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“You feel incredible, Pru. All for me,” he said and she nodded.
“All for you,” she said as her hips began to move, and he thought his eyes would roll to the back of his head with the pleasure she gave him.
* * *
PJ couldn’t stay still. Gabe filled her so completely, making her wild with the need to feel more, feel everything as sensations rained down on her. His mouth was on her lips, then her neck, then her breasts as she became more swollen, more wet with need.
He drove into her again and again, and she knew, somehow, it would never be enough. She would never tire of him, of this connection to him.
“Gabe,” she moaned as he drew back and teased her with shorter strokes, drawing out the pleasure rushing through her. His hand dropped between them and his fingers found her clit, pressing, circling, driving her mad.
Her muscles clamped down on him as she felt herself fall over the edge in what seemed like record time. He pushed deep and hard and long again, abandoning the small strokes, filling her as he came with her.
When the aftershocks left her system, she wrapped her arms around Gabe where he’d fallen half on top of her, half to the side as if he held his weight off her.
“Relax. I won’t break,” she said and pulled him down closer. He groaned, but sank onto her. The weight of him felt good. Reassuring in some way.
God, she already felt so much for this man. So much it scared her when she thought about it. So she tried not to. She wouldn’t let what had happened with Jimmy Mondo and Kurt Tolleson spoil this for