He mutters under his breath, but I crawl quickly onto the bed. Flopping over to my back, I spread my legs. Nick’s got one boot off when he catches me drag my fingers through my wet folds. “Fuck this.” Nick crawls onto the bed with one boot still on, one pant leg still trapped. He grabs my ankles and pulls. Cupping my ass, he lifts me to him as his head lowers.
Each lash of his tongue against the swollen bud of my clit is sheer torture. “I’ll never survive this,” I manage to gasp.
“You will. Now just go over,” Nick orders before he suctions his mouth over my lower lips and gives me a particularly devastating kiss that sends shivers coursing through me.
I cry out as I come, unable to keep in the sound. But nothing, I swear nothing, feels better than Nick Cain’s smile against the entrance of where he’s about to thrust his cock right before he mutters, “That’s my girl.”
Twisting around, still hampered by the jeans and boot, Nick finds a condom and slips it on. He tries to toss the wrapper over the side of the bed. I giggle as it flutters and lands right next to my head.
He just shakes his head. Lifting one leg up over his shoulder, I feel on display—as if Nick could see inside my body all the way into my heart. When he presses his chest forward and lines up his cock with my opening, dragging the heated flesh against my still-clenching entrance, I close my eyes to give myself some sort of shield.
Nick merely blows past it by notching his cock against the entrance at the same time his lips crash into mine. My eyes fly wide open. At that moment, he pushes inside me.
Physically, emotionally, I’m spread wide open for him. His cock is penetrating me in long slow thrusts much as his tongue is. But it’s nothing in comparison to the way his heart claimed me years ago. I’m certain it all shows on my face as I do what I can to mark him in the same way he’s done to me—with emotion, with my body.
“Harder, Nick. I want to feel you whenever I move,” I gasp into the air after I tear my mouth from his.
It’s like setting a caged lion free.
Leaning all his weight down, he shifts his weight to his knees. My eyes grow round as his thrusts become harder, deeper, more intense. “Fuck, Maris, take more,” he bites out.
“All of you. Give it to me, love.”
Like it was some sort of secret incantation, Nick sets the animal that lives inside him free. His eyes narrow. The arm beneath me pulls me into his thrusts as he tips my hips into receiving them. When I feel myself start to go over, he holds me in position before curling his lip and sliding his hand up my body and pinching my nipple.
My breath catches as the clenching starts again. My head whips back, and my hips lock against his.
And then I feel him go over.
He thrusts once before he buries his pulsating cock inside me. As he leans forward, the depth of his penetration sets off another spasm.
For long moments, I can’t form a coherent thought. Nick has shifted his weight to the side, though he’s still resting partially on me. But just as I’m about to pass out, I whisper into the air. “That was worth waiting for.”
And what does Nick do? He lifts his head and kisses me. “Yeah, it was. Let me know when you’re up for round two.”
Faintly, I ask, “Round two?”
Nick pulls out and rolls completely off me. The pants whip against the nightstand. He curses before stripping off the boot and his jeans. Nabbing a tissue off the nightstand, he wraps up the spent condom and tosses it in the trash basket. Spinning around, he faces me.
My heart stops beating. I actually feel it stop when I check out his well-muscled shoulders, flat stomach with those damn Vs, narrow hips, and thighs I want to ride just to see if they can make me come.
Fuck, I want to ride him.
“Did you hear that?” Nick asks as he crawls across the bed.
“Hear what?” I start to sit up, but Nick puts a hand to my chest to hold me in place.
“That was the sound of the second round.” Then he lowers his head.
I have a feeling I’ll never be able to forget feeling him inside me after tonight.
Maris
“Pain isn’t always physical. Anguish is often harder to deal with than the scars. If I were to psychoanalyze him — hell, it’s my thoughts, so why can’t I? — I’d guess that’s why Nick chose to be a fighter. He can’t deal with abandonment. It’s why he backs away from all of us.” - From the journals of Jedidiah Smith.
Nick trails his fingers along my spine. “Will you talk to me about the surgery?”
I stiffen briefly but relax under his ministrations. “Bad circumstances,” I try to joke.
“Maris.” Just my name. From anyone else, I’d have stormed away. But not after what Nick and I shared in this bed, the physical exchange of emotions that have always lived between us.
Tucking my arm beneath my head, I swallow my pride and declare, “I made a foolish mistake, and it cost me something infinitely more precious.”
“I doubt it was that cut-and-dried, Sunshine.” His hand tangles in the ends of my long hair.
Instead of answering him right away, I release a pressure valve I didn’t know was still ready to blow. “I used to dream about having a little girl with my hair. I’d remember how my Mom would curse every day trying to run a brush through it. She’d say, ‘One day when you have a daughter…’” My eyes sting with remembrance. “The last time she ever said it, I was in the hospital room. Dad and Jed had stepped out to get food. I couldn’t brush my own hair. I almost borrowed scissors from the nurses’ station to hack it all off. Mom knew me too well, or there was a note on my chart to keep sharp implements from me. They refused to give them to me when I asked a nurse for them.”
Nick doesn’t say a word, just continues to let me speak. But my next words shock him. “Jed told me about the guys’ get-well wishes. I was so glad I never heard from you.”
His fingers clench against my scalp.
“But Nick, that wasn’t because I hated you. I would have hated for you to have seen me like that. I was worthless as a woman.”
He releases my hair and rolls me to my back. “Don’t you ever say that. Ever.”
My shame drips from the corner of my eyes. “I lost everything trying to give up on what my heart knew it couldn’t do. It was my punishment for trying.”
His thumbs brush back and forth, smoothing away the wetness. “What was that?”
“Saying goodbye to you. I tried to let you go since you’d walked away from me, us, without a glance.”
His head bows. His shoulders heave. “Stop talking.”
“Then, a year later, I got your letter. I thought it was a sign that maybe everything was going to be okay. That my time in purgatory was over.” Now that I’ve opened the dam, the floodgate of my emotions is pouring out.
“Maris.” Nick’s voice is shredded.
I turn my head aside. “I felt so small in those days. I was still learning who I was all over again.”
“And I fucked up.”
I face him. It’s time to relieve him of his guilt. “Maybe yes, maybe no. We’re not the same people today we were then. I’d have followed you anywhere, been anyone, done anything, but is that the kind of woman you need?”