Page 132 of Claim

I spun, caught his mouth with mine, hands on his face to pull him impossibly close and groaning into him as he drove me back against my door. He then grabbed my arse, lifted me clean off the floor and pinned me there, devouring my mouth while the door rattled on its hinges, no doubt alerting the building to what we were doing.

Maybe we’d never shed the need to be public.

Fuck. It was desperate. Months of restraint collapsing all at once. He tasted exactly as I remembered. Rough and hot and real. And it took everything in me to shove him back even half a step.

“Let’s get inside first.”

He let me go long enough for me to get the door open.

Then he kicked it shut behind us and didn’t give me even a second before he was on me again.

Not that I wanted one.

I never, ever, wanted his hands to stop touching me. I was addicted to them. To him. His mouth, his weight, the way he took up all the air in the room. I’d picked my poison a long time ago. Chosen it. Swallowed it down, knowing exactly what it would cost. And I wasn’t ever going to stop craving him.

Clothes disappeared. Tugged free. Dropped. Forgotten. He pressed me into walls. I dragged him closer. Always closer. As if there still wasn’t enough of him, even with his body flush to mine, his mouth on mine, his hands everywhere at once.

By the time we reached the bedroom, we were naked, hard, and completely gone in each other. I fell back onto the bed and pulled him down with me. He followed, draping himself over me, mouths meeting again, bodies sliding together as if reacquainting, as if reminding themselves exactly how this felt.

Real.

Here.

Ours.

He lifted onto one arm, resting his forehead against mine, breath hot and uneven, sweat warming his skin as he looked down at me. He traced his fingertips along my side, achingly delicate and deliciously tender, finding the place where the scar bloomed thick and unyielding.

He swallowed.

I could have said something. That it was fine. That it didn’t matter. That it wasn’t his fault. But words were useless. Because he knew. He knew, because he was here. Touching me. And looking at me as if nothing about me was broken. So I lay back and let him touch me, to work through it.

And he did. He smoothed his hand over the raised, twisted skin where the bullet had torn through me, where I’d been stitched back together, eyes never leaving mine. Everything sat there between us—fear, relief, want, love.

Then he kissed me.

And as he did, he drifted his palm back over the scar, down my stomach, along the inside of my thigh, easing my leg back and apart, before cupping my balls, massaging me. I tapped around in the drawer beside my head, found the lube and chucked it nearer to him. Then he closed his hand around my cock, warm and sure, moving slowly as his mouth claimed mine again, tongue unravelling me.

I was gone. Melted into the sheets. Letting him take me apart and put me back together all at once.

“So fucking beautiful when you’re like this,” he whispered, though there was nothing soft in it. Nothing pretty. I didn’t want there to be. Because this was him. Hunger. Possession. A reverence bordering on violence.

I reached for him, biting my fingers into his shoulder as I dragged myself up, desperate for his mouth. But he denied it. He pulled back enough so I couldn’t have it. Not far enough to escape me. But far enough to feel it. The heat of his breath. The almost.

And with that unbearable space between us, with his gaze burning straight through me, he said, “I love you.”

My breath left me.

Those words from him, this hard, unyielding, brutal man, were the most precious thing I had ever been given. More than any inheritance, any comfort, any protection my world had ever offered. They were the most powerful thing I had ever been trusted to hold. I wouldn’t ever crawl away from them. As they’d just rewritten the fucking ground under my feet.

So I grabbed him.

Fisted his hair and hauled him back to me and kissed him. Hard. Staking my claim. Bleeding the same truth back into his mouth.

“I love you too, Richie.”

The sound he made wasn’t pretty. It was wrecked. Torn out of him as if he hadn’t meant to let it exist. He crushed his mouth to mine, hard enough to bruise, as if swallowing the aftermath before it could destroy him.

Then he broke away.