I’m so primed for him that my orgasm crashes over me in mere seconds. My leg gives out, but he supports my weight as he wrings the last few tremors from me. Before I have the chance to recover, he gets to his feet, hooks my leg on his hip as he frees his cock, then buries himself to the hilt.
“Roman!” It’s the first time I’ve said his name since he appeared. Hell, it’s the first time I’ve said it in three months. But in just that one word, his name, I say a dozen hidden things.
You made me love you.
You made me believe in you…in us.
How could you toss me away so easily?
Why wasn’t I enough for you?
I miss you so much I can scarcely breathe.
God, you feel so good, so perfect, so goddamn right.
Fuck me.
Love me.
Jesus Christ, I’m a mess and mentally all over the place. But as soon as he starts to move, everything becomes laser focused on the pleasure, on our bodies fitting and moving in ways that redefine the term “made for each other.”
One hand is holding my leg to his hip, the other is clamped around the back of my neck as our mouths lock together in slippery, heated passion. He starts his thrusts slow, withdrawing and returning in smooth, measured strokes, building my next climax in layers. Every time he seats himself fully within me is another layer, another second closer to the heaven I know is coming.
Soon his movements become less fluid as his control starts to slip. He pulls me up and away from the wall then repositions me higher until my toes are barely brushing the tiled floor. He breaks our kiss in favor of pressing his forehead to mine so we can drag in the air we need. Staring into my soul, he pumps his hips faster, harder.
My arms are wrapped around his neck, and all I can do is hang on as he pushes us toward our end. His staccato grunts slice through the thick steam engulfing us and bounce off the tiled walls, echoing his pleasure as though emphasizing it for my benefit.
I’m perched on the knife’s edge, ready to fall…waiting…waiting…
“Now, Addison,” Roman growls. “Come for me.”
Sparks shoot behind my eyes as I scream his name then come so hard it cuts off my air and prevents any sound from further escaping my throat. The waves ripple out from my center through my entire body, making every nerve tingle with ebbing pleasure. Then he thrusts inside me three more times, so hard that my back slides up and down the wall. With the last one he holds himself deep inside me and roars in his chest as warm lashes of his seed brand my fluttering walls.
He gently lowers my leg and holds my hips until he’s sure I’m steady on my feet. The water splashing us is now tepid at best, so he reaches over and shuts off the spray as we try to catch our breaths. “Fuck, baby,” he rasps when he drops his head to my neck. “I missed you so goddamn much.”
And that’s what breaks the spell.
I try to push him away again, but he’s an unyielding mountain. Unable to escape bodily, I turn my head and rest the side of my face on the cool tile. “You don’t miss me. It’s nothing more than ego. You want what you don’t have,” I say, closing my eyes against the new spring of tears.
“That’s not true. I didn’t come here for an ego fuck. That’s not what this is.”
“Just leave, Roman. Please.”
“Addison, baby, listen to me.” He cradles my head in his hands and angles it up, forcing me to look at him. “I’m not leaving here without a fight. Not until I show you how much you fucking mean to me. How much I…”
Roman studies my face as though trying to commit it to memory in case I kick him out. Strong fingers brush away wet strands of my hair that cling to my cheeks. He licks his lips and swallows thickly, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. An outsider would see an intense man, dark and broody, comprised of refined lines and dangerous edges. But I see the nerves under all that power. The uncertainty. Not in whatever it is he’s about to say, because Roman Reeves is always certain of what he wants to say, good, bad, or indifferent. No, it’s almost as if he’s nervous about how I’ll react to it, and now all the viable possibilities are racing through my mind.
How much I desire you?
How much I missed you?
How much I want to be with you?
“How much you what, Roman?”
I see the moment resolve spreads through him. It sets his jaw and locks his gaze to mine, and for the first time, the color of his eyes doesn’t remind me of polar caps, but of a warm, summer day. And when he speaks, there’s a strength and resolution to his voice that bolsters his words. “How much I fucking love you.”
My breath catches on a gasp, my mouth parted and eyes wide. “You…love me?”
“Yeah,” he says, “I do.”
I have no words. None. Roman Reeves has managed to strike me speechless for possibly the first time in my life. When I don’t move or respond, he steps away to quickly take off the rest of his soaked clothes and grabs a towel off the rack, wraps it low around his hips, then snags another one. He sweeps it over my body in long strokes, the soft terrycloth greedily soaking up the droplets of water from my skin.
When he crouches to dry off my legs, my tongue comes unglued. “But you don’t believe in love. At least, not for yourself.”
A smile teases the corners of his mouth as he continues tending to me. “Never thought it could happen. Hell, I never wanted it to happen.” He stands up and wraps a finger in the towel to gently dry my tears. “But I never had a chance with you, and I think I knew it that first night. You pushed me, challenged me, until I broke all my hard and fast rules and gave in to my desire for you. Then you kept pushing me. In the office, in the club…”
Wrapping the towel under my arms, he tucks in the end and sweeps me up into his arms. I clasp my hands around his neck as he carries me out of the shower and into my bedroom. “I told myself that I was the one in control, but it was always you leading the way. I was helpless to resist you. I couldn’t walk away, even when I knew I should.”
