Page 100 of When We Had Forever
“It’s...a name.”
“Whose?” I don’t know why I ask. I already know. Lily’s.
The fingers on my hip tighten. “Does it really matter right now?”
I drag my eyes back up to his. Strangely, it does. It’s part of what makes him so painfully beautiful—this unguarded brokenness, all the ways in which his past has wrecked him, none of which he bothers to hide.
“Kiss me,” I say.
“Fucking hell,” he growls. “I thought you’d never ask.”
When he bends and slants his mouth across mine, the world dissolves into glittering darkness.
It’s so...different.
Where my husband was a frantic, lightning-storm crackle, Grayson kisses like he’s filling a years-deep hole drop by drop. His tongue sweeps against mine in long, worshipful strokes. The Scotch makes him taste as smoky as he sounds, like a spreading flame consuming the dark.
I kiss him back. A wave builds and builds, a tsunami that tugs at something rooted so far down I can’t tell where it ends. I finally admit, then, what I’ve been avoiding all evening.
This is not just sex. Itrusthim. He hasn’t once rolled the shutters down. He hasn’t closed me out. He’s let all his jagged edges show, and that makes me feel safer here in this vast, empty forest than I ever did in my fortress of glass.
I bury one hand in his hair and skim the other down his backside.
His tongue plunges deeper, a slow and inevitable devouring. I open as fully as I can. Yet it’s so much more than just my legs widening to accept his weight or my lips parting to welcome him in. It’s a baring of myself, an offering up of my shadows in exchange for everything he’s allowed me to see. It’s arecognition.
No kittens here, after all. Just a pair of battle-bruised, still-fighting tigers, willingly engulfing each other while the world dims to a crackling glow behind us.
He releases my mouth. His hair drags against my neck as swollen lips kiss a path toward my chest, where his teeth tease me right through my bra.
My spine bows. He tugs the fabric aside and sweeps the peak of my nipple into his mouth, drawing a luscious sound of unraveling from my lips.
I slip my hands into his boxers and clutch at his ass, grinding my pelvis upward in a mindless demand for completion. He submits, if only partly. His hand strays downward, cupping between my legs, where his thumb draws maddening circles right through my panties, in a place that makes me want to hit the ceiling.
I cry out and hold him tighter. He levers upward and kisses me again, stealing one gasp after another from my lips as his fingers flick aside the narrow strip of fabric and slip into me. I tilt my hips up, giving him access, and I coil and burn and forget myself and care about nothing but the way he feels around me, in me, murmuring my own name into my mouth.
Just when I worry he’ll bring me over the edge too early, his hand retreats to the curve of my waist. I ache with the sudden emptiness.
He pulls back and looks me in the face. “Fuck,” he says. “I’ve dreamed about this for so long. You have no idea.”
I gaze down my cheeks at him, not bothering to fight the drunken weight of my half-slitted lids. If he drags this out any longer, I might actually die. “You don’t have to talk.”
“I know,” he says. “But I want you to know...this isn’t just me trying to get into your pants.”
“It’s fine, if it is.”
“No, it’s... I’m...”
A frown steals in from around the fringes of my bliss. He looks so...resolute. Like he has something to accomplish before we go any further. “You’re what? Why’re you looking at me like that?”
“Because.” He studies me from inches away, his attention jumping from one of my eyes to the other. All the depth from earlier is back, but this time, it’s like it has no bottom. “The truth is, I’m so in love with you I don’t know what to do. I’m so fucking in love with you it hurts.”
“You...wait,what?”
“You heard me.”
It’s like he’s flung a bucket of ice water straight at my face. I snatch my hands free and scramble backward, laying one palm against his chest to press him away. “You don’t mean that.”
He cringes. “Oh, god. I’m sorry. Shit. I wasn’t trying to scare you. I just needed you to know.”
