And the sound he made then as I lay there in only my panties, and he feasted on me with his eyes…
I didn’t have the vocabulary to label it. It was raw and primal. A grunt and a growl and a sigh all mixed in one. Its baseness made me feel beautiful. In a way that I was used to feeling beautiful—with my body—but also in a whole new way because I didn’t think anyone had ever looked at me so thoroughly. So completely, seeing all of me. The insides along with the out. The bad as well as the good and still wanting to see more.
“You’re fucking gorgeous,” he said, staring at my breasts like they were diamonds. My nipples were pointed so sharply, I swore they could have cut glass, but when he licked his tongue across one, it was me who cried out.
Seriously? Just having my tit licked felt that good?
I’d never had my breasts adored, never had someone kiss them and suck on them and squeeze them and nip at them until I was wet and writhing. It was more difficult than I imagined. More than once I tried to wrestle a hand free—so I could push him away or pull him closer, I didn’t know—and every time he dominated me, keeping me restrained, reminding me he’d stop if I just said stop.
I didn’t want him to stop.
As strange and vulnerable as he made me feel, I wanted more.
He took his time giving it. Slowly kissing down my stomach, fucking my belly button with his tongue before moving lower.
“Can I kiss you here?” he asked, hovering just above the very wet spot in my panties. And after I said yes, after he’d kissed me, “Can I kiss you without them on?”
“Please?” I was already about to beg him to take them off. Which had me topsy-turvy because I was a virgin at this part too—I’d never had a mouth between my legs. Never had anyone try to get me off. It was always the other way around, I was always the one giving or being taken from, and even before he had my panties down my legs, I could tell how different it was to be on the other side.
How vulnerable it made me.
How powerful. How wanted.
Even wanting them off, a rush of timidity came over me as he pulled the white flowered panties down my thighs, and I sat up suddenly.
“You’re okay.” He stopped, though, my underwear gathered around my knees, and of everything he’d said and done, that might have hit me hardest. “Is this okay?”
I had to look away. A deep breath later, I still couldn’t look right at him.
“Did you hear something?” He was listening now, assuming that’s what my problem was.
“No, I…” I had to decide quickly what to say. Another breath. “I want this. I just—”
He sat up now too. “We don’t have to do this tonight.”
“No! I mean, yes, we do. Because I want to. And yes, it’s okay. Just, no one’s done this to me before.”
“Never?” He seemed surprised, and I almost wanted to ask what he thought my experience level was, but that wasn’t a conversation I really wanted to have at the moment.
So I avoided the question. “I’m nervous.”
He stroked the back of my calf, possibly subconsciously. “Nervous about what?”
“That I’ll do it wrong.”
“I’m the one who will be doing, remember?”
“Or that I won’t be able to…”
“There is no end goal here.” Now his caress became purposeful, up and down from my ankle to my knee. “If it feels good, it’s working. If it’s not, I’ll stop.”
Then there was the practical matter. “What if I...taste...bad?” I was glad it was too dark for him to see me blush.
“Your panties were soaked, Jolie. I could already taste you.” He licked his lips. “And you tasted fucking good.”
I lowered my face, trying to hide my embarrassed grin. “Okay, then. I’m ready.”
I didn’t lie all the way back this time. Keeping my elbows propped, I watched as he tugged my underwear off and tossed them to the floor. He kept his eyes on mine, checking in. Reading my every reaction as he gently pressed my knees apart.
I shivered when he finally tore his gaze from mine to look at what he’d uncovered. Again, his face lit up like he’d discovered buried treasure. Reverently, he ran a finger down my seam and up again.
“I’m going to lick you here,” he said. “I’m going to put my tongue between your pussy lips, and then here…” He rubbed his finger around my entrance. “I’m going to lick you here. And here.” He stuck it inside me, penetrating only as far as I imagined his tongue would go.
My insides clenched tight.
His finger was wet when he dragged it back along the path he’d drawn, landing at the hooded nub at the top. “I’m really going to lick this. Suck it too. Is it okay if I eat you, Jolie?”
My nod was eager.
If I thought describing what he was going to do was amazing—which I did—it was nothing compared to the actual doing. As soon as his tongue hit my skin, sparks shot through my body, awakening nerves I didn’t know I had. “Ah!”
His head lifted, and I knew he was about to ask, so I beat him to it. “Still okay. Very okay.”
He smiled briefly before—praise be—returning his tongue to my pussy. Just the swipe of it along my lips had my toes curling.
And still, my mind was a nosy bee. “Have you done this before?”
He paused to consider. The fact that he had to think was enough to make my body tighten because the answer wasn’t hard. The only thing he could be considering was whether or not he should be honest.
Thankfully, he chose the truth. “Yes.”
Or maybe not so thankfully because now my throat felt the hard knot of jealousy. “Amelia?”
“No.” He laughed like that idea was ridiculous. “And it wouldn’t matter if I had because you’re the only girl I’ve done this to that I loved.” He licked around my hole, which felt dirty and wrong and really fucking hot. “So I really haven’t done this before.”
