Her feet moved of their own accord, carrying her through the empty streets until she looked up to find herself outside a steel and glass building on Franklin Street: Millennium Tower.
It was where Nolan lived.
She couldn’t remember how she knew it was true. Had Will told her? One of his many attempts at pushing her and Nolan back together when Bridget had been pretending she was over him? That she wasn’t hungry for news of him?
She reached for the glass door and pulled it open, then stepped into a luxurious lobby with creamy marble floors. A plush, modern sitting room with a white leather sofa and chairs stood to her left, illuminated by sleek table lamps that illuminated the sitting area with a cozy glow.
To her right, a long counter separated a security guard from the lobby. Beyond him, a staircase rose to a mezzanine that looked like the first line of defense for the condominiums and office space that occupied the rest of the building.
“May I help you?” The guard’s voice echoed across the marble floors.
She approached the desk and hesitated. She hadn’t thought this through. She could still leave. Could turn around and backtrack through the city until she reached her car, get in and drive home, have tea with her mother.
“I’m looking for Nolan Burke,” she said.
“Is he expecting you?” the guard asked.
“No.”
“Your name?”
“Bridget Monaghan.”
He picked up a phone behind the desk. “Sir, there’s a guest to see you. Bridget Monaghan.”
She had a moment’s panic. Maybe Nolan didn’t want to see her. Maybe his girlfriend was here. Maybe they even lived together and Bridget would be welcomed into to their home, offered something to drink by a woman in expensive loungewear who would look at her with pity.
“Yes, sir.” The security guard hung up and pushed a sign-in sheet attached to a clipboard toward her. “Sign in please.”
She wrote her name.
“Elevator’s just past the stairs,” he said. “Fifty-third floor, unit 5302.”
“Thank you.”
She started for the elevator, her mind surprisingly calm. For the first time in as long as she could remember, there was no incriminating voice. The litany of missteps and failures that had been a soundtrack to her every movement was silent.
The elevator was as nice as the rest of the building. In spite of Nolan’s wealth, the way he carried it like a crown he’d been born to wear, it was hard to see him here. When she thought of Nolan it wasn’t tailored wool and a sea of imported marble that came to mind. It was the jacket he’d once worn around the neighborhood, the leather infused with his scent. It was beers at The Chipp and late nights at Ramsey Park and the shelter of his arms.
The elevator opened and she stepped into a hall with widely spaced doors on either side. One of them was open. She walked toward it and found Nolan standing on the other side of the threshold. He studied her for a long time, holding her gaze until she couldn’t have looked away if she’d wanted to.
“You don’t have to love me, Bridget.” His voice was low and hoarse. “But don’t come in if you don’t want me.”
“I want you.” The words came easily, from someplace inside her that knew all her undeniable truths.
He stepped aside to let her in.
Chapter Fourteen
He closed the door and waited for her to lead the way.
“Are you alone?” she asked.
“Yes.”
He watched as she started down the corridor leading to the living room and kitchen, then stopped outside the master bedroom. He’d been reading there, trying not to think about her, about the way she’d looked the night before at Foley’s.
“Is this your room?” She didn’t look at him as she asked the question.
“Yes.”
She disappeared over the threshold and he followed, pausing in the doorway to watch as she walked purposefully to the headboard. She reached for the sconce on the wall that had been illuminating his book and turned out the light.
The room was cast into almost total darkness, the lights of the city beyond the window barely making a dent in it.
She stood with her back to him, silent and still. It was only when she slipped her coat off her shoulders that he realized she’d been undoing the buttons. He waited as she followed suit with her shirt, tossing it onto her coat.
He held his breath, taking in the long sweep of her back, her artfully formed shoulders, as she bent to slip off her shoes and jeans.
She’d gotten thinner, her waist more narrow, but the flare of her hips was still there, the swell of her ass leading to shapely thighs and calfs. Her hair was shimmery in the half-light, brushing against her back, tempting him to go to her, pull it aside, lower his mouth to the back of her neck.
He forced himself to stay put. She was shedding the layers of life that had kept them apart, doing it her way, the way she did everything.
She reached behind her and unhooked her bra, then threw it on top of the growing pile of clothes on his bedroom floor. His cock, already erect, became painfully hard as she removed her underwear, baring the full glory of her naked body.
He waited, both to savor the view, to bask in the vision he’d been forced to carry in his mind for the past four years, and also because deep down, he was still afraid. Afraid she would change her mind, that she would pull on her clothes and leave him with the aching body and aching heart that had grown all too familiar.
She turned to face him and he sucked in his breath at the sight of her breasts, her pink nipples hard, her belly soft and begging for his kiss, the fair hair between her legs.
“I need you, Nolan. Please.”
There was desperation in her voice, something vulnerable and afraid that made him go to her, the workings of his mind quieted by the need to hold her, to press his lips against her skin, to mold her body to his.
