by Nalini Singh
Petting her thigh, he flicked out his tongue to tease one nipple, then the other before getting serious and sucking one to luscious wetness. At the same time, he ran one finger along the seam of her sex, putting just enough pressure on her clit to make her tremble.
"Abe."
He released her nipple after one last flick of his tongue and inserted a finger inside her slick sheath. "What do you need, sweetheart?"
A clenching of her inner muscles, her lips shaping a single word. "You."
Groaning, he managed to wedge in another finger. "You can take a third, can't you, Sarah?" His fingers were thick, but his cock was thicker.
Bracing her hands behind her on the counter, Sarah arched into his fingers in a silent answer. He pressed the pad of his thumb against her clit as he began to push a third finger inside. The pressure was exactly what Sarah needed. Screaming, she held on to his wrist with one hand as her body spasmed around him, those hidden feminine muscles promising his cock so much pleasure that it came back to life in a rock-hard surge.
Pulling out his fingers--and inciting a cry of pure feminine outrage that made him grin--Abe spread her thighs wide and, pulling her forward, thrust deep inside her in a single motion while she was still in the throes of orgasm. Her nails dug into his shoulders as her head fell back, his name falling from her lips over and over.
"You feel too damn good," he groaned. "But don't worry. I've got plenty of stamina thanks to your sexy mouth."
"Oh God, Abe."
He rode her through the last shudders of her first orgasm, then got to work on heating her up for a second. And a third. She was boneless when he finally came inside her, when he marked her in the most intimate way possible.
Holding her cuddled up against him, their bodies yet one, he hoped she knew he was loving her.
SARAH LAY IN BED AFTERWARD, her mind hazy and her breath still short.
Abe had always done this to her, turned her into a mass of trembling flesh that was all nerves and sensation and need. But he'd satisfied her too. As he had tonight. Even when everything else had gone wrong between them, the sex had been phenomenal.
During their marriage, she used to call it "making love"--at least in her own head. Her stupid mushy heart had liked the sound of it... but she had to be honest now. They weren't making love now, hadn't been making love then. No... she had been.
Because she'd loved Abe in a way he had never loved her.
Careful, Sarah. Don't you fall again. Don't you let yourself be broken when you've barely put yourself back together.
"Only until the baby comes," she said on a driving wave of fear and primal protectiveness.
Abe leaned up on his elbow to look down at her, all gleaming brown skin and taut muscle. "What?" He ran his free hand over her abdomen and hip.
She shivered, held on to her thoughts through sheer strength of will. "This," she whispered, looking away from him because facing a sexually sated Abe and having rational thoughts were mutually exclusive events for her. "Us."
His hand went motionless on her skin. "I thought you said I could have a role in our kid's life if I proved myself and my sobriety?"
She turned onto her side so she was facing him--and he was scowling now, so she could hold an actual conversation instead of being led around by her hormones. "Of course you're going to be a father to our child," she said at once. "I want that more than anything." Memories crashed into her without warning. "You have to stay clean though, Abe. I can't handle all that again--and our child shouldn't have to."
His jaw muscles tensed, as did his shoulders, but he didn't get angry. "Yeah," he said, "I get that. I won't fuck up our kid's head by getting shitfaced."
"That's what I meant about us too." She took a deep breath, and his scent, it was like a drug through her system. "It'll confuse our child if he or she finds us in bed together, or if they figure out we're having sex."
Raising his hand, Abe brushed her hair off her face, a passionate intensity to his gaze that held her captive. "Only if we aren't together in reality by then."
Her heart slammed against her rib cage, hope spiraling upward in a golden burst. It was tough, so damn tough not to jump into the arms of that hope. "We self-destructed, Abe," she whispered. "No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get through to you about--"
"I had to be ready first." Abe's voice was rough, brutally honest. "You couldn't help a man who didn't want to be helped."
"It wasn't just that." Then she said it, said the most hurtful thing. "You didn't love me."
