Embers (Blaze Series Book 3) (6 page)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

His kiss is soft, gentle, light as air. My
lips tingle where his mouth meets mine. I could stay in this kiss forever,
feeling his hands deftly moving over my body. Tracing the lines of my
shoulders, his touch expertly chasing all the tension out of my back, drifting
down easily over my waist.

But when he starts to kiss his way down my
neck, down to my breasts, I wonder why I would have wanted anything but this.
In the dark of his hotel room I offer my body up to him, arching my hips until
my ass is off the mattress. He sucks one of my nipples into his mouth, rolling
it over his tongue. I can feel myself getting slick and wet.

“What do you want?” he whispers, his words
as hushed as a prayer in the silent room. For a moment I don’t answer him,
losing myself in the sensation of his hands moving over my body. I don’t know
how to say it:
I want you. I want all of you.

“I want it to be gentle tonight,” I say,
finally. And it’s the truth. I want it to be smooth, and slow. I want it to be
loving and long, and I want to see the look in his eyes when he comes. I want
him to make love to me.  

He doesn’t say a word. He takes hold of my
thigh and gently moves it, opening me up for his first thrust. I gasp as he
slides in. He settles his weight on top of me and moves slowly, pushing in
until he couldn’t be any further, until it feels like he’s buried inside me.
Then he slowly pulls back and I want to moan at the momentary emptiness, like
I’ve been hollowed out. Then he pushes into me again and I sob with relief.

I roll him onto his back. For a moment I
forget everything except feeling his cock, huge and hard and impaling me. I
breathe out, a breath I’ve been holding my whole life without knowing it. He
reaches up to cup my breasts and I balance myself on his thighs, slowly rolling
my hips. When he starts to thrust from beneath me, I put one warning hand on
his chest. His skin is warm and firm. His movements slow, letting me take
control. I move slowly, the exquisite pleasure of feeling him matched only by
how badly I want him.

Finally he turns me onto my back again and I
let him take control. His thrusts stay gentle but start to quicken and he
swells inside me. I move with him, my legs curled around the small of his back.

When his breathing starts to get harsh, I
put my arms around his neck, catching him, holding him close. I’m not going to
let him get away again.

His cock pumps and then he’s coming, a warm
flood erupting inside me. I kiss him, savagely, feeling the heat of him
spreading through me.

“I love you, Gabriel,” I whisper, clamping
his body against mine like it’s the last time we’ll ever make love, wanting
nothing else, needing nothing else, but him.

Shadows lie dark and full across his face.
It’s hard for me to tell what his expression is but I don’t need to; the warmth
in his voice is enough for me. We trade words back and forth, the kind of talk
we never used to do. About our day, about our favorite books, our favorite
foods.

I trace little circles on his chest with my
finger as he talks. His heartbeat underneath my fingertip is a slow, steady
beat that reverberates with strength. I wish I had a stethoscope so I could
hear it echoing in my ears, filling up my whole world with him.

I lean forward and softly kiss the line of
his shoulders, the long flat line where the broadness of his chest sweeps up
into the hard muscles of his delts. His skin is warm on my lips and he falls
silent. He tastes like life and sweetness on my tongue.

When I break away, he’s turned toward me.
There’s a kind of sadness in his voice when he speaks.

“You just don’t know what you want, do you?”
he asks. I shake my head, not because I don’t know, but because, perhaps for
the first time, I do.

“I want
you
,” I say. “I want
us.
Like
this. So simple, so easy. All the time. This is what I’ve been looking for my
whole life.”

He doesn’t say anything; he just keeps
looking at me with that not-quite-stern, not-quite-loving look that I don’t
know how to react to.

I slide my hand down his flat stomach and
cradle him. His cock responds instantly, stiffening in my grip. I start to
stroke him, gently, feeling him harden and pushing back against my touch. A
warm throb starts up inside me. For a moment I wonder what it would be like to
get him off with my hand, stroking him with my lightest, softest touch until he
couldn’t stand it any more.

