That’s when it catches my eye. Her camera, sleek and expensive, still nestled atop the faded quilt.
She wouldn’t have left that on purpose.
Maybe she’ll come back for it.
My heart lifts at the thought and then crashes back down, because even if she comes back for it, even if I get to see her pretty heart-shaped face and luscious body again, it doesn’t mean I have a right to ask for more.
Like asking her to listen. Asking her to stay.
Making up for my earlier cruelty with as much pleasure as I can possibly visit on her body.
But still I find myself taking the camera in my hand, thinking about how her hands must have cradled it in exactly the same way.
It makes me feel closer to her.
I stopped questioning myself and my feelings when it comes to sex and love a long time ago—the way Caleb and I love each other necessitates a certain amount of adaptability and spontaneity—but I still can’t help wondering about my feelings. To be so gone for someone after only a night? It’s never happened to me before—not with Mackenna and not even with Caleb. Both of those relationships gradually evolved over time. But falling for Ireland was like an explosion—jagged and fiery and quick as hell.
By the time I heard the click, it’d already gone boom.
I go out on the porch, as if that will somehow bring her back to me. I’m clutching her camera like a child clutches a toy when I see the distinctive glint of sunlight on metal coming from the north.
My chest tightens; something inside it flips over and flips over hard.
Ireland.
The length of another breath brings a little Prius into view, bright blue and flecked with mud, and I know for sure it’s her. I know that somehow I’m being given another chance, and I decide I’m taking it no matter fucking what. I’ll beg her to listen, and I’ll never stop begging if that’s what it takes. I fucked up, but I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to her, if only she’ll let me.
Oh God, please. Please let me, sweetheart.
“I’m just here for my camera,” she announces briskly as she climbs out of her car. She’s still in her distractingly sexy shorts and clingy tank top from earlier, and there’s still sheetrock dust in her hair, but she has a bandage on her leg now and a heat in her eyes that means she’s either furious or aroused. Or both.
Hot blood kicks to my groin, and I feel myself thicken against my zipper. Fuck, I want her. Even furious with me, I want her. I want her to scratch at me as she holds my face to her pussy. I want her to bite my neck and shoulder and chest as her heels dig into my back to drive me deeper inside her.
I hand over her camera without any additional urging from her. I’m not interested in holding it hostage or using something important to her as leverage. I’m only interested in her—her happiness and her safety and her pleasure.
She doesn’t meet my eyes as she takes the camera, and she turns back down the porch stairs after she takes it without another word.
“Ireland,” I say in a strangled voice. “I was wrong. I was cruel. I’m sorry for it, and it won’t ever happen again.”
My words halt her progress, and she slowly pivots back to face me. The hurt and anger in her expression would be enough to drive back armies.
“You’re goddamned right it’s never happening again,” she hisses. “Because I’m never coming back here. Ever. Ever.”
Her words tear at me, tear at the part of me that wants her to feel safe. I should let her leave, and at this point, saying anything else aside from my apology is dangerously close to manipulation or coaxing, and I don’t want that. I want her here because she wants to be here, not because she’s guilted into it or convinces herself to stay against her better instincts.
That’s what Caleb would do—clearly, that’s what he did—given he’s no longer here and Ireland is in possession of her car again. Ever the country gentleman, he escorted her to her car and honored her wishes the whole time.
I’m not Caleb.
I step down the stairs. “I don’t want you to leave,” I say in a low voice. She lifts her chin at me defiantly, refusing to step back as I approach.
“Then you shouldn’t have told me to leave,” she seethes.
“I shouldn’t have,” I agree.
“You treated me like shit for no reason,” she continues, color rising in her cheeks, her eyes bright. “You made me feel stupid and awkward and embarrassed—and I don’t deserve to feel any of those things!”
“Of course not,” I murmur soothingly, because she’s still letting me get closer and I don’t want to spook her.
