Page 20 of Untamed Heart

Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how you looked at it for the sake of my mental health—each punishing slam of his hips against my ass, each time his cock bottomed out, filling me to absolute perfection, only drove me higher and pushed me closer to a release I could already tell was going to ruin me for a good, long while.

“Oh god,” I keened, arching my back and driving myself back into Roe to take him deeper and harder. “Oh, fuck. I’m so close.Roe!”

“Fuck yes,” he grunted behind me, one hand squeezing my waist in a bruising grip as he slid the other one up my spine, one vertebra at a time, before tangling my hair into a fist.

That was when I realized my second mistake. “Don’t—” I started, but I didn’t get the words out fast enough.

Roe’s entire body locked tight, his cock mid-way inside me, but I could feel the ice suddenly coming off of him, and I knew why without having to turn around.

Given its placement, it was easy to forget the rose I had inked on the nape of my neck a few years ago... or more specifically, the older ink that it covered up.

Any hopes I might have had that Roe had forgotten the six words that had been tattooed underneath went up in a puff of smoke at the velvet-wrapped gravel in his voice as he growled, “The fuck?”

I chanced a look back over my shoulder and the pain slashed across his face stabbed into my chest like a white-hot blade through butter. “Roe, I?—”

I wasn’t sure what I planned to say, not that any excuse I had would have made the situation any better. But then he his expression changed, and the betrayal that hardened his features even further filled me with an irrational anger. What right didhehave to feel betrayed byme?

Before I could throw that in his face, however, he moved. Roe’s fingers released my hair and wrapped around the nape of my neck, using the hold to jerk me onto my knees so fast a startled yelp burst past my lips before morphing into a moan as he sank impossibly deeper inside me.

If I thought what he’d been doing before was hard, it was nothing compared to how he fucked me after finding that I’d covered the matching tattoo we’d gotten together years ago.

It’s you.

It’s me.

It’s us.

Those words no longer existed on my skin, and it felt as though Roe was trying to re-brand himself into me, but with his cock this time instead of a needle.

“Oh, fuck. Roe! It’s too much,” I whimpered, feeling him so deep, so hard, my teeth clacked together with each slam of his hips.

“Think you can get rid of me that easy? Just erase me after everything we had?” he hissed in my ear as his hand came around to take hold of my throat, keeping me pinned against him, his chest pressed hard into my back as he continued to fuck me with the kind of stamina that no real man should be capable of.

A thin sheen of sweat broke out across my skin as the pressure in my core grew so intense it actually scared me. “Roe, please. I can’t take it.”

“Oh, you can,” he gritted angrily. “You can and you fuckin’ will. You’re gonna come all over my cock whenever I say, and when you do, it’s gonna be so goddamn hard you’ll never be able to work me out of your system. You understand me?”

Starbursts formed behind my eyelids as I slammed them closed, every muscle and tendon in my body locking up tight in preparation for what was about to happen. The pressure in my core reached a level I’d never experienced before. I was already teetering on the edge of a steep cliff, and when Roe’s hand moved from my hip down between my legs where we were connected, his index and middle finger pressing hard and circling my clit, what happened next was out of this fucking world. It felt like every atom in my body shrank in on themselves before exploding outward. My mouth dropped open on a silent scream as all of my nerve endings sizzled and sparked as if I’d touched a live wire.

The tremors that wracked my body as my release continued, stretching longer as Roe continued moving inside me, were so strong even the muscle in my jaw froze up, clamping my molars together. The walls of my pussy continued to flutter as Roe buried himself to the hilt and shoved his face into my neck, coming on a primal sound that sent me over the edge again, this time straight into the abyss.

We collapsed onto the bed, neither of us able to hold our bodies up for another second. As the high of the world’s greatest orgasm started to wane, a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature washed over me. A quiet voice in the back of my mind told me not to move. The damn thing practically begged me to stay right where I was, wrapped in one of Roe’s strong arms as he spooned me from behind, his heaving breathswisping across my shoulder and stirring my hair. But I knew what waited for me at the end of that road, and it was the kind of heartbreak I barely survived the first time around. There was no way I would make it through that a second time.

Sliding out from under his arm, I scooted to the edge of the bed and threw my legs over, giving myself a second for my knees to steady before I dared to attempt to stand. Once I knew it was safe, I shot up, snatching my panties and T-shirt off the floor and making quick work of throwing them on and covering the most vulnerable parts of me before going for the rest.

I felt Roe moving around the room as I did, and from the corner of my eye I caught sight of him pulling off the spent condom, knotting it, and tossing it into the small wastebasket next to the bedside table. The silence that filled the room as we quietly dressed was downright suffocating, but I couldn’t bring myself to break it first. Or look him in the eye as regret washed over me. I’d been such an idiot. What was I thinking, letting my guard down enough to allow...thatto happen.

“Dakota—”

I had a gut feeling I wasn’t going to be able to handle what he said next, so I cut him off, spinning his direction and focusing on a spot on his shoulder because I was too much of a coward to meet his eyes. “It’s getting late. You should probably go.”

As far as brush-offs went, that one was as pathetic as it was cliched. But it was all I had at the moment. I was no longer naked, but that didn’t mean I didn’t feel raw and exposed after what happened. And I wasn’t in the headspace to handle any of it.

I scurried past him as he yanked his shirt into place and pulled the door open, sucking in a deep breath of warm, fresh air that I hoped would help clear the hazy mess that Roe had created. “Thanks for all... that.” I waved my hand toward the mess that was my bed—the comforter had slid onto the floor atsome point, and we’d been so vigorous that the fitted sheet had popped right off one corner of the mattress. “But I’m tired, and I’d like to get some sleep.”

That was bullshit, of course. I already knew I wasn’t going to find sleep for a good long while. Not with the mess my head was currently in.

My gaze was pinned to the floor as Roe’s boots came into view. I was so focused on avoiding his face that he startled a jump out of me when his hand came up to cup my throat a lot like he had when he was fucking me only minutes earlier. Pressing his thumb beneath my chin, he forced my face upward until I had no choice but to meet him eye to eye.