He held her face in his hand and looked at her, torn between the desire to kiss her and the need to memorize the way she looked at that moment, to hold the picture in his mind when the night ended and they were thrown back into a dynamic that had been made complicated, when for him it had always been simple: he loved her, had loved her since the moment he saw her, would love her until the day he died.
She solved the conundrum for him by sliding her arms around his torso and stepping close, her nakedness searing his skin through the fabric of his T-shirt, eviscerating what was left of his control.
He crushed her mouth under his, invading it with his tongue. She opened for him like a flower, pressing her body to his until he felt the peaks of her nipples, her stomach pressed against his erection.
He was lost in her. Lost in her mouth and the softness of her body, a refuge against the world’s hardness. He traced her neck with his hands, stroked them across her shoulders, delicate but somehow strong enough to bear her burdens with grace.
She reached for the hem of his T-shirt and he helped her pull it over his head. She continued kissing him as she reached for the button on his jeans. She worked his zipper and reached inside his underwear, wrapping her hand around his throbbing shaft.
He groaned into her mouth and forced himself to pause their kiss long enough to slide off his jeans, desperate to feel her bare skin against his own. The pleasure of pressing her naked body to his was almost painful—a pain he’d ached for, longed for.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and he kissed her deeply, slower now that she was back in his arms where she belonged, the way she belonged: nude, raw, as hungry for him as he was for her.
She turned and pulled him down onto the bed. He stretched out over her and kissed her forehead, her eyes, her nose. He touched his lips to the corners of her mouth and stroked her hair back from her face as he soaked her in, half expecting her to dematerialize as quickly as she’d appeared.
There was so much he wanted to say.
I still love you. I never stopped.
I need you.
> I don’t care what you’ve done or what you feel you have to do now.
He couldn’t get any of it out. Her beauty overwhelmed him, the fact of her in his arms a fragile blessing.
She turned her head, avoiding his eyes, hiding from him the way she’d been hiding all these years. A tear leaked down her temple into her hair.
He kissed it away and turned her chin to face him.
“No tears. And no hiding anymore. Okay?”
She nodded and he kissed her again, long and slow this time, kissing away the ache in his heart at the sight of her tears, wanting to kiss away whatever it was that had made her cry because it was better and infinitely more pleasurable than killing whoever had perpetrated the crime.
The kiss rekindled the spark between their bodies, and he kissed his way down her neck, taking his time at her collarbone before continuing to her breasts.
He rubbed his nose between them, inhaling the scent of her skin before taking one of the mounds in his hand. She arched her back when he flicked his tongue against the other one and he took the whole areola in his mouth.
She gasped as he sucked and lapped at the aroused peak, using his other hand to roll her other nipple between his fingers. She writhed under him, the moisture between her legs sliding against his throbbing cock, sending a shriek of desire through his body so potent he almost couldn’t see for it.
He wanted to drive into her, bury his cock inside the welcoming heat of her core. He knew exactly what it would feel like, knew exactly how exquisite it would be. The knowing made it all the harder to keep his desire under control and he forced himself to concentrate on the garden of her body, bringing it to life with his hands and mouth, his own coming back to life as she bloomed under him.
He trailed kisses down her stomach, relishing the softness of it, the softness of all of her, an erotic contrast to the hard planes of his own body. Dipping his tongue into her navel, he kissed his way to her waist. She jumped a little just like he remembered.
Still ticklish.
He wanted to know these things. Would she still sigh when he put his mouth on her sex? Would she still close her fingers around his hair as he brought her close to orgasm with his tongue?
He leaned back and pressed her legs open. She was so wet that beads of desire shone on her folds. He let his eyes travel up her body to her face and was surprised to find her looking at him, eyes wide open.
There was a storm of emotion in her eyes that he was afraid to interpret. He bent his head and ran his tongue through her folds and was rewarded with the sigh he remembered, her body sinking down another inch, making it clear what she wanted.
He ran his thumb along the opening to her channel as he licked her clit, making slow circles until she picked up his rhythm. He closed his mouth over the swollen bud and sucked, relishing the sound of her voice crying out into the room.
Her hips came off the bed as he put more pressure on her clit with his tongue, his cock demanding to be brought home inside her body. He forced himself to put the sensation aside, to lose himself in the petal-soft folds of her pussy, the sweet taste of her on his tongue, her engorged clit evidence of her need for him.
He let her take the lead, waiting until her hips moved faster, the press of her mound against his mouth more insistent. Then he slid his fingers inside her while he sucked on her clit.
She gasped, and he groaned as she wrapped her fingers in his hair and tugged, the jolt of pain traveling down his spine, morphing into desire at the tip of his cock. He fucked her with his fingers, letting them slide through her slippery heat as he alternately licked her clit and rubbed it with his thumb.
“Nolan…” His name was a whimper on her lips. “Please…”
He matched the pace of her hips, licking her faster, plunging his fingers inside her, withdrawing them only long enough to embed them in her again, his mouth and hands working in concert until she was struggling for breath.
“I’m going to come, Nolan.”
