Perfectly Unmatched (24 page)

Goofy.
And crazily in love with books and reading and translations. And dreamy. And poetic.

My family’s business would hatchet every romantic piece of him and feed the bloody bits to the wolves. He would never survive a Youngblood business deal, even the ones that are completely clean. This business takes a certain knack, a certain disposition, and
Cormac doesn’t have it. Not at all.

I get up because I need to keep busy or my thoughts are going to drive me insane. I pull off his shoes and
socks, unzip his pants and tug them down, leg by leg. I pull his shirt over his head and admire him in all his lean, muscled glory.

The bright blue numbers on his alarm clock alert me to the fact that it’s late. I should be home in bed, because my parents are coming by in the morning. We’re supposed to have a breakfast together.

I lie down on the mattress next to Cormac and run the back of my hand over the scruff that’s starting to grow beyond five o’clock shadow.

“I think I love you,” I whisper. His mouth hangs open and he snores and moans a little.

The image of Winch kissing Evan by the lake flashes through my mind. I want that. I want it so badly.

He got it by turning his back on our family, and now I realize why.

Now that being a Youngblood is forcing me to choose between the family I love and the man I love, I know exactly what my brother felt and why he made the decisions he did.

Why he did what he had to do.

“What kind of family does that?” I ask Cormac’s sleeping form out loud. “How can they love me so much, but not know me? How can I love them so much but be petrified to tell them the one thing I want?” He rolls on his side, his hands searching me out, his arms pulling me tight even in the depths of his drunkenness. “You. What I want is you, Cormac Halstrom.”

It’s late at night, and in a few hours, it will be past the time when I can make it back to my bed undetected. I can stay awake and try to steel my will, keep up my conviction to turn my back on the family I’ve always cherished for this one singular shot at a possible something with
Cormac. Or I can do what I have to and go back to the people who’ve done nothing but love and care for me since I was a little girl. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know who to turn to or who to trust or what to think, and I’m scared out of my mind to make a decision either way. And then I realize there’s another option.

I can just fold myself into his arms and sleep. The time will pass. The sky will lighten. And, when day comes, the decision will have been made.

I’ll start my life with Cormac.

I lie down, my back spooned to his chest, and he throws a strong, long arm over my ribs and tugs me tight, so I’m fitted against him, spine to ribs, hair to mouth, feet entwined, netted and woven.

And then I sleep.

***

“Awed by her splendor/ stars near the lovely/ moon cover their own/ bright faces/ when she/ is roundest and lights/ earth with her silver.”

Cormac’s
voice is in my ears, but when I open my eyes, I don’t see the oranges and pinks of dawn. It’s still the midnight and silver of deep night, and he’s not kissing me awake for romance.

“More Sappho you remembered?” I stall, smiling at him.

“Re-learned,” he corrects, kissing me softly on the lips. “I had this weird feeling I might fuck up, leave you horny in your room, get so drunk at a bar that I’d wind up stumbling around in front of your incredibly macho brother, and would probably have to be carried to bed on his broad shoulders...I’m slightly clairvoyant when it comes to my own miserable failings. So I memorized some particularly beautiful verses...the ones that most reminded me of you. And I will shamelessly use them to win you back to my very, very marginal good side.” He kisses me again, his lips lingering a tiny bit this time. He doesn’t pull completely away when he says the rest. “By the way, I’m very sorry. And, if it makes you feel better, I feel a little like an entire tribe of obnoxious clown children on speed are kickboxing my skull and like I may have eaten a cartload of rotten fish. So, I think the gods are telling me that I was very wrong yesterday. Or earlier tonight. Or wherever we are in time. Just...yes, sorry. The point is definitely that I’m sincerely sorry.”

“I was wrong.” I sit up and pull the covers over my shoulders in the chilly night air. “I was an idiot,
Cormac. And I’m ready.”

His face goes pale.
“To get married?”

I feel my cheeks burn. “Is that what you want?”

He widens his eyes and blinks. “Me?”

“Not you?” My head spins like I drank.

“You want to marry me?” he asks slowly, and I can’t tell if he would rather hear a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’

“Did you not want...me?” Now I’m feeling like an ass and glad for the few hours his midnight wake-up call will give me to cry this out before I see my family.

It’s just that last time we talked he seemed so...ready.

“I want you!” He pulls me back to him, presses me under his body and kisses me, first softly, then with more aggression. “My god, I want you every second of the day,
Benelli.” He runs his hands over my hair, along my shoulders, down my body. “And not just in bed. I mean, I want you here, but only for me. As mine, only, not anyone else’s. When I see you out on your dates, I want to beat the shit out of every one of those guys.”

I moan a little, loving the feral side of
Cormac that he usually keeps buttoned up. “They’re just dates, Cormac. You’re the only one I want to touch me.”

“Like this?” He shoves his hand up the leg of my shorts and tears away at the fabric of my underwear, so his two fingers slide deep inside of me, deep in where I’m already wet and ready for him.

“Yes,” I choke out, my head tilted back, waiting. He draws his fingers back out and presses them in. Out an in, slow and steady, until I’m panting under him.

“You want me to touch you like this,
Benelli?” His voice scratches in my ears.

“
Mmmhmm.” I want to answer, to talk back, but the slide of his fingers seems to be directly connected to my vocal chords, and the thrumming, humming vibrations echoing through my body don’t allow anything more articulate.

“Where else, love? Should I suck on you too?” His voice is so calm, so soft and low in my ears. I only nod, but his free hand twists my tank top and yanks it over my head. His fingers flick the clasp of my bra open and press and pull at my suddenly exposed breasts. “You want me to suck here?”

