Author: Nicolette Day

He peered down at her, shaking with misery and restraint. “Not a fucking chance. I just don’t have any condoms.”

She gaped at him. “You didn’t bring condoms to a wedding?”

“I wasn’t planning to get laid.”

“I’m on the pill. Can…I trust you?”

“Yes.” He closed his hand over hers. “In this, you can trust me. But, Lil…I can’t promise anything more.”

She blinked back the moisture in her eyes. She could trust him with her body, but not her heart. Whatever. Fine. She didn’t want to hear it. She just wanted him. Now. Even if it meant losing him afterward. She’d deal with the shame of humiliation later. Right now, she didn’t want to feel that. She wanted to drown all the future bad with everything good he was offering her now.

“Nate. Stop talking and just fuck me.”

Heat flashed in his gaze and he plunged inside with one hard thrust. He pulled out and slammed home again. Then buried his face in her neck and groaned as he kissed her there and grazed her shoulder with his teeth. Out and home. Out and home.

In this position, she still couldn’t get the friction she wanted. Needed. Every time he thrust into her she inched farther away from him on the slick countertop. She whimpered, scooted forward, and ground against the base of his erection.

“Hold on to me,” he ordered, sensing her frustration, and slipped his hands under her bottom to pull her off the counter.

She locked her legs behind his hips and he spun them around. Her back slammed against the closed door. She moaned at the way he filled and stretched her from this angle. Perfect. The door rattled under the force of his unrelenting thrusts. The sounds of skin slapping against skin and their mingled grunts and moans filled the tiny space, driving her even higher and hotter than she thought possible.

She caught their reflection in the bathroom mirror and her stomach tightened at the erotic image—Nate pinning her against the door, his muscles flexing, straining, powering her toward release. The intense pressure built between her legs with every sensual thrust of his hips, until it came crashing over her in an instant. Her breath caught in her throat and stars winked across her vision. She opened her mouth on a silent cry as her thighs trembled around him. He pressed his forehead against hers and his pace increased until she was bouncing on his cock.

“That’s it, baby. You’re going to come for me. You’re going to come for me so hard that every time you close your eyes you’re going to see this. See me giving you the fucking ride of your life.”

“Oh, God. Nate!”

He crushed his mouth against hers, smothering her scream as he pounded, drawing out the aftershocks of her orgasm as he sped toward his own. He groaned, and a second later she felt his muscles tense under her fingertips. Then the force of his release exploded and throbbed inside her.

When she finally caught her breath and opened her eyes, he was still holding her up against the door. Breathing hard, he reached up and swept the damp hair away from her face, then rubbed his thumb over her bottom lip. The tenderness in his eyes killed her. He shouldn’t be looking at her like that. That’s not how a man looked at a woman he was just using for sex.

She blinked and looked away. “I probably need that shower now,” she murmured. “You don’t have to stay.”

He watched her for a few seconds in tense silence, then turned and carried her over to the shower. Without a word, he set her on her feet under the spray, then stepped in to join her.

“Nate…what are you doing?”

“Right now?”

“Yes?”

He kissed her once, slowly worshiping her mouth with his lips and tongue, then dropped to his knees. He kissed the spot just below her belly button, and gripped her calves. He peered up at her with renewed desire in his eyes. “I’m tasting every fucking inch of you.”

Chapter Ten

Nate knelt down in the dew-covered grass of the cemetery where his parents were buried. Muted light poured over the two headstones in front of him, and his heart throbbed in pain. He fisted the dog tags around his neck and swallowed a belly full of guilt as he stared at his mother’s name. There was so much he needed to say to his parents, but all of it just sounded like bullshit when he played it out in his head. No words were ever going to be enough.

It had taken him ten years to get here. Ten fucking years, and he’d only ended up at her gravesite on a whim, after he’d stumbled out of his hotel room before the sun had even broken over the horizon. He hadn’t slept at all, for fear that Lilly would witness one of his hellish nightmares. The last thing he needed was her seeing firsthand exactly how fucked up he really was. So, when the glowing numbers on the alarm clock had flashed five thirty, he’d climbed out of bed, not realizing his early-morning walk would land him in the one place he was nowhere prepared to visit.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered to his father’s headstone. “I’m sorry I let you down.”

He tightened his jaw and pulled a weed that was growing next to his mother’s headstone. “Damn it. I should have brought you flowers, Ma.” He tossed the weed away and grabbed the back of his neck. “I’m sorry. You’d think that after ten years I’d start getting some of this shit right.”

She’d told him once that sometimes you had to lose your way to find the right path. Of course, she’d also told him he was just like his father. At one time he’d believed that. He’d believed it enough to give up civilian life to chase after his father’s dream. Or his ghost. Nate still wasn’t sure which had driven him to enlist the first time around.

Either way, she was wrong. He was nowhere near the man his father had been. His father had been a hero. Colonel Bradford Jennings had never run from a fight in his life. He’d met it head-on. It’s how he had died, defending his men, fighting for what was right until the last ounce of life drained from his veins.