“Okay,” I said. There seriously wasn’t room for any language in my brain anymore. And also, it really was okay. More than okay. It made me happy to be his first in some way.
It made me happy that he was my first in this too.
He took that okay as the end of discussion, which it was, and devoted himself to his task, starting over from where he first began and leisurely running his tongue all the places he said he would. He spent several minutes at my hole before completing his sweep back up my lips.
I was quivering before he even made it to my clit.
Then when he did... Fuck. I had to lie all the way down.
I thought for a moment, as he sucked the bundle of nerves into his mouth the first time, about how I’d describe the sensation. The words that came to mind were vague. Incredible. Heaven. Ecstasy. It felt like little fires everywhere in my body, furnaces turned to full blast. It felt like volcanoes. It felt like…
Indescribable, really.
So I stopped trying to name it and let myself relax and just feel, and pretty soon the fires began to build and blaze, and before I knew it, my hands were wrapping into the bedsheets and my entire body was trembling. I couldn’t breathe. The ball of fire inside me was too big, pressing against my lungs, growing bigger, bigger still until I thought it might overtake me.
Then it did.
My chest lifted from the bed, and pure pleasure launched through me. I was buzzing everywhere, everywhere. There wasn’t a fragment of my body that was untouched by bliss—pure and intense and encompassing.
And for the first time, I had a glimpse of understanding about sex, and why people were the way they were with it, and why it was such a powerful commodity, and why so many were obsessed with taking it even when it wasn’t given.
But as wonderful as it was, it was over within a minute. And though I felt more relaxed than I’d ever felt, the orgasm didn’t fix anything inside of me.
“Are you okay?” Cade had stretched himself out beside me while I recovered. I could feel the bulge in his jeans pressed against my hip, but I knew he wanted me to ignor
e it.
For once, I did.
“I’m fantastic,” I said honestly. Enlightened a bit, too.
Then I wrapped myself up in his arms and let him hold me while we talked late into the night.
Sixteen
Cade
Present
* * *
I jiggled the pick in the lock of Stark’s office, grateful that Donovan had given me his jackknife pick set for the trip. It was taking me longer than I’d expected, partly because it had been a while since I’d had to engage in a task of this sort. Partly because I wasn’t usually so distracted.
“It’s like old times,” I whispered. “Sneaking around your father’s house late at night.”
She laughed, making the light from the flashlight bounce. “I’m not scared enough for this to be like old times. And not naked enough.”
Not right now, anyway.
I peeked over at her. Dressed in my T-shirt and drawstring gym shorts, she might as well be naked. She had the same effect on my cock. “We could fix that last part. Would you get any satisfaction from fucking on your father’s desk?”
“Ew, no.” She shivered in disgust.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure I would either. Too many bad memories of that room. I probably couldn’t even get it up.
“We’ll get our vengeance.” It sounded like a promise, and I wasn’t so sure she should be that assured.
But she looked so adorable with that quirky smile, wearing my clothes, and I was pretty sure I’d just gotten the last pin lifted with the wrench, so I leaned over and kissed her.
Then I opened the door.
She smiled against my lips. “That’s a pretty hot trick of yours.”
So apparently I could get it up.
I could wait until we were back in our room to do something about that.
I pushed the door open, then reached in and turned the light on without crossing the threshold. Instead, I stood there, looking in at the space that had been the source of so many years of nightmares. It was almost an exact duplicate of his office at school with different books lining his shelves and a window that faced south instead of west. It was smaller than I’d remembered. Better lit. More mundane.
But those changes were all about me and my grown-up, distanced perspective, because on further examination, the room seemed basically unchanged.
Jolie hadn’t yet moved either. “He reorganized the books,” she said, indicating she was applying the same scrutiny to the room I was.
I followed her line of sight and saw it immediately—a minor alteration, unnoticeable to anyone who hadn’t spent long minutes staring at the shelves, memorizing the titles to distract from the pain. My body shuddered, remembering.
Fuck. It was terrible.
Being back here was unspeakably terrible.
I grabbed Jolie’s hand in mine, and she took it quickly as though she’d been the one reaching. There was no choice but to be together in this house. Now, like then, it was the only way to survive, and I didn’t question the necessity of her. Didn’t think about what would happen between us when we left. Future didn’t exist when you were in Stark’s world. There was only the present, anchored in a shitty past. There was only living through the moment.
I pressed my palm harder against hers. “Should we?”
“Yeah,” she said, straightening. Steeling herself. “Let’s get this over with.”
Together, we crossed into the room.
Strangely, it was just as easy to breathe as it had been out in the hall. Back then, I’d been convinced the oxygen was thinner in Stark’s office. It seemed I’d been wrong.
Maybe he had to be there for the air to constrict.
Realizing it was just a space like any other made it easier to focus, and I dropped Jolie’s hand and headed straight for the desk.
“Which one did you say it was in?” I asked, already tearing apart the top drawer. This had always been planned as a quick in-and-out. We needed the extra key to the cabin safe, and that was all. Planting evidence in Stark’s safe was the surest strategy, and there was no reason to torture ourselves staying longer than we had to.
