“You deserve to be in a bed, not in a cot in a horse barn,” he mutters, looking down into my eyes as his hand moves up and down my thigh, sliding behind it to lift it up and hook it over his hip.
Bringing my hands to his cheeks, I cup his face in my palms and lean up, pressing my mouth gently to his before pulling back.
“I already told you, I don’t need anything but you, Eli.”
He sighs, resting his forehead against mine.
“Say my name again,” he tells me softly.
I smile, craning my neck so I can press my lips to his ear.
“Eli, Eli, Eli,” I whisper.
With a low, muttered curse, he turns his head and takes my lips again. My body ignites when our tongues touch and I move my hands from his face to slide them down his sides, yanking and tugging at his shirt. He breaks the kiss long enough to lean back and pull his T-shirt off and I press my palms to his muscled chest, an ache building inside my heart when I feel lines of scars under my fingers.
I look up into his face to see him watching me with apprehension. An ache builds inside my chest, thinking about what he went through and I don’t want him to believe for even one second that he’s anything less than an amazing, strong, beautiful man.
“We both have scars,” I remind him.
“Yes,” he says with a strangled whisper that threatens to crack my heart open.
“Does mine make me look weak?” I ask.
“Fuck no,” he immediately replies as I continue running my fingers over his chest.
“Neither do yours.”
He groans quietly when I dip my head forward and press my lips against each mark I can feel. One of his hands immediately comes up and he slides it through the hair at the back of my head, holding me against him as I kiss each painful memory away. When I finish, his fingers tighten in my hair and he pulls my head back and reclaims my mouth.
We move in a blur of hands and arms and shifting around on the small cot, removing each other’s clothes as fast as we can, pausing to kiss in between each article that’s removed. When I’m naked and lying completely bare and open beneath him, he slides his body down the length of mine, stopping with his head above my thigh.
Pushing myself up on my elbows, I watch as he takes his turn, kissing every inch of my scarred leg so softly and with so much care that I know this moment will be burned in my mind forever, making me feel cherished and beautiful. I let the people closest to me make me feel ugly and ashamed for too long.
Eli moves back up my body, pushing himself between my thighs as he goes. Locking my ankles behind his back, I hold his face in my hands once more as he rocks his hips, sliding himself against me, over and over, until I can feel my wetness coating him. His mouth hovers above mine, our lips barely touching as I pant and gasp while he continues to tease me.
It’s been so long since I’ve wanted something this much, craved someone this immeasurably, and as he pulls his hips back and pushes slowly inside me, I know I’ll only ever feel this way with him.
“Only you, always you,” I whisper against his lips with a groan as he slides fully inside me, saying the words he wrote to me all those years ago in his letters.
My name floats from his mouth on a whisper and the sound is filled with such awe and wonder that it takes my breath away as I push my hips up to bring him deeper.
“Say it again,” I murmur against his mouth as he begins slowly rocking in and out of me.
His mouth leaves a trail of kisses down my cheek until he gets to my ear.
“Shelby, Shelby, Shelby…mine.”
His hands grab on to mine and he takes them away from his face, lacing our fingers together as he pulls my arms above my head and presses them into the cot.
I groan his name and my head tilts back as he continues moving slowly in and out of my body.
His mouth finds mine again and his tongue pushes past my lips, sliding against mine in the same rhythm as his cock moving inside me, over and over. My body feels alive for the first time in six years, pleasure tingling up my spine and pulsing between my legs. I don’t have to be ashamed of what I want and what I need when I’m with Eli and I’ve missed this part of myself. I want to let go, be wild, and have this man who heals me take everything I have to give.
I break the kiss, keeping my lips against his when I speak with another groan as he pushes deep and grinds himself against me.
“Harder,” I whisper against his mouth.
A strangled, desperate sound flies past his lips, one of need and barely concealed control.
“Six years, baby,” he pants as he starts moving a little faster and I tighten my thighs around his hips. “I’m barely holding on. Don’t wanna hurt you.”
He’s still holding my arms above my head, and I squeeze his hands tightly, wishing for the hundredth time that I could go back and never let him leave me. Never have one second of missing out on this.
“I’m not going to break. Please,” I beg, pushing my hips up to meet him.
He growls low in his throat and immediately pulls his hips back and slams inside me, hard, just like I wanted. I shout his name and every thought flies from my mind. Suddenly there’s nothing but Eli—the feel of him taking me, the sound of his body slapping against mine, and the curses he mutters as he moves above me. The legs of the cot scrape against the wooden floor, inching closer to the wall as he drives into me with such force that I can barely breathe from how good it feels.
He fucks me like he can’t get deep enough, can’t move fast enough, can’t get close enough. He claims me with each slam of his hips against mine and I know I’ll never be the same again after this moment. Our sweat-slicked bodies slide against each other as we give and take, and still, it’s not enough.
I’m dying.
I’m alive.
I can’t breathe.
