His heart beats faster now, trotting to a gallop.
“I want to come home to you every night. I want to sleep next to you, always. I want to talk about our days. I want to teach Honor what love, real love, looks like. What it means to be a family.” He cups my face in his hand and tilts it upward.
I open my eyes, breath catching with each inhalation. “So what are you saying?”
“I’m asking you to do life with me, Astaire.”
There’s no ring. He isn’t on bended knee. And there’s no mention of marriage. But in its own way, what he’s asking of me is so much bigger than any of that.
“So what do you say?” He pulls me into his lap, sits up, and clicks the lamp on beside us. “Are you in?”
His gaze surveys mine, his breath slow and steady, patient—unfitting for a man who doesn’t have all the time in the world.
I don’t how this is going to end, but I can’t imagine walking away from the beautiful life we could have together, be it tragically brief or wonderfully everlasting.
“I’m in,” I say through clouded vision.
His mouth arches at the sides and he claims my mouth with a kiss that sends tingles from the top of my head to the bottoms of my feet. My lips part to accept his tongue, and I slip my hands over his shoulders. A moment later, he’s peeling his t-shirt off my shoulders. The outline of his cock grows harder, thicker as our mouths connect and I grind against him.
Sliding the gusset of my panties aside, he slips a finger between my seam, teasing my clit before pushing it deeper inside me.
But I want more.
I want his heat filling the ache between my thighs.
I stifle a moan before whispering into his ear, all but begging him to have his way with me.
His kisses turn biting and greedy as he flips me onto my back and shoves my panties the rest of the way down. And his mouth grazes mine before he moves south, teasing a pert nipple with his tongue as his fingertips trail my inner thighs and stop at the apex.
I pull him close, reaching for his cock and freeing it from the confines of his low-slung navy sweats. He fills my palm, hot and hard, pulsing with matched desire.
“I want you so bad …” I grind beneath him, impatient and willing.
Our eyes catch in the dark.
“I’m on the pill …” I remind him.
Bennett slides his hands beneath my ass, pressing his hardness against my wetness, and flips us over, until I’m straddling him and he’s got the million-dollar view.
“Show me how bad you want me.” There’s a glint in his shadowy eyes and a tease in his tone.
I rock my hips over his throbbing erection, teasing him back, and then I slide myself over his length, slow inch by torturing inch, until he fills me to the hilt. His hands search my body before settling at my hips, and I rock back and forth, fully intending to ride this out to the end—in every sense of the word.
I love this man.
I love him, I love him, I love him.
46
Bennett
“You sitting down?” My attorney asks Wednesday afternoon. “I’ve got some news.”
“What’s going on?”
James breathes heavy into the other end. “Your brother has filed a suit to establish paternity.”
I sink into my desk chair, eyeing the drawer containing the stack of text transcripts. With everything going on this past week, I hadn’t had a chance to figure out exactly how I intended to use them, but now I know.
“Thanks for the information.” I try to end the call, but James protests. “James, it’s fine. I’ve got this. I’ll call you if I need anything else.”
I press the red button, pull up my contacts, and select Errol’s name. The line rings three times before the bastard answers.
“Come over,” I say. “We need to talk.”
“Thought that would get your attention.” Errol’s been standing in my doorway for a mere five seconds when I’m forced to restrain myself from knocking him to the floor. While I’d love to give him the beating he deserves, I invited him here for a discussion. For now, I’ll have to replay the fond memory of breaking his nose in the pool house back in high school, when I caught him trying to take advantage of some drunk girl from Worthington Heights High who was two seconds from blacking out and clearly unable to consent.
Besides, I’m not in the mood to wipe his pathetic blood off my foyer floor.
“Follow me. There’s something I need to show you.” I stride to my study, shoulders back, head high. My head swells with confidence because I’ve got the bastard and now he’s going to pay.
“What? What’s this about?” Errol asks when he steps inside.
I yank the transcripts from my top desk drawer and shove them at him. “Any of this look familiar to you?”
He straightens the stack, eyes narrowing as they glide over the disgusting discourse.
“What is this made-up garbage?”
“This garbage is proof of the sordid affair you led with your adopted sister. And while it’s merely a snapshot of your disgusting perversion, there’s more than enough evidence to show you’d been grooming her, you psychologically and emotionally abused her, you manipulated her, and you knew damn well about the pregnancy.” I point to the stack. “I’m sure Beth would love to read the sweet and wonderful things you said about her when you were nailing your sister behind her back.”
Errol stares at the papers, but his eyes stop scanning. He’s lost in thought, it would seem. His complexion tints a sickly shade of grey, his lips pressing flat, like he could be sick at any moment.
I always knew my mother’s intentions in keeping Honor out of this family, but I realize now that I had it all wrong with Errol. He wasn’t trying to protect his marriage so much as he was trying to erase any and all reminders of the man he is inside.
The sick, sordid monster of a man.
The part of him he hates.
And even if he were never to see Honor again (and he won’t), knowing that his younger brother is raising her, doing the right thing—would kill him. It would eat away at him, little by little, day by day.
“Little backstory for you,” I say, relishing in the opportunity to kick the man when he’s down. “Since no one in this family ever thought to throw the poor girl a bone, I had the decency to at least provide her with a cell phone. For safety reasons. Since I owned the line, all it took was a few phone calls and the carrier was able to provide me with transcripts of every message—text and picture—sent between the two of you. It’s all here. Every twisted little secret you thought you could bury.”
My words are ripe with self-righteousness, and I couldn’t care less.
“I’ve got everything in an email. I’m literally a single click away from sending this to your wife, to our mother, to literally anyone who might find any of this salacious enough to write a cover story or make a newspaper headline out of it,” I say. “Your life, as you know it, would be over, Errol. No beautiful, loyal wife. No infant son. No check-writing mother to afford your cushy lifestyle. No robust social circle. No one buying your art. No more reaping the benefits of your last name. You’d be a laughingstock, a joke. For the rest of your life.”