Page 38 of Reckless Love

When his shirt is gone, I run my palms along his chiseled chest, marveling at the way his muscles ripple under my touch. Stephen’s physique is stunning, and the want that’s been building inside me is reaching a fever pitch. I don’t just want him; I need him. Like oxygen.

“Ava,” he rasps.

Hearing my name causes a full-body ache to sweep through me, settling in the center of my core. With him, “Ava” is a prayer and a curse.

“I thought I lost you.” My voice cracks. “And I’ve never been so sad. No one had ever broken my heart before.”

“I came back.” He nuzzles my nose.

“Too late. Why did you have to come back too late?” My throat is thick with emotion.

“Too late? Come on, Ava.” His lips are on my jawline, so close to my mouth that I’m almost panting with eagerness. “It’s only too late when we’re both in the ground.”

A surge of recklessness buoys me up, dries my tears, bulldozes any sense of caution. “You’re right.” I grab the back of his head, and I push up onto my toes, finding his mouth with mine. When he angles his head to embrace the kiss, I moan his name.

Why has it only ever been like this with him?

Shocks of desire shoot straight to my core, as though my libido has been dead, and his presence is the defibrillator, bringing it back to life. Not only am I not in the ground, I am So Fucking Alive.

Mid-kiss, Stephen picks me up and tosses me onto the bed, and as I go down, I laugh, but my amusement is short-lived when he follows me into the heavy blankets, hands and teeth and lips everywhere. My skin is so electrified that each caress is almost painful, but I still arch into the contact, desperate for more.

It’s been so long.

It’s been too long.

He slips his hand between my legs, and I spread myself wide, eager for his touch. I cling to his shoulders as he hovers over me, his long, thick fingers playing my most sensitive parts like the chords of a song he memorized.

“So wet for me,” he says, his gaze piercing. “Have you been thinking about what it’d be like for me to be inside you, stretching you, filling you? Do you remember what it was like to have me driving into you, pushing you to the brink?”

“Stephen, yes,” I breathe out, wiggling under his touch. His words inspire visceral memories of exactly those things, and every part of me wants to relive them. So much yes.

“You’re so good at coming for me, baby. I love it. Do you want to?” He locks his gaze with mine, and my vision is hazy with lust.

“Yes. God, yes.”

He slides a finger inside me, then two, and I’m trembling with anticipation.

“More,” I say, because that’s what I’ve always wanted with him. More and more and more.

A third finger, and I’m so close, hovering on the brink. If his thumb so much as flutters over my clit, I’m done.

“Stephen,” I beg.

“You want to come?”

“Yes. Please.”

“Too bad,” he says, and then he’s gone. A mirage vanishing in the desert.

I wake with a scream of frustration, hitting Raul’s pillow with my fist over and over before taking it and stuffing my face in it to scream again. My body aches with unspent desire, lust that has nowhere to go. The edge I was so close to toppling over is distant now, no longer easily within reach.

The door handle rattles, and I remember I locked it before I went to bed. I don’t even know why.

“I heard a scream,” Stephen’s deep voice penetrates the thick bedroom door. “Let me in.”

I breathe deeply into the pillow for another one, two breaths. The urge to throw open the door, let ruination in, rises briefly to the surface. Stephen would take one look at me and know—he always knew. Maybe we could finish what that dream started.

But at what cost?