“I’ve spent so much of my life feeling like that, and I’m not going to feel like that anymore!” she says, blinking fast. Each blink feels like a blister rupturing open for me, knowing I’m the source of those tears. Shame and anger at myself stab deep, but I don’t let it stop me from getting closer to her, close enough to reach out and stroke her cheek.
Her eyes flutter closed…and then snap back open. “Stop! You can’t handsome your way out of this! You were an asshole!”
“I was.”
“And you made me feel like I was the asshole!”
“I did.”
A tear escapes one of her sweet blue eyes, and I catch it with my thumb. She bows her head slightly, as if defeated by the strength of her own emotions. “I’m so angry,” she says to the ground. “I’m so furious with you. And I’m even more furious that I’m crying right now when all I want to do is yell at you.”
“You can yell at me as much as you’d like,” I tell her, sliding my hand to the nape of her neck while my thumb strokes along her cheek. “As long as you stay here to do it.”
Another tear spills out. “I want to. Don’t you see why it makes it extra awful? I want to stay here with you and Caleb so badly.”
I don’t miss how the present tense slips out in her words. A ray of hope shoots through me. “Stay, Ireland. Stay and let me make it up to you, make me suffer every minute you’re due after what I did, just please”—I bend my face down and brush my lips against hers—“don’t go.”
She shivers at the touch of my mouth on hers. Parts her lips just enough to invite the gentle stroke of my tongue. And then we are kissing in truth, with her gathered in my arms and our slow kisses turning hot and sultry. Before long, my cock is burning against her belly and she’s subtly rocking her hips against me.
When we part for air, her tears are gone, although her eyes are still vulnerable and glinting with turbulent feeling. “How?” she whispers. “How can you kiss me like this when just a couple hours ago…?”
I need to tell her about this part of me, but I don’t want it to sound like an excuse, like I’m justifying my awful actions because I’ve had awful things happen to me in the past. I press my forehead to hers and accept there’s no easy way to talk about the busted parts of one’s mind, the broken and the healing parts. “Did Caleb tell you I was in the army?”
“Yes,” she answers softly. “Afghanistan. PTSD?”
“And a sprinkling of garden-variety depression and anxiety. It’s—well, it’s a work in progress. I’m a work in progress. I was already on the edge after seeing the town like that, but when I thought you might have died, when I saw you were in danger…” My fist is clenched in the material of her tank top at the small of her back, and I force myself to uncurl my fingers. “We went through so many villages that looked exactly like that. Just heaps of stones and bricks. And you never knew what would happen when you were walking through. Would you be shot at? Step on an IED? Find the bodies of a dead family left out in the sun? It’s like being turned up to maximum volume for hours…days. And then the volume knob breaks clean off and you can’t turn it down anymore.”
I stare at her, letting her see something I’ve only ever let Caleb see. Me, as I am, part shell and part sensitive boy who got beat to shit after school every day. “I’m so sorry, Ireland. I didn’t want to hurt you. I wanted you safe…and I was so desper
ate to get you away from anything unsafe that I hurt you to do it. It’s unforgivable, and I know that… I just also want you to know why. It’s not because I don’t want you or care for you. Just the fucking opposite.”
Her eyes are huge and liquid, like deep-blue waters of emotion, and her lower lip trembles the slightest bit as she asks, “How can I trust you won’t be awful to me again?”
All over again, I’m stabbed with shame and regret and self-directed fury. I know it’s not helpful—I’ve spent the last five years listening to therapists and other veterans tell me it’s not helpful—but the shame comes all the same.
And yet with it comes the faintest note of something else. Hope? Optimism?
Certainty?
Yes, I think, it’s because I’m certain about Ireland. I’ve never had a reason to believe in things like fate or destiny—the war was very effective at proving there’s nothing but chaos in this world—but Ireland makes me doubt all that now.
“Because you’re mine.”
Her eyes flick over my face, searching me. “You mean that?”
