Halle-fucking-lujah.
I growled as her hands grabbed my waist, squeezing there before moving down to grab my butt. She pressed me into her, holding on tightly so that the minute amount of space I’d brought between us disappeared and was swallowed up. She arched her ass though, rocking her pelvis back so that she could tunnel her other hand between us.
When I felt her hand on my cock through my pants, I had no idea how I wouldn’t burst.
Jesus Christ.
This woman was my personal dynamite.
I groaned into her mouth, loving the vibration that tingled along our tongues. She grunted in response, then I felt her nip my bottom lip. Hard. Not tearing into the soft flesh, but marking me as I’d marked her before.
And I fucking loved it.
God, I wanted her to claim me, because that would make me as much hers as she was mine.
I shoved forward, only so I could twist us around and press her back against the door. Taking advantage of the new position, I reached up and cupped her tit, and the second I did that, her hand tightened on my cock.
Fuck.
My eyes would have crossed if they weren’t closed.
I began rocking my hips, began thrusting into her palm, and just when I felt sure I was about to claim my woman for the first time against the front door, her cell rang.
And my entire night went to shit.
Chapter Eleven
“What happened?” Phoebe sneered, and I realized I’d never truly seen her this denigrating, this angry and outraged. I mean, I thought I had, but I hadn’t. “Let me guess, you fell asleep, drunk as usual, and were smoking at the same time?”
The woman sitting, coughing and spluttering into a ventilator, looked like the human equivalent of jerky.
Not because she was burned. She wasn’t. But smoked? Yeah. She was brown and leathery, sweat streaked her skin, making white tracks appear here and there along the creases of her eyes and down her cheeks. Her body was wrapped up in a silver blanket, and the fact she was huddled up, her knees wrapped against her belly underneath said blanket, told me she hadn’t been burned because she’d be creased up in agony if she had.
At her daughter’s words, however, Linda Whitehouse’s head drooped. “It was an accident,” she rasped, tucking the nebulizer out of the way so she could make her claim.
“Always is with you,” Phoebe said with a scoff. “You know the only reason I answered?”
Linda blinked at her warily. “W-Why?”
“Because you hadn’t called me since I moved out. You didn’t give a fuck about me. And I figured this was someone in a hospital somewhere calling your emergency contact.” She snarled, “How right I was.”
“I-I need your help, baby.”
“I’m not your baby, and I’m already taking care of the only child that is. I have enough responsibility without dealing with a drunken, deadbeat mother.” Her top lip curled. “You’ll get no more help from me other than what I gladly give Scottie. I only came here to tell you two things.
“I don’t and never will forgive you for being a useless mother. And the only way I will ever let you into mine or Scottie’s lives again, is if you complete the Twelve-Step Program and come to us clean. Otherwise, that’s it. You’re dead to us.”
Before I could do little other than eye the frazzled woman on the smeared-with-charcoal hospital bed, Phoebe had grabbed my hand and was hauling me down the corridor we’d just traversed.
The ER department was busy at this time of night, but Phoebe moved through it like the pro she was at avoiding crowds, thanks to her job at the bar. With my hand tucked firmly in hers, I let her guide me until we were outside.
The second the warm night air hit us?
She almost folded in two, and that was my Phoebe. The one in there had surprised me. Not disgusted me, just had taken me aback.
Phoebe wasn’t perfect, and I didn’t think she was, but her disdain for her mother had come as a definite shock.
But this Phoebe?
Who sobbed as she propped herself upright? Whose tears sounded like they were being dragged from her kicking and screaming?
This was my Phoebe.
And she stood there, like the island she’d been but no longer was, holding up the tide, containing it all within herself, when now, she wasn’t just one but a part of a pair.
Her tears killed me, decimated me, and under the blinking light outside the ER’s reception area, I rearranged her pretzel-like form and hauled her into my arms.
She sank against me like I was a life raft in the stormy sea, and I let her, let her sob into me, let her drench my shirt with her emotions and took it for the honor it was.
Around us, people stared, but this was a hospital, and they misconstrued her grief.
They stared at us through a haze of cigarette smoke, some of them attached to IVs, others in wheelchairs. Some were surgically attached to their cellphones and peered up at Phoebe’s sobbing with a glower for her disturbing their concentration. Others ignored us, too intent on their own problems.
Before us, the ambulances came in to dock, spitting out EMTs who shouted as they moved, wheeling in gurneys with patients who were bleeding and gasping for air. Some were silent, no lights required, as dead bodies were brought in.
Around us, the world was chaos, and even though Phoebe still wept, her tears had slowed down, and I felt like I was in a calm space with her as we looked out onto the manicness of the scene around us.
She brought, I realized, peace to me.
Funny how I only just recognized that.
Even when I’d followed her and had been stressed, my intention hadn’t just been to make sure she was safe, because I saw now that it was because of how it made me feel to be around her.
Like she was my air and I was suffocating without her.
I closed my eyes at the thought, and pressed my face into her hair. Like she knew I’d abandoned myself to her, thrown myself all in, she curled tighter into my arms, huddling into me as though together, we could make anything right.
And hell, maybe she wasn’t wrong.
Maybe the two of us together was the only thing that made sense in this godforsaken city.
All those months ago, when Phoebe had walked into my world by strolling onto my campus, she’d been like a living representation of my past. When I saw her, the flick of her hair over her shoulder, her silken smile, the sinuous curves of her body as she wielded them like a knife in a duel, I’d seen Gina. I’d seen the bitch who’d controlled me, and I’d stalked that past. Had followed it to make sure I knew where it was at all times, because it couldn’t hurt me then. She couldn’t hurt me then.
When she’d compounded my belief in her wickedness by stealing, I’d taken advantage of that, and inadvertently, had welcomed the present and the future into my life, because Phoebe was both. And she could never know the true origins of our relationship. If Phoebe ever did, that was it. My life was over.
“Are you ready to go home?” I asked after a few moments longer. Peering up at the sky, I saw the clouds that had been threateningly dark all morning had moved over us, and looked set to trigger our own personal storm. I hoped that wasn’t a harbinger.
“Home?” she whispered.
“Yeah.” I bussed her forehead and squeezed her tightly. “Our loft.”