Page 77 of The Scars We Keep
“Moan again,” he says, voice desperate as he unravels.“Do that again, Bella.”
I moan and suck harder, and his whole body shudders as his rhythm becomes urgent and frantic.There’s no more restraint or careful, measured strokes from Lorenzo, just him using my mouth and losing his mind doing it.
“I have thought about this mouth every single day since I fucking married you.”The words come out in fractured ragged breaths as his hips drive forward in a rhythm he has stopped pretending to control.“Every time you sat across from me.Every time you argued with me.Every time I had to sit there and watch your mouth move, thinking about nothing but having it exactly where it is right now.”
A deep groan tears out of him as I hollow my cheeks.“This is all I have thought about.You.Your mouth like this, every fucking day.”
I take him as deep as I can and then swallow around him.It hurts my jaw, but I push through the pain for him.
“Oh fuck, Bella, I’m going to fucking…”
His face when he comes is the most unguarded thing I have ever seen in him.His head drops back, throat exposed to the rain, jaw falling open, and every hard controlled line of him dissolves at once.A deep broken groan tears out of him that starts low and climbs, his hands pulling me in rather than back, and he pulses against my tongue in long rolling waves.His cum is hot as I take everything, swallowing each pulse down.His hands tremble in my hair as I listen to the sounds of him still coming.
Eventually, his hands loosen in my hair as if the sensation is returning to them slowly.His chest heaves as I pull back slowly and free his cock from my mouth.
I meet his eyes.
He looks down at me, rain running down his face, jaw loose, chest still shaking with the effort of breathing.His thumb traces my bottom lip with a strange sort of tenderness.
“Bella,” he says.His hands gently cradle my face as the rain falls between us, and he looks at me like I am the only fixed point in the world.He pulls me to my feet.
“I love you.”
Simple.
Certain.
Immovable.
“I loved you the moment you walked in wearing that black wedding dress and told everyone to fuck off.”His thumb traces my cheekbone, and his eyes never leave mine.“I was done the second I saw you.I have been done every second since.”
“I love you,” I tell him.“I love you, Lorenzo.”
Something in his face breaks open completely.He pulls me against his chest, his arms cross at my back, and his face drops into my wet hair.He holds on with the grip of a man who has found the one thing he refuses to lose.I press my face into his neck and hold on just as hard.
The rain falls softly around us.Neither of us speaks for a long time.
His hand moves slowly through my wet hair, and then he pulls back just enough to look at me, his eyes dropping over my face with that particular focus of his, the one that sees everything.
“Your father and your brother,” he says quietly.“They will never come near you again.I am going to make sure of that.You will never stand in a room and feel trapped by either of them again.Not in my house.Not anywhere.”
His hand cups my jaw.“That‘s a promise, Bella.”
“Lorenzo, I need you to listen to me.”
I press my palm flat against his chest, feeling the steady, thrumming pulse of his heart beneath my hand, a solid rhythm against my skin.
“I need you to be careful.”My voice drops, and something raw moves through it that I can’t stop.“I have lost people I love to this world, and I can’t… if I lost you.”
My throat closes around the words.“If something happened to you, I wouldn’t survive it.Do you understand me?If I lost you the way I lost Ethan, I wouldn’t survive.”
His expression shifts entirely.Both hands come to my face as his eyes search mine, and what moves through them is not the alpha certainty of a moment ago but something deeper, quieter, and more devastating.
“Look at me,” he says softly.
My eyes meet his.
“I am not Ethan.”His thumbs brush my cheeks.“And I’m not going anywhere.I have survived this world for a very long time, and I intend to keep surviving it.”His forehead rests against mine.“You’re not going to lose me.”