Abe's face closed off. She'd seen that a hundred times before, should've become used to it. But it still hurt just as badly as the first time he'd shut her out. "There you go," she said through a throat gone raw. "Leaving me behind while we're naked in the same bed. I never felt as lonely as when you did that."
CHAPTER 23
SARAH'S SOFT WORDS HIT ABE HARD, drawing blood. He knew that hadn't been her intent. Sarah had always had a heart of pure mush. "I'm sorry," he began, because it was time to stop being a coward, to man up and admit his terror.
"It's all right, Abe." A sad smile, her fingers brushing his lips. "You can't force love. I don't expect it, wasn't trying to guilt you into a false confession."
No, he would not let this bullshit stand. "That man you knew during most of our marriage?" he said, tugging away her hand and pressing it against his heart. "He wasn't Abe. Or he was a fucked-up version of me." The music had survived his addiction, but the drugs had damaged everything else. "But I was stone-cold sober the night I met you and I'm stone-cold sober now--and no woman, no woman, does to me what you do. I fucking love you. Always have, always will."
Sarah's throat moved as she swallowed, the thickness of her lashes coming down over the dark of her eyes for a long, still moment. "The physical connection isn't enough," she said, and he knew she didn't believe him.
His world threatened to shatter.
But then he realized: words were easy. It was the doing that was hard.
He'd have to do. He'd have to love her until she had no choice but to trust in his love.
Cupping the side of her face, he slit open his veins. "I'm a coward, Sarah. So scared of losing you like I lost Tessie so terrified of having my heart torn out of my chest that I tried to push you away, deny my love." Abe felt as if he was fighting for his life. "But you're it for me, Sarah. The only woman I will ever love."
He and Noah, they'd had a conversation about love not long ago where he'd told Noah something his mom had asked him before his and Sarah's wedding: Was Sarah a woman he'd have run off with if given the chance? When Noah repeated Abe's mother's question, Abe had hesitated, said he wasn't sure.
What a load of fucking horseshit.
All it would take was the slightest encouragement and he'd have her in front of a justice of the peace so fast she wouldn't even have time to get a wedding dress.
But Sarah didn't speak. Her hand lay unmoving on him, her expression still, but there was nothing to say she believed his declaration. Abe didn't panic; he'd known this wouldn't be easy. He'd hurt her brutally in his self-protective terror, savaged that soft heart. He had to earn back her trust, earn the right to fight for her love.
"Give me till the baby comes," he bargained. "If you don't think we'll make it at that point, I'll agree to whatever you want. We'll be friends, co-parent, nothing more."
Sarah's fingers curled against his chest. "I don't know if I can," she said at last, the words falling like rocks on his hopes. "I was so alone, Abe. I waited for you to call me after that night, to come for me. You never did. You left me all alone."
He heard the tears she was trying not to shed. They eviscerated him. "I've got no excuse for that." Sarah had no family in the city, no one to whom she could've turned. "I didn't do it on purpose, that much I can say."
Dark eyes met his, stark knowledge in their depths. "Did you take drugs after I left that night?"
"I took a bunch before we ever spoke."
Her pu
pils dilated. "What? You weren't sober when we fought?"
Abe could've taken advantage of that fact to play Sarah's soft heart, but he wasn't that guy, wouldn't ever use her. "Doesn't excuse what I did," he said flatly. "And yes, I took more after you left, a shitload of them. And I kept doing it for weeks, chasing it down with the hardest liquor I could find."
"The others--"
"--were all out of town."
She lifted a hand to her mouth, horror a bleak shadow across her beauty. "You were alone that entire time? You could've--"
"Killed myself?" Abe nodded. "Yeah, I know." Another ugly truth he'd had to accept, stop hiding from. "Noah's the one who eventually found me. I was messed up and fucked up." No way to pretty that up. "He called the others, waited until I passed out at a club, then they hauled me into rehab."
"I'm glad." Relief sent a tremor through her. "But the fact you didn't think to call me once you came out of the drug haze... it proves my point."
