by Nicole Snow
“Thanks, boss. You're a good man and I'm seriously happy for you.” Skylar smiles, taking another loud slurp of her coffee. “You've got to get out of here, now. The last thing I want my crappy situation to do is drag down your wedding day.”
I throw a hand on her shoulder and squeeze one more time, and then I'm gone, finding my wife in the crowd again.
Although there’s a warmth, an afterglow, to feeling like I’m part of something again after the joy and rush of marrying Kenna, it’s a relief when time catches up. We watch the last car pull out from the driveway and leave us alone among the tables lined up along my private beach, just skirting the edge of the waves in the strip of sand between the ocean and the newly reconstructed beach house.
Kenna’s looking out across the water; the sky's a deep velvety blue, the waves black silk, and they meet where the stars and moonlight throw down their reflections to make glinting edges on the waves. I slip up behind her, wrapping my arms around her waist, and then pressing my lips to her sun-freckled shoulder.
“Ready to go home, Mrs. Strauss?”
She smiles, soft and thoughtful. “I’m already home.” She turns in my arms, slipping her own around my neck. “Home is where you are.”
“Then come with me, my beautiful bride.”
That’s the only warning I give her before I lift her up in my arms, sweeping her against my chest. She lets out a yelping laugh, clinging to me, and rests her head on my shoulder as I carry her toward the beach house, stepping over two drowsy cats dozing on the front pathway.
They've had a big day, too, with all these people milling around. For once, I'm happy Velvet and Mews will be too tired to bother us tonight.
There’s a deep satisfaction carrying her over the threshold, as if honoring a time-worn tradition makes this final.
Makes this real. And there’s a sense of breathless anticipation as I carry her through the open, spacious rooms, into a new addition I had built into the reconstruction just for her.
The solarium is almost pure glass, and the curved dome of it turns the room into a glittering globe of the heavens captured just for us, a pocket of silver and shadow pulling the night into our own private heaven.
Reb looks ethereal, more like an angel than a living woman, as I lay her down on the bed tucked into one corner. She’s all pale moonlight and sea-green eyes and chestnut hair and tiny flowers scattered all throughout those spreading locks, looking up at me like some wild sea-nymph I managed to coax up to shore.
That filmy, soft white sundress is beautiful on her. So fucking beautiful.
I’ll always remember her like this: natural and perfect and mine, watching me with her eyes dark and dilated, pink tongue caught between her lips, as breathless and soft as if it's our first time.
In a way, it is. A new beginning. A promise we made months ago fulfilled.
The first time I’ll touch her as my wife, claim her body as her husband. Kiss her as my one and only truth.
Take her, and then take her again. Binding her to me in flesh as well as in word.
This feels like an act of worship. The heat that burns in me is as slow and deep and scorching as magma, and I can’t even find words for the emotions racing through me as I strip out of my shirt, then sink down to cover her body with my own.
The way she fits against me is just right – as if we were made for each other, crafted from the same primal clay. Meant to meld.
She arches to me with a sigh as I skim her body with slow touches, letting her shape guide me, memorizing her with my palms. I lose myself in the rhythm of her sighs, the music of her soft, low sounds.
Face, hair, skin, tits, and cunt. They make me more frantic the more I have.
I devour every arch of her body, every flutter of her pulse against her throat, every part of her lips and flush in her cheeks. She responds to me with such delicacy, such perfection, such perfect rhythm.
We're no longer two separate beings, but one.
Kenna is, and always will be, my heart made flesh.
She lifts her arms over her head as I strip the sundress away – then gasps as I tangle the dress around her upraised wrists, keeping them trapped, pinning them there.
Her pale, smooth skin is a feast for my lips. Her taste so lush with that faint hint of sea salt clinging to her as I kiss her shoulders, then the upper curves of her tits, then her soft, sleek belly, and then her inner thighs.
Her moans slip out and I submerge her into a delicious torture.
Nibbling along the curves of her bra, the line of her panties, teasing her just to hear her whimper, just to watch her writhe in anticipation.
When I tug her lace cups down over the tempting, plush mounds of her tits, those strawberry-pink nipples are already hard and begging for my mouth. And when I wrap my lips around one, tracing it with my tongue, the way she jerks beneath me and the soft cry that rises makes my cock throb with a raw, potent, animal need.
I want to taste every fucking inch of her. Touch it. Bite it. Own it.
From the soft underside of her knee to the crease inside her thigh, from the soft sweat-misted valley between her tits to the hot, soaked folds between her thighs.
She’s already wet, so wet for me, and there’s something deliciously dirty about leaving her drenched panties on and only tugging them aside to bare her to my tongue.
Fuck. Yes. There.
“There, baby, there,” I growl between licks, sending a quiver through her body.
I can’t get enough of her taste. She’s tart and sweet and creamy all at once.
I lick every last slick drop from her skin – circling her clit, delving inside, finding every place that makes her shrill whine hit the peak that just fucking ruins me before it breaks and she nearly sobs out her pleasure, digging her fingers into my hair.
“Landon!”
I want her like this.
Always like this: open for me, wet for me, begging for me.