She didn’t appear to be as motivated to be done with our task. Instead of following me to the desk, she’d crossed to the bookshelves. “Antony and Cleopatra. All’s Well That Ends Well. As You Like It.” She paused in between each title, as though searching for the next. “They’re all still here. Just not in alphabetical anymore. It looks like they’re grouped by genre now.”
Not finding any keys in the first drawer, I shut it and moved on to the second. “Was the key all by itself, or is it on a ring?”
“The parenting books were the ones I found particularly ironic.” I heard the sound of a book being pulled off the shelf. “Positive Discipline. It even looks like it was actually read. There’re notes in the margins.”
“Let me guess—he’s arguing with his methods.” The second drawer was also a bust, and the bottom drawers were locked, but the sight of an external hard drive had me reconsidering our strategy.
“Her methods. The writer is a she, and of course, that’s what the notes are. I’m surprised he even bothered reading material written by a woman.”
“We could just plant the flash drive here,” I said, thinking out loud.
“Not after we’ve been here. It’s too obvious. He could claim we planted it.” She said it quickly, suggesting she’d already thought about it.
“Right, right.” I would have gotten there too in a minute. And now it made me think of something else. “We should put the safe key back after so he can’t say it was stolen.”
Fuck. I didn’t want either of us to have to come back.
“Could we get it copied tomorrow? Put it back before we ever go?”
She was sharp.
I should have been that sharp. “Good thinking.” I pulled the jackknife pick from the pocket of my sweats. “You said the safe key was in a locked drawer, didn’t you?”
“Bottom right, if it’s in the same place it was before.”
She put the book back and moved to the single bookshelf with pictures on display. A fleeting glance told me they were exactly the same photos that had been there years ago—a professional headshot of each of Stark’s parents, a posed family portrait of Stark and his first wife with a toddler version of Jolie on her lap, a picture my mother had given him of me and her at my eleventh birthday party, and a formal photo from both his weddings, the first one framed and the second printed out and stuck in the corner of the glass covering the original.
“I always thought it was funny that he had these in here at all,” she said. “They were always covered in dust. It wasn’t like they meant anything to him, and it’s not like he was putting them up to boast. No one ever came in here but us.”
I’d stared at those pictures until I had every detail memorized, and I’d never thought too much about why they were there. They’d seemed incidental to me. A place he put these things that he didn’t know what to do with.
I’d wondered if that’s how he kept us in his mind too—relegated to a dusty shelf, never looked at, displayed exactly how he wanted us displayed. “They reminded him we were his,” I said, sitting down in the chair to work on the lock.
“Was that it?” She didn’t seem quite convinced.
The drawer was easier to pop than the door, and it was open almost instantly. “Got it,” I said, looking up at Jolie.
She’d picked up one of the pictures from the shelf and was studying it. Now that she was holding it, I realized I didn’t recognize the frame, and her earnest expression had me curious. “What is it?”
She let out a sigh. “Me. Graduation.”
I knew better than to get distracted, but I needed to see it. “Show me.”
She brought it over, and I stood to look at it with her. Seeing her like that, looking like she had the last time I’d seen her all those years ago, knocked the wind out of me. She looked exactly how she’d been etched in my memory—her hair a
mousy brownish blonde, her face round. I could have conjured up the image of her in that cap and gown in a blink, and I hadn’t even gotten to see her walk the stage. It was just another thing Stark had stolen from me. Another moment that I’d been denied.
I’d imagined it though. I’d sat in that stupid parking lot and fantasized the whole thing, waiting for her to hitch a ride with Amelia’s parents and come meet up with me five miles away.
“You can tell I’d been crying,” she said softly. “My eyes are puffy.”
They were visibly red, and she hadn’t even bothered to try to smile.
I realized what she was insinuating. “You’d already decided you weren’t coming.” I’d wondered for years. Wondered if she’d ever planned to come at all.
“I wasn’t always not going to come,” she said, reading my mind. “I’d meant it when I said I would.”
And there it was—the part of the past we’d been dancing around. The thing I hadn’t been able to bring myself to talk about. Because it hurt so much already, and I couldn’t imagine that any reason she gave for not coming would make it better. Chances were, it would make it worse.
So I hadn’t asked.
And she hadn’t said.
But now it was there between us, picture proof that she’d suffered something.
I forced my eyes from the ghost in the picture to the woman at my side. “Why didn’t you?”
Her lips turned down, and her eyes seemed to match the frown, but when she opened her mouth, it was another voice that spoke.
“Should have known that you weren’t just stopping by for old time’s sake. Should I call the cops and report a break in? There’s nothing of value in there, I assure you.”
Jolie jumped, and both of our gazes flew to the doorway where my mother stood in her bathrobe.
“It’s not what it looks like. We were just…” As always, Jolie was quick to make amends. To smooth things over.
Fuck that. I wasn’t explaining shit to my mother. “Do you even know what’s in here? Have you ever taken the initiative to look for yourself? Hard drives. Locked drawers.” I hadn’t even gotten to the ones that held his instruments of pain.
Wild War Page 14
