My chest ached for him, and I was crying, too.
“I’ve only known you a few days, and I know what we have isn’t love. But you’re a good person with a good heart, Natalie. And that’s why I followed you out of here. And that’s why you’re not going anywhere tonight.”
He blew out a strong exhale, and I felt my heart break into pieces for him.
“Honestly,” he said, “I’m not going to sleep tonight thinking to myself that I let you out of the house at all, to start. I shouldn’t have let you go.”
I rolled my eyes gently, trying to be playful and lighten the mood. “Oh yeah? Are you just going to keep me locked in here like some sort of damsel in distress?”
He bit his lower lip. “If that’s what it takes, yeah. That’s right.”
I breathed out a sigh. It wasn’t exactly relief.
“Come here,” I whispered.
I could see the pain written all over his face as he recalled these memories, and I wanted to do anything I could to help him.
“You were in a tight spot when your father died,” I said. “Personally, I can’t believe my father would have just screwed you all over like that. I want to think that there’s a reason…”
“Money turns people evil,” he gritted out. “That’s the reason.”
“There’s got to be something else,” I frowned.
Putting my hand on his cheek, I gently angled his chin toward me. “Shane,” I whispered. “I’m sorry for anything I’ve done. If there is a trust, I don’t know anything about it. I can see you’re still hurting.”
He nodded, not wanting to make eye contact with me. “That’s putting it lightly. Things will never, ever be the same.”
I draped my hands on his shoulders. “You’re right. They won’t be the same. My father is gone, so is yours. Louisa is gone. But we’re still here, and we can work to make the future bright.”
He cleared his throat. “You said something the other day. And I can’t stop thinking about it,” he said.
“What did I say?”
“You said, ‘are you happy here?’ You know what my immediate thought was? Hell no. Ever since then, I’ve been trying to think of the things that do make me happy here.”
“Are there any?”
“Yes. Coaching the hockey team. Taking care of my mom--she was in relapse when I came back last year, and she’s doing a lot better now. And--there’s one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“The possibilities of this.”
Gripping my hair, he pulled me in for an unexpected kiss. My body tingled everywhere from my toes to my nose.
They say if you want to know how your relationship really is, you can tell by the kiss.
Well, this kiss was nothing like the ones before.
I could feel a new swirl of complexity now as our lips touched.
Yesterday--heck, even earlier today--had been a kiss of blind bliss and need.
I moaned. He growled.
This kiss was honest.
He pulled my hair a little harder than he had.
This kiss was angry.
My hand landed on his chest, and I felt his heart beating like crazy.
This kiss was more passionate than anything I’d ever experienced.
Our tongues battled, and my mind raced.
This man had admitted to throwing around a kidnapping plot for me, I reminded myself.
Yet I couldn’t stop wanting him.
He pressed my body forward into the couch, so he was on top of me.
“I want to learn all about you, Florida. Tell me what you like.”
“I like you,” I mewled as our hips ground together.
“Tell me more,” he growled. “Tell me what you were thinking about when you touched yourself in my bed.”
“I thought about you seducing me,” I started, smiling. “I thought about you coming into my room late at night in a Santa Claus suit and beard.”
He chuckled, and wiggled his eyebrows. “I mean I have a suit upstairs. If that’s what’s going to get you off.”
I giggled, then grabbed a tassel of his hair and pulled his ear to my mouth. “I thought about you just taking me.”
“Is that what you want? For me to take you?”
“I like it when you take charge.”
“You know what I want to do?”
“What?”
“I want to carry you up the stairs to my bed, and fuck you again.”
My stomach clenched.
“Can you handle that?”
I nodded, and he swept me off my feet.
23
Shane
After session number two, we headed back downstairs and put our dinner, a frozen pizza, in the oven.
I pressed her into the wall and kissed her deeply while we waited for it to cook.
When we were done kissing she held her hand tight on the back of my neck.
“Wait. Do you do that a lot?” she asked.
I smirked. “Cuff a girl to the bed and take her virginity?”
“Yes,” she nodded, her face turning red. She averted eye contact.
“Oh yeah,” I grinned. “All the time.”
She rolled her eyes, and I ran a hand through her hair. “I’m being serious. I want to know.”
“Nope. Just you, Florida. I told you, I’d never had sex with a virgin before.”
I tipped her chin up so she would kiss me again.
“And what about those handcuffs?”
“What about them?”
“You had them for a while. You’ve used them before?”
I threaded a hand through my hair. “In college, I thought I was on the path to sexual enlightenment with my girlfriend at the time. So I bought a few pairs of those. Turns out, she was on the path to sexual enlightenment. Just not with me.” A fluttering feeling racked through me. This was in the category of things I didn’t like to reminisce about. I hadn’t talked about my ex in years.
Natalie jerked her head back. “That really sucks. You must have been heartbroken.”
I shook my head. “Maybe for a day or two. It was good riddance, though. I’m glad I found her out. Everything happens for a reason. I’m glad I had those handcuffs on hand.”
“They certainly served their purpose.”
“Would you have run away last night?”
