Legally Yours (Spitfire Book 1)

by Nicole French

  I smiled against his warm cheek. “Not really. Tommy Leibowitz tried once, but he broke the branch of the oak tree trying to scoot into my window. No one else could get in after that.”

  “Well, Tommy Leibowitz ain’t got nothin’ on me, baby,” Brandon growled. “Not when it comes to you.”

  His fingers gripped my mass of hair while his other hand drifted down to clench tightly around my ass and press me into his obvious erection. A few fingers slipped under the edge of my underwear so he could grab my cheek fully, causing low moan to rise in the back of my throat.

  My breath caught in my chest, and suddenly I couldn’t that my grandmother was only a few flights of stairs away from my unlocked door. In fact, the idea actually made the whole thing that much hotter. I couldn’t get him naked fast enough.

  “Off,” I mumbled into his mouth, tearing at the buttons of his jeans below me.

  He growled and lifted his legs—with me on them—just enough to scoot off his jeans and boxers so that his erect penis lay heavy over his stomach. His fingers slid into the edges of my underwear and pulled them down my legs. I kicked them the rest of the way off and resumed my place straddling him, my hair falling around our heads in a thick reddish canopy.

  One arm encircled my waist in an unforgiving grip, the other around my neck as he yanked me down to meet his hungry mouth.

  “Fuck, Skylar,” he growled in between the torrent of arduous kisses. “Fuck!”

  I could feel the velvety length of his rubbing against me, the friction of his long shaft tickling the outer edges of my entrance and making me wetter by the second. I rolled my hips, helping the movement along. It was a dangerous game we were playing, but he felt so, so good there. I absolutely ached to have him inside me.

  I rolled my hips again, and the tip of him managed to sneak in, catching us by surprise when I lost my balance and took him completely and unexpectedly. I gasped at the sudden, immediate penetration. Brandon’s big body arched at the contact and he cursed: “Fuck!”

  We stared at each other, both of us shocked, dumbfounded, and undeniably turned on, if the involuntary movements of both of our hips was any indication. I swallowed, and before I could lose myself in the movements, I pushed off him and hopped down to the floor.

  “Ah!” he yelped, almost as if in pain.

  “Condom,” I muttered, looking frantically around as I tried to remember if I had any here.

  “My jeans pocket. Goddamn it, hurry!”

  Frantically I rifled through his pants until I came across a strip of condoms. I tore one off and practically jumped back onto him before ripping the package open and sliding it on as quickly as I could. Brandon grabbed my hips and shoved me down on top of him, forcing me to take his throbbing length to the hilt. He grabbed my hand and held it to my clitoris, just above where our flesh met.

  “Touch yourself,” he ordered gruffly. His hips began to move beneath me, causing me to moan. Barely able to think, my mind so clouded with desire, I started to move my fingers, massaging the tender nub of my clitoris while I reveled in the fullness of having him inside me. There was really nothing better.

  “Did you like that, baby?” he growled as he pumped into me from below, his hands vices around my hipbones. “Did you like how I felt in you, with nothing on?”

  I couldn’t answer, just undulated down to meet his movements, only able to feel the long length of him spearing me to my core.

  “Ummm,” I moaned, just as he tugged me down to his eager mouth.

  His hands were like steel while his hips rocked mercilessly into me, against and again and again. My fingers, trapped between our undulating bodies, worked ferociously in time to his harsh rhythm.

  “That’s how it’s meant to be, baby,” he mumbled into my mouth. “Just you and me, Skylar. Nothing between us.”

  Brandon slowed his movements, causing me to sit back up and look down at him in angst. Both hands released their hold on my legs and slid up to tug the cups of my bra below my breasts. His deft fingers found my nipples and began to tug them lightly, pinching them in a way that sent pulses of need straight to my core, straight to that place where his body met my own. His hips rolled agonizingly slowly, forcing me to feel every last inch of him as he created that delicious friction just inside me. My G-spot. God, the shape of him was made for it—there was no other explanation as to how he was somehow able to make me come better than I could ever do for myself. I pressed harder on my clit, just atop where the feeling was building, doubling up on pleasure as I closed my eyes to just feel it.

