Prayer (The Pagano Family Book 5)

by Susan Fanetti

  John chuckled and sucked at her earlobe. His hand brushed over her thigh, the fingers skimming lightly, making patterns, leaving her trembling. When he reached her knee, he grabbed gentle hold and brought her leg to rest on his hip. She could feel his erection making its demand, and she shifted her hips so that it slid between her legs, through her folds, against her mound. They both groaned at that, and Katrynn reached over her head and wove her fingers into his silky hair.

  “Your skin is so soft,” he whispered. “My hands are lonely when they’re not filled with you.”

  God, he was so perfect. The words he said, the things he did, the man he was—he was everything she wanted. She thought of what was happening with her, and between them, as falling, and at times like this, when she was so happy, so completely and unexpectedly happy she didn’t know how to contain it, she actually had that whoopsie feeling of falling. She shivered.

  “Are you cold?”

  “No. I just love you.”

  “And I love you.” His hand ended its dance over her leg, and she felt him take hold of himself. When he pushed into her, the sound he made was of deep, encompassing satisfaction.

  Without thinking about anything but a touch that she wanted, she brought John’s hand up and covered her breast with it. He twitched as if he were surprised, and she realized what she’d done.

  “That’s my girl.” He caught her nipple between his fingers and began to tease it the way that she liked. She arched her back and, with her fingers twisted in his hair, she let go.

  They picked up the rhythm that they both knew. Whatever position they were in, a comfort and familiarity was developing between them—so much that she’d just now been secure enough to make him give her a touch she wanted. Rather than dull the pleasure, it intensified; they were coming to know each other well enough to explore the experience without focusing so much on what worked and what didn’t. It was the beauty, Katrynn thought, of lovemaking. Sex was all about physical sensation. When there was love, too, the act was exponentially deeper—on every level, including physical.

  John must have felt the change in her, because she felt a corresponding change in him. If anyone had asked what it was, she wouldn’t have been able to say, but suddenly everything between them was deeper. The world around them faded out, and everything that mattered was between them.

  She felt each thrust, slide, press, flex, clench in every atom of her body, and she was going to come—oh God, she was going to come—

  —then John pulled out, fast, and pushed her to her back. He was on top of her and inside her again before she could finish the inhale of shock at the interruption.

  “I need to see you. I want to see your eyes when you come.” Staring down at her, wild-eyed, he grabbed her head in his hands and picked up their rhythm again.

  He didn’t have to wait long to see her come; locked and lost in his eyes, seeing his love and need for her, while he filled her with grunting force again and again, turned her orgasm into a cataclysm, so much force that she had to slam her eyes shut and shake her head frantically, trying to contain it while they were out in her mother’s back yard, separated from that mother and John’s brothers by little more than a couple of nylon tent walls.

  “Yeah,” John groaned. “Oh fuck, baby, yeah. I love to see you come. Fuck!”

  John was often loud when he came, and Katrynn had the presence of mind to grit out a hiss to try to shush him—and he had the presence of mind to hear her and do something about it. On his finish, he dropped his head to the crook of her shoulder, and he bit down. He bit hard. And yelled into her skin.

  At that act of pure, bestial need, Katrynn came again—or still; she wasn’t sure. She only knew that she had screamed before she could stop herself.

  While they were still panting and mostly insensible, from just outside their little tent came the sound of applause. Then somebody whistled loudly.

  “Assholes!” John called and dropped his forehead to hers. “I’m sorry, baby.”

  She giggled. “Don’t be. Totally worth it. But watch your words. If Mom hears, she’ll call you out every time.”

  “I think the beauty we just made cancels out one ugly word.”

  Laughing, Katrynn wrapped her arms around John’s neck and held on. For about the hundredth time in their few months together, John had given her the best sex of her life.

  He really was perfect.

  ~oOo~

  “Those are good guys.” Katrynn’s mother paused with her hands in the soapy water and looked out the window. Katrynn stood behind her and looked, too. John and his brothers, and A.J. and a couple of his friends, had nearly finished the garage.

  John was crouched on the roof, shirtless again, with some kind of pneumatic hammer, putting down the shingles, walking in that crouch as he went. Carlo was on the other side of the pitch, doing the same thing, and their graceful movements almost seemed to be choreographed. The sharp, loud beat of their tools filled the air. Katrynn thought it sounded like war drums.

  A.J. and his friends were painting. Luca was building shelves inside. They’d all started after breakfast, and had taken another break for lunch. By the look of things, they’d be done before dinner.

  “Yeah, they are good guys.”

  “You love him.” Dana resumed washing the lasagne pan. Leave it to her mother to fix lasagne for a bunch of Italians.

  She hadn’t made it sound like a question, but Katrynn answered it as if she had. “Yes, I do.”

  Dana nodded. “You love his family, too.”

