Niall clocked the saltwater pooling in her eyes. ‘Cass?’
‘I’m good.’ A tear rolled down the side of her cheek. ‘Really good, Butler.’
‘Tell me if anything hurts, anywhere,’
‘I will.’
Nothing hurt. Not a single thing. Not with Niall here, fucking her like he loved her, because he did. He’d told her that. And it was there in every measured thrust of his hips, every crease on his face as he fought not to vocalise what this was doing to him. She could see how much he was gone. And she loved him for it. Needed to tell him.
But then he pulled out of her, and she was desperate for him again, ached for him to make up for that void inside her in the way no one but he could. Was he trying to tell hersomething? Remind her how much she needed him? How it would be without him.
As if giving her the answer, Niall thrust himself hard and deep back into Carli, and she reeled. His jaw clenched and he lifted his chin to the bookcase behind them, a man trying to stay in control of all that possessed him.
When he came back to her, he spoke, rough and raw.
‘Tell me now,’ he said commanded, low and loaded.
And Carli understood why he’d cut her off before. Oh, this was so Niall. She should have known he’d want to do it this way. Should have known that nothing but peak feeling was enough for this man. With her free hand, she reached up and held the rough graze of his stubbled face.
‘I love you, Niall Butler,’ she said, not a second of this lost on her either. ‘So, so much.’
And the light, but also relief, in his face at her words. It was beautiful. His way of doing things had been the right way, even if he’d taken a gamble on her saying the words back. His compass was aligned exactly north. To her. He brought his mouth to hers and kissed her deep and desperate with such fervency, filling her fuller than she’d ever been.
‘I love you, too, Cass,’ he said. ‘This is the best sex of my life. I’m burning up for you. Although this slow thing is killing me.’
‘Just fuck me like you love me, Niall. That’s all that matters.’
‘I can’t do anything but.’ He held her knee and pistoned his hips. Never once did he take his gaze from her, and they fixed on each other as he claimed her for his own, showed her exactly what he could do to her body, and ruined her for any other men. Although that had happened years ago.
Other people, mere rooms away, meant only hushedwords were exchanged between them, but the library itself was heaving with emotion. Love and angst and desperate, urgent want spilling into the space for every one of the years, months, minutes they’d spent apart. For all the time they’d spent without each other, longing, wanting, aching for these moments they never thought they would have again.
‘Fuck, Cass,’ Niall groaned low. ‘I love you so much. I’m going to come.’
‘I love you too, Niall. Come for me and I’ll…’ The words had barely fallen from Carli’s lips when her orgasm flew in like a cyclone and everything was the bliss of climaxing with Niall rock hard and detonating inside her. The romance novels were flying off the walls, pages being torn open, all the declarations of ‘I love you’ and ‘I’m coming’ within the chapters congregating in her swollen sex at once as she clamped onto his erection, a silent series of ‘oh my Gods’ hurtling out of her. And the sight of him coming too. The man who loved and fucked with such intensity, who had taken sex and turned it into something so meaningful it made her cry, was coming, roaring silently but with no less fire than she’d have expected from him, lifting Carli right over into another thunderous climax that had her tearing her nails down his back and gripping onto him, the way she planned to do – forever.
Chapter 29
Carli
The Royal Scotsman train pulled slowly out of Edinburgh’s Waverley Station, accompanied by the sound of the bagpipes played by a lone piper on the platform. Carli had been promised a man in a kilt and there he was. About sixty years old and nothing on Niall Butler, but a man in a kilt, nonetheless.
The train was the ultimate in opulence. She perched on a velvet couch in the observation car and gazed up in awe at the craggy rock face in Edinburgh’s Princes Street Gardens, atop of which stood the ancient and otherworldly castle. Soon, they were travelling across the iconic red cantilever framework of the Forth Road Bridge, the Firth of Forth glittering blue below. On they steamed through Fife and Perthshire, passing historic villages, timeless lochs and snow-capped mountains.
Despite the views to die for, Carli couldn’t help but cast her mind back to Kinshore, but funnily enough it was Sean who came to mind. Last night, she and Niall had stayed at Sean’s together and he had returned that evening, exhausted.
Carli had never seen him so quiet as he retrieved a beer from the fridge and took it over to the couch where he sat down and switched on the TV.
Niall had grabbed a can of Irn-Bru from the fridge and sat on the couch next to his brother watching ‘Come Dine with Me’ while she busied herself making a salad to go with dinner.
‘You alright?’ Niall asked.
‘Is this guy serious that he thinks he can win the grand by making pasta and pesto?’ said Sean, as if the TV show was the only matter on his mind. ‘And an Italy football shirt for Italian dress code? Even I could do better than that.’
Carli listened, chopped tomatoes and avocado and smiled as the brothers chatted like old friends, which is what they were, but there was a heaviness about Sean that had to be related to their father’s health.
‘Did you see Dad again?’ Niall asked when the ad break came on.
‘Aye.’