  “One day you’re going to feel me all the way, baby,” Brandon said in between shattered breaths as he made another agonizing roll with his hips. “You’re going to feel me come in you, deep inside you, fill you up until you just. Can’t. Take. Any. More.”

  He matched his thrusts to his words, each one stronger than the last as his words finally forced me to come undone.

  “Fuck!” I cried as I began to shake uncontrollably. “Ah!”

  His hands released my aching breasts, and one rose to grasp me around the neck, pulling me down into his vibrating body as he rolled out our orgasms together. We shook desperately in each other’s arms, stricken with pleasure until we both lay limp and lifeless, our only movement the rise and fall of his chest as he fought to catch his breath.

  Finally, he tilted my head up to his and laid a soft, but thorough kiss on my lips.

  “That was…”

  “Intense,” he finished. One hand rose to stroke the top of my head, but fell lifelessly again the mattress. “I’ve…fuck. I’ve never wanted to do that so badly. Shit, Skylar, we almost—”

  “I know,” I murmured into the soft hair on his chest. “I know.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  We lay silently, recovering as the reality of what had just happened gradually dawned on us both. My body stiffened, and his hands gripped my arms, holding me in place.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I didn’t come. Wasn’t even close.”

  “I’m on the pill,” I said automatically into his chest. The thump of his heartbeat rose clearly against my cheek. It pounded loudly, as sturdy as he was. “That’s not what I was thinking about.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m clean, I promise. I was tested not too long ago. I’ll show you if you want—”

  “That’s fine,” I interrupted, not yet ready to lose the hazy post-coital warmth I was still basking in. “I’m clean too. I had a physical last month, and I was tested then.”

  “So we’re good,” he said as his big arms slipping around my bare back.

  The contrast of his warm skin against the cool air was welcoming, and my body melted further into him. I sighed with pure contentment. “Yeah. We’re good.”

  “This room feels like you,” he commented a few blissful moments later.

  “What, like in me?” My crude joke earned me a mild smack on the backside.

  “No, perv,” he said. “Just in general. I didn’t see you as a madwoman in the attic, but other than the creepy rafters, it’s pretty much like I expected. The dollhouse furniture and the posters. It’s such a damn girl’s room.”

  I returned his light-hearted smack, but I ended up hitting more mattress than man. In my sex-haze, though, I didn’t really care if he thought if my teenage bedroom was so typical.

  “What did yours look like?” I grumbled into his check.

  “At the Petersens’, the group home, or in Dorchester?” His body stiffened slightly under me, and the arms that had drifted down my back tightened to prevent me from sitting up to look at him. Shit.

  “Um…”

  “I don’t really remember the room at my mom’s place,” he said quietly. I lay perfectly still, urging him on silently. “But Ray and Susan have a small house up in Somerville. Nothing special, just a little colonial. My room was on the second floor and overlooked the barbecue in the backyard. They gave me a bunch of Ray’s old furniture from his grad school days, and I remember when Susan took me dow
n to Newbury Comics to pick out posters.”

  I wanted so badly to sit up to see his face while he was talking, but his arms continued to hold me still.

  “She made me choose three,” he continued, “and when she realized I’d never listened to anything other than Kieran’s radio downstairs, she ended up buying me a cassette player and about twenty of her favorite albums.” His chest shook slightly under my cheek with laughter. “I thought this lady was crazy, but I didn’t stop her. No one had ever done anything like that for me before.”

  “Did you like her picks?” I asked curiously. I hadn’t met Susan yet, but now I really wanted to. Her kindness was touching.

  “Some of them. I wasn’t really into Carly Simon, but I did like her Springsteen choices. I used to listen to The River over and over again while I was studying. Ray hated it, but Susan made him let me keep it on. Everyone else I knew back then was crazy about, I don’t know, Marky Mark or some shit like that, but I just wanted to listen to the Boss.”

