AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It was too fast. Too...rushed.
‘Relax,’ Liam murmured, dropping a final kiss on her abdomen before choosing the moment to flip them both around. He moved to the end of the bed while she pushed herself up onto her elbows to watch, a savage hunger joining that fire inside.
He was magnificent. He was always magnificent. His athletic physique a symphony of rock-solid ridges and corded muscles. And this time, when he lowered himself onto the bed on top of her, Talia gripped his shoulders and turned him over as she moved astride him.
‘That’s how you want to play it?’ he rasped. A rich, throaty sound.
‘That’s exactly how I want to play it.’ She moved her hands reverently over that incredible body, committing every last millimetre of him to memory, though she couldn’t have said why.
She tasted him and teased him, grazed his skin gently with her teeth then followed with her tongue. Her hands, her mouth slid over that hewn chest, the rippling stomach muscles and that perfect V-shape where his lower abs moved against his obliques like tectonic plates shifting beneath the earth’s crust to create the Bec Range that they had admired together a lifetime ago.
And he was every bit as awe-inspiring.
It was only as she moved lower that Liam caught her hips and moved her back up his body, and she couldn’t help but think that she’d always loved how his hands were so large and powerful that it always made her feel all the more feminine and dainty.
Then he shifted position so that her heat was pressed against the hardest part of him, and she didn’t think any more. She just felt. Letting him lift her slightly as his blunt tip edged into her, taking it slowly as she braced against his shoulders, her breath catching in her throat.
It took Talia a moment to realise that he was letting her control the pace. Letting her rock against him, her body thrumming and clamouring for him, as it always had. Leaning forward, she laid her body over his, every inch of them touching as she let him cup her cheeks with his palms and trace her jaw with his fingers.
Then, very languidly, very deliberately she reached down between them and took hold of him, wrapping her fingers around his long, thick length and testing his heavy, glorious weight in her hand. He groaned, and she exulted in the sheer freeness of the sound. Wishing it was a sound she could hear for ever.
There was something about being here, on St Victoria, that made her feel unburdened and lighter, in a way that she’d never felt back in North Carolina.
Or perhaps it was she who was different. Or Liam.
A stab of sadness shot through her, swiftly followed by a shot of urgency. He couldn’t stay here any more than she could return to Duke’s. So if this was all they were going to have, she wasn’t about wa
ste it on melancholy and what–ifs. Guiding him back to her softness, she began to move again, rocking against him as she moved back up to a seated position and then taking him inside her heat.
‘So tight.’ Liam groaned again, and a tremble rolled through her.
She inched down again to the same response, and again, until he was as deep as he could be. Then she lifted off him and did it all again in a private tango all their own. A bliss like no other as they built up the rhythm, lazy and indulgent at first, picking up pace and urgency in time, that edge heading towards her, faster and faster.
And then, suddenly, he reached down between them to press down where she ached most, and she felt herself catapulting over that abyss. Tumbling and falling with no safety net as he surged inside her, and as they plummeted back to earth together she couldn’t help calling out his name.
Or the fact that she loved him.
But she didn’t realise that she’d actually voiced it aloud until he froze against her, his length still inside her but no longer holding her as he had been a moment ago. The bliss around them shattered, with no way to piece it back together.
Well, she’d told herself to put it all the line for him, and this was undoubtedly a spectacular way of doing precisely that.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE DECLARATION HUNG in the air between them and, for what felt like an eternity Liam was too stunned to answer. And then, suddenly, he lifted her off him and flipped from the bed, grabbing a pair of cargo shorts in the process and hauling them on.
How could such beautiful, simple words actually sound so damned ugly? Or perhaps it was more that they made him feel ugly, because they reminded him of the truth he’d spent the past weeks pretending didn’t exist.
Or maybe it was because a wretched part of him bellowed to echo it back to her—and that was a terrifying thought because he was already fighting the urge to acquiesce to her early suggestion of staying on St Victoria.
‘No, you don’t,’ he bit out eventually, stalking the room.
His voice was too controlled and yet razor-sharp, as if he could silence her. As if he could reverse the last thirty seconds by sheer force of will alone.
Because even if he did say it back, and even if he thought he might mean it—somehow—he knew it would be duplicitous since he didn’t understand the concept of love. Not really. However much he wanted to.
And that meant, in the end, he would end up letting her down. Hurting her.
‘I love you,’ she repeated, quiet but firm, wrapping herself up in the pure white bedsheet that somehow only served to enhance her appearance of fragility. And made him feel even worse, as impossible as that was.
