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“Your birthday is about to get better.” Clinging to her bravery, she tightened her grip and angled his hard-on so it pointed her way. Before he could recover from the move, she lowered herself.
The wide, smooth head of his dick slid around for a second, feeling big and unwieldy in the comparatively small crevice she was trying to guide him through, but then, miraculously, she found the target, and pushed him in as far as she could before her tight muscles begged her to stop. She bit her lip to stifle a moan.
“Oh, Jesus.” His hand flew to her hip, fingers digging into her skin. The other maintained a hold on the base of his cock. “Let me…let me…”
“Don’t move,” she managed, and heard the waver in her voice over the rush of blood in her ears. She barely felt his other hand move to support her trembling thigh. The stinging pain between her legs demanded all of her attention. She switched from holding him, to holding herself, her fingers forming a wide “v” around the place where their bodies connected.
Eyes closed, she gritted her teeth, and lowered herself a little more. The ache intensified to something impossible to get beyond. Tears burned. A million frozen needles pricked her skin, making her shiver, leaving her cold everywhere except the one spot where scalding heat refused to abate. “Are—are you in?”
“Baby girl, I’m about halfway there.” His thumb swept over her trembling lip. “You’re hurting.”
Stoicism abandoned her. She nodded. “Bad.”
“Want to stop?”
The clipped words told her the offer cost him. She blinked her eyes open and took in his tense jaw, the little notch between his brows, and his gaze locked on her face. “Does it feel good to you?”
A muscle in his jaw twitched. “No… Fuck.” He dropped his chin to his chest, and groaned. “God yes. Being inside you feels like heaven.”
All her emotions threatened to break loose. Holding them back inflicted a different type of pain.
The torture of holding back.
She’d put herself between a rock and a hard place, and there was only one way out. “Okay.” She sniffed back tears and held him tighter to stop the shakes rattling her. “Okay. You do it. You’ve done this before.”
“I’ve had sex before. I haven’t done this before. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Just do it fast.”
“Sinclair…”
“Please?” Her teeth chattered over the word. “I trust you—”
He drew her back, and kissed her, hard. Then her world tipped on its axis, and she landed flat on her back on the blanket in a move controlled solely and exclusively by him. He kept right on kissing her while he hitched her leg up to his waist. The position, and simple physics, accomplished the deed in one searing second. He sank deep, tearing past her body’s fragile resistance, swallowing her gasp as if by sealing his lips to hers he could absorb the hurt. When her cry subsided to a whimper, and the pain subsided—thank you God—to something hot and…itchy, he relinquished her mouth and trailed his lips over her cheek to kiss away tears she hadn’t realized had snuck from beneath her closed eyes.
She forced them open, and drank in every beautiful plane and angle of his face, from the slope of his forehead, to the subtle hollows under his cheekbones, to his chiseled chin. “Happy birthday, Shane.” Then she followed a need too consuming to fight and rocked her hips.
A shudder wracked his body. His pupils expanded, turning his eyes dark as they stared into hers. “I love you, Sinclair,” he whispered.
The dam on her own emotions broke, and she let the words that had been building for the last three weeks tumble from her lips. “I love you, too. I love you…I love you…”
Even as she locked her arms around his shoulders and held on with everything she had, she couldn’t protect the moment. Harsh light began to filter through the network of leaves above her. It burned through everything, like film caught in a projector, obliterating the sheltering tree, the warm night, and Shane.
Dread poured into her gut, heavy and sickening, as the light separated into shapes, and then the shapes fell into focus. Serious faces peered down at her from behind white surgical masks. New pain struck, low, unrelenting, and terrifying.
She tried to cry out, but her voice was a cloud—insubstantial and beyond her reach. Everything around her kaleidoscoped, and when the whirling stopped, she was lying in a hospital bed while her father—the man who had patiently assembled a thousand Barbie accessories for her and Savannah, coached their softball teams, and given her a silver chain and heart bracelet on her last birthday because he wanted to be the first man to give her jewelry—stared at her with a look of fury and desperation on his face she’d never seen before, and never wanted to see again.
“My sixteen-year-old daughter is lying in a hospital bed, and some fucking criminal is walking around scot-free. Give me his name, Sinclair. Give me his name or I swear to God, you’re going to be grounded for real. No phone, no computer, no nothing…”
The churn of tires on gravel threw her out of the dream. She jerked upright in her chair, dragging in air like a drowning woman, scanning her surroundings through a blur of tears to reassure herself she was in the here and now.
The old boards of the barn she called home stared back at her, steady and reassuring. They’d withstood more than a century of challenges and done what they were supposed to do. Accepting the silent inspiration they offered, she wiped her face, pushed back from her worn-but-sturdy pine table, and headed to the door. She could handle half a dozen encounters with Shane Maguire.
She stepped outside, lowered her black sunglasses over her tired eyes, and slid the heavy barn door closed behind her. Shane killed his engine a moment before it clattered into place, making the noise sound all the more profound and final in the sudden silence. She turned in time to watch him climb down from the Range Rover. A civilized white button-down only emphasized the breadth of his shoulders and skimmed the trim lines of his torso before disappearing into tailored gray suit pants. With the shirtsleeves rolled up his forearms, his light-blue tie loosened, and two buttons at his throat hanging open, he looked like he’d just taken over the world and was ready for the next conquest. Then his focus landed on her, and his mouth curled up at one corner. He didn’t say a word, but every step he took to close the distance between them told her he had his next conquest in sight.
Clear, green eyes took in her long, black V-neck sweater and leggings. Yes, her favorite sapphire teardrops dangled from her ears—the ones she knew set off her eyes—but she was a jewelry designer, for Christ’s sake, and she’d be naked without at least one statement piece. She certainly hadn’t dressed up for him, and if he didn’t like it, he could just turn tail and be on his way, because she was damn tired. Two overheated, uncomfortable nights spent tossing in her bed, fighting off old memories, and new memories—it was his fault she couldn’t sit at her kitchen table for five quiet minutes without falling asleep.
Irritation propelled her down the slight slope of her yard toward the drive. He met her halfway. Before he could say a word, she cut him off. “Just so we’re clear, I’m not going to sleep with you.”