I'm not exaggerating when I say I could spend hours buried between her thighs, kneading my fingers into sweet yielding flesh, fucking my tongue into the sweetness of her cunt till her back arches and she spasms hard.
But Reb clenches her knees against my waist, pulls me up, and kisses me too soon, distracting my mouth.
This sweet wanton woman who’s as delicate as a virgin and as willing and wanting as the most experienced lover. How could I ever resist the electric tease, the need building in my balls?
I give her the taste of her on my lips while she tells me what she wants without words, moving her body against mine until her slickness glides against my cock and I throb from root to tip with the violent caveman urge to be inside her.
So ready to fuck. So ready to take. So ready to pump everything inside me in her.
A few more teasing strokes. A few more moments of delving, deep, soul-melting kisses, and then our bodies glide together.
The moment comes when we fit perfectly, my cock poised just short of finding home, her wet, heated folds wrapping around my cock head. Gasping, I part our lips, resting my brow to hers. “Kenna.”
“I know,” she whispers, so many wordless things between us. “I know.”
She coaxes me into her pussy, drawing me deep with the clench of her thighs.
Groaning, I bury myself in her body, slowly, drawing it out till we’re mated in tandem with strained cries and tortured breaths and the trembling flex of our muscles.
Moment after moment, I hold and savor her sweetness. I engulf my dick in her silk, resisting the urge to slam her into the mattress with powerful, beastly jabs of my hips. I hold out just a few seconds longer, before taking her deeper, deeper, even as her fire torches down my senses, my control.
And by the time I’m fully inside her, enveloped in a wet and giving lushness like a deep and burning sea, I'm lost.
Happily undone.
I lose myself in her, thrusting like a madman, driving deep again and again, moving to the crash and roll of the waves outside, the turn and sway
of the constellations overhead.
There’s pleasure and then there’s this – this insane thing where every time my body cries out in torment, my heart and soul answer. Ringing affirmation.
Drawn into this wicked primal rhythm. I can't even breathe without tasting her.
My balls keep time, smacking against her skin, my dick swelling as I fuck her straight through one spastic release and into the next. Her body is my dream, my ambrosia, my vessel.
This is our true wedding vow.
Here, joined together, buck naked and writhing like wildcats in heat.
This moment, our moment, witnessed by stars and sea. Promises made in breathless, strained exaltation, heard only by sky and sand and our own pounding ears.
I clutch her to me, crushing our bodies together. I need to fucking come.
We’re melded in sweat and tangled limbs, in desperate kisses and needy grasping hands. Kenna rises up to meet me again and again, faster and faster, until we flow, until we’re liquid, until we’re falling apart.
“Fuck, Reb, come with me. Come. Right. Now.”
I burst. I dissolve. And so does she.
My balls twitch, pouring sheer fire, my whole spine going electric. For a second, I really am an animal, claiming and mating and marking her as mine.
It’s rough. It’s raw. It’s sharp and strange and biting, that quiet twilight magic turning into wild bestial sorcery, and as we crash together one last time I lose control.
Lose it, yeah, but never lose my hold on her, even as I spill myself into her gushing, sucking cunt and breathless screams, feeling that tightness that comes when she takes me for every drop and gives back her own and begs for more.
Kenna's mine tonight, as long as the stars shining down on us last.
No, longer.
She’s mine, heart and soul, and nothing will ever make me let her go again.
* * *
We lie in the muggy summer heat, tangled together, naked and stuck together by sweat.
She’s half asleep; I’m not far behind.
Something about our first time as man and wife broke something inside me.
By something, I mean my fucking self-control. I turned into a goddamn animal in heat and took her every which way I could.
Up against the headboard, her fingers clutching at the edge of the wood and her ass thrust back against me while she taunted me with little grinds of her hips.
On her hands and knees, fingers tangled in her hair. The noise Kenna made when she came branded itself in my memory. So did the way her sweet cunt shook every inch of me, pulling the heat from my balls with every whimpering twitch of her skin.
On my back, her body plunging down over me, glorious and beautiful and wild. Her hips tempting me to dive deeper into her. Her mouth molten on my cock, making me writhe.
I made noises straight from the Caveman Lexicon. Feral, sandpaper sounds, like my own rough pleasure scratching at my throat as it left me.
Her legs over my shoulders, her hips bucking, jerking and thrashing and coming real sweet for me again while I licked her clean with my tongue. I gorged myself on her greedily, and I feel no shame for it.
How she'd suck me nice and hard between each round. She's an angel when that mouth speaks, but the woman is all devil once her tongue touches my cock. Her delicate tease up and down my length ends with her circling my swollen crown, focusing her soft licks under it, finding the spot that makes me want to shoot off in her mouth if I wasn't so crazed to fill her pussy.
I've taught her too damn well.
If I can’t walk in the morning, it’s entirely her fault for being this gorgeous.
I can’t stop myself from tracing the line of her hip with my hand, following the dip down toward her still slick opening again. She laughs, batting my hand away drowsily.
“Enough, tiger.” It's barely an exaggeration. I have to fight to suppress a growl that'd make a saber-toothed beast do a double take.
“Rest, babe. You've earned it,” I say, kissing her bare shoulder.
