Page 46 of Bombshell

Adair

I awake in a near-black room, and for a moment I can’t remember where I am or how I got here. My hands shoot out in either direction, trying to find something to help me make sense of the strange surroundings, then they move to my stomach.

She’s gone.

Panic threatens to overtake me, but then I feel Sterling there beside me. Slowly, my eyes adjust, sketching the lines of his bedroom in the faint glow from the lights on the street below his building. The dread from my nightmare begins to fade, loosening its grip on my chest. He must have carried me in here. I roll closer to him, tucking myself between his arm and chest, fighting back tears, and he stirs, sensing something is wrong.

“You okay?” he says groggily, pulling me closer.

“Just a nightmare,” I say, and even recalling it sends a shudder down my spine. I try to swallow away the raw ache. It’s been a long time since I had that nightmare.

“You’re safe, Lucky,” he says, hugging me tightly. “I’m right here.”

“I keep telling myself that,” I admit. “But after yesterday, after everything you found out...it’s like I can’t believe you’re still here. And then...You know what? It doesn’t matter. It was just a dream.”

I repeat it over and over in my head, tuning my focus to the beat of his heart. He’s here. That should make me feel safer instead of more afraid.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks gently.

I start to say no, but as soon as my mouth opens so do the floodgates. “You’re gone, and I’m all alone, somewhere strange, and I’m pregnant.” I nearly choke on the word. We’ve danced around it. He knows. Somehow, it’s still hard to say it—hard to remember it. “And then, I’m not pregnant, and I can hear Ellie crying and I keep looking for her, trying to reach her. I can hear her getting closer and closer, but every door opens to an empty room. I keep searching, but I can’t find my way out and I can’t find her. I’m all alone and trapped and she needs me and…”

I dissolve into frantic pants, and his arms tighten protectively.

“You’re not alone anymore. I’m not going anywhere,” he says, closing my eyelids gently with his thumbs before planting tender kisses there.

“I don’t want to be alone again,” I whisper. “Come find me.”

His weight shifts, and he pulls my head toward him, my body responding to his implied command, my lips parting in anticipation. The scruff of his stubble scratches my cheek, and then his lips are on mine. There’s a pang in my swollen lip, the place he nipped yesterday, and the spark of memory lights my body like kindling, pushing the anxiety and dread of my nightmare from me.

“I want you right here, next to me,” he says, his tone languid and inviting as he continues to explore me with his hands and mouth. Each kiss, each brush of his skin on mine, erases more of the dream until finally it fades to a memory. “I want you to know that—no matter what—I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

For the hundredth time over the last few days, I wonder how I ever let myself believe he had abandoned me. My mind spins with flashes of our passionate sex yesterday, and of anger at myself for taking so long to trust him. But that too is driven from me when he rolls onto his back, pulling me on top of him.

I straddle him, aware of the hard promise of what’s to come pinned between us. My eyes adjust again in the dark to reveal the lines of his body. But while the hewn curves of his muscles and his stacked abs are hard and brutally beautiful, he’s relaxed. He looks like Sunday morning. Unhurried. Certain. He’s liquid sex, and I want to melt into him, but he has other ideas.

His hands start at the tops of my hips, rubbing gently up my back and pressing my belly and breasts into the hollow under his chest, releasing a lifetime of tension there. He kisses my forehead and eyelids like he never plans to stop.

I burrow into him, drinking in the smoky notes of his cologne, which has long since faded into something that is only Sterling and always has been. I want to taste him, and I begin to kiss his chest, savoring the taut bands of his muscular pecs, then his collar, then his neck. I inch toward his lips, my hips moving with me and dragging my aching seam along his thick length. By the time my hair falls around us both, my mouth greedily sucking his lower lip, the promise wedged between us is nudging me open.

“Fuck, you’re so gorgeous,” he growls, the corners of a smile tugging against my mouth.

“You can’t even see me,” I tease, planting a kiss on his brow.

“I’ve got every inch of you memorized,” he says, chuckling and kissing the hollow under my jaw, driving words from my lips. “I don’t need to see.”

His fingers knead my ass, and I slide my hips further up his torso, inviting more of him—but he tucks his arms against his sides and his hands grab my hips. He yanks my body up until his mouth is between my thighs.

He pauses and my body takes over, my hips bucking closer impatiently. His soft chuckle sends a soft stream of air brushing over me.

“Do you have somewhere to be?” he teases, lightly drawing his stubble across me. “Because I’m exactly where I want to be, and I plan to be here a while.”

A whimper escapes me, and I lock my hips before they mutiny and take control. Finally, his mouth covers my cleft, the warm heat of his tongue licking across my seam. He urges my traitorous hips forward, adding just enough friction to make me light-headed.

I’ve never felt anything like it before. At first—in the brief flashes of coherent thought, anyway—it’s almost better than normal sex, the sensation warmer and gentler. Within a few moments, it feels like he’s connecting me to some deeper part of myself, and each time I exhale, it’s not just air coming out of me, it’s tension and stress and fear.

How does he always know what I need? Sometimes, when I look in the mirror, what I see looking back is something written in another language. But Sterling always knows how to read me, like he was born knowing my language.

My hands find his hair, tangling there in some desperate, subconscious attempt to tether myself to this man, who has so much power over my body and soul. Each second winds me around him, until there’s only his skin against mine, the caress of his mouth, the scratch of his jawline. I coil and wrap but there’s only one way to completely bind myself to him. “I need you inside me. Now.”