  “I do. I love my family, too. Mom, I’m so sorry about what I said last weekend.” She’d apologized, several times, and her mother had accepted it graciously, as Katrynn had known she would, but it hadn’t yet felt sufficient.

  Her mother smiled and turned to see her straight on. “I know. You don’t need to keep saying it. It’s just been…this week I’ve had to confront some truths. When Evie left and said the things he said, I suppose I held onto you, thinking that you understood, so that meant we had done okay, even if Evie didn’t understand. I didn’t know you feel like he does.”

  “I don’t, Mom. I get it. I do.”

  “No, darling. If you understood, those thoughts wouldn’t have been in your head to become words last Saturday. And that’s okay. I’m sorry we gave you a home you don’t understand. I wish we could have done better.”

  Katrynn took the lasagne pan from her mother and began to dry it with one of the old, and apparently eternal, red and white tea towels her mother had always used. They didn’t have a dishwasher because Dana enjoyed doing dishes, and she especially loved doing dishes with someone else. She thought it was the perfect time for serious talk—the soothing and quiet of the repetitive work in warm water, the sated peace at the end of a meal. Katrynn had told her mother most of her big news, and had asked for her most crucial advice, standing right here in front of this sink.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course you can.”

  “Why do you let him come home?” It was a question she’d had growing up, too, but it had never felt so pressing to know the answer as it had recently.

  Dana had been adding new soap and hot water to the basin. She turned it off and stared at the fresh suds. “I love him. This is what he needs.”

  “But what do you need?”

  “Him.”

  “That’s not all you need, Mom. It can’t be.”

  “It’s enough. What I have of him is enough. What fills the spaces like this is just that: filler. When he’s here, I really feel alive. Katrynn, if you don’t understand simply by having grown up in this home, then I don’t think I can make you understand. I love him. I’ll take him as I can. And he tries to stay home. Every time, he tries to stay. Maybe you didn’t see that. Maybe that was just between us. He loves us and he misses us when he’s gone, but he just can’t stay. He dwindles. I think it would kill him to stay.”

  “I don’t want a love like that. I want to be the place he
can’t stand to leave.” Realizing too late the criticism implicit in her words, Katrynn turned to her mother, prepared to offer yet another apology.

  But Dana wasn’t offended. She smiled. “I know. You don’t have a vagabond heart, and I’m glad. There’s no rest in a heart like that. Your dad, he’s always got his eye on the horizon. Wherever he is, he’s looking to the next place. But you don’t need to worry about that. Last weekend, you said you didn’t know how anybody was going to love you. Somebody already does, Katrynn. The way you want.” She tipped her head toward the window. “John’s eyes follow you. They linger on the space you leave. I think you’re the only place he wants to be.”

  Katrynn set the dried pan aside and went to the back door. John and Luca were talking, John on the roof and Luca on the ground below. John laughed at something his brother said, tossing his head back with it. The sound wafted in through the open window above the sink.

  When he brought his head forward, he paused, and his smile widened. He was looking at her; he’d seen her behind the glass door. He put up his gloved hand in a wave, and Katrynn set her open hand on the glass.

  She had known that already, sensed it—the way he watched her. Not like he was monitoring her or studying her—well, sometimes it was like he was studying her—but as if his eyes just wanted to be on her. When she turned and found him watching, he always simply smiled.

  “I want to be his home,” she whispered, too softly for anyone but herself to hear.

  ~oOo~

  That night, John stayed at Katrynn’s place. They moved back and forth between her apartment and his house on the beach. There was no method to their choice; they just sort of decided each night where they’d crash. It had been weeks since they’d slept apart, though. They each had stuff at the other’s place.

  He’d just taken a long, hot shower, and he’d opened the bathroom door to let the steam dissipate as he stood at the sink and brushed his teeth. Katrynn heard the door open and came out of the bedroom and looked down her little hall.

  She had already showered, and was dressed in a pair of men’s boxers and a little white beater, her preferred warm-weather sleeping ensemble. Seeing John now, though, she felt like she had too many clothes on.

  Her bathroom mirror faced the door, so she had a perfect view of his back side. He had one of her red towels wrapped around his waist, and his hair was slicked back. She watched the muscles of his back roll with the motion of his arm as he brushed.

  Unable to resist, and without any reason she should, Katrynn went down the hall and into the bathroom. As he bent to rinse his mouth, she laid a hand on his beautiful back, just above the towel.

  He jumped a little, surprised, and looked into the mirror. When their eyes met in that reflection, he smiled. “Hey, you.”

  “Hey. Thanks for this weekend. What you did, you and your brothers—it’s special.”

