CHERISH (50 page)

I could get used to this, being treated like a lady.

The little primitive flutter between my legs is now officially creating a problem for me. You see, I made a solemn vow seven years, four months and six days ago that I would never—NEVER—fall for a guy again.

Only, it seems my seven years of good luck is running out because this mountain of scarred, brooding man-meat is making me feel things I’d promised never to feel again.

“I should check on your dad.”

Beckett is still standing right behind me. The touch of his hands on my shoulders to take my jacket has sent a sky full of migrating Monarch butterflies down my spine.

He’s not speaking, but he’s saying a lot . . . and I’m listening. His fingertips wrap under the hair that has fallen out of my loose bun and pull it over. The left side of my neck is suddenly cooler, exposed, and I can feel the warmth of his breath on my ear.

“Your dad . . .” I manage to squeak out, but I’m not even sure what it is I want to do with his dad right now.

Seven years . . . four months . . . how many days?

“Promise, you are beautiful.”

That is the last thing I remember before my world spun like a hurricane, and I felt something I’ve never felt before.

His lips touched as light as a feather at the base of my neck, but I felt it in every cell in my body. He’s holding them there, and I want to claw at him.

I must have been crazy. I am crazy. Why wouldn’t I want this? This is by far the best feeling ever. I want more.

STOP.

No, don’t stop. It’s just a kiss. I can stop it later, whenever I want.

STOP.

I can’t keep my eyes open. His lips are decisive, the softness turning to pressure. His lips are sure, but I’m not.

“Is this okay?” He whispers in my ear, his voice deep and hard and yet the softest thing I’ve ever heard.

Now I feel his tongue. It’s light, warm and I’m spinning in that hurricane. There is screaming wind inside my head. The demons are scratching at my eyeballs and bellowing with laughter. They are sure, once again, I will end up as someone’s perverse joke, but I don’t care.

This is different.

He is different.

Is he? You don’t even know him.

I let my head fall back against that field of muscle that is his chest, and his hand moves up to wrap under the curtain of my hair and steady me. His fingers wrap completely around, and I realize he could kill me so easily. One twist of his massive hand and I would be a lump at his feet.

“I won’t hurt you, Promise.” It comes out of him like a commandment.

He’s reading my mind because I needed him to tell me that. Right now. And he did.

How did he know?

Beckett

There cannot be any other place like this.

I would live here, in this second, for the rest of my life and not have one fucking regret.

She tastes like the fury of winter and the lust of spring.

The fact that she is allowing my lips on her skin is, in fact, the most beautiful moment of my life.

A kiss, after all, is not just a kiss.

Her skin calls to me. I can see in my mind the way I want to leave my mark on her.

What is that? This dire urge to wrap every part of me around her and absorb her into me.

I’ve fucked a lot of girls, women. . . . Well, both.

Did I really ever believe that there was one person that would feel like this? One person that could corrupt all the ones that came before and create in me a place I’d not yet discovered?

This, what I’m doing right now, is new. All the kisses that came before must have been called something else because they are melted snowflakes on a hot sidewalk. Gone, evaporated, non-existent.

Her head is leaning back, and it seems every move and every sound she makes is redefining that word, “beautiful.”

I pause my lips in the spot under her jaw because I can feel the blood moving in her veins. The little pump is fast, and I want it to be because of me.

Or, is it fear? Because I could understand if it was.

I’m overwhelmed with this sense of possession as I feel her heart pumping each thump onto my lips. I want her in a way that I didn’t know wanting knew.

Awakened, an instinct. The way a parent feels for their own.

There is a shudder that raises somewhere from low in her and finds its way to my lips.

In an instant, I’ve got her spun against the counter. Her eyes are slits almost as if she doesn’t want to look but can’t trust to close them completely.

For the first time in my life, I’m fighting an inner battle. I want her more than my heart wants its next beat, but I’m not sure it’s the right thing for her.

My dick is about to stage a coup, but her wide eyes are more deer-in-the-headlights than I’m-ready-lets-do-this.

Her lips are mine in the next second, and before I seal mine to hers, I hear the gasp.

My tongue brushes the softness of her lips. I’m not pressing, I’m asking, and even the split second it takes for her to kiss me back feels like every year of my life in slow motion.

Holy hellfire, this is not a kiss. This is a play, our kiss Act I of the rest of my life.

Her tongue doesn’t seek but mine does, and it is the sweetest of brilliant moments when I realize I’m inside her mouth. She’s letting me kiss her again, like this, and a light comes to me from behind her eyes. I make a silent promise to never ever hurt her—to never make her feel less than the magical creature she is.

The strange desire to grip her throat and control her breath overcomes my more rational thoughts, but I pull back. The fast pace of our breath becomes warm between us, and I realize my fingertips are still gripping around the back of her neck, harder than intended.

“Sorry . . .” I loosen my fingers and close my eyes, trying to find my control.

Promise is shaking, and I realize I’m covering her with my body, bending her back over the edge of the countertop. I pull her up and into me as I rest my forehead atop the part of her ivory hair, taking in a deep breath of her.

“It’s okay.” She sounds nervous, her words automatic like she doesn’t know what else to say.

“No, it’s not okay. You said you didn’t want to kiss me again. I guess I’m not a very good listener.”

A musical breath of muffled laughter comes from under me, and I want to hear that sound for the rest of my life.

My hands are on her cheeks, brushing the heat with my thumbs, steeling my eyes to hers. There’s an unusual lightness in my head, a jerking and stabbing near my heart, and my breath won’t sink far enough into my lungs to satisfy my need for oxygen.

