Page 17 of Intersect

“Believe me,” he snarls, “if it weren’t for that tumor, you’d be humiliated by what an absolute cunt you’re being right now.”

I’m so stunned I nearly drop the phone. I’ve known him since I was a little kid, and I never dreamed he’d use that word, much less direct it at me. But it’s freeing, seeing how low he will sink when he doesn’t get his way. Any lingering guilt I felt releases into the air like a balloon. “You have no idea what a cunt I can be. Keep harassing me and you’ll find out.”

I hang up and turn to find Nick standing a few feet behind me with a shirt on and keys in hand, eyes narrowed to slits.

“Tell me he didn’t just call you that,” he says, his voice flat. It would be easy to mistake him for calm, but there’s nothing calm about him right now.

“It doesn’t matter.”

His nostrils flare and his fist is clenched so tight I’m worried the keys are going to cut into his palm. “The fuck it doesn’t.”

“Believe me—if you intervened, it would just make things worse for everyone involved.” My mouth twitches upward. “And I took care of it.”

“Why are you smiling?” he demands. “Because I’m fucking pissed.”

I laugh and close the distance between us, wrapping my arms around his neck. “Did you hear me? I was kind of a badass for the first time in my life. I was feisty.”

He grins reluctantly. “Yeah? And? Did you enjoy it?”

I go on my toes to press my mouth to his once, quickly, before I drop back to the ground. “Yeah, I really did.”

He pulls me back to him. “Good,” he says, his lips a whisper from my mine, “because I think seeing you feisty is unbelievably hot.”

Desire spasms low in my stomach at the look on his face. “You might not like it so much when it’s directed at you,” I reply, my voice suddenly breathless.

His lips graze my temple, my cheek, the corner of my mouth. He teases me, avoiding them, moving down to my jaw and my throat. “I think I’m going to like that even more. But I’m going to fuck you until you can’t climb out of bed afterward, so wait until that’s an option.”

I groan. The combination of his mouth on the side of my throat, and his words, and the image of him doing exactly what he said…I want it so badly I don’t know how we’re ever going to avoid it. “You can’t say things like that.” I feel winded. “Or I’m going to beg you to do it.”

He is hard against me, and his hands now contain a tension on my hips they didn’t have before. As if the rage that was boiling in his blood only moments ago has suddenly been channeled elsewhere. “Jesus. You have no idea how badly I want you to.”

I vibrate with the need for more. His hand slides from my hip to my thigh, beneath the bikini bottom. His fingers glide over me, slip inside, and he groans low in his chest—a stifled, desperate sound. This isn’t carefully planned like we’d intended, but it no longer matters. I can’t be content with just his fingers. He could make me come ten times, just like this, and it still wouldn’t be enough. My hands are at the button of his trunks, sliding them down even as he lowers me into the grass. On an open hillside, in daylight, for all the world to see, and it just doesn’t matter.

He looms over me, his eyes heavy-lidded and hazy. He pulls my bottoms to the side and his cock rests between my legs. “Jesus, Quinn. You have no idea how hard it is not to push inside you right now.” I want to beg him to do it. The need pulls every cord of my body tight, except there’s a tiny voice in the back of my head, warning me. “We can’t.”

His mouth finds mine as he glides against me. The head of his cock bumps my entrance and I gasp—90 percent want and 10 percent fear. Our eyes lock. The strain of holding back is written in every line of his face. “We can’t,” I repeat, “but I just need…just don’t stop.”

He flinches and continues to glide against me, faster, harder. He unties the sides of my bottoms and pulls down the top before his lips fasten on one nipple, hard. “Faster,” I plead, my legs wrapping around his back. He complies and the sight of him above, his face strained and desperate, unleashes something inside me.

I shatter without warning, crying out so loudly I can hear the sound echo down the hill, over the water. He jerks away and spills across my stomach. “Fuck,” he growls. His eyes are squeezed shut, his jaw taut with the strain. We aren’t even done and I already want more.

His eyes open slowly, still in a haze. “Jesus Christ. The last time I came from dry humping someone was the day I got my learner’s permit.”

He presses his mouth to my forehead and then pulls away, preoccupied and unhappy, only now glancing toward the lake to make sure we didn’t have an audience. He hands me my bikini bottoms and pulls up his trunks, then strips off his T-shirt to wipe my stomach—all of it in complete silence. “That’s exactly what I was talking about,” he finally says, collapsing on the grass beside me. “If you’d told me to go for it, I would have. I’d halfway rationalized it before we hit the ground. If it was anything like this before, I understand how you wound up pregnant so fast.”

Except I was on the pill in London, and it’s worked without exception since I started dating Jeff. I assume Nick’s managed not to impregnate anyone either—so what is it about the two of us together that causes the problem? And the woman I always see in my nightmare—is it a coincidence that she appeared in his office mere hours after the two of us got together?

Of course it isn’t.

I can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner.

“It’s not about us,” I gasp, sitting up. “It’s about the baby. In that dream I always have of us in the hospital? We’re there because I’m delivering, and that’s when she stops us. She doesn’t want us to have the baby.”

He sits up too, looking at me warily. “Why do you say that?”

“Neither of us have a single memory of me that goes past the point when I was pregnant, right? That’s where our story ends both times. I remember feeling panicked in the hospital. Scared something bad was going to happen, even before she came in, and also desperate to get through it before she could stop us.” I’m talking so fast I’m barely stopping to breathe. “She keeps changing aspects of my life so we don’t meet at all. The first time we grew up together, were children together, and so she changed it. The second time we grew up apart but found each other in London, and she ended that too. But she doesn’t care about the two of us being together. It’s only when we get pregnant that she tries to change things.”

Nick stares at the water, frowning, his expression grim. “It has to be related to the Rule of Threes, right? The baby must make the fourth in the line.”