And now here Nate was, ten long years after their deaths. Still running. From Lilly. From the storm of emotions she was stirring up in him.

He swallowed another rush of self-recrimination. He should not have given in to her. To the overwhelming temptation to touch her. To be with her. To pretend, for just a few precious moments, that he could be a normal man and live a normal life with the woman he was falling for.

He’d known what would happen if he let himself give in. He’d known it would be hell leaving her behind.

He had been very careful the past two years. Careful not to become attached to anyone or anything he couldn’t in good conscience leave behind when the time came. Because he’d known all along that day was coming.

Soon.

Too soon.

He blew out a breath and stood. How the fuck was he going to walk away from her now?

Because he still had to. What was he supposed to do? Ask her to wait for a man who might very well come back in a pine box the way his father had? No way. Fuck that. He couldn’t do to someone what had been done to his mother.

He turned at the sound of footsteps, and saw Lilly approaching him as one might approach a wounded animal. Her gaze bounced between the two headstones before finally settling on him.

She wrapped her arms around her middle and a breeze whipped the stray hairs that had escaped her ponytail into her face. “Nate?”

“What are you doing here?” His voice sounded broken, even to himself. He hated it. He hated her seeing him like this.

“I thought you were leaving me there,” she admitted. “So I followed you.”

She could have slapped him and it would have hurt less. She’d thought he’d abandoned her in a dumpy motel in a strange city—after they’d slept together?

He would never do that. He wanted to be pissed at her for even thinking it, for seeing him as that kind of guy, but he couldn’t. Not when he’d never shown her anything else. In that moment, he wanted to show her something different. He wanted her to see a man she didn’t regret sleeping with the night before. He wanted her to see someone other than the asshole who had done nothing but hurt her over the past year.

“I wouldn’t leave you,” he said. “Not like that.”

Lilly nodded, her eyes searching his face, looking for things he didn’t want her to find. She stepped up beside him and inspected the headstones. “Who are they?”

“My parents,” he said.

Lilly dropped to her knees and pulled a few weeds that had grown around the graves. At seeing her tending to them, no questions asked, something he’d never felt before flooded his chest. Something warm and sweet and painful, all at once. He sank down beside her to help, and they worked together in peaceful silence until every last weed had been removed. Afterward, she walked across the street and came back with two bunches of wildflowers, and placed one at each headstone.

“Thank you,” he managed to get past the giant lump in his throat. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“My brother and I take turns,” she said, quietly. “Taking care of Mom’s.”

Nate watched her try to hide the pain etched on her face. She wasn’t pushing him like she normally did. Instead, she was giving something of herself, from a place that brought back a pain all her own. And she was doing it for him.

She was too good for him. She belonged with someone who could take that pain away, not add to it.

“How long has it been since you’ve visited them?” she asked.

“Ten years.”

She glanced up at him. “Why so long?”

Spouting some lame-ass excuse was something he couldn’t stomach right now, so he just said, “History.”

“What kind?”

“The kind that reminds me what a bastard I am that I couldn’t be bothered to stick around when my own mother was taking her last breath.”

Lilly picked a blade of grass between them. “Be glad you weren’t there to see it. You get to remember her in a way she would have wanted. Alive. Healthy. Free.”

He slipped his hand over hers, lacing their fingers, and surprise lit her eyes.

“Is that how you remember your mom?” he asked.

A sheen of moisture glistened in Lilly’s eyes, but she quickly blinked it away. “No. My mom didn’t care how anyone remembered her after she was gone. Inside, where it mattered…she’d been gone for a long time before I ever found her in that tub.”

Jesus. She’d been the one to find her mother like that? What kind of a monster set her kid up for a nightmare like that? A sick feeling swirled in Nate’s gut just envisioning Lilly having to deal with such a horrific thing. Small and afraid. Devastated by loss. Terrified for her future.

He wanted to hurt someone for her making her go through that.

She tugged on his hand, and he realized he was squeezing hers too hard. He loosened his grip, but refused to let her free. “What about your dad?” he asked.

She laughed, a lifetime of bitterness carried in the sound. “What about him? I’ve never really known him. I know he owns a big company. Mom used to be his secretary, and was screwing him behind his wife’s back. After she got pregnant with twins, I guess the affair lost its appeal. He paid her off to keep us a secret. She tried to find another man to replace him, but it never worked out. He was the only man she ever really wanted, but he didn’t want her back. In the end, Sawyer and I…we just weren’t enough for her.”

Nate gritted his teeth, fighting the urge to wrap her in his arms, so they could both forget how fucked up their lives had been. “Who took care of you and your brother? You said you were fifteen when she died.”

She shrugged. “We took care of each other.”

And there, in a nutshell, was the difference between them. Lilly wasn’t someone who ran. She was someone who stuck around. She was loyal and good and strong. And she was the most beautiful fucking creature he’d ever laid eyes on.