He felt it in her body, in the quickening pace of her hips and the tension in her thighs and the swelling of her channel around his fingers as she came closer to the pinnacle.
He closed his mouth on her clit and sucked hard, drawing the peak into his mouth. For a split second she seemed to freeze. Then she was shuddering against his mouth, crying out into the room as she came, her pussy clamping down on his fingers, flooding them with the moisture of her desire as the contractions rolled through her body in wave after wave that threatened to loose his own orgasm, coiled like a beast and demanding release.
He didn’t stop moving his fingers, didn’t stop lapping at her clit until he was sure she was done. Then he rose onto his knees and reached into the nightstand for a condom.
She watched him through hooded eyes as he rolled it onto his cock, then she reached for him.
“I’ve been waiting forever to feel you inside me.”
Chapter Fifteen
She could have looked at him all night, his chest and arms sculpted and defined, his tapered waist leading to powerful thighs, the cock that rose thick and magnificent between his legs.
Her memory, her imagination, hadn’t done him justice.
She should have been satiated. The orgasm he’d delivered with his mouth and fingers had shaken her like a hurricane, opening up fault lines in her body she’d paved over long ago.
It only made her want him more.
He positioned his crown at her opening and stretched himself over her body. Stroking the hair back from her head he lowered his mouth to hers as he sank into her bit by bit, like he wanted to memorize every second of their becoming.
He didn’t stop until he was buried, her body, long empty, stretching to accommodate him. He nipped at her lower lip, his tongue lighting a blaze that had her moving against him in seconds, her body primed and ready.
Remembering.
He drew out of her slowly, then reached for her hands and stretched them over her head. He hovered at her opening, looking at her with something that could have been anger or desire. Maybe it was both.
“This is how it was meant to be, Bridget. Do you remember?”
“I remember.”
And God help her, she did. She remembered what it meant to be joined with him. To be one.
She remembered what it meant to feel like someone was part of you at a cellular level, that they were inside your skin, woven into the marrow of your bones, their heart beating in time to your own.
“You never stopped being mine,” he said, still poised at her entrance. “Say it.”
She turned her head. Her body was screaming for him, a primal demand that warred with the last vestiges of self-preservation that told her she was dangerously close to losing herself, to losing her grip on the distance she’d built between them, brick by painful brick over the past four years. The distance hadn’t let her forget, but it had enabled her to go on breathing without him even when it seemed impossible.
His kissed her neck, nudged her face to make her look at him, her hands still pinned above her head.
“I know it’s true,” he whispered as he kissed her. “Tell me it’s true.”
She kissed him back, her eyes filling with tears. She didn’t want to say it, didn’t want to make false promises, didn’t want to hurt him again when the little bit of reason she had left was telling her nothing had changed.
“I’ve always been yours, Nolan.” It was true, and Nolan, more than anyone, deserved that truth. “I’ve always been yours.”
He drove into her with a groan and released her hands. She sighed, wrapping her hands around his back, digging her nails into his skin, wanting more proof that he was real, that he was flesh and blood and not another dream.
“You feel so good, Bridge. So damn good.”
She moved with him, picking up a familiar rhythm, everything old made new as he plundered her body, driving into her with so much force she gasped, withdrawing inch by inch only to push into her again, forcing himself through her swollen
channel, burying himself inside her so that every thrust sent shockwaves through her clit that traveled to every corner of her body, lighting the fuse of another orgasm.
She wrapped her legs around his thighs and lifted her hips, rising to meet him on the downward thrust. He reached under her and lifted her ass off the bed, pulling her even closer until she was half in his lap, her legs wrapped around his waist, just enough room between them for him to drive into her again.
She held his face in her hands, watching his eyes change from blue to green to amber, watching four years of pain and loneliness pass over his face as he thrust into her, faster and harder, until her orgasm was undeniable.
“Come with me, Nolan.”
He lowered his head to her shoulder with a growl and pushed upward into her with a fierceness that took her breath away.
She gasped, crying out as he pounded a path through her body, her orgasm rising like floodwater. She was buoyed along with it, expanding until her skin couldn’t hold her anymore, until she was bigger than her body, releasing a wave of pleasure that rolled through her like a tidal wave washing away everything in its path.
All her sorrow and all her loneliness and all her fear.
She was only distantly aware of her voice in the darkness of the room, of Nolan’s groan as he shuddered against her, their bodies coming forcefully together again and again, locked in their embrace, limbs intertwined, moving until they’d wrenched every ounce of pleasure from each other’s bodies.
When it was over he sat back on his knees and pulled her closer, her legs still wrapped around his waist, her arms around his back. He took her face in his hands and looked into her eyes. She’d never seen so much pain in their depths.
She’d never seen so much love.
“I fucking love you, Bridget.” His voice was full of anguish. “I know you don’t love me, but don’t lie and say that this isn’t real.”
She wanted to correct him, to tell him she did love him, she’d never stopped loving him. She wanted to make everything right, to start over again with the truth.
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