She put her hands around my neck, and I cupped her perfect, rounded ass and kissed her like she wanted. She groaned and opened her soft, red lips for me, her lip gloss long gone, and I kissed her harder. I pressed her to me and rubbed her slowly with my hard cock, letting her feel me under the hot spray, and she responded, pressing her hips into me harder. God, I’d never met a woman as naturally sensual as Dani. She was made for sex, for pleasure. I woke up again, the same painful way I had by myself in the shower days ago, all of me coming alive against her. There hadn’t been sex before Dani. When I’d watched her with her mouth on me, enjoying it, giving herself pleasure, swallowing—I’d thought my head would fucking explode. And this was going to be better.
I cupped her ass tighter, then slid the fingers of one hand between her ass cheeks, rubbing her slow and gentle. She broke the kiss and buried her face against my neck, making an urgent little sound of pleasure.
“You want it, sweetheart?” I asked her.
She lifted her face and kissed the edge of my jaw. “I want to erase him,” she said.
Those words sliced me open. Like a scalpel, parting my skin with exquisite pain. Of course. That was what she wanted, and that was what I could do. She’d spent seven months with McMurphy, and four days with me. What the fuck was she supposed to want?
Not me. Never me. That was the plan.
I swallowed the hurt. I had offered her all of it—protection, my money, a few hours of pleasure to erase her past. But nothing beyond that. I was no good beyond those few things, and she couldn’t give me anything else—she was still too raw. So we were back to where we started, looking at the next few hours and nothing else.
And if it hurt, so be it. Like Dani, I could take pain.
She was here, naked and ready. My wife, for as long as I had her. I may as well make the most of it.
I turned the water off. “We’ll erase him,” I said.
Twenty
Dani
I shouldn’t have said it. I knew it when the words left my mouth, but
it was too late to take them back. I felt Cavan pause, felt his muscles stiffen, and I knew I’d hurt him. This man who was so strong and impossible to rattle—my words had cut him.
And it was true, I wanted to erase McMurphy, everything he’d ever done to me. But it was a lie, too. I wanted Cavan. I wanted his secrets, his complexity, the things he thought behind his eyes but didn’t tell me. I wanted his scarred heart. And yes, I very much wanted his body—every inch of it I could get.
I was only going to get one of those things tonight. But he was my husband now; the other things, I would work on.
We fell on the bed, tangling together. His hair was shorter, his beard more trim, and I kept running my fingers over him, feeling the difference. Long hair or short, he was the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen. The shorter hair—and the suit he’d been wearing until he’d stripped it off an hour ago—should have made him look more clean cut, but it didn’t. Cavan Wilder wasn’t capable of looking clean cut. When he cleaned up, he just looked dangerous in a different way. Nothing changed the look in those gray eyes, hard and yet sad enough you wanted to kiss him. Nothing changed the sexy line of his mouth or the gracefulness of the muscles beneath his clothes or the taut beauty of his skin. Nothing changed his clean, spicy smell or the crinkle between his eyes. The bruise over his eyebrow only added to the aphrodisiac effect.
He put me on my back and nipped the skin of my stomach with his teeth. “Legs open, Dani,” he said.
He was going to take control, then. My body throbbed harder at the thought. This had always been part of my weakness with men—some shameful part of me liked it when they told me what to do. But with Cavan, I could let it go. Because when Cavan told me what to do, it was because he had something in mind that I’d like.
I opened my legs like I’d been told, and he stroked me open, bent his head, and licked me, once again proving me right.
He was so good at it. So good that despite the fact that my body was skyrocketing exactly the way he intended it to, I was hit by a bolt of doubt. I grabbed his hair and interrupted him. “Why are you so good at this?” I asked.
He smiled at me from between my legs. “Worried?” he asked.
Was I? I just felt tight, strange. Despite his crazed jealousy, with McMurphy there had always been someone else, someone he liked better, at least for the moment. Someone he’d rather have.
My husband dipped his mouth to my hipbone and sucked the skin briefly between his teeth, a pain so exquisite I gave a helpless moan. “You taste good,” he said. “I’m inspired.”
“But you’ve done it a lot,” I insisted. I didn’t know where this panic was coming from, bubbling up from somewhere deep. I just knew it felt out of control and I couldn’t stop it.
“Dani, Dani,” he said. He laughed softly against my skin, then moved up my body. I should have smacked him, but somehow that laugh sounded deadly serious. “You really want to know the answer?”
“No,” I said, panicked again.
“Too late,” he said. He was at my breasts now, and he paused to take one of my nipples in his mouth, making me moan again. He sucked softly and let me go. “Not a lot,” he said. “But you’ve seen my ink work.” He lowered to my other nipple and sucked it, then let it go. “When I do something important, I take the time to do it properly.”
My pulse was beating in my throat. He was saying I was important. “Cavan, when I said what I said, I didn’t mean—”
“Stop,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.” He moved up and kissed my neck, winding his hand in my hair. “Forget it. Forget everything. Are you on the pill? Because I’m clean, and to fuck you properly, I need to do it bare.”