I turn and push her back up against the front door. She’s still straddling my waist, and I start to thrust my hips up. I’m humping her right against my door, and I wish we were naked so I could be fucking her instead. She’s tender as her fingertips move from my jawline to thrust into my hair, and I’m the opposite of tender as my animal instincts kick in. I push her down off me so she’s standing against my door. I make quick work to yank her jeans and panties off, leave the jersey on, and reach into the shorts I changed into after my post-game shower. I pull my cock out, stroke it a few times, and lift her back up into my arms so she’s leaning against my front door again with her legs straddled around my waist.
I reach down under her leg to position myself, and then I line up with her body and thrust into her.
I still for just a beat, and her eyes open mere inches from mine. A hot, intimate moment passes between us as our bodies still, our eyes still, everything seems to still except for the beating of our hearts.
It’s a connection unlike any I’ve felt before, and when I start to move, that connection only seems to intensify. My mouth slams back to hers, and somehow I’m also perfectly content just fucking her right here up against my front door.
I focus on the feel of her hot cunt as it surrounds my cock, of the slip and slide in and out of her as I pump away. I focus on the feel of her legs as they tighten around me, as her kiss starts to get more frantic, more chaotic, more urgent.
And then her mouth breaks from mine, and she whispers in a plea, “Oh, God, Mav. I’m coming. I’m coming so fucking hard. God, this is what you do to me.” She claws at my back, leaving scratch marks with her red nails over my shirt, and I fucking love it.
Just hearing those sweet words drop from her lips pushes me into my own climax. My release is long and hard as I pump into her, my face buried in her neck while I growl out some curses. And once my body starts to come down from the high, once I start to move back from that sweet edge of pleasure, I carry her over to the couch. I’m still inside her when I lay her down and hover over her. I’m not ready to go again quite yet, but I’m still hard enough that I don’t fall out. I pump in and out of her, enjoying the sensation of extra sensitivity after just coming inside her.
I pull back, and our eyes meet again. Her eyes search mine, those big brown eyes moving back and forth between my blue ones, and I wonder what she’s thinking. I wonder what she’s feeling.
When I see the way her eyes are so pure on mine in this moment, I have to believe she’s in this for far more than just her career.
She feels it, too. Something is growing between us, and it’s not something I’m going to be able to just set aside.
Because I opened myself up to feeling again, and that means I’m opening myself up to heartbreak again, too.
CHAPTER 31: Maverick Jennings
Incoming Call
The sun is already up when I wake, and Everleigh is asleep in my arms.
The last time I felt this content, it was all ripped away, and that’s why I wake with a feeling of dread rather than of contentment like I should feel.
I didn’t find out about Christina’s accident from some phone call. I always thought it would’ve been easier if I had.
No…I found out when I drove by. She drove a black SUV, and when I saw a black SUV upside down in the ditch, my first thought wasn’t that it was hers. In retrospect, I often wondered if I should’ve felt it when she passed. It was immediate. On impact, they said. I should’ve known. Should’ve felt the light shutting off.
I didn’t.
She was coming home from the grocery store. They always say the worst accidents happen close to home. You have that level of comfort that you’re almost there. We were in Ohio, and it was summer. Someone who witnessed the accident said a deer ran in front of her, and she swerved to miss it.
The last thing she saw was a deer in headlights.
The image haunted me every day until the funeral. And then I found out what she’d been doing behind my back, and the image of the deer was replaced with images of her underneath another man.
Those images have haunted me for a decade, and they didn’t really start to fade until my brain started to fixate on red lips and red heels.
I rustle a little as a feeling of uneasiness pulses through me. This woman has thrown me all out of sorts, but the truth is probably that I’ve been out of sorts most of my life. Maybe for the first time, I’m…in sorts. Or whatever the opposite ofout of sortsis.
My phone buzzes on my nightstand with a call, and when I seeMontgomery Memory Careflash on the screen, a shudder runs through me.
That sickening feeling of dread rises up in my throat.
I suddenlyfeelit. I feel the thing Ididn’tfeel when Christina died.
I know what the words are going to be before I even answer the call.
If it were my mother calling me when she was awake, as I asked Susan to have her do, the incoming call wouldn’t sayMontgomery Memory Care. It would sayMom.
“Hello?” I murmur so as not to wake Everleigh, but she starts to stir anyway.
“Hi Maverick. This is Susan from Montgomery Memory Care.”
