“Come for me, Pip,” he demanded, his hand slipping between us to press his thumb against my clit.
That was all it took. Pleasure detonated, white-hot and all-consuming, ripping through me in violent, endless waves. My back arched off the counter, a scream tearing from my throat that was pure release. I clenched around him, milking him, my vision blurring at the edges.
The feel of me pulsing around him broke him. With a raw, shattered shout of my name, he drove into me one last, deep time and came, his hips stuttering, his whole body shuddering against mine. I felt the hot rush of him inside me, and a second, smaller ripple of pleasure echoed through my spent body.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of our heaving breaths and the rain. He stayed buried inside me, his weight slumped over me, his face buried in the crook of my neck. His lips moved against my damp skin.
He finally, carefully, pulled out, helping me sit up. My body felt boneless, used, gloriously sore in entirely new ways.
He grabbed a clean dish towel from a drawer, running it under warm water at the sink before gently cleaning between my legs. The domestic intimacy of the act, after the raw passion, made my heart squeeze.
“Can you walk?” he asked softly, his eyes scanning my face.
“Yes,” I answered, and I needed him to know I might feel pain, but I was alive, and tonight was the first time he had treated me like I was since it happened.
He helped me off the counter, my legs wobbling. He quickly pulled his jeans back up, then gathered my clothes. Instead of handing them to me, he simply swept me into his arms, cradling me against his chest.
“Cade—” I started.
“Hush,” he murmured, carrying me out of the kitchen, through the dark living room, and up three flights of stairs.
I could have walked them, and he knew that. But all I felt was that, for a minute, we had been us again. Not all the way back yet, but close enough to breathe.
He shouldered the door open and laid me gently in the center of his bed. The familiar scent of his cologne and soap, and now me too, was intoxicating. He disappeared into the connected bathroom for a moment, returning with a glass of water and two painkillers from the bottle at the sink.
“Take these,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed.
I did, swallowing them obediently. He took the glass back, set it on the nightstand, and then just looked at me in the dim light filtering in from the bathroom. He reached out, his fingers tracing the line of my jaw, my collarbone, over a bruise on my wrist.
“I wasn’t gentle,” he said, a shadow crossing his face.
“I didn’t want gentle,” I answered honestly. “I wanted you. All of you.”
He nodded slowly, then stood to strip off his pants. I watched him from the center of the bed, propped up on my elbows, the comforter a soft pool around my hips. The ache in my side was a distant, manageable throb, utterly drowned out by the liquid heat still pulsing between my legs and by the sheer, awe-struck focus of watching Cade strip.
He’d set me down with such care, like I was made of spun glass, but now there was a different kind of intent in his movements. He stood at the foot of the bed, backlit by the faint ensuite light, and his fingers went to his boxers. The simple cotton boxer briefs, already strained and damp in places, fell to the floor.
The sight of him, that thick, hard length springing free, already slick from being inside me, made my mouth go dry all over again. He wasn’t soft. Not even close. He was still fully, brutally erect.
But it was his torso that held me spellbound. He pulled his shirt off over his head in one fluid motion, and the breath caught in my throat.
Hockey had carved him from stone and sinew. Broad shoulders tapered down to a defined waist, every muscle cut with the functional strength of an athlete instead of the polished vanity of a man who worked out just to be looked at. His chest, his stomach, the deep lines of his hips, the dark trail of hair leading down to the base of him—it all held me spellbound. Old scars, white and silvery, mapped his skin. A slash across a rib. A puck-sized dent on a hip. The familiar, knotted terrain of his back. He was a landscape of violence and strength, and in this moment, he was all mine.
He saw me looking. His eyes, dark and predatory in the low light, locked on mine as he kicked his jeans the rest of the way off. He was completely naked now, utterly unselfconscious, a primal display that sent a fresh wave of wetness between my thighs.
“See something you like, Pip?” His voice was a low rasp, a thread of dark amusement in it.
I couldn’t speak. I just nodded, my gaze drinking him in.
He moved then, not with the frantic haste of the kitchen, but with a deliberate, predatory grace. He crawled onto the footof the bed, his movements making the mattress dip. He came up over me, not touching yet, just looming, his heat radiating against my skin. He braced himself on his hands, caging me in, his eyes tracing a path from my face, down my throat, over my bruised breasts, my stomach, to the junction of my thighs.
“I told you,” he said, the words dropping like stones into the quiet room. “I told you I wouldn’t stop.”
A shiver, delicious and fearful, raced down my spine. This wasn’t the Cade who helped me the last four days. This was the Cade from the kitchen confession, unleashed. The one obsessed. The one who’d been holding back a tsunami.
This was my Cade.
My Cross Check.
