"I'm clean," he murmured into my mouth. "I can show you the papers, but I'm promising you right now, I'm clean. I got tested the minute I heard you were coming home."
I laughed against his lips. “You just assumed you'd be fucking me? Oh my God, you are so fucking cocky."
He pressed his forehead against mine so that the blue of his eyes was the color of the entire world. "You got that right, babe."
"Jesus, Jax. Just fuck me. Now."
He pressed my thighs open with his hands, positioning me underneath him. I lifted my head and watched where we came together. He was so long, so impossibly hard. My arms gave out as he buried himself inside of me and he caught me up, threading his arms around me so I was cradled against them.
And then he just… stayed there.
"Jax?" I wiggled, wrapped my legs around him and tried to draw him upward, but it was like tugging at a rock.
"You wanted it wild, Bit?"
"Yes!" I panted.
"I'm gonna give it to you wild, greedy girl. But this?" He snaked a hand up my chest to cup my cheek. "This is for me."
He held my gaze for a moment. …doesn't have to mean… I couldn't finish the thought. Not when he was looking at me that way, like I was the only thing he wanted was to see me there, connected to him this way. And when he had had his fill, he began to move.
It was slow, at first. He slid his hands under my hips and lifted me so that nothing could distract from the wet slide of him. Out and in, the only sound our ragged, gasping breaths. He pulled almost all the way out again and looked down at me.
"Yes," he whispered.
And then I got what I wanted.
The wild, pounding urgency exploded from his hips. He gripped me so tightly I squeaked from the pain. He was fast, and urgent, his speech devolving into desperate, delicious growls. I wrapped my hand around his back and he fell forward, rolling his hips with each thrust, faster and faster now.
"You feel so good," he gasped against my breast. "I'm can't… I'm not going to last long. Come for me, Lil. I want to feel you all around me." He reached between my legs and pressed his thumb to my clit, timing his strokes with the rhythm of his hips. "Now, baby. Get there…"
Chapter Twenty-Two
Jax
Heaven is my Lily falling to pieces underneath me.
The relief that flooded my body was almost as intense as the pleasure. She had heard me. She said my words back to me and I knew, I knew I was forgiven.
"You are so fucking cocky." "You got it right, babe." Those were the words that we said that morning she found me sprawled between two blondes much too old for me, drunk off my ass on whiskey and my own narcissism. Those words echoed in my head for so long that I had to write them down in the song I wrote for her.
I was waiting for her to say something, anything about what it meant to her, how she felt about the song. It wasn't like Lily to beat around the bush like this. But when she teased me with them, I knew she had finally heard me. She heard my sung apology and now things were the way they should be with us…
With her wide-open eyes fixed on my face as I watched her shatter beneath me.
I saw everything. There was no way I wasn't going to remember this for-fucking-ever. The way her eyes went wide at the last minute before she suddenly squeezed them shut, like it was all too much for her to take. I wished I could go deeper, somehow. I wanted to give her more, more than I had to give, but she fucking deserved everything I had and then some. So I pressed her, harder, higher, to the very limits of my endurance and my reward was her tiny body clinging to mine and her perfect lips gasping my name over and over again. I felt my own orgasm barrel down on me, white-hot and searing, but I didn't want it to end. I kept moving like a man possessed.
I was.
A ringing silence filled my ears as I slowly came to my senses. Lily was staring at me wide-eyed. Her perfect body was slick and shining. I bent my lips to her neck and tasted the salt on her skin. "You good?" I asked. I needed to know.
She squeezed my back with her ragged, bitten nails. "I'm good," she said into my neck. Then she twitched a little. I pulled back to see that she was laughing.
"Something funny about this, Bit?" I growled teasingly.
"I'm not…" She wiped her eyes. "I'm okay."
"You sound a bit unhinged."
"I am a bit unhinged. I just fucked my stepbrother on a folding table. I think that qualifies."
An icy tension gripped my heart. "Not yet," I grumbled. Separating from her was the hardest thing I had ever done. I was afraid of what would happen once I wasn't touching her any more. "We have…"
"Nine more days," she said. Was that sadness in her voice? I couldn't tell.
"Still technically ten," I corrected her, checking the clock on the wall.
"Yeah, but tomorrow…"
"So let's not let it be tomorrow yet.
"How the hell does that work?"
I pulled on my jeans and turned to the shelf by the mirrors and grabbed a tissue. She accepted it with a grateful look and dabbed at her thigh. "You get yourself cleaned up and come out with me."
She snapped her head up. "Out with you?" Her eyes nearly bugged out of her head.
"Yeah, Bit," I said casually. I knew what she was thinking. In the time we were together, we were always sneaking around. We were always careful never to be seen as a couple. But now, after this? I needed it. I needed to take her around, introduce her as mine. It was stupid and reckless and would probably backfire horribly, but I was pretty used to that drill by now. "There's an after party. Come with me. Be my date."
I always loved how uncomplicated Lily was. She couldn't lie for shit—every thought she had was a wide open book you could read from her face. It was something that made her unique in my world and why I had always treasured her reactions. But right now, I could have done with her being a little less transparent.
Her mouth opened and closed, and then she shook herself minutely, from the tips of her bare toes all the way to her shoulders. Flickers of worry, dread, and something I couldn't quite identify passed across her features. And then it just suddenly… shut down.
"Okay, sure!" she said brightly, but it was false. All wrong.
"Great." I smiled, but it felt like a mask I was putting on. What the hell just happened? One moment she was looking at me with all the trust in the world, and then next minute, she closed off entirely. I clenched my fists and for the first time since I spotted her in the audience, I turned away from her.
Had I read her wrong? Maybe she was worried about being seen with me, about our new familial connection. But that wasn't it. I could tell. She hadn't balked when I asked her to come out with me. She freaked when I asked her to be my date.
Was she ashamed of being with me?
The ice in my veins was suddenly replaced with white-hot rage. It would be one thing if this was still a year ago and I was still a stupid, cocky kid relying on nepotism to pave my way, but she had just seen me on stage tonight. I was making something of my own, separate from all of my mom's bullshit. I was my own fucking man now, a musician in my own right and she had witnessed that firsthand.
And as for the stepsiblings thing, who gives a fuck? We weren't related, not by blood any way, and we were grown fucking adults. Our parents marrying each other didn't mean a thing, if you thought about it. Which I had. Obsessively.
So what was her deal?