  I didn’t say anything, just imagined a twelve-year-old Brandon in his small room, working hard at his new-old desk, trying to impress his foster parents even while he was at odds with them. I wondered if he was tall at that age too, or if he was still small enough that only his toes touched the floor. “That explains the Springsteen preference. You sound like a model ward. I can’t imagine why Ray would have had such a problem.”

  Brandon’s chest rumbled with a low chuckle beneath me. “Well, I wasn’t a bookworm most of the time. I liked school, but I also liked sneaking out to meet my friends back home. I got into more than enough trouble to merit Ray’s disappointment.”

  “Well, you don’t now,” I said grumpily, recalling Ray’s stoic countenance toward his foster son. I didn’t care how many things he had done for Brandon in the past—I hated the cold manner in which he treated a man who clearly thought the world of him.

  “Maybe.” Before I could pursue the cryptic response, Brandon swiftly turned the conversation back to me. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a Smiths fan—that’s more for old people like me. I was thinking more like Dashboard Confessional.”

  Atop him I shrugged. “He ripped off Morrissey anyway. Besides, what The Smiths lack in composition, they make up with polish and ironic lyrics.”

  “‘To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die’?”

  I nuzzled deeper into the hollow of his clavicle. “Something like that. So is that all you like about my house? My old concert posters and flea market furniture? It’s basically a garage sale compared to your place.”

  The fingers of one of Brandon’s hands drifted up and down the lines of my shoulder until they clasped together over my spine and I could feel the soft rhythm of his breath in my hair. Eventually, I started to wonder if he had fallen asleep.

  “No,” he answered at last. His voice was low and distant, a contrast to the immediacy of his warm body. “I like it because it feels like you.” He took several more breaths, and then said, so low I could barely hear it, “It feels like home.”

  ~

  Chapter 32

  The sounds of Bubbe’s feet on the stairs woke us less than an hour later. We jumped out of my small bed, giggling like guilty teenagers, and stumbled around while pinching at each other in between bouts of laughter. I quickly dressed casually in jeans, a thin black sweater, and my worn black motorcycle boots before we left to go see Dad.

  Brandon stayed in the hospital lobby to work on his computer while I took the elevator up to where Dad was in recovery. He’d been moved out of the ICU, thankfully, which meant he was doing well. I found him lying in bed, flipping through the TV channels, a curtain pulled around the bed of the other patient in the room.

  I knocked lightly on the open door, and Dad looked up. His face still had a gray pallor with dark circles under his eyes, but it brightened when he caught sight of me.

  “Pips!” he croaked with a hoarse, strained voice.

  I winced as I walked in and sat down in the seat next to his bed. “Hey Dad.”

  He turned off the television and allowed me to take the remote and set it on his side table. Then I gently gave his good hand a squeeze. The bruises around his face were already starting to turn a mottled mix of purple, yellow, and blue, and it looked like the swelling around his cut eye was starting to go down. He gave me a sheepish grin, and grimaced when the movement in his face jogged the mask over his nose.

  “Careful, old man,” I said, though I couldn’t stop my voice from wavering. Before I could stop them, tears welled up and started to fall down my cheeks. I bent over and buried my face in his leg. “Oh, Dad.”

  He didn’t say anything, but I felt his good hand stroke my head gently, weaving the fingers lightly through my tangled waves. My sob came, hard and heavy, wracking my body in brutal shakes and heaves.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, over and over again. “So sorry, baby.”

  His words only made me cry harder, and I didn’t stop until a nurse bustled in, announcing with some awkwardness that she needed to take his vitals.

  “Of course,” I croaked, pushing my chair back to give her room. I grabbed a tissue from the nightstand and dabbed vainly at my eyes, where no doubt streams of mascara tracked down my cheeks. I sniffed back the last of my tears and watched vaguely as the nurse took my dad’s blood pressure and checking his other vital signs.

  “Everything looks good, right, Gina?” Dad asked with a sly smile. “Good enough to steal you away from that husband of yours, right?”

  Gina, who was probably in her early sixties, just rapped him lightly on the head and made a few marks on his chart. “We have to watch this one,” she told me with a grin. “He’s up to no good. I’ll be back in an hour, so behave, Danny, you hear?”

