Seconds pass in ragged breaths. Each one panted a second too long until I can be buried in her.
Her back pinned against the wall. My hands on her waist, lifting her so that she can wrap her calves around my hips.
She curls her hand around my cock, and as good as that feels, it has nothing on when she arches her hips and rubs it up and down her slit.
Wet doesn’t even begin to describe how fucking drenched she is.
Tight doesn’t explain the resistance I feel when I lower her down onto me.
Fucking ecstasy doesn’t hold a damn candle to what it feels like to be buried in her balls deep.
“Christ, Tate.”
“Soooo good.”
She clenches her muscles around my dick and pulls me in tighter, and I swear to fucking God, any less of a man would have come on the spot.
It takes everything I have not to.
But that’s only because this feels so damn good that I don’t want to waste the pleasure.
“You do realize that, when you do that, it begs me to fuck you on every goddamn surface in this house, right?” I groan as my head falls back, and I fight the urge to fuck her into oblivion.
Her laugh rings out as her fingernails dig into my shoulders. “Then I guess I need to keep doing it.”
Those storm-cloud-colored eyes of hers are dark with desire, etched with need, as she tightens around me again.
My jaw clenches—hell, every goddamn part of me clenches in response.
I lean in and kiss her. The kind of kiss that makes my balls ache and my eyes roll back. The kind of kiss that is soft and slow like she needs since it’s all she’s going to get. Because she feels so fucking incredible that, the minute I move—the minute my dick slides out and then pushes back in again—there will be no way slow is going to pass through my mind again.
Hell, thinking won’t even begin to be an option.
With my lips on her and my hands on her waist, I begin that slow slide out. I hold her against the wall as I fight for every ounce of control when I push gently back into her again.
“Jack.” A sighed moan.
“Jack.” It’s my name she’s calling when I’m buried to the hilt so there isn’t a single ounce of space between where our bodies meet.
“Jack?”
Another pull out.
“Mmm?” I lean back to look at her to remind myself what I needed from her last time that she didn’t give me.
Her eyes open and on me.
Her lips moaning my name.
It’s her needing me right now.
Not Fletcher.
Not him.
Those eyes pull me in as much as her pussy does. Lids heavy with arousal. Hair a mess falling around her face. Lips parted and swollen from mine.
“Fuck me, Jack.” If her words were explosive, then the groan that follows them is a Molotov cocktail.
Restraint snaps.
Gentle. Soft. Slow—cease to exist.
Now. Need. Hard.
It’s all I can think.
All I can feel.
Until I can’t think.
Until it’s just Tate and me and her pussy and my dick.
“Look at me,” I demand as black eyelashes flutter open.
Until it’s just her fingernails scoring lines in my skin and my teeth nipping her shoulder.
“Look at me, Tate.” As sex-drugged eyes hold mine.
Until it’s her panted cry as the orgasm slams into her and my own release hits me so goddamn hard I almost black out.
Instead of moving, we slide down the wall, my jeans still around my ankles, and her legs still wrapped around my waist.
We don’t speak as our hearts decelerate. We don’t acknowledge we had sex two nights in a row when technically this isn’t really a thing. In fact, we don’t do anything other than sit with her forehead resting on my shoulder and my dick softening inside her.
“We have to move at some point,” I finally mutter as her skin begins to cool beneath my lips.
She chuckles. “You mean we have to do the unsexy part of sex?” she asks as she slides her hand between her thighs and cups herself as I slip out of her.
“The unsexy part?” I ask, knowing full well what she means but loving that she’s talking about it. Loving that this woman is comfortable enough with me to.
“Yeah,” she jokes. “The duckwalk to the bathroom part for me. The wash your dick off in the sink part for you.”
“Well,” I say through a laugh as she rises and I watch her head down the hall. “I guess I need to find that sink then.”
“You probably should,” she says over her shoulder looking to where I’m sitting. Her eyes roam to my dick, still semi-hard against my thigh, still coated in both of us. Her smile is shy when, after what she just did, there’s no way in hell she’s shy. “We’ll need to use that again later.”
And just like that, I’m left speechless for the second time tonight.
29
TATE
“Holy shit.”
It’s my first and only thought as I look in my mirror above the sink in my bathroom.
My cheeks are flushed. My neck has red marks from where his goatee scraped against it. My eyes . . . my eyes are alive with excitement and pleasure.
And I initiated it.
Not only did I initiate it but I also told Jack Sutton that I freaking wanted to do it again.
My hands go over my face as I die of embarrassment, questioning what had emboldened me all of a sudden.
But I know what it was.
It was picking up the pieces of my old life off the floor. It was realizing each memory felt manufactured. Each one was hiding a lie I never knew about. Every piece held love, but it was deceptive and duplicitous. Yes, Fletcher and I loved hard, but he also lied harder.
It was as I was sorting the mess that I realized just how strong I am and how I don’t recognize the woman I was back then.
It was hearing that knock on the door and knowing who it was and what I wanted, to lose myself in Jack for a while. To forget to remember, to bury the past, and to see that I have a future as Tate Knox, not Fletcher’s wife.
It was hiding behind the realization of what I had done by using humor to do the walk of shame, only to find there isn’t shame. There is only freedom in knowing what I want and not being afraid to express it.
That’s all new for me.
I run a hand down my chest, over my breasts that Fletcher teased were too small but that Jack seems to have absolutely no problem with. To my hips that swell out. To the apex of my thighs still throbbing from the pounding he just gave it.
And I feel alive—scream-from-the-rooftops, dance-in-the-rain, flip-off-all-my-haters alive.
A giggle bubbles up in my throat as I try to figure out what in the hell to do next.
“You okay in there?” Jack calls out with a laugh as I hear a faucet turn on in the bathroom down the hall as he cleans up.
“Yep. I’m good.”
And when I look back in the mirror at the goofy smile on my face, I know I just might be.
30
JACK
The door is ajar.
Black trash bags, which look to be full of shredded photos, line one side of the floor. Framed photos are arranged in a gallery on one wall. There are black-and-white stills of the landscape, colorful ones of exotic places overseas, muted ones of the everyday on this ranch. The other side of the room has unframed 8x10s hanging from clips on a crisscross of strings. There is a small workstation with a laptop, camera parts, and accessories beneath a row of windows.