"No, it doesn't." Muscles bunching, Abe sat up with his elbows braced on his knees, the sheet pooling around his waist.
He rubbed his face with his hands, felt the harsh stubble already forming on his skin though he'd shaved before picking up Sarah. Then he admitted the worst of it. "I was angry at you," he said, one hand gripping the wrist of the other. "Out of it or sober, I woke up thinking about you, only you, every single day, and I was so goddamn angry with you."
He heard the rustle of sheets as Sarah sat up beside him. "Because I touched the piano?"
"Because you made me feel." He squeezed his wrist hard enough to cut off the blood flow. "Before you, I could self-medicate with drugs, numb myself to the extent that nothing mattered and I could forget that I'd buried my baby sister when she was only eight. A baby sister who looked to me as her hero--but I could do nothing when the cancer began to eat at her. Nothing." His demons howled, dark and twisted inside him, and suddenly all he wanted was the numb nothingness of drugs, the false ecstasy that shut out the agony of brutal reality.
Shoving off the sheets, he got out of bed and pulled on his boxer briefs. Then he dropped to the floor and began to do push-ups, making sure to keep his form viciously straight. If Sarah thought him mad, she didn't say so, remaining silent as he fought the clawing darkness that wanted to haul him back into the abyss.
Abe wasn't about to go. Never again.
He spoke on an upward push. "But no matter how many drugs I took," he said, "as soon as you walked into a room or even if I suddenly thought of you--and I thought of you a hell of a lot, especially when we were apart--my heart would wake up, start to beat your name, and part of me hated you for it. For having the power to call me back, to keep me from drowning in numbness." He went down, his nose almost to the carpet, pushed up again, repeated the movement, waited for Sarah to speak.
"I didn't know you felt anything for me." Her voice shook. "Even before you said what you did that night, deep inside I thought I was just a convenient sex partner. Forgotten as soon as I was out of your sight."
"Never that." He did three more push-ups before he had the emotional control to continue speaking. "I wanted you from the instant you told that silly knock-knock joke at the party where we met. You laughed so hard at your own joke and there was such joy in you... I wanted that for myself. I wanted you to look at me with that open delight."
SARAH STARED AT ABE'S MUSCLED BODY as he continued his punishingly strict movements, not a single part of his body out of alignment. "I didn't tell you the joke," she whispered, the events from that night unspooling in her mind like a film reel in full color.
She'd crashed the Beverly Hills party with a girlfriend she'd met at the minimum wage job she'd been working at the time, her earnings barely enough to cover her tiny room in a terrible part of town. Graffitied hallways redolent with the smell of alcohol and other noxious substances, gunfights in the street, screaming matches between couples and family members that came right through the paper-thin walls, that had been her reality.
It had still been safer than her childhood home.
However, determined to better herself and not scared of working hard, she'd kept putting on her cheap but neat "interview suit" and applying for jobs that paid a little more. That day she'd had one rejection too many--and the interviewer had leered so hard at her she'd had to go home and shower before her shift at work. The asshole had all but licked his lips as he spoke to her chest.
So when her work colleague said she had a contact who could get them into a fancy party, Sarah had said, "What the hell. At least they might have some nice finger food to eat--I can save a few bucks on groceries."
Sarah had dolled up in a little black dress, figuring most people wouldn't be able to tell at a glance that it was a knockoff of a knockoff--and black dresses fit in everywhere in LA. That much she'd learned in her time in the city.
Her colleague had been as good as her word; she'd gotten them into the party courtesy of a friend who was on the catering staff. But the other woman had disappeared with an older man not long into the party, leaving Sarah alone and feeling out of place and not sure how she'd get back home since her friend was the one with the car and they were outside the public transport area she knew well.
She'd decided to wait, see if the other girl came back.
Feeling stupid hiding in a corner, she'd made herself approach a group of people who didn't look too snotty, told them the silliest knock-knock joke. And when one of the women had laughed, she'd laughed too, so happy and relieved that she wasn't being rejected.
Abe hadn't been in that group.
