She returned the showerhead to its original position. “No, but something about you accusing me of loving you conditionally, along with your sudden lack of imagination in a certain department, kind of ruined the whole mood for me. I’m over it.” Turning around, she reached for the shampoo. Before her fingers had a chance to curl around the bottle, my arms were around her waist and pulling her into my lap. She crashed into me with a little gasp. “What are you doing?” She angled her head back at me, blinking away drops of water as the shower rained down on us.
One of my arms stayed tightly wound around her torso, my hand splaying in the soft bend between her hipbone and ribcage. My other arm slid lower, the hand even more so. When I’d barely just grazed her, she gasped again.
“I’m getting creative.” I lowered my mouth to her ear and kissed the spot just below it until her breathing picked up. When her breathing hit the ragged realm, my finger’s touch became a bit more . . . intentional. “How’s this for imagination?”
What I guessed was meant to be a smile formed on her face, though it looked more like she was riding the line between pain and pleasure. What appeared on my face was unmistakably a smile.
She was right. We could be intimate in more ways than the act I was so familiar with . . . and a rather large fan of. I would have rather lost my hearing or eyesight—hell, I’d even have sawn off a limb or two—rather than give up a functioning dick, but I didn’t get that choice. Life had made that choice for me. So even though I might never have been able to experience falling apart inside Josie again, at least I could give her the experience. A finger in the shower while she reclined in the lap of a man in a wheelchair might have been a poor substitute for the way things had been, but it was something.
And that something, from the look and sound of her, didn’t seem to be registering in the mediocre department.
When her arm wrapped behind my neck, cinching tightly as she got closer, my head wound up closer to the base of her neck, so that was where I focused my mouth. I sucked at her skin harder than perhaps I should have, but every time I moved to a new section of skin, she whispered things that made soft and slow impossible.
Even through the water dotting her skin, she tasted the same—like a summer night following a rainstorm. When she threw her head back over my shoulder, arching her neck toward the ceiling, I knew she was moments away from falling apart in my arms. However, this was the best thing to happen to me since the accident, and I wasn’t in a hurry to finish it. I could have stayed in the shower long past the expiration of the hot water, touching her . . . kissing her . . . making love to her.
When my pace slowed, each stroke and kiss becoming softer, a groan escaped her lips.
“Be nice,” she breathed, angling her face so our mouths were so close I could feel her heavy breaths against my lips.
“You didn’t fall in love with me because I was nice, Joze.” I moved my face closer so our mouths were separated by just a thin sheet of air. I traced the seam of her lips with my tongue, and when her lips parted, I kissed her as if it were the last time. I kissed her as if we’d been separated by time and circumstance for years and we would be again in another few moments. I kissed her like I loved her—with abandon.
“You’re right,” she whispered when she had to break away to catch her breath.
Her chest was rising and falling so hard, practically begging to be touched. My hand at her side slipped up her wet body to palm one of her breasts. When I squeezed, more of a moan than a gasp escaped her lips.
“I didn’t fall in love with you because you were nice.” Her vo
ice was so low with want, so breathy with desire, it barely sounded like Josie’s. “So where’s the not-nice man I fell for? Where’s the one who’s so bad he would have already been tossing me from my back to my front for round two? Where’s the guy who grunts dirty somethings into my ear as he’s coming so hard inside me that I’m sore the next day?” A sigh bubbled from her lips when my finger moved against her again. Faster. Firmer. “I want him.”
I might not have been able to achieve a climax in my current condition, but damn if I didn’t feel as though I was right on the edge of my own. My grunt vibrated against her cheek when she grinded her hips into my hand. “I can guarantee you don’t want him as fucking bad as he wants you.”
A shiver ripped down her body. One of her arms dropped from my neck and landed on my arm working on her before winding down it. All of the way down it. “I want to feel you inside me when I come.”
When her hips lowered again, she ground her ass into my lap, circling it in a way that made my eyes roll back into my head. I might not have had any sensation in the area she was waxing with her wet backside, but fuck, it didn’t matter. I felt something, and whether that was just the memory of what it had felt like when she’d done that to me before or the accumulation everything else I could feel—like the fullness of her chest spilling out of my hand or the heat that resided between her legs so wet I could feel it running down the insides of her thighs or her beautiful face draped over me, staring at me like nothing had changed between us or her breathing so labored I knew I could give her what she wanted with a few more stokes—I might as well have had my dick buried deep inside her for the way I felt right then.
“I want to feel you inside . . .” she said, her words broken by whimpers. She circled my lap harder, hinting at what she wanted.
“Baby, I can’t. You know . . .” If I could have given her that, I would have. Even if I’d had to make another deal with the devil and handed over my soul in my next life too.
She shook her head against me. Another whimper rolled from her mouth when my finger circled a certain part of her. Winding her finger around a couple of mine, she slid them down, stopping just outside . . .
“I want to feel you inside of me.” Her voice was the firmest I’d heard it since entering the shower. Lifting her hips again, she slipped my fingers inside her, moving them in and out until I picked it up on my own.
“Damn, Joze,” I said, moving inside her in just the way I knew she liked when she was about to come. She was so wet and warm and fucking hot that my breathing hit a point where I wondered if hyperventilation was on the horizon . . . but that didn’t slow me down. Instead, it encouraged me.
“You didn’t fall in love with me because I was nice either.” Another just barely detectible smile tugged at her mouth, but it fell into something more dramatic when my pace increased.
“Joze, baby, come.” My fingers curled deeper into her chest. “Come for me. I want to feel you come around me.”
She might have been a strong person, the toughest woman I’d ever met, but not even Josie could have held on for another second. Her body went rigid against mine, a scream starting small and growing louder until it echoed around us, and I felt her muscles tighten around me in quick, tight beats.
Her orgasm seemed to tear through her twice as long as it had before, and after she collapsed back into my lap with a satisfied sigh, she tilted her head back to look at me. The smile on her face even touched her eyes. She stroked my cheek with her thumb, threading her fingers through mine once they were free.
I kissed her again, this time a bit more softly, almost sweetly. When I ended it, she looked as surprised as I did that I was capable of such a kiss. “I love you, Josie Gibson.”
Her smile stretched. “I guarantee not as fucking much as I love you.”
“WE’RE LATE.” JOSIE checked the time on the dash for the hundredth time and gave her truck a little more gas. The big diesel engine growled louder as it sped down the highway. “We’re really late.”