With a contented sound, she snuggles against me, spooning herself into the curve of my body with that delectable little ass rubbing right against my cock. “I feel like I’ve been beaten with a meat tenderizer.”
“That’s not something my cock’s ever been called before. Nice compliment.” I wink.
She laughs, twisting in my arms and facing me, resting her hands against my chest. “You know what I meant. You’re awful, Landon. Why do I love you?”
“Because you do. And because I love you. And because you'll want this dick again in the morning, and I'll want to give it to you so hard you'll come up with fun new names for being fucked.”
“Landon.” There's a playful warning in her voice, her eyes narrowed.
I run my fingers through her hair, pushing her against me, taking my sweet time burying my lips on hers. “You heard me, Reb. Don't act like you didn't. I love fucking you like a man possessed because I just fucking love you. Period.”
Kenna's gaze relaxes. She lets out a soft, contented sigh, her green eyes bright in the darkness. “Nice save. I’ll never get tired of hearing that.”
“Good. Because it's gonna be your background track from now on.” I brush my lips to hers, tasting the sweat of us on her lips.
Fuck, do I love it. Just tasting us together. Another sign we’re inseparable.
I sigh, gathering her closer. “I’ve known we were connected since the moment I met you, Reb. Call it fate. Like the gravity in the stars. I was lost then. Spent so long looking for the constellations to guide me home...when I always should've known they were here, right in front of me.”
“You've found your way. Home,” she whispers, while I brush a lock of sex-kinked hair away from her eyes.
No word on her lips has ever tasted sweeter or truer than that last one. Home.
And I'm still thinking about the kind of eternal home we'll make for ourselves when I silence her with another hungry kiss.
* * *
Thanks for reading Still Not Over You! Look for Skylar's book coming soon.
Want to see what happens to Landon and Kenna three years later?
Check out their Happily Ever After and new surprises in this extended epilogue. - https://dl.bookfunnel.com/sjpghkkdaj
Then read on for a preview of another bestselling protector romance by me, Accidental Hero. FREE in Kindle Unlimited.
Accidental Hero Preview
I: Walking Masterpiece (Izzy)
I have to bite my lip at how the silence excites me.
This is exactly what I’ve dreamed about for years. A room full of talent. Bright eyes and young souls eager to impress, bleeding creativity.
Every student deep in concentration, glancing towards the drawing on the easel next to my desk only long enough to confirm the next swoosh of their pencil. I hadn’t known what to expect when I accepted this position, other than it would bring me one step closer to my goal. Plus a little more money.
Oh, and it's the perfect escape from the weekly family dinners. Losing those gossip-fests is worth more than the income boost any job brings.
Working with this room full of remarkable young artists is way more fun than listening to mom's tongue-in-cheek 'encouragement.'
Or entertaining cousin Clara's dire warnings about how I'm destined to wind up with a house full of cats and die in my eighties, still a virgin.
That’s my future. Isabella Derby. AKA crazy cat lady.
The fact that my family believes that’s the path I’m on and insists on reminding me so often never fails to piss me off. No matter how many times I hear it.
This is the twenty-first century. Supposedly. I don’t even own a cat, and I’m twenty-three.
Twenty. Three.
Not fifty-three, and pining about what might have been. I have years before I need to worry about getting married. I have ambitions. Always have.
If only everyone else in my life would see that and leave me the hell alone.
I
f only they'd notice accomplishments besides landing men and wracking up babies.
“Ms. Derby?”
I rise from my chair and walk around my desk, happy to have something else to focus on besides my sad, nosy relatives.
Stopping next to her, I look down at the girl and smile. “Yes, Natalie?”
She’s what some would call a child prodigy. Only ten, she has the talent of some people five times her age. Not just in fine arts either.
Her enrollment papers says she’s in eighth grade. Most kids her age are still fourth graders. I kneel next to her. “What's up?”
She gestures to my drawing at the front of the room. “Um, I just noticed...the dog you drew doesn’t have any eyelashes.” Her shy voice comes out in a whisper. “Is it all right if I add some on mine?”
“Of course! Your personal muse is always welcome in this class.” I look at the drawing on her easel, picturing exaggerated Minnie Mouse eyelashes.
Wrong idea.
My breath literally stalls in my lungs at the detail in her creation. This little girl wouldn't be caught dead making anything unrealistic. The collie she’s drawn looks like it's ready to leap into the room. Just like everything she does.
It's more like a black and white photo than a drawing. Especially one done by a child.
Every feathery line she's sketched brings the dog to life in ways I can’t even describe.
Hell, it's almost better than mine. And it took me a Master's degree and years practicing to get where I am.
I glance between her dog and mine. Forget almost.
Hers is far better. A masterpiece.
I choke up as I watch the eyes on her dog come to life as she carefully pencils in a few soft lashes. “Keep going. You’re doing a great job!”
“Thank you,” she whispers.
The way she’s biting the tip of her tongue demonstrates how fully she’s concentrating. I smile again, then stand, making a round of the whole room.
Only six students here this evening. The others are all high school kids. Natalie’s dad had to pull some strings to get her into this class, meant for kids at least in their freshmen year.