He sets me down in front of my dresser and retrieves a pair of panties and a sleep cami from my top drawer. Removing my towel, he leans down and silently instructs me to step into my panties before sliding them up my legs. Next he helps me into my camisole then turns me around and begins drying my hair.
I close my eyes and revel in his tender affections as my mind reels from everything he’s told me. “That night at your apartment. The things you said to me,” I say. His hands stop, and I think I hear him suck in a breath and hold it. “I felt like you weren’t merely trying to hurt me. It was like you were trying to break me.”
I feel his long stream of expelled breath as he leans his forehead on top of my wet hair. He pulls me back against him, his arms around my waist like steel bands, as though he’s holding on for dear life. “From the moment you walked out my door, and every moment since, I’ve hated myself for what I said to you that night. But I thought—”
He sighs and releases me. I turn to face him, my arms hugging my middle as I watch him struggle with the words. “Roman?”
Dragging a hand over the stubble on his jaw, he says gruffly, “I thought you were hooking up with Austin on the side.”
I close my eyes and take a calming breath before I can look at him again. The volatile cocktail of emotions from the last few months is quickly overtaking the whisky and sex endorphins rushing through my veins. The slight buzz is wearing off, and in its place is the sharpness of the pain Roman caused me, as fresh as the night it happened.
Leveling him with a glare, I finally respond. “You know, I thought that maybe you suspected as much, and I understood why that would’ve upset you. If the roles had been reversed, I would have been spitting mad, too. But you know what I wouldn’t have done in your place?” I ask, my voice rising as my emotions get the better of me. “I wouldn’t have played at entrapment, or attacked your fucking character. I would have confronted you with what I saw or knew, and asked for an explanation. And do you know why?” I don
’t give him the chance to answer. “Because I loved you, too, goddamn it.”
His eyes widen, which only serves to piss me off more. “Don’t look at me like that. Of course I loved you. How you could’ve ever doubted that is beyond me. It’s not like I was the one who treated you like shit. Because here’s a newsflash, Roman, when you love someone they deserve the benefit of the doubt and proper communication. Not assumptions and slander.”
Brushing past him, I leave my bedroom and make my way down the hall toward the door so I can usher him out of my apartment and out of my life. With every step, the hot sting of new tears grows in the back of my eyes. Damn it, keep it together. You can fall apart when he’s gone.
“Keep the towel if you want,” I toss over my shoulder as I turn the corner to the main living area. I hear his heavy footfalls behind me.
“Addison—”
“I’ll have your tux dry cleaned and sent over to you.”
“For Christ’s sake, Addie, it’s seventeen degrees outside.”
Swallowing past the lump in my throat, I just barely manage a hoarse, “That sounds like a you problem.” Then I throw the deadbolt and yank the door open.
Chapter Thirty
Roman
Fucking hell, I’m losing her. I can’t lose her.
I catch up to her just as she starts to pull the door open. Crowding behind her, I reach past her and shove it closed with one hand, then lean into it so she can’t try again. I hear her exhale shudder as she rests her forehead and both palms on the smooth wood. She looks defeated, depressed. That mischievous edge in her smile, the sparks in her aquamarine eyes, they’re all missing. And it’s all my fault.
“I’m sorry,” I say sincerely. I want to pull her into me and wrap myself around her, but that would be selfish. She needs some space right now, so I’ll give it to her. But I don’t give her more than the couple of inches I’m sparing her at the moment. The entire CPD couldn’t drag me farther than this if they tried. “I fucking lost it when I thought you didn’t feel the same for me as I did for you. It hurt like hell, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. All I could think about was everything I’d ever told myself about love, and how I never wanted to end up like my dad—”
She spins around suddenly, effectively cutting me off as she crosses her arms and tips her head back to meet my gaze. “Don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter why. Unless you walked in on me fucking Austin’s brains out, nothing you did was justified. You acted like a spoiled alpha who thought someone else was playing with his toy without permission.”
Fucking ouch. She’s right, and hearing it put like that makes me feel like even more of an asshole as she continues. “How dare you turn everything around on me like that. You actually had the audacity to insinuate that I wanted to try out new and more extreme kinks when I was only doing any of it because of you in the first place!” I mentally wince at her sharp tone and even sharper words, then she appears to run out of steam, and her voice goes quiet. “You never lived up to your nickname more than you did that night. You were truly ruthless…and you wrecked me.”
Icy panic floods my heart, and I grasp her upper arms firmly. “Baby, no. Don’t fucking say that. I fucked up, I know that, and I’ll never be able to tell you how goddamn sorry I am for everything I said. But I’m not giving up on us. You can kick me out into the freezing-ass temps tonight, but I’m done running away from this. I don’t care what it takes to convince you to take me back. I’ll sit outside your door every night. I’ll call, text, email, whatever. I’ll hire a skywriter, take ads out in the Trib and Sun Times, and spell it out in window lights on one of Chance’s high-rises. The entire Greater Chicago Area will know how much I love you, and I won’t quit until you goddamn-well believe it, too.”