"I know," Abe said, his muscles rigid as he held himself in position using only one arm, his other one folded over his back. "I was standing behind you at the time."
Sarah frowned; she hadn't met Abe until almost fifteen minutes later. They'd run into one another at the bar when she'd gone to get a glass of water after the group with which she'd interacted had all separated to see other people. Men had come on to her once they realized she'd been separated from the herd, invitations in their eyes, but Sarah had never been into meaningless sexual encounters. She'd always been looking for her man. For home.
Then Abe had asked her if he could buy her a drink sometime, and boom. "Did we meet by chance?" she asked, her heart thundering.
Abe did two more push-ups before angling his head to shoot her a heartbreaker grin. "Of course not. I stalked you."
That racing heart of hers, it turned all gooey inside her. Never, not once during their relationship, had Abe given any indication that he'd chosen her, wanted her. Part of her had always believed that it was pure luck she had the right to call this gorgeous rock star her husband, that she'd just had the right timing.
To know that he'd deliberately sought her out at a party filled with beautiful, sophisticated women... It changed the dynamic of their entire past.
Sarah tried to think past the rushing in her ears, the heat in her cheeks. "Why did you do that if you didn't want to feel?" It made no sense.
"Because I couldn't stay away from you, couldn't stop watching you from the instant I first caught sight of you." Abe finally stopped the push-ups and sat down on the carpet, his hands braced behind him and his body right there for her to ogle, the tiger tattoo prowling up the side of his rib cage making her want to trace the lines of it with a fingertip. "The idea of anyone else laying a finger on you infuriated me."
She just stared at him, her entire understanding of their past in pieces. "You never said anything."
"I married you." His eyes held hers, refusing to let her look away. "And I held on to you even when I knew I was screwing you up, messing with your head." He clenched his jaw, his abdominal muscles an iron-hard wall. "By the time I got clean, got over being angry with you, and came to haul you home, you were with that fucker Vance."
She heard the whip of anger, felt her own fury bristle to life. "I was in a bad place, Abe. My husband had abandoned me after all but calling me a gold-digging slut."
Abe fl
inched but Sarah carried on, so angry at him. That anger had been growing inside her since the day she first realized he wasn't coming for her. "I never intended to get into a relationship with Jeremy." Hadn't wanted to be in a relationship with anyone but Abe. "He just happened to come by the night I saw pictures of you painting the town red with half-naked groupies. You had your goddamn hand on a woman's ass, her tits almost falling into your face! What was I supposed to think?"
"Fuck." Abe didn't talk again until he'd completed ten more push-ups. "I don't remember most of that night." Another push-up. "I only saw the photos after rehab, after I had the poison out of my system."
Sarah's anger turned into the crushing pain of knowing she could've lost him forever during that binge. Then, because Abe had stripped away his own shields, she did the same with part of hers. "All my life, I figured my body was the only thing of value I had. I don't mean that in a mercenary way." She tried to find the right words. "I thought my body made people like me, so that's how I tried to form relationships."
Sometimes she wanted to go back to the naive, needy, romantic girl she'd been and just hug her, tell her she had far more to offer the world--and that the boys who took advantage of her desperate hunger to be loved weren't worth her emotions or her heartbreak.
"Even you only seemed to really like me during sex." She swallowed. "So when Jeremy came on to me while I was numb from seeing those tabloid shots, imagining you with those groupies in our bed, I thought, what did it matter? Even if you'd rejected the only thing I had to offer, at least he wanted it." She hugged her knees, unable to add the rest: that she'd already been vulnerable because of her screaming aloneness. The tabloid images had been the last straw.
Loneliness was her greatest fear.
She'd never told Abe why, never told anyone. Today she found herself wondering if she should... but keeping secrets tended to harden them to stone inside a person. Her chest ached with breathlessness, the pain an old one. She'd hidden her origins for so long, telling people as little as possible.
"One thing we have in common," she said. "I don't remember most of that night either." She'd gone away inside her head, woken to find a naked Jeremy asleep beside her.