My hold tightens on her. “Yes, baby. You’re mine and Caleb’s, and you’ll remain ours until you don’t want to be any longer.”
“Yours.” She tries out the word, as if the entire concept is foreign to her. As if no one’s ever tried to possess her before.
Then they were all fucking fools.
“Ours,” I confirm roughly, yanking her close once again. “As long as you want us.”
She nibbles on her lower lip, and I can’t help it. I bend down and bite that lip for her. “Do you still want us, Ireland?” I murmur against her mouth. “Will you stay and let me make it up to you?”
Chapter Thirteen
Ireland
A couple of years ago, I was watching a movie with a handful of girlfriends as we traded gossip and passed around popcorn and bottles of wine. And we got to the part of the movie where the hero makes his grand gesture, chasing after the heroine and declaring his love for her. Declaring that she was his.
The room gave a collective groan at this, popcorn flying at the screen, and someone pronounced how utterly backward and chauvinistic that was and how she’d never be caught dead with a man who looked at her and said mine. A man who looked at her like she was a prize in the machine simply waiting to be claimed.
I stayed silent.
Because I wasn’t going to argue that on a structural level men should act proprietary with women, and I never would. But on a personal level, well…
It was hard to look at my friend, who was slender and sleek and would no doubt have men wanting her everywhere she went and not think easy for you to say. Her body was the kind of body that people wanted to claim, wanted to stake some kind of sexual ownership of, and mine was not—never had been, and as years of pointless diet torture had taught me, never would be.
So it was hard not to wish I had the luxury of scoffing at male desire. It was hard to watch those movies and know that, according to them, people like me didn’t have heroes chasing after them. People like me are the best friends, the comic relief, maybe even the villain.
And in real life? In real life, the kind of male attention I received was dangerous and demeaning. Aggressive frat boys who told me I should feel “lucky” to have them fuck me and then got belligerent and nasty when I refused them. Mean men at bars who grabbed and groped and assumed I’d be grateful for the assault since clearly nobody else would ever want to touch my body.
Girls like me, we didn’t get chased, we didn’t get claimed, we didn’t get the happily ever after. Not in movies. Not in real life.
And was it such a crime to want those things? I burned to have them, ached to be the heroine standing in the rain or at the airport or whatever while the hero pleaded and begged and humbled himself for the privilege and honor to be with me. While he ached and burned for my attention and my body.
And now here I am, listening to Ben plead and beg. Listening to him lay his claim.
Mine. Ours.
The corollary to Ben’s words darts around my mind, and it swallows up every other wound and worry: Theirs.
I’ve never belonged to another person before, not in the way that Ben is implying. Even Brian always made sure to tell people we were friends with benefits—or worse. At one memorably shameful work event, he told his boss I was his cousin in town for the week.
So, no, I’ve never had someone stand in front of me, eyes blazing with possessive lust, and practically vibrate with the need to claim me. Declare I’m theirs.
I’ve never been the heroine. Until now…and God help me, I like it. I like having this man on his proverbial knees while he also looks like he wants nothing more than to pin me against my own car and fuck me until the only word I remember is his name.
“Please, Ireland,” Ben says, his voice hoarse and his eyes swirling with a mixture of desperation and lust that my body can’t help but answer. “Please.”
I suck in a breath, my anger blowing away into nothing. “You have to promise to treat me with dignity,” I say, sliding my hands up his chest. “You can’t hurt me again.”
“Never again,” he vows, and then his lips are tracing back over mine with hungry, greedy kisses. “God, Ireland, never fucking again.”
He wraps my hand in one of his big ones and tugs me inside the house with the kind of uncompromising urgency that brooks no argument. Not that I’d argue anyway. There’s something about having a six-foot-plus, square-jawed, dark-eyed soldier yank you up to his bed that makes a girl eager.
But he surprises me—he takes me to Caleb’s bed instead, sitting back against the headboard with his long, muscular legs sprawled.
“Shorts off, panties off,” he says. It’s not a question.
