitate it.”
“Jenna,” he repeated calmly. “It’s dead.”
I stared at him dumbfounded. “I—it’s what?!”
He lobbed it to me. “It’s dead. Probably has been for days.”
“No, but it was fully charged.” I pushed the same button he had and got a red lightning bolt on the screen, nothing else. It was dead. “Son of a bitch.”
“Did you bring a charger?”
“Yeah, of course, but it… crap!”
He opened the door to the hallway, rolling his suitcase out. “We’ll charge it at the airport. We don’t have time right now.”
I nodded numbly, stashing the phone in my pocket and pulling my suitcase obediently behind me into the hall. I followed Kellen’s back, my blood rushing in my ears. How long had it been dead? Had she tried to call me and I didn’t answer? Was she pissed at me because she thought I was shutting her out? Why had the motherfucking thing died?!?!