  “Not if I can help it,” Dad said with a weak grin at me as Gina walked out. I did my best to smile back, but Dad’s face fell at my expression. The tears rose again.

  “Oh, Pip, baby, please don’t cry,” he begged, reaching out with his good hand, although I was too far away to touch.

  I took a deep breath and pushed the tears away. “No. I’m okay. Sorry.”

  Dad watched me carefully and laid back into his pillow, clearly worn out by the interaction with the nurse. “I’m so sorry, Pip,” he said again quietly. “I’m so sorry you have to deal with this.”

  “You’re sorry,” I repeated numbly. I stared down at my hands, which gripped the cool, metal arms of my chair. My knuckles turned white before I released them. Another tear fell; I sniffed it back, and looked up at my dad, who was watching me with obvious caution.

  “Dad,” I said softly. “Daddy.”

  “Pip, I—”

  “You could have died.”

  We stared at each other, the gravity of the words falling between us like a gavel. He was lucky his injuries weren’t worse. He was lucky he wasn’t at the bottom of the East River. He knew it, and I knew it.

  I stared at his maimed right hand, which was resting in a suspended sling hanging from the bed.

  “What did the hand doctor say?” I asked.

  Dad shrugged, then winced at the movement. “Oh, he hasn’t come yet. They said he’d be here this morning, but I haven’t seen him.”

  I nodded, not knowing what else to say. I’d wait for the doctor to come before I left so I could help Dad negotiate the treatment plan. I reached out as if to touch his hand, but pulled it away when he shirked at even the idea of it. Dad stared out the window next to him. A pair of pigeons tapped lightly at the pane, but beyond them, there was only the red brick siding of another hospital wing.

  “Dad,” I said gently. “Dad?”

  He looked back at me, his tired eyes full of pain and fear and glossed slightly with tears. “Shit, Pips. I’m just so damn ashamed, you know? I never wanted you or Ma to get wrapped up in all of this, and now I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

  It was obvious he wasn’t just talking about his hand.

  “It’ll be all right,
” I told him, wishing I could say it with more conviction. “I promise, it will be all right.”

  ~

  Doctor Bennett stopped in shortly after the nurse, moving in a bustle and hanging some of the X-rays that had been taken the night before. He rattled off the Latin names of at least five different breaks in his hand. Dr. Carraway hadn’t been lying last night—Dad’s hand really had been effectively crushed.

  “I see a lot of construction workers with this kind of injury,” Doctor Bennett said as we all gazed at the blurred lines of the X-ray. “Usually when some kind of beam falls on their hand.”

  “It was a hammer,” Dad corrected him quietly.

  My stomach dropped, but I stayed quiet.

  The doctor cleared his throat before informing us that Dad would need at least one extensive surgery to repair the damage, and at least six to nine months of physical therapy to regain use of his hand, although full use would could take up to two years, maybe longer. When I asked about the piano, Dad turned white and shook his head. Doctor Bennett, an abrupt, middle-aged man with a scant sense of bedside manner, had taken one look at Dad and said he’d make that assessment after the surgery. Dad would be able to finish recuperating from the liver surgery at home after all, but he’d need to come back early next for the first, and hopefully the only, surgery on his hand.

  After the doctor left, I waited until Dad fell asleep, napping with his next round of Percocet, before going down to find Brandon and run some errands. I wanted the house to have everything he loved when he came home tomorrow. Brandon, feeling helpless, insisted that I allowed David to drive us from place to place while Brandon continued to work in the backseat via teleconference. I had told him there was no reason—he could go back to Boston instead of waiting around for me, but there was no convincing him otherwise.

  So we zig-zagged around Brooklyn, picking up random things I thought Dad would like—a cheesecake from Junior’s, whiskey from the liquor store, knishes from a deli just off Ocean Avenue. Brandon had the brilliant idea of stopping at a mall to purchase an iPod and a music streaming service. Dad, of course, wouldn’t be able to listen to his record downstairs while he was on bedrest.