But his strong hands are gripping my hips,
turning me on to my front. As he moves around behind me his cock presses
against my flank and I push my body into him, grinding on him, loving the feel
of his heat, his hardness on my curves.

He settles his weight on the bed behind me
and with one smooth thrust, hilts himself inside me. A long, low grown pours
from my throat. I can feel the head of his cock pushing inside me, a hot bar of
iron. I roll my hips up and down against him and his thrusts begin to gather
speed.

My head drops down and I take him in, all of
him. Even after all this time, I’m not used to how big he is. How good he is at
this. The friction is getting intense and his breathing comes in short, hard
gasps.

He pulses inside me and then his hardness
breaks in shot after shot of his warmth, pouring out inside me. I push back
against him, feeling my ass flatten against his hips, desperate to capture
every last moment of this.

My breath is like a hurricane as I collapse
forward on the bed, my chest heaving and my hair flattened against my forehead.

Finally I stretch, and the moment breaks.

“I’m going to get us a drink,” I tell him.
“I’ll be right back.”

There’s a bottle of diet soda in the fridge.
It’s about as close as I get to a drink for a special occasion.

The air is chilly on my naked body and I
hiss at the cold of the wooden floor on the soles of my feet. I’m halfway back
from the kitchen when I hear the front door opening and my housemate Sarah
coming back in, I guess from a shift at the hospital.

Fuck.

I sneak as quietly as I can through the
corridors of the house, my heart thumping in my chest, as Sarah, making as much
noise as a baby elephant, goes to her room. I’m finally around the door to my
room as she’s rounding the corner. She may or may not have been treated to a
flash of my ass, before I make it back to my room.

Gabriel drinks deeply after I pour him a
glass. I gulp mine down, my body desperate to get some fluids back, even though
diet soda probably isn’t the ideal choice. The glass makes a heavy clunk when I
put it down on my bedside table. All my coordination is gone as my muscles try
to recover from the workout they just got.

I nestle into his chest, feeling warm and
happy, a blessed out drowsiness starting to descend. He’s quiet, as if he’s
thinking. Then he speaks.

“OK,” he says. “I need to tell you some
things. About me.”

And just like that, I’m wide awake.

CHAPTER TWENTY

He breaks away from me, leaving a cold space
in my arms where his warm, solid body just was. He reaches into his jacket, hung
over my crappy wooden desk chair, and takes something from the inside pocket.
He turns on the bedside lamp and warm yellow light floods the room. I blink
painfully as it hits my eyes and when I open them again I can see it reflecting
off something silver.

A long, delicate chain hangs from his hand.
Without saying anything, he slips back into bed, next to me, but not touching
me. There’s something about the way he sits, the way he talks. It’s like he’s
put on an invisible suit of armor, keeping me away from him. Wordlessly, he
opens his hand, letting a silver pendant fall. He catches the chain and the
pendant bounces, swinging gently in his grip.

It’s beautiful. And old. I don’t know much
about jewelry—probably because I could never afford any—but I can at least tell
an antique from something modern.

“It belonged to my mother,” he says, and I
shiver at the sound of his voice. It’s hoarse, and raw. There’s none of the
control, none of the arrogance, none of the laughter I’ve heard in him before.

“My father died when I was young,” he goes
on, and his muscles tighten. He’s like a statue, but a statue full of pain. “I
can still remember being taken out of school to be told. It was the quietest
day in my whole life.”

He takes a deep breath and lets it out. I
want to reach out to him, to touch him, to comfort him and make everything okay.
But somehow I know that doing that right now would just make him put his guard
up again, and I want so badly for him to keep going, with whatever confessional
this is.

“My mom . . . my mom was devastated. But
after a while we repaired things. I started doing more around the farm, and the
neighbors helped out wherever they could. They were good people.”