She blinks the tears back and shakes her head sadly as she breaks eye contact to stare straight ahead at my naked torso. “Roman, I—” Her quiet gasp cuts off whatever else she was about to say. “What is that?”
I follow her gaze to my left side. I’d forgotten all about my new ink. Wednesday night, after talking with Austin, I showed up at Sirus’s shop. I paid him double to stay afterhours and do this piece, and two hours later I walked out with a fresh addition to the tribal tattoos that now stretch down my rib cage. It hurt like a fucking son of a bitch, but I’d welcomed the pain as a partial penance for my sins against the woman I love.
“It’s you,” I tell her, looking down at the tribal rendition of the head and one paw of a honey badger. The image is pieced together in bold, black curves with sharp edges. And under its jaw, next to the paw with long claws that stretch toward my abs, are her initials—A.P. underlined by an infinity sign. “I wanted it on my ribs because they’re what protect my heart, and my heart, Addie, is and always will be you.” I give my chest a couple of light thumps with my fist. “You’re what’s inside of me. You’re what finally brought me to life, and I swear my heart only beats when you’re with me.”
Her eyes well up with unshed tears, and she brings the fingers of one hand to cover her mouth as she swallows hard. She still has traces of mascara smudges down her cheeks and her long earrings are still in, reminding me that she’d looked exquisite an hour ago, before everything went to shit. I did this to her. I hurt her. I made her cry. I turned her into this tragically stunning disaster standing before me. And now I need to fix her.
Gathering her hands, I trap them against my chest and pray she hears the truth in my words and sees it in the reflection of my soul. “What I did to you was reprehensible. You’re right, my reasons don’t matter. Nothing justifies how I handled things or how I treated you. I’d give anything to go back in time and do the right thing. I’d trust you and talk to you and then take you to bed and show you how much I fucking cherish you.
“But I can’t go back, baby. All I can do is promise that it’ll never happen again.” Giving her a hesitant grin, I offer her some insurance. “And if it does, I’ll personally hand you a dull, rusty blade for your castration enjoyment.”
She narrows those beautiful aqua eyes at me. “You’d be of no use to women after the condition I’d leave you in.”
“Sweetheart, I won’t be of use to any woman but you ever again anyway. So if you’re planning on mutilating me, you might as well cut yourself from my chest while you’re at it. Because I have no use for my heart if I don’t have you in my life.”
Locking her gaze onto mine, she whispers, “You really do love me?”
“More than I ever thought possible.” I cradle her face in my hands. “You’re everything to me, Addie. I don’t know if you’ll be able to put up with me for five years, much less fifty. But if you give me the chance, I’ll do everything in my power to make you happy.” Addison’s face lights up but then dims almost as quickly. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
Her hands wrap around my wrists. “I believe you,” she says with a sad smile. “And I love you, too—so much—but it won’t work between us.”
My heart drops into my stomach like a ton of bricks. “Why the hell not? If you remember, things were working really well between us before I fucked it up. It can be that good again. It’ll be better.”
She’s shaking her head, causing the tears to overflow and stream down her cheeks. I use my thumbs to wipe them away, but as soon as I dry a set, another replaces them. “I thought I could do it. I mean, I did and it was great, but when we started out, everything was just fun for fun’s sake. I never expected to fall for you like I did, and now…”
“Now what, Addison?”
“I don’t want to be in a relationship where I’m not enough. Even though you love me, you’ve told me time and time again that you need to share the woman you’re with. It’s not that I didn’t like it. It’s just not a necessity of yours I can live with. Not anymore.”
The whole world stops. I can’t hear anything. Not the TV behind me, not the traffic outside, not even the sound of my heartbeat. “You don’t want me to share you anymore?”
Her brows
furrow, and she glances away, her beautiful brain working something out before she meets my gaze again. “It’s not that exactly,” she says carefully. “It’s not that I wouldn’t enjoy it on rare occasions. But I don’t want you to need to share me to be happy. I just want you to need me.”
All at once, the world comes alive in a rush of sound and motion. I crush her to me and descend on her, kissing her hard. “Thank Christ, because I don’t want to share you anymore, either.”
Her eyes grow round and her eyebrows hitch up toward her hairline. “You don’t?”
I shake my head. “I had to fight not to give Austin a reason to be fitted for dentures the last couple of times.”
“So this means…”
The hope shining on her face gives me wings and grounds me at the same time. Hope means she wants the same thing I do, but it also means she thought there was a chance that I didn’t. From now on, I only want to see certainty and love on this woman’s face. “It means you’re mine and only mine, wildcat.”
She beams a smile up at me then glances down and traces a fingertip around my new tattoo. “You mean honey badger.”
I give her a sly quirk of my mouth. “You might be a honey badger, but you’ll always be my wildcat.”
“So we’ll have to agree to disagree?”
“Fuck no,” I say, hoisting her up so she wraps her legs around my waist. “I like arguing with you, woman. Feel free to disagree with me at least once daily.”
She sighs dramatically as I carry her into the living room. “You really are the perfect man for me.”