His lips close over my nipple, and I press my hips up harder against his hand, so hard my clit rubs against his wrist and he slides even deeper into me. He sucks hard, pulling his mouth away with a pop of suction, then catches the other in his mouth and tongues it until I’m jerking my hips harder against him.

“That’s it. Come for me. C’mon,
Benelli,” he whispers.

I shake my head and he nuzzles the underside of my breast again, sending a new wave of heat through me, so unbearably sweet and cruelly gorgeous, my moan fractures and sputters.

His tongue slides down, bisecting between my breasts, down my belly button, under the waistband of my shorts. He sits up and pulls them off my legs, his green eyes almost black, his mouth a flat, hungry line, his breathing so heavy it’s making his chest rise and fall visibly.

The tight stretch of his cotton boxer briefs shows the hard length of his dick, and I want it. I want him in me, over and over, all night. I want him in the morning, the entire morning, not just for that one single second before I have to watch him repel down the side of the house. I want him for the complete day. I want to have him meet the family I love, not just the one brother who can keep a secret.
Because I don’t want to keep Cormac a secret anymore.

I...love him.

I do.

And I want everyone to know it.

I push him back on the bed and yank his boxers off, loving the way he lies back and smiles, looking up at me like I’m the only thing that matters to him in the world.

“I love you,” I say, my voice fierce, my hands firm on his shoulders.

His smile falters and he backs up, so I slide a few inches down his thighs.

There’s a moment of sizzling, crackling tension in the air between us.

“Pardon?” he asks, the question so dazed and proper, it almost makes me burst out laughing.

But I don’t. I pull closer on his lap, the wet, ready center of me sliding right where he’s hard and eager.

“Don’t say anything.” I lean forward and kiss his strong jaw, the perfectly kissable, witty mouth, over each dark-lashed eye, into his dark hair, which smells like the ink and paper he loves. “You’ve fought for me. You’ve challenged me. You’ve begged me and left me and come back to me, and I just want to tell you that I love you. Not for sex, not for a summer fling. I love
you
, all of you. And I want you. All of you. And I have no idea, not a single idea, how this is going to work, but it is. I will figure this out, because I’m not leaving you. I’m never leaving you.”

His mouth is hanging open, and there’s this solitary flash of a second where I’m sure, I’m positive, I’ve just made the biggest mistake of my life, and I’m sitting naked on the lap of a guy who doesn’t love me and decided I wasn’t worth it and went to drink my memory away this very night.

Then he drags me in his arms and crushes me against his hard chest, only pulling back to kiss me solidly on the lips. When he pulls back, his eyes are bright with determination. “I love you. If Odysseus could make it back to Penelope, we can figure this out, love. We can do this.”

I laugh at his random literary metaphor, at the way I feel so perfect, so damn
me
when I’m in his arms, and the kissing gets more intense until it morphs into touching, and before I know it, his hands are on my hips and his fingers are sliding against me, making my entire body ache and quake around a deep down need to feel him against me, in me, all over me.

I reach over for my bag and fumble to take out a condom and roll it on. I slide onto him, and the stretch of his dick inside me takes a few seconds to get accustomed to. After those few seconds, I rock back and forth against him, focusing on the smooth, solid length of him, the rough scratch on his hands on my arms, my breasts, up and down along my thighs. I close my
eyes and bite my lip to keep a rhythm, to keep moving against him, but it’s not enough, not close enough.

I don’t have to say anything; like he can read my frustrations,
Cormac sits up and pulls me tighter, wrapping my legs around his hips and thrusting into me, deeper, longer, anchoring his hands on my hips and nuzzling his mouth near my ears so he can whisper things about how he thinks about my naked body and the things he wants to do to me and the things he wants me to do back to him.

“I think about you in the shower,
Benelli, how your skin would look naked and wet and slippery with soap. I want to run my hands over you and in you and I want to bend you over and slide my dick inside of you over and over.” His voice catches on my gasp. “I do a thousand translations with a stiff cock, because I’m imagining what it would be like if you showed up and took it in your mouth and sucked it hard. I want to sit you on my desk and spread your legs, lick every inch of you until you come in my mouth.”

He doesn’t hold back, doesn’t attempt to soften anything, and it’s a turn on equal to his whispered poems. I love that he can be so wild and erotic and romantic and sweet all at once. He keeps whispering things that make my cheeks burn, things that make me jerk and thrust against him, and I get hotter, wetter, move faster and brush against him harder.

Every single image flickers through my brain and snaps one more thread in the chord that’s tethering me to him.

And then it’s completely broken, and I’m pressed on top of him, face buried in his shoulder, arms wrapped around his strong, muscled back, gasping out his name as he strains against me, his body completely tense for a few perfect seconds before we both topple, spent and sweaty, in a heap on the bed.

“That was...holy fucking Aprhodite’s fucking...Benelli!” He groans, then drags me on top of him and kisses my neck and breasts and face. “How will the poor, classically-deprived children of Hungary ever get their corresponding English-language translation of
The Odyssey
if you’re going to parade around tempting me with your perfect body?”

I giggle. “You’ll have to move me in with you.”

His face goes serious. “Would you?”

I thread my fingers through his. “Would I what?”

“Would you...move in...with me? To my stuffy one-room loft awesomely furnished with a hot plate and a single bed?” He bats his eyelashes at me.

“Did you just bat your lashes at me?” I smile and kiss his jaw.

“Yes. I’m willing to stoop to new lows for you.” He cups my face in his hands. “In all honesty, I know you’re a powerful woman from a powerful family, and I’m nothing but a strange professor educated in one of, literally, one of the least useful fields. Ever. Really. It’s awful. I’m laughably useless as a working adult human in every way except one very rare specific one. But I would do anything...anything I needed to to try this. Should we try this?”