“What about you?” I ask in a breathy voice.
Ben holds up a hand at my question, as if to say in a minute, even though I can see his thick erection stretching all the way to his hip and would hazard a guess it doesn’t want to wait for any period of time. “Sit after you get bare for me. We’re going to give Caleb a treat when he gets home.”
God, yes.
I swallow with a combination of nervousness and arousal, but I’ve already gone to work on my buttons and zipper. As soon as I’m as Ben wants, naked from the waist down and settling between his legs, he finally answers my question. “Don’t worry, baby. I’ll get what I need very soon.”
He arranges me with all the bossy precision of a field commander used to having his orders followed. I’m leaned back against his broad chest and my legs are arranged to drape over his in a way that exposes my pussy to the open air. I almost have a moment of self-consciousness when I feel how wide Ben’s legs have to part to accommodate my ass, but it’s erased the moment I hear his moan as his erection makes contact with my body. His control fractures the tiniest bit, and he pushes his swollen cock against the place where the small of my back curves into my naked bottom.
“Fuck yes,” he grates in my ear. “I love your body. Caleb does too—should we get that pussy of yours ready for him?”
“Yes,” I whisper, already wet from Caleb’s earlier attention and now from the kiss of cool air along my intimate places. But then Ben strokes a hand down over my breast, over the slopes of my stomach, and down to my feminine place, and I instantly grow even wetter.
“Oh baby,” he rumbles. “You need us right now, don’t you? Need your boys to take care of that pretty little cunt?”
My head drops back onto his shoulder as his finger delves inside. “Yes,” I moan. “I need it.” And even just the thought of Ben and Caleb sliding their throbbing columns of unyielding flesh inside me is enough to make me clamp down on Ben’s finger. He gives an answering growl.
“Careful, baby,” he murmurs. “I’m not letting you come until Caleb gets here. It’s going to be a long dance at the edge if you keep up like this.”
But what choice do I have? With a handsome, tortured soldier holding me close with one arm while his other
reaches between my legs to play with me as if I’m his new toy? What girl wouldn’t already be on the edge?
“God, I love how you open up like a flower,” he groans, his finger tracing my swelling, slick folds. He buries his nose in my neck and breathes me in. “You’re perfect. Fucking perfect.”
I’m nearly beyond speech with wanting his fingers to do more. “Ben…” is all I can manage, and then I’m just whimpering and squirming as he teases the pad of one finger around my budding clitoris.
Behind me, I can feel the heat of his erection even through his jeans, like a rod of scorching need. I want it inside me—anywhere, everywhere. And just the thought of having him everywhere launches me that much closer to orgasm.
“Ben,” I beg. “Don’t make me wait any longer.”
“You’ll wait as long as I say you will,” he replies in that dark, authoritative voice that never fails to make me quiver in delight. “Even if it’s hours.”
Hours?
And to prove his point, he trails his touch away from my clit…down, down, down.
“Oh!” I gasp as he presses against a place no one’s ever touched before. His finger is slick with where it’s been, and it easily penetrates the tight ring of muscle there. I writhe against the new pressure and the illicit thrill of it, and Ben ducks his mouth to my ear. “You want me to fuck you here? Caleb too?” His finger probes deeper, and I make a helpless noise of assent. “What about both of us at the same time, hmm? Working both your tight holes while you’re pinned helpless between us?”
“Yes,” I whimper, and he rewards me with the heel of his palm against my clit as he carefully fingers my ass. I’m so needful that his entire hand is now wet with me, and playing with my ass clearly gets Ben beyond needful too, because he grinds out several curse words as his other hand flies to his pants to free his cock so it can rub along my bare skin.
And that’s how Caleb finds us just a few moments later—me shamelessly rocking against his best friend’s hand, my dirtiest secrets penetrated and exposed for viewing, and Ben’s erection grinding livid and hot against my skin.
Misadventures of a Curvy Girl Page 11