“I think so.”
“Where would you have gone?”
“The church, probably.”
“Points for honesty. How about now? You going to run tonight?”
She bit her lower lip. “Yeah. I think I might.”
I wiggled my eyebrows suggestively. “Well I just might have to chain you up again, then.”
I trailed my hand down the front of her stomach until my fingertip reached her clit. “Because you’re mine now, Natalie.” I wrapped my hand around her neck, not tightly, but tight enough. “You belong to me.”
I felt the tension in her body as she swallowed.
“Pizza looks like it’s done,” she croaked.
We ate, it snowed, and for the first time in who knows when, I forgot where I was, and the depression that had tailed me since I was a teenager.
And by depression, I don’t mean that in the clinical sense. I just mean, since the deaths of my father and sister, a dark cloud always seemed to float above me, no matter what I did to stop it.
Natalie used my phone to call her mom since her phone was in the rental car and buried under all that snow.
Then we sat idly on the couch, eating, kissing, watching some old Christmas movies that were playing in the background, Home Alone II and then Love Actually.
“Did you think your first time would be like that?”
She took a sip of the hot cocoa I’d made her. “I thought it would be much more anti-climactic, to be honest. So you’ve never been with a virgin before?”
I shook my head. “Never.”
“Was it different?”
I gripped her calf muscle and moved my han
d slowly up her leg.
“This was different, yeah. But not because you were a virgin. It was different because…” I twisted around and considered for a moment. There were a million ways Natalie was so different than anyone I’d been with.
“Yes?”
I studied her. Nervousness was written all over her face, like she was about to get a report of how she’d done.
“What to say, what to say…” I ran a hand over my blond stubble. “I could say your skin felt softer than anyone’s I’d ever felt. That I loved studying the freckles on your face when we did it in the beginning. And that I now have a fascination with the birthmark on your lower back.”
I squeezed Natalie’s thigh under her pajamas, and I could sense her body stiffening.
“I could say it was different because I’ve never felt a pussy so tight, that made me so hard. That got so wet for me. Sure, I could say those things, but that would just be scratching the surface.”
I could feel her warm body shuddering as I ran my hand up toward her stomach—thank you long arms.
“But I think we both know this wasn’t any normal hook up. Because I was serious about what I said back there, about trying not to hate you and failing. I’m glad we did it. You understand why part of my heart turned black, a long time ago. But the way you moaned underneath me, the way I punished you, I’m getting hard just thinking about it. I’m going to remember that forever. Not to mention the fact that you knocked me in the face with a fucking iron not one hour before we went at it. So yeah, Natalie, it was different.”
Her lips quirked in a small smile. “I’m different.”
Her brown eyes, her lips, were hypnotic.
I had called out her craziness. But the more I thought about it, I started to wonder if *I* was the crazier one of us two. “The journals,” she said, bobbing her head in the direction of the boxes. “You read them.”
I shrugged. “Yeah. Kept wondering if there could be more clues in there about the accident.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way. Damn, you probably will. But, what do you most want to know about his death?”
I felt my insides flip, just thinking about it. The rush of emotions from that day came flooding back.
She signals for me to put my hand in hers, and I obliged. I liked being tangled up with her on the sofa. “I remember everything about the day the mine accident happened. I was in third period biology class, and the lesson was about the evolution tree. There were a few people in my second period who had mentioned something about an ‘accident in the mine’ but I figured they were just saying that to mess with me and a couple of the other kids who they knew their parents worked there.”
“Jared and Bob.”
“Yes. Jared and Bob. So in third period, we got called out of class. I was there with Louisa, Jared and Bob and a few others. Principal Norton was bawling, and we knew something was dead wrong. She broke the news to us…I just remember sitting there hearing words like ‘collapse’ and ‘death,’ thinking, there’s no way that *my* dad died, though. There must be some mistake. My dad was a big, strong man—and there’s no way he got caught.”
The last words came out groggy. I held back the tears that pooled in my eyes, remembering the accident. I was losing my ability to talk. “Sorry,” I grumbled.
“Hey,” Natalie said, with her hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay. Don’t be sorry for crying. It’s your fucking dad.”
Sadness racked through me, and I nodded. “In the weeks after, I was obsessed to find out more about what happened in the wake of the accident. I know what ultimately killed Louisa was the cold. But I often wonder if she felt the way I did back then—I stopped caring if I lived, or died.”
A tear rolled down Natalie’s cheek. “Come here.”
She opened her arms and I slid over toward her.
“I wanted answers, and we never got them. I just feel like knowing what exactly happened in the mine would give me some closure.”
Natalie wrapped me up tightly in her arms. I hugged her back. She was crying more than I was.
A chill ran through me, starting at my spine and making my entire body shiver.
We stayed like that for a couple of minutes, “When’s the last time you’ve talked about this?”
I shrugged, then pulled back from the hug. “I stopped talking about it a year or so after it happened. After I couldn’t find any answers.”
“No,” she said.
“What do you mean no?”
“We’re not done hugging.”