He stares out the window, into the blackness
of the night.

“She found a new man a few years after that.
I was a bit older by then but I was still just a boy, really. Thirteen years
old. And that’s when Hank started coming around.”

His face twists when he says the name, venom
seething under his words.

“What a charmer Hank was. With his drinking.
And his fists. At first the drinking was just a little more than what was
usual. Instead of a few beers at a party, or a whisky on a Friday night after a
big week, it was seven or eight beers, or five or six whiskies. I guess he
wanted to hide it until he knew he’d won my mom over.”

Gabriel’s fists tighten, and the necklace
with it.

“His drinking kept up, and when he felt safe
enough, the beatings started.
Chastisements
, he called them. For when
I’d screwed up. And after a while, looking at him the wrong way was enough to
screw up. But I knew my mom was desperate. I knew she—somehow, God knows—felt
something for the bastard. Maybe it was just knowing that there was a man
around, taking care of things. I don’t know.”

He pauses.

“I got out of there when I was eighteen. I
took a tree felling job, three states over and up by the Canadian border. I
just wanted to make money. Enough to come back and buy a stake in the farm.
Enough to make Hank see that I wasn’t a little kid he could smack around
anymore.”

His jaw tightens, turning into a steel line.

“I even found a girl. She was French-Canadian.
Her name was Claire. I thought she’d be the girl I married, the one who would
have all my children.”

My heart flips unpleasantly, hearing that. I
try to ignore the jealousy I feel, just hearing another girl’s name.

“I took her home with me on my twenty-first birthday.
To meet my mom. To see where I grew up. To show her the photos I still had of
me and my dad, the guy I’d been telling her about for what felt like forever.”

He closes his eyes for a moment.

“I didn’t tell my mom we were coming back. I
wanted to surprise her. When we got there, she wouldn’t open the door. When I
finally went around back I saw that it was because she was trying to hide a
black eye. And then I saw all the faded bruises on her arms. And so I walked
straight out to the field where Hank was working, and I hit him as hard as I
could, and I just kept on hitting him.”

He breathes out again. I can still see the
fury in him, the rage of so many years ago.

“Eventually Claire pulled me off him. She
got me back into the house. And Hank, asshole that he was, decided to drive
straight into town to see a doctor. And to see the police, he kept yelling. He
kept shouting how he was going to have me arrested, have me thrown in jail. My
mom went with him.”

Gabriel goes silent, for so long I wonder if
he’s going to talk again. He just sits there, a man half in light, half in
shadow. My beautiful man.

His voice shakes when he starts speaking
again.

“Hank was probably already half drunk. But
they found a bunch of freshly-opened cans in the back of his truck. When they
finally got to the scene.”

I feel cold, like icy water’s been poured
through my bones. I know what Gabriel’s about to say, but I don’t want it to be
true. I don’t want to hear him say it, to make it real.

“My mom never felt a thing, they said.
Neither did Hank, for that matter. The driver of the truck Hank hit had two
broken legs and a cracked ribcage, but he recovered. After a while.”

I sit, numb, listening to the misery pour
out of him, wanting to do something, to say something, that will take his pain
away, but not knowing what to say.  

“I lost my mind,” he says. “Every day was
just . . . gray. Claire tried to get me out of it, tried to get me to come back
to Canada with her. But I wouldn’t leave the farm. Not when it was all I had
left of my family. After a little while she started acting strangely, but even
that didn’t matter. I knew she was cheating weeks before she finally confessed.
She said that something had ripped a hole in me, a hole that couldn’t be filled
because I didn’t want it to be. She left a little while afterwars, and I have
no idea where she is now.”

Finally he looks at me. His eyes are shining
with tears.

“I’ve never told anyone that story,” he
says. Before he can say another word, I kiss him gently, with all the love and
sorrow I feel.,I kiss him, wanting it to heal, to be a salve, and I pull him
against me, wishing that somehow I could take it all away.