She wouldn’t dare say it aloud. It was too much, too soon. It was a future that couldn’t be hers, a movie she hadn’t been cast in. But she cautiously slid her hand beneath his grey sweatpants to find him hot and hard.
Maverick hissed, almost as if he were in pain. He opened his eyes to stare at her.
Nina gently slid her hand up and down his length, marvelling at the heat and silky softness over iron. Placing her other hand on his face, she drew him to her and took his mouth. ‘Please, Maverick.’
‘I’ll pull out,’ he promised. When she nodded, he rolled off the bed and removed his sweatpants. ‘It’s been a long time for me too,’ he said. ‘Almost five years.’
‘Five?’
He grinned. ‘I’m not a casual guy.’
His words hung in the air between them for a moment, almost in warning to both of them that they were moving too quickly, but then he was climbing over the bed and kneeling between her legs, and Nina couldn’t focus on anything but him.
She had never been turned on by only looking at a man’s penis before. In fact, she typically felt only fear. Not now though. Maverick was big and thick and impossibly hard – forher. And, right then, she wanted him inside of her like she had never wanted anything else.
He gripped her thighs and hauled her closer. Nina’s laugh died on a sigh as she felt him notch at her entrance, and when he reached down one hand to touch her and quickly caught himself, snatching his hand back, she whispered, ‘Do it.’ And when he still seemed unsure, she insisted, ‘I want you to.’
Gently, as if she were made of glass, he slid a single finger through her wet heat. His breath caught audibly.
Nina didn’t think about the assault or the last time a man had touched her there – without her permission that time. She couldn’t.
All she felt was Maverick.
Everywhere that he touched burned.
He kept his gaze locked on hers as he slid his finger out of her and into his own mouth.
‘Mav,’ she begged, impossibly turned on.
He grinned wickedly, and lowering both hands to her hips, held her in place as he slowly sank into her.
She moaned.
Maverick stopped moving.
He looked down at her, that same slightly stunned expression on his face.
And then everything exploded. They took each other in a frenzy, a mating, hands never resting, legs tangling, breaths sawing through the room, and this time, when Nina gave herself to the wave passing through her, Mav didn’t wait. He gripped her hips, thrusting into her in three quick pumps, and then pulled out, and followed her over the edge.
Chapter 15
The first half of the week passed in a blur as Nina and Maverick settled into a new routine that involved long days at the stables and around the ranch, followed by dinners at the ranch house, and then long, secret nights wrapped in each other’s arms.
After that first night, Nina, not wanting to overstep, had been too self-conscious to go to him, but once the house had settled, Mav had knocked on her door, and when she had opened it for him, he hadn’t said a single word, only swung her over his shoulder, carried her back to his bedroom, and gently thrown her on his bed.
Though they kept each other awake long into the night, now, when Nina slept, she slept deeply, the knowledge that she was safe in Mav’s arms following her into sleep, so that on Wednesday morning, she woke up in her own bed, disoriented. She looked around and frowned once she realized that she was back in her own room. She didn’t even remember leaving Maverick’s bedroom the night before.
She rolled over, yawning as she stretched, and sighed when she saw that it was still dark outside. She reached for her phone on the nightstand, habitually bypassed the missed calls from Alex, and read the single message Markus had sent at midnight the night before.
I wanted to be the first person to wish you happy birthday! Can’t wait to celebrate with you tomorrow! X
Nina replied and then flopped onto her back.
Another year gone, she thought. She knew she wasn’t ‘old’ by any means, but at thirty-four she was starting to feel it. Throughout her twenties, it had seemed like she’d had all the time in the world. Time to work more, time to win an Academy Award, time to get that next big role. But now, with her career on the brink of implosion, it was the strangest thing to realize that she didn’t have much else to show for her thirty-four years. Worse, had she never been assaulted, she might never had realized it. Relationships had never been part of her plan.
She had Markus, and God knew she would always be grateful for him. He had stuck with her through everything. She had Luigi and a few others from the restaurant, but Nina was ashamed to admit that she hadn’t been good about staying in touch with them through the rigours of her work.
It was humbling to realize that she had spent her entire life frantically striving for something to judge her worth by – something, she knew, to prove her mother’s prophecy wrong. It was embarrassing to realize that in that frantic search, she had somehow managed to avoid forming relationships at all.
