Five years of anger, of longing, of bitter regret are poured into this one kiss. His mouth crashes down on mine, demanding, punishing.
His lips part mine, his tongue sweeping in to claim every corner, to taste and to possess. It’s a kiss meant to erase, to overwrite, to remind me who I belong to.
His hand tightens in my hair, a delicious, controlling pull that tilts my head back. He breaks the kiss, trailing his lips down my throat.
My head is pounding, a frantic, painful drum solo, but all I can feel is the heat of his mouth, the scrape of his beard against my skin. My hands bury under his shirt, desperate for more contact.
My palms glide over the warm, smooth skin of his back, tracing the familiar landscape of his muscles. He feels harder than I remember, etched with a life I wasn’t there for.
“Holy shit,” he breathes against the skin of my neck. Then he’s lifting me.
My feet leave the floor in a rush, a gasp stolen from my lips. He hooks one of my legs around his waist, his hand cupping my ass, pulling me flush against him.
The new angle is electric. The hard, thick ridge of his erection presses directly against my core, a perfect, agonizing friction that makes me moan into his mouth.
This kiss. It’s a drug. It’s so good, so overwhelmingly right, that I can feel the pressure building low in my belly, a tightening coil of pleasure.
I think I could come just from this, from his mouth on mine and the hard press of his body against mine. He rocks into me, a grinding motion that makes my eyes roll back in my head.
His teeth scrape against the sensitive skin where my neck meets my shoulder, right over my scent gland. A jolt of pure, unadulterated need shoots through me.
“You taste so fucking good,” he growls, a vibration against my skin.
The possessiveness, the raw, primal hunger in his voice, is my undoing. It unlocks something inside me, something I’ve kept locked away for years.
“Fuck! You too, baby,” I gasp. The endearment slips out, a phantom from a past life, a time when this desperation was laced with love.
And just like that, the world stops.
He freezes. Every muscle in his body goes rigid. The hand on my hip drops away. He lets me down, my feet hitting the floor with a soft thud.
He takes a step back, putting a cold, empty foot of space between us. The sudden absence of his touch is a physical blow, a void where a moment ago there was fire.
“This was a mistake.” His voice is flat. Cold. All the heat, all the passion, is gone, extinguished as if it never existed.
“Billy…” I gasp. My body is still lit up from the inside out, aching for a release he’s just denied. My lips feel swollen, my neck is sensitized, my core is a clenching, needy knot.
But he doesn’t look at me. He turns his back, takes two long strides to the kitchen door, yanks it open, and disappears into the storm, leaving me alone.
The plate of chicken and fries sits on the counter, getting cold. And I’m left standing in the wreckage of a moment that was never supposed to happen, my broken heart shattered into a million more pieces.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Billy
I plungeheadfirst into the wall of rain, the cold a shock against my overheated skin. My boots sink into the mud, each step a struggle. My chest burns, my lungs heaving for air as I run.
I don’t slow down until I near the woods that border the property. I’m trying to outrun her, outrun my need for her, but she’s everywhere.
I can still taste her on my tongue. Rain and mint and something that is purely, intoxicatingly Sedona. The memory makes my cock ache, a hard, painful line trapped in my jeans.
I trip over a root, catching myself against the rough bark of a pine tree. My breath comes in ragged, painful gasps, each inhale pulling the scent of damp earth and wet leaves into my lungs.
“Baby.”
She called me baby.
It was an endearment from another lifetime, a word she used to murmur against my skin after we’d made love, when the world was soft and warm and ours. Hearing it now is like pouring gasoline on a fire that was already burning out of control.