Natalie sat in my lap, resting her head on my shoulder. I combed my fingers through her hair, and listened to her breathing, felt her heartbeat.
“I didn’t know anything about the accident,” she finally said. “I think my mom and dad probably worked to keep me in the dark about it. But I also admit I didn’t exactly actively seek out information about Black Mountain once I got to Florida.”
A new clarity seeped into my mind. It was absolutely silly that Jared, Bob and I ever blamed Natalie for any of this. It was insane, actually. But when tragedy strikes, you need a scapegoat.
I enjoyed feeling the heat from her body pressed up against mine. She had this way of warming me up. I’d resisted this feral attraction to her from the beginning. But the truth was, every second I spent with Natalie made me feel like I was coming back to the me I used to be before the accident. She was breathing life deep into my soul in a way I’d never seen coming.
She moved her hips back and forth on me as she sat in my lap, reigniting my arousal.
“What are you doing, baby?”
Baby. That just slipped out.
“I want to make you feel good,” she moaned. The heat between her legs was palpable. I felt my cock stiffen.
“You keep that up, you know what you’re going to get, you naughty girl.”
“It’s more fun when you tell me,” she whispered against my ear.
“You sure your delicate little cunt is going to be ready for me again, already? Because I’m not going to go easy on you.”
She kept grinding. Fuck, she was hot. Years of bottled up aggression were coming out of me.
“Never go easy on me, Shane. Never. I don’t like easy.”
I’d heard enough. I kissed her once more, then helped her get her red flannel pajama pants off. I slid my sweatpants off as well.
We were both desperate to fuck and so impatient that she didn’t even get her shirt off.
Well, it was one of my old high school hockey jerseys.
I sat back on the couch and she straddled me, sinking down onto my cock and clenching all around me.
“Does that feel good?” she whispered in my ear as she began to ride me.
“Fuck, that feels amazing,” I breathed. At first, I gripped the base of her neck and stared into her eyes.
She started off riding me a little tentatively at first. Then we found our rhythm together.
Pleasure coiled inside me as her hips pounded into me furiously. Then playfully. Then furiously again.
We panted together, I grabbed her hips as I buried myself in her from underneath, slapping her ass when she needed it. I lifted her up and spun her so she was kneeling in the middle of the couch, her ass facing me. Fuck me, she looked hot. I fucked her until her ass was pink from my hips smashing into her and she was screaming so hard it sounded like she was crying.
Well, she was crying, I guess. Those were her screams of pleasure.
We did it in all the angles we could on that couch. She seemed to know the position I wanted her in before I even said it. And if she didn’t, I positioned her just right.
But in spite of our versatile porno positions, this was nowhere near some physical only hookup.
No. When Natalie moaned, I could feel her soul vibrating into me.
When she came, it wasn’t on the surface. It was deep inside her. She had the tightest pussy I’d ever felt, but that wasn’t what turned me on about her.
I watched her eyes roll up in t
he back of her head several times. Felt how she clenched around me in pleasure, loved it when she would dig her nails into me.
Loved the hot sting of her ass on my palm.
“Yes, Shane,” she whispered, riding me again. “I love how you use my pussy like that. I love how I can feel you in control even though I’m riding you.”
Her words, her voice sent me over the edge. I came so hard I thought I might be having an aneurysm.
“Jesus,” she muttered. “Be careful.”
“Everything okay?”
She smiled hazily as she stood up, off me. “As long as my cervix didn’t break, yeah.”
I went to the bathroom and got us a towel to wipe both of us down.
“You forgive me yet?” she asked, as we pulled our pajamas back on. The question lingered in the air as she brought us both warmers of the hot cocoa that was on the stove.
“Thanks.” I nodded my head in the direction of her dad’s journals. “I’m getting there. How about we go through those?”
She took a sip of her hot cocoa. “I’d like that.”
My phone buzzed on the coffee table, and I went to check it.
The message was from Jared, to a thread with Bob and I:
Jared: Dude. Where the fuck have you been? We’re worried Natalie might have left
Shane: You’re still seriously on that? Dude, that was high school shit. We were never serious about the pact. REALITY CALLED AND THEY WANT TO MAKE SURE YOU UNDERSTAND PEOPLE WHO KIDNAP PEOPLE GO TO PRISON
Bob: Oh, we were very serious. She’s loaded, dude. And you know we’ll be able to elude the law.
Shane: You two are out of your goddamn minds. We’re not doing that. It wasn’t her fault.
Jared: Wow. Sounds like someone’s gone pretty soft.
“Who is it, babe?” Natalie asked.
One day of sleeping together and we were on ‘babe’ terms.
But it didn’t feel weird. Sometimes, you just knew someone was going to be special in your life. I didn’t know if Natalie and I would be together forever, a month, or even the rest of the day.
But I knew I’d never forget how she made me feel.
“Just my mom,” I lied. “She’ll be coming back in a couple days, I think. Snow is supposed to stop tonight and then hopefully they’ll be able to clear the roads.”
Black Ice: A Standalone Enemies to Lovers Romance Page 18