I’m whole.
My release doesn’t creep up on me slowly, starting at my toes and moving up my legs. The built-up pressure explodes out of me all at once like a million fireworks, my back arching as Eli slams his mouth to mine, swallowing my cries as the waves of pleasure pulse between my legs.
I tug my hands out of Eli’s and yank my arms down, my palms smacking against his back and my fingers digging into his skin as his hips move impossibly faster and harder. He wrenches his mouth from mine and buries his face in the side of my neck to muffle his moans as his orgasm hits him as hard as mine, his hips jerking and shuttering through his release. With one last hard thrust, he collapses on top of me. I wrap my arms around him, holding him to me as tightly as possible so I can feel the rapid beat of his heart against my chest.
Chapter 21
Eli
Are you planning on living with me forever, or do you have a plan? Do you need an intervention?”
Rylan laughs at me as I finish putting away the box of plates, cups, and silverware that Kat gave me as a housewarming gift when she stopped by yesterday to see how I was doing. I can tell she still isn’t fully on board with me moving out of her house, going by the way she hovered over me, asked me a hundred times if I needed anything, and reminded me to call my shrink if I needed someone to talk to. At least she didn’t try to tell me again that I could come back to her place at any time, but that might have had something to do with Daniel giving her shoulder a squeeze each time she even thought about saying it. At least she liked the place and she was impressed with how quickly I’d unpacked and settled in.
“Is this your subtle way of telling me I’m cramping your style?” Rylan asks as I close the cabinet door and turn around to find him lounging on my couch with his hands behind his head.
“Not right at this moment, but you’re going to need to find something else to do when Shelby gets here in a little bit,” I remind him.
It’s been a week since the day I cleaned out Shelby’s studio and we spent the night together in the tack room, and we’d spent every night since then doing it again and again. We never made plans to meet, we just kept showing up at
the same time, long after the workers had all gone home. Sometimes I’d get there first and have the music playing when she got there, and sometimes she got there first and I was able to spend a few minutes standing in the back of the room, silently watching her stretch out her muscles. When she’d catch my eyes in the mirror, she’d apologize for not giving me much to look at like she did six years ago, and I’d reassure her it didn’t matter. Just knowing she was trying and actually looked happy doing it was all that mattered to me. I didn’t know much about her injury other than what Meredith had told me the night she took me to the high school and I didn’t want to upset Shelby by asking about it before she was ready. The only thing that kept echoing through my mind was the night she broke down right in that studio, so lost and hurting when she told me she couldn’t hear the music anymore. I just wanted to give that back to her, any way I could. I wanted her to remember what it was like to have hope and know she could do anything she put her mind to.
Every night for a week, we’d dance together in that studio until the temptation of holding each other and touching each other became too much and we’d wordlessly move to the tack room and spend the night making up for all the time we lost. We could have come back here, we could have gone to her guest house, and we could have gone a hundred different places to be alone, but always wound up back in that damn tack room. There was something familiar about being there, like we were reliving the past, and I don’t think either of us wanted to break the spell just yet and join the real world. Waking up each morning with Shelby in my arms, the two of us laughing while we scrambled around for our clothes so we could sneak out of the barn without anyone seeing us, felt just like old times. I know it should make me happy that we’d so easily fallen back into our old habits, but it didn’t. We weren’t the same people we’d been six years ago and we couldn’t turn back time and make everything that had happened during that time disappear. There was nothing better than touching her again, being inside her again, and kissing her again when I’d done nothing but dream of those things for so long, but we couldn’t keep doing this forever. We needed to talk. I needed to know what she wanted and I needed to make damn sure she knew where I stood and what I wanted.
I couldn’t keep ignoring the fact that every night we were together, her cell phone would ping with several incoming texts and she’d shrug them off and tell me they were nothing important. I saw who they were from when she’d glance at her phone before quickly shoving it away. I knew she had someone else in her life, and I knew we needed to talk about it, as pissed off as that made me.
“So, you’re finally going to bring her here instead of slinking out every night to meet her at the stables?” Rylan asks, giving me a knowing look when I glare at him. “I see all and I know all. Also, you’re not the quietest guy in the world when you’re trying to sneak out of the house late at night.”
He laughs with a cocky smile as he pushes himself up from the couch and walks into the kitchen.
“You need a job. Or a hobby,” I tell him irritably as he flops down on one of the bar stools lining the island in the middle of the kitchen.
“Why do I need a job when I have you for a sugar daddy? he asks with a wink. “And my hobby is watching you try not to fuck this shit up with Shelby. Again. It brings me great joy to see you bumbling around like an idiot without a plan.”
“I have a plan,” I tell him through clenched teeth.
“You had one plan—to clean up her studio and get her to dance again. Mission accomplished and it got you laid. Repeatedly. Nice work, by the way, but I think you’re going to have to work a little harder than that to get what you want. You might have to, dare I say, talk to each other. About important shit,” he reminds me.
