His groan was filled with pure relief. With her arms and legs anchored around him, he carried her into the bedroom, laid her back on the mattress, and pulled off her nightshirt and panties in quick succession. He stepped back, stripping off his jeans and briefs. After retrieving a condom from the nightstand and sheathing himself, he moved onto the bed, between her already spread legs.
He brushed the tips of his fingers reverently through her soft, wet folds, his tender caress so at odds with the possessive heat blazing in his wild eyes that told her this joining was going to be demanding and greedy. That once he was buried deep inside of her, it was going to be a relentless, merciless ride to the finish.
The thought made her stomach quiver and her nipples peak into hard, needy points. She was already drenched and sensitive, her body so attuned to his touch. Another dip and swirl of his skillful fingers, and she gripped the comforter in her hands and shuddered, knowing it wasn’t going to take much at all for her to come.
Once he was assured that she was ready for him, he lifted her legs up, resting her ankles on his shoulders. He aligned the engorged tip of his cock against her opening and leaned all the way over her until his arms were braced on either side of her head. With his dark, glittering eyes locked on hers, he reared back slightly and drove inside her with one hard, ruthless thrust.
She sucked in a shocked breath—at the initial twinge of pain and surprisingly tight fit, and the way her hips naturally tilted up to take him so impossibly deep. She was pinned beneath him, her body completely open to him, completely his, no doubt, just as he intended. This unconventional position gave him all the power, all the leverage he needed to take her any way he wanted.
His taut body trembled, and she realized he was holding back. And she instinctively knew why. “There is nothing you can do to hurt me, and I’m not going to break,” she assured him huskily, giving him what he needed to hear. “Fuck me, Clay. Fuck me hard, because it’s what I want, too.”
Her words made him snap, and he started to move, driving into her, again and again. His hips surging faster and faster. Pounding harder and harder. Sliding deeper and deeper, each time dragging the head of his cock against sensitive nerve endings just inside her channel until the sensation had her trying to shift in counterpoint to Clay’s aggressive thrusts. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. She could only let the climax build, as Clay’s control finally shattered.
He bared his teeth with an animalistic growl, his hips pumping, pumping, pumping, until the relentless friction set off her release. Her entire body splintered from the inside out, exquisite sensation taking her over the edge and keeping her there. She moaned and tipped her head back, feeling her internal muscles continue to flutter, tighten, and squeeze around his cock as she came and came and came—so long and hard she couldn’t hold back her scream of pleasure.
With one last brutal thrust, he followed her over with a hoarse shout, his body jerking hard, releasing not only his orgasm but, she hoped, his demons, as well.
It was the last gift she could give him, and she wanted it to matter.
Chapter Thirteen
The calm after the storm. That’s what it felt like as Clay lay on his back on the bed with a warm, naked Samantha curled into the crook of his arm and her head resting on his shoulder. While he was still worried about the situation with Wyatt, the anger and barely suppressed rage he’d been carrying with him all day and night were now just a dull ache in his chest. Thank God.
Samantha had gotten
him through one of the worst days in recent memory, had given herself over to him so selflessly, her body and, he suspected, even more. She’d surrendered everything to him, not thinking twice about allowing him to slake his primal need inside her, to release all the pain he’d kept buried since he was a kid because he didn’t know jack shit about how to deal with his emotions. It had been so much easier to suppress the pain and misery, despite the dark memories lingering just below the surface, always there, silently festering, just waiting for the one trigger to cause an eruption when the past resurfaced again.
Seeing Wyatt after all these years, remembering all the horrific things he’d endured at the man’s hands, and him threatening Samantha, had been the catalyst, causing him to unleash all the ugliness in a firestorm of rage and bitterness that had threatened to consume him. And it would have, if Samantha hadn’t come out of the bedroom and been strong for him. She’d been the anchor he’d so desperately needed to keep him grounded when he’d been so damn close to losing his mind and fracturing in two.
She’d asked about the scars on his back, and after everything Samantha had just given him, along with the fact that Wyatt had her in his sights, she deserved to know the truth. About everything. But first, he owed her an apology for being so rough on her, for taking her like a fucking animal.
With her head resting against his shoulder, he lifted his hand and gently stroked his fingers through her soft, silky hair. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice raspier than he’d expected it to be.
“I’m not,” she replied quietly, understanding the reason he was apologizing before he could even explain. “It was what you needed, and I’m grateful that I was here for you.” Her warm breath drifted across his chest as she spoke.
He was grateful, too, more than she’d ever know. God, she knew him so well. Had known what he’d needed even before he had. “Then I guess what I should say is thank you.”
Before she could respond to that, he quickly pushed out the next words so he couldn’t change his mind. “You asked about the scars on my back and what happened back when I was a kid.”
“Yes. Will you tell me?” She was quiet and hopeful but not demanding.
He realized she was giving him a choice, and for the first time in his life, he found himself wanting to share the most personal, private side of himself with someone. With Samantha. And so he did, starting from the beginning.
“My mother was a crack whore and a prostitute,” he said, bracing himself for some kind of negative reaction from Samantha—flinching, shuddering, something to indicate her disgust. But the only thing she did was rest her hand on his chest, right over his beating heart, as if she needed that emotional connection to him as much as he needed her.
He swallowed the thick knot in his throat and continued. “Mason, Levi, and I, we all have different fathers. Each time our mother got pregnant, it was with a different john, so we don’t even know who our fathers were. We never had a man’s influence in our lives. But there were many jerk-offs who lived with us in our one-bedroom apartment, and they were all drug addicts like our mother,” he said, unable to withhold the disgust he harbored. “And since she was never aware or conscious enough to take care of us kids, I took on the role at a very early age.”
“That must’ve been hard,” she murmured, her hand still lingering over his heart.
He didn’t acknowledge just how difficult it had been. “I was six when Levi was born, and even then, I was the one who made sure he had his bottle, and I changed his diapers the best I could. I made cereal and sandwiches for me and Mason—at least when we had food in the house, but a lot of times we went to bed hungry.”
She lifted her head and met his gaze, her blue eyes filled with compassion and a flicker of anger, too. “Why didn’t social services step in?”
He wasn’t surprised someone as pure and untouched as Samantha still believed in the system. “We lived in the projects, and nobody cared about what happened with their neighbors. Nobody noticed, so my mother was never reported. And in her lucid moments, when I complained, my mother instilled the fear of God in me, warning me that if I told anyone that she was rarely home or that we had no food, social services would come by—to take us away and split the three of us up forever.”
“That’s awful,” she said, her voice an aching whisper.
He shrugged. “That was my life.” Exhaling a deep breath, he gently pressed a hand to the back of her head and brought her cheek back to rest on his chest, and continued to stroke her hair. It was much easier to talk to her about his past without looking into her sad, somber eyes.