“I
want
you to kiss me.” It’s a whisper, but it’s the loudest whisper I’ve ever heard.

She doesn’t look away, those swimming-pool blue eyes as steady on me as mine were on hers.

“What else do you want? What is most important to you?” I ask.

Fuck, you idiot! Just kiss her.

No, I don’t want to just kiss her. I need it all.

She becomes stiff as a board under my fingers, but I need the answer.

“To not be afraid.”

A silent thunderclap deafens me. My sixth sense that knows the truth when I hear it just sent the needle into the red.

And I want to give you that. I’ve always wanted to give you that, even when I didn’t know what it was I wanted.

Her lips aren’t just soft. They don’t just taste good. They are uncharted territory in some pleasure center in my brain. She drifts into me when I bring my mouth down. I leave my lips hard and unmoving on hers for a long moment.

I feel the tension drain out of her, and something else comes in its place—a lightness that is somehow pulling in my gut, like a long dormant sickness beginning to rise and rule over everything that came before.

Her fingers are digging into my shoulders.

She’s not trying to pull me closer; she’s trying to hang on. There is a desperate child inside her, and I’m only beginning to realize what it feels like to be responsible for someone again.

I taste her, her tongue moving with mine now as gasped, tiny breaths come out of her, my hands covering her cheeks, willing her to stay right here, to decide I’m the one she’s needed.

I need more. My arms are around her waist, lifting her in one, smooth motion to sit on the counter in front of me. An explosion of some crazy desire heats my skin as her knees open, and I center my body between them, our kiss turning our heads one way, and then the other, then back, and I draw her lip into my mouth, holding it there, so she knows I have her.

A drawn out moan escapes her lips and I almost freaking lose it.

I made her do that. She moaned for me.
It’s going to be one of the first of millions of the best moments of my life with her.

I hope. But how can it?

I’ve got her caged and the rampant blood flow down into my dick is making my damn eyes water. I don’t remember ever having this kind of hard-on for someone before. And, it’s not just the relief I want, it’s something new.

Something so much more encompassing.

Her hands are on my hair, eyes studying my face, and I want to give her all of me.

“Do you want to know?” I ask because she is clearly staring at my scars.

I’ve lived by a lot of rules.

They keep as much order in my life as possible. And, one standing order has been to never tell any woman or girl what happened to my face. My SEAL brother’s know. Louis of course knows.

Dad.

No one else. I don’t share that shit. I lock it up and seal it in a cinder block room with deadbolts and razor wire. I don’t go there, especially not with a chick.

But, Promise is not a chick. What she is, I’m not sure, but she’s not even close to anything I’ve had before.

I’ve heard dudes talk about owning a woman. That shit always sounded like a load of elephant crap to me.

But, not anymore. Sometimes you have to see the color to understand, and that is exactly what this feels like—a new dimension that exists for two people somewhere beyond any place you’ve been before.

A simmering need to consume someone else. To claim them in front of the world as yours. As a possession so precious you vow to protect and cherish them like nothing else that came before or will ever come after.

“No. Not now. Maybe someday, but not now.” Her eyes turn to wells of sadness, and her fingers trace from the top of the scar where it just touches my hairline. She’s moving them like she is reading a beautiful book in braille.

She pauses at my eyebrow. The glass cut deep there, the scar thicker.

The delicate dance of her fingertips is only throwing kerosene on the flames that feel like they are consuming me.

If she only knew how much effort it’s taking to hold back right now. To not subjugate and tear at her like a beast.

She moves right down over my eyelid, across my nose. I’m watching her eyes as they follow her fingers. Inspecting me, like she’s learning something unique about me from every nuance of the jagged, silver skin.

She stops where the deep line intersects with the pulled mesh of burns that begins at the top of my cheekbone and courses down under the collar of my shirt.

She pulls back, and I feel a sense of loss when she takes her fingers away.

The pulsing in my cock is about to drain the blood from my brain, but I’m giving her whatever she needs from me.

You can’t give her everything; you know that.

I ignore the voice in my head. Some things you have to ignore. You have to find a way. She doesn’t need to know, and I’ll never tell her.

My hunger for her consumes me, and it is unlike anything I’ve ever felt. Moving on their own, my hands fall to that amazing part of a woman where her back swoops inward just above where the swell of her ass starts.

Only on Promise, that amazing part is magical. I’ve watched her ass move under her scrubs and her jeans like it was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Now, imagining my hands only inches from getting myself a glorious handful, I’m damn near heaven.

God, my head is spinning as her hand stills on my face. I take my chances and drag lower, then tug her entire body forward, spreading her legs until I feel her heat.

My cock is fighting the good fight below as the kiss is more electric than earlier. She is making those wind-chime sounds, and her breaths are coming in little starts. The stunning swell of her chest is pressed against me, and her lips are utterly irresistible.

I’m under the hem of her sweater, the first brush of my thumbs on her flesh sending a concussion force boom into my core. I want her.

Like, I’ve never wanted before.

Like, I didn’t know the meaning of that word before.

I
want
her.

A desire so raw, I’m scared because I don’t know how to stop it.

She doesn’t know it, but she’s mine.

In a way I didn’t know existed before, I want to bend her to my will—take and take and take from her—until she is not sure who she is anymore. Then, give it all back to her in such pleasure, she will never understand what it feels like to hurt ever again.

It’s just a kiss. Don’t lose your shit man, it’s a kiss.