Smoke Signals (25 page)

All except for Razor. But calling him an angel didn’t seem to do him justice after all that he’d done for me. All he was continuing to do. He was so much more than simply an angel. He was real.

“Maybe one more,” he said. He took my hand and pressed it to his chest, over his heart.

He meant me. But I wasn’t anyone’s angel.

“What do you think?” he asked. “Are you my angel?”

I shook my head.

“I think you’re wrong.” He raised my hand and pressed a kiss to my knuckles.

Dizzy. My knees gave out. Razor caught my wrists and eased my backward fall onto the bed. All too soon, he released me. I took hold of his hands and guided him down beside me, then pushed him onto his back so I could climb up and straddle his waist.

His hands dropped to the bend of my knees. He kept them there, not moving, his eyes on mine. Waiting.

I placed my hand on his and slid it up my thigh. “Touch me. I need you to touch me.”

He kept moving it upward until he reached my hip.

I traced the line down the center of his abs until I got to his belly button.

“Your skin is so soft,” he murmured. “Like silk.” He put his other palm flat on my belly, his fingers splaying up toward my breasts. “But so much strength underneath.”

“I’m not strong.” I eased my hands along the length of his arms, marveling at the corded muscles of his biceps beneath my touch. “
You’re
strong. Big muscles everywhere.” I pinched a spot on his side to prove my point. “No fat anywhere. All muscle. All strength.”

He inched higher to cup my breast, my nipple hardening into a taut bud immediately upon contact. “You’re all muscle, too. Except here. Here, you’re all softness and sweetness.” He rolled up until he could take the other breast in his mouth, and I arched my back, driving farther into him. His tongue circled my areola and flicked my tit, and when he suckled me, I felt the pull all the way down in my pussy. Not to mention the wetness. He repeated the process with my other breast before backing away and looking deep in my eyes. “That’s not the kind of strength I was talking about, though. I meant in here.” He pressed his hand over the left side of my chest, directly over my frantically beating heart.

I shook my head, but he stopped me with a kiss that stifled any argument I might have had. Wrapping both arms around his neck, I allowed myself to get lost in him. At least for now. At least for this moment.

Without a thought in my head, I ground my hips down into him, relishing the sensation of his cock gliding through my folds.

“Christ, you’re so fucking wet,” he murmured against my lips. He kissed me again before flipping us so I was on my back and he was hovering over me, supporting his weight on his elbows. “Do you think you’re ready to try the dilator now?”

In a haze of need, I’d completely pushed all thought of the dilator from my mind. I’d just wanted Razor. I still wanted him, but he picked up the drawstring bag and opened it, emptying the set of dilators onto the bed beside us.

He was right. As much as I wanted to forget all about using the silly things and just have sex like any normal man and woman would do, I knew he was right.

“We should try,” I agreed, albeit reluctantly.

“Tell me what to do.”

I fumbled through the set until I found the second smallest piece, one that was about the same size as one of my fingers. “This goes on handle. Then put on lube, try to relax, put inside, and do Kegels.”

“No moving it while it’s inside you?” He was already screwing the handle into the base.

I shook my head. “Maybe later. Kegels first, see if it hurts.”

“And what should I do while you’re doing that?” He took the lube in one hand.

“I…” I shook my head. How could I ask for what I wanted when I didn’t know what I wanted? He was the only man who’d ever given me the option before. In the past, I’d usually only reached an orgasm when I’d been completely immobilized and had intense, direct contact on my clit. The problem was, they’d done that so many times for so long that I’d lost my sensitivity. After a while, if they weren’t doing something like that, my only option had been to fake my orgasms, something I’d done more often than not.

Razor wasn’t going to go for that.

But he smiled and spread some lube on the dilator. “How about this? How about I try some things, and you tell me if you like them or not. Tell me what you want more of. We’ll go from there.”

I bit down on my lower lip and nodded.

“Do you want to put it in?” he asked.

“No. You.” I wanted him to be as much a part of this as I was. I needed to learn to trust him with my body. Or maybe I needed to learn to trust my body with him. Either way, it had to be him.

I bent my knees, placing my feet on the edge of the mattress.

I expected Razor to place the dilator at the entrance of my pussy, but he didn’t. He pressed a kiss to the inside of first one thigh, then the other, gradually working his way closer to the center of my heat. He squeezed a bit more of the lube onto his fingers and spread it over my inner labia, almost but not quite inserting the tip of a finger.

“Still breathing?” he asked.

Good point. I inhaled, long and deep, focusing on relaxing my muscles.

His mouth came down on my clit. He circled it with his tongue a few times and then sucked it gently between his lips.

And I felt it. Really, truly felt every bit of what he was doing.

He flicked his tongue over my nub a few times. When I rolled my hips, he set the dilator at my entrance and slowly—painstakingly slowly—slipped it inside me.

I’d been bracing myself for the pain, the sharp stinging and the clamping down of my muscles at the invasion into my body. But there was none of that. Oh, I felt the presence of the dilator, sure, but it wasn’t the pain I’d come to believe would always be part of me.

“More?” Razor asked after a moment. “Or should I stop there?”

