Page 104 of Sterling Fight

“That night,” I exhale, finding the courage to admit the rest of the story. “The reason my father beat me up.” I blow out a breath. “I’d stolen this ring from him.”

The memory rushes back at me. His thundering voice. The sharp point of his finger.

Where the fuck is it?

“He’d accused me of taking it from him, and I lied. I told him I hadn’t.” He’d caught me admiring her ring often enough. Often picking on me for missing her so much. He even threatened to toss the ring in the trash and that’s when I took it. I didn’t doubt he might throw it away. My last memory of her.

“Why?” Genie whispers.

“I’d planned to ask you to be my girlfriend.”

Genie stops moving, staring up at me with wide, sad eyes and severely pinched brows.

“I’d been wanting you, yet never admitting my feelings. I hadn’t ever checked yes until you asked me to that dance. It gave me hope that you might want me the way I wanted you.”

“Judd,” she whispers, still holding my hand but staring at me with wonder and fear in her gaze.

“I wanted to do it right. Make a grand gesture. You wouldn’t have simply been my first girlfriend, you’d have been my first everything.”

My first and last. I knew it then as I know it now. She is the perfect woman to wear this gift, and I don’t want her to take it off. I want her to wear it for real as a bond between us, as a promise of a future.

“Baby,” she says softly, cupping my cheek.

“You were younger than me and it would have been a big ask to ask you to wait for me, me going away to college while you were still in school. I wanted the ring to be a promise. A statement of my feelings.”

Genie glances at her hand.

I swallow, almost embarrassed by how backwards my question will sound, but I ask my fake fiancée anyway, “Genie Webster, will you be my girlfriend, for real?”

I’m met with the most soulful eyes I’ve ever seen. A black so deep I could get lost in her and yet I know she’d find me.

Never lose one another. Again. Never, ever again.

“Yes,” Genie whispers, then clears her throat. “Yes, yes.” Then she tips up on her toes and kisses me, sweet and hesitant, like a first kiss might be.

“You would have been my first kiss,” she admits. “First date. First boyfriend.”

I release her hands and cup her face, kissing her with all the passion of missed kisses and all the promises of future ones.

Kiss every day. With her in Knoxville, and me here, I don’t know how I’ll make that happen, but I’ll figure something out.

Suddenly, I’m moving us, pressing Genie to walk backwards until her legs hit the edge of the velvet lounger. Our kissing has grown heavier, needier, and I’m starving for more from her. I spin her to face the chaise and pepper kisses along her shoulders and across her shoulder blades. Only two days ago I had her bent over the dining room table, my dick at the ready and so tempted to be inside her.

Tonight, I have other fantasies to act out.

“Remember how I asked you to sit on my face at my brother’s place the other day.”

Genie giggles beneath the kisses I continue to cover her skin with. “What about it?”

“I’d like to do that now. Only I want you to take me in your mouth at the same time.”

Genie spins to face me, her gaze darting all over my face and for a moment I worry I’ve asked for too much.

“Here?” she questions, her eyes puzzled like she isn’t certain how that would work.

I nod. “I’ll lay on the settee, and you climb over me.”

“I don’t want to crush you.”