  He shut the water off and turned, setting his hands on her hips. “We were happy to do it. It was fun, actually. We don’t get much chance these days to hold actual tools.” Lifting one hand, he brushed his fingers over the side of her neck. The skin there was a little tender; he’d bruised her that morning, when he’d bit down as he’d come. It was pretty nasty, but she’d had worse. And it had been intensely erotic that he’d been so overcome with their sex that he’d lost that control. “I’m sorry about this.”

  She closed her hand around his. “Don’t be. I’m okay, and I liked that you needed to do it.”

  His brow furrowed a little, and he traced the bruise again. “Do you? Like that, I mean.”

  She blushed and dropped her eyes, but John caught her chin on his finger and lifted her head again.

  “It’s okay if you do, baby. I just want to know what you like.”

  “I don’t. I don’t like to get hurt. I…like passion, and that’s what this is. It’s what we always are. I like what we do.”

  He grinned and bent to touch his lips to the corner of her mouth. “I like what we do, too.”

  Katrynn thought that he’d make the kiss more serious, but instead he stood straight again. “Can I ask you something? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

  She stepped back, her nerves suddenly jangling. “That’s an ominous way to start a question.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “In February, when Calhoun was here, your throat was bruised. Did he do that to you?”

  She flinched and would have drawn away, except that John caught her hand. As far as Katrynn was concerned, the name Atticus Calhoun should never have utterance between her and John. She opened her mouth to say so, but instead she said, “Yes. But…”

  “Was it like this?” He brushed her bruise again, his fingers like feathers.

  “He’d say it was. John, I don’t want to talk about this.”

  He pressed on. “What do you mean, ‘he’d say it was’?”

  “I mean that I didn’t tell him that I didn’t like it. I have trouble with that. I didn’t tell him, and he thought I liked it, and he did it more, and I still didn’t tell him. I faked it and got through it, and I’m fucked up like that, which you probably have figured out, so can we please stop talking about this?”

  She yanked her hand from his grip and stalked up the hallway, pausing at the bedroom—but didn’t want to be in there. She felt anxious and embarrassed and vulnerable, and the bed was too scary a place just at the moment. So she went to the living room and sat down in her armchair, where she was guaranteed to have some space.

  Still wearing nothing but the red towel, John came into the room and crouched before her. “Don’t run off. You just told me a bunch of shit I need to process.”

  “You shouldn’t have asked at all.”

  “Why not? I love you, and I want to know. And I told you that you didn’t have to answer. You’re saying he was hurting you, and you don’t think he knew that?”

  “He’d have no reason to know. I was more afraid of the awkwardness, so I didn’t let on.” God, this conversation was embarrassing.

  John picked up her hand and held it gently. “Do you fake it with me?”

  “No! I’m not just saying that—I don’t. I swear.”

  He smiled. “I know. You know how I know? Because I pay attention. I feel what your body is doing, and I know. I’m betting Calhoun knew, too. But even if he didn’t, either way, he’s a selfish prick.”

  Of course he was a selfish prick, and she was an idiot for falling for his charm. Not news, and not something she wanted to relive with John. “Why does it matter? Why did you need to bring that up?”

  “Because the bruise I left reminded me of why I punched that asshole. And now I’m doubly glad I did it, even though it tore things up at the shop.”

  “You punched him because of my bruise? But you didn’t know he’d done it.”

  “Unless you’re doing UFC on the side, it wasn’t the kind of bruise you just get randomly. But I think I punched him because I fucking hated his hands on you at all. The bruise was the final straw. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  She was grinning. “That’s such a caveman thing to do.” But she had entertained precisely that fantasy: that she’d mattered enough to him that he’d felt driven to bash in the face of someone who’d hurt her.

  He grinned back, sheepishly. “I don’t like it when people I care about get hurt.”

  John was a pretty enlightened guy, overall, but there were several little things like that—like the way he called her baby, and the way he sometimes said That’s my girl in intimate moments—that she knew she should think were overly patronizing. But she loved them all, and she wasn’t even ashamed of it. She liked feeling protected.

  She loved that he’d started an epic brawl for her.

  Her first year at college, she’d dated a guy in her dorm, and she’d thought it was serious. He was the first guy she’d ever brought home to Welcome. That had been a disaster—her dad had been home, and her mom’s distraction a
t the time hadn’t left, and if Katrynn had known that, she wouldn’t have brought Steve home. He’d thought the whole arrangement was hot, he’d thought her mom was really hot, and things had gotten decidedly weird between them after that.

  But a few weeks before that, at Halloween, they’d gone to a costume party at a local pub. Katrynn had dressed up as Aphrodite, in a one-shouldered toga. Steve had refused to dress up, but he’d worn some stupid hat and called it a costume.

  While they’d been standing near the bar in the crowded pub, a group of guys had walked by. One of them had stuck his hand inside her toga and grabbed a handful of boob, then walked on. She had been too stunned to react before the guy had moved on.