He yanks me to him with one harsh move, then sinks his face between my thighs.
My back arches and I cry out as he eats me out fiercely, groaning into my flesh.
“This is how you think?” I pant, pleasure winding through my muscles, ignoring the fact that my brain is somewhere else. All he has to do is touch me and I react physically. I can’t control it.
“Just let me be,” he growls, rubbing his face side to side to get my wetness all over him. “So fucking sweet,” he grunts, picking up the pace until I corkscrew my hands into his hair and pull at the roots.
He curses and his pace increases. I glance down but his eyes are screwed shut, closing me out. He always keeps intense eye contact when he goes down on me, and the lack of blue gazing up at me makes a sob catch in my throat.
I tug at his hair, but he sucks my clit harder.
I throw my head back with a moan as the familiar building takes over my body. I can’t stop it even if I want to. So I stare at the stars instead, and as spectacular as they are, they’re a poor substitute for the eyes of the man between my thighs.
“Slade,” I whimper.
“Come for me,” he instructs.
He won’t stop until I do. So I succumb, separating my mind from my body and letting him take control.
He sucks my clit, and I fall apart with a cry, staring at the world while he keeps his eyes glued shut, closing himself off inside his own private one.
The intensity of his mouth against me eases as my orgasm crests and falls away. I focus on the one brightest star until his sucks and licks turn into soft kisses of adoration.
“Jude,” he murmurs.
I hold my breath, my grasp on his hair loosening until I’m lovingly toying with the strands, letting them slip between my fingers like silk.
“They… it…” He curses, kissing me between the thighs. “What happened here three years ago… my family covered it up.”
I keep stroking his hair, too afraid to move an inch or do anything that might cause him to stop talking when he’s finally,finallybegun.
He presses more soft kisses to my thighs, then my lower stomach, bringing a hand to rest on it. He keeps his eyes fixed on his thumb as he circles it slowly around my navel.
“I woke up on another boat after the fire on Dad’s yacht. The woman on it said I climbed on board covered in cuts and bleeding. But I don’t remember any of that. All I remember was the TV playing behind her. My family held a press conference announcing mine and my mother’s deaths. My brother spoke first, then my father. The moment he opened his mouth, I understood what they were doing. To the world, they sounded like a grieving family supporting one another, but to me… I knew exactly what they meant.”
“What did they say?” I breathe.
He finally lifts his eyes to mine, and I suck in a breath at the tears swimming in the icy blue.
“They said Beauforts stick together.”
The devastation in his eyes has pain ripping down the center of my chest.
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s what my father always said to us growing up. If me or my brother or sister ever snitched on the others as kids, he’d tell us ‘Beauforts stick together’. It became our mantra. Whenever one of us needed something doing or needed covering for getting in late or sneaking out after curfew, it’s what we said. When I broke my arm zip lining with the clothes hanger, I also wrecked the TV and left a dent in the wall. My father said those exact words to me, knowing my mother would be angry. He told me my trip to the emergency room was lesson enough in his book. He took the heat off me with Mom saying he’d wanted to reposition the TV and had dropped it into the wall, breaking both. She was mad at him for days about it.
“I knew the moment he said those words, and that he would never get over losing his wife and son, that I would never see any of them again.”
He sinks his head into my stomach, kissing me there with shaky breaths. I keep stroking his hair, waiting for him to keep going.
“They gave me an out, Jude. After what I did, they still gave me an out, wanting to save me, even though I didn’t deserve it. I should be in jail.”
My stomach twists. “What did you do that was so bad? Whatever it was, if they covered for you, then they must forgive you? I don’t understand. You’re serving a sentence here without them. You have no one.”
He shakes his head, the dullness in his eyes signifying his acceptance of a situation without hope. “What I did was unforgivable.”
“You could talk to them,” I whisper.