“More,” I replied in awe.

He pressed it in farther and then glanced up to meet my eyes. He winked. “Do your Kegels, beautiful.”

I contracted my muscles, squeezing them tight around the dilator for several seconds before releasing and resting them. The second time I tensed, he lowered his head again and used his tongue on me. Each time I strained with the effort of my exercises, he went to work on my clit. Each time I released and relaxed, he stopped.

With every effort I made, he drove me higher, closer to the edge. Within a few minutes, I was fisting my hands in the sheets and squeezing my eyes closed, a desperate attempt to hold on to whatever remained of my sanity.

But I squeezed again. And he swirled his tongue.

And I shattered into millions of tiny pieces.

And it wasn’t just my body.

It wasn’t just sex. It wasn’t merely an orgasm, one to go along with many before it and many more to come.

It wasn’t an instance in which I could separate myself and look down on it from above.

It was me. All of me. Every piece of myself that I’d tried to hold back, to protect, was now in shards no bigger than specks of dust.

It was too late now. I loved Razor, and that scared me more than anything else in my life ever had.

Because everyone I loved was taken from me. That was how my life worked.

He was still between my legs, guiding me through the first real orgasm I’d had in months and months. The waves of my climax kept crashing, but they dragged me down, down, under the depths until I couldn’t see the light above me anymore. All I could see was fear and its icy fingers, which were digging tracks into my skin like a tattoo.

Mine might be invisible, but it felt far more permanent than the ink on his skin.

OUR HONEYMOON IN
Portland had brought us closer to experiencing sex the way I wanted to, but I still wasn’t about to delude myself into thinking it wasn’t a long way off. Don’t get me wrong…Tori was always willing to help me out with her mouth or her hands, and I couldn’t complain about her skill. I just wanted
more
. I wanted to be inside her and still be able to kiss her, to look into her eyes while we made love. Call me a romantic. I wanted a more powerful connection with her, one that was on par with the way things were between us when we kissed lately.

Because that bond was definitely intense, and becoming more so every day.

Something had changed between us since we’d left Tulsa. It wasn’t just because Tori had finally been able to orgasm, either.

She smiled more. Laughed more. Instead of me being the only one to reach for her hand or put my arm around her waist and draw her to my side, now she was starting to seek out those small touches.

And I craved them as much as I craved her smiles.

Tori was no longer waking me up in the night to lure me into fucking her. She was kissing me out of nowhere, resting her head on my shoulder, and wrapping her arms around my waist to hug me from behind. It wasn’t just about using her body as a mode of currency for her anymore. It had never been just about sex for me, but now she seemed to be on the same page.

Except for the fact that now, during moments she thought I wasn’t looking, her panicked eyes had returned full force. She always brought them under control again as soon as she realized my attention was on her, but her scared-rabbit routine was becoming far more common, making me worry she might try to run.

And now she had the means to do so, too. I’d bought her a car, and she had gone to get her Oklahoma driver’s license. She had access to my bank accounts, my credit cards… She could go, if she thought that was for the best. She could pack up and be gone, never to be seen or heard from again, in a flash. I could blink and she’d be out of my life for good.

But where would she run? And who would she run to? I thought—
hoped
might be more appropriate—that I was the person she’d seek out. But she definitely wasn’t planning to run
to
me if she was thinking about running
away
.

We were back in Tulsa now. Training camp had started three days ago, so all the time I’d been spending with Tori over the last few months was going to be cut significantly. I had practices, team meetings, film sessions, and workouts every single day, not to mention games. And road trips were right around the corner. I was going to be gone as often as I would be at home for the next seven months or more, a thought that made my gut churn. If she did decide to leave, would she wait and do it while I was gone and couldn’t do a damn thing to stop her? I honestly wasn’t certain.

The one thing I was sure of? If she left, I wouldn’t report the car as having been stolen. I wouldn’t cancel the credit cards or close the bank accounts. I damn sure wouldn’t shut off her cell phone. Maybe I was crazy for thinking like that, but I couldn’t help it. The thought of Tori being alone in this world with nothing—the way she’d been when I’d first found her—was too much to bear.

I cared too fucking much. Every time she gave me another glimpse into her life or took down another brick from her wall, I fell harder than before. Maybe we’d initially married just to get her a green card, but it was more than that now. At least for me. I thought it was for her, too.

I thought about her all the time. I missed her when we were apart. I craved her touch night and day, asleep or awake. The idea that she might run off left me in a cold sweat. I was a fucking mess over her.

Today, I’d spent the entire day up at Thunderbirds headquarters with the guys. Now, all I wanted was to get home to Tori, but Hunter cornered me on my way out to show me the latest pictures of Harper on his phone. Even though all I wanted at the moment was to see my wife, I didn’t have it in me to brush him off. Not after spending all those hours at the hospital with him.

“She’s smiling at me in this one,” he said, flipping to the next image. “Would you look at that grin?”

Looked like she had gas to me. Still, I hoped I might one day be the proud new father. Maybe. Did Tori want to have children? And would she stick around with me long enough for that? Not a good line of thought right now… Better to play along with Hunter and not think about what might happen someday.