“Which is exactly why she’s coming here tonight instead of us meeting at the studio, where it’s too easy for us to fall back into old habits,” I inform him, even though I don’t know why I continue confiding in him when he takes entirely too much joy out of making fun of me and riding my ass.
“And you’re seriously letting all that shit go about your parents’ accident? You’re okay with forgetting about what happened and not getting the truth after all these years?” he questions.
I shrug as I grab my keys from the bowl on the counter.
“Paul was right. It was a long time ago. As much as I want justice and as much as it kills me knowing someone else was responsible and will never pay the price, some things are better left alone and some things are worth more than retaliation,” I explain to him as I head to the front door, Rylan sliding off the bar stool to follow behind me. “The only good thing that came from the hell we lived through is that I know we’re not always guaranteed to live another day. I’m not going to waste the time I was given back focusing on something that isn’t worth it. Being pissed all the time and hating someone for what they did to my family…it’s not worth it. It’s not going to make me happy and it sure as hell isn’t going to make Shelby happy. She deserves to finally be happy again and I’m not going to fuck that up by ruining her life a second time.”
With my hand on the doorknob, I glance at Rylan over my shoulder. “I sound like a pussy, don’t I?”
He laughs, leaning his shoulder against the wall and crossing his arms in front of him.
“Of course you sound like a pussy, but it’s better than you sounding like a selfish asshole. You can’t say talking to a shrink isn’t working for you. You’re like the poster child for Therapy worked for me and it can work for you, too!” he cheers, throwing a fist up in the air.
“Seriously, when are you going to get a job and move out?” I grumble as I open the door and head outside to run to the grocery store so I can grab what I need to make dinner for Shelby.
“I’ll leave when you don’t need me anymore!” he shouts with a laugh.
Chapter 22
Shelby
December 12, 2010
Shelby,
I know you think one of my favorite things was to watch you dance, but actually, one of my favorite things to do was just be with you. Any way I could. I miss being able to talk to you. About anything. About everything. I even miss how whenever one of us wanted to talk about something heavy and deep, we could easily make it lighter, easily distract each other so the time we spent together wasn’t wasted with worries and what-ifs. And even though I know we have a lot of heavy and deep to talk about when I get home, I still can’t wait to be distracted by you again. I love you, Shelby. Only you. Always you.
You and I had been inseparable for weeks. Whatever free time either of us had, we spent it together and I didn’t even care how much sleep I was losing or how exhausted I was every day at my two jobs. You finally realized I wasn’t going anywhere and you finally stopped fighting me every step of the way, opening up to me and letting me see the strong, amazing woman you’d become.
“If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?” you asked, quickly switching to a new topic.
I tried to hide the scowl on my face when you told me about some douche bag your mother had been trying to set you up with for years. I did my best to not let my jealousy show when you told me your mother invited him over for dinner that night and demanded you be there, but obviously I hadn’t done a great job.
We were lying in the grass a few acres away from the stables, me on my back and you on your stomach by my side, your chin resting on top of your hands as you looked over at me.
“Wherever you are,” I told you with a smile.
You laughed and shook your head at me.
“I’m being serious.”
“So am I,” I told you with an easy shrug.
“We barely know each other,” you countered.
I rolled to my side to face you, tucking a strand of hair behind your ear.
“I know you’re the strongest person I’ve ever met. I know you don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks. I know you work your ass off in that studio every day to make your dreams come true. What else do I need
to know?” I asked.
We’d spent a lot of time talking the last few weeks and it made me laugh that you still thought we didn’t know each other. You didn’t even realize how much you’d opened up to me and how much you’d let me see, and you had no idea that the stuff I’d shared with you weren’t things I went around announcing to everyone I knew.
I’d told you about my life growing up, my parents and their accident, joining the Marines, and continuing to work at the stables so I could put my sister through college.
You’d told me about your father and how he’d had the studio built for you, and how it was your little secret between just the two of you, that you both kept from your mother.
You had no idea how good it felt knowing that you trusted me enough to let me in on the secret you’d only ever shared with your father and Meredith. Whenever I had any doubts about not being good enough for you, not having enough money, not having anything to offer you other than myself, you’d erase all of those uncertainties just by being honest and not being afraid to tell me anything.
“What are we doing?” you whispered as you stared into my eyes and I slid my hand down your side and wrapped it around your waist. “I’m probably moving to New York in a few months and you’re a Marine who could get stationed anywhere in the world. This is crazy.”
It was crazy when you put it that way, but I didn’t care. I also didn’t tell you that I’d already asked about a possible transfer to New York. I had no idea where this thing was going between us, but I knew where I wanted it to go. I knew when I kissed you a few weeks ago in the stables that there would be no turning back. You’d gotten under my skin and into my heart and I knew I would do anything to keep it that way. After years of denying my attraction to you and refusing to allow myself to have you, I would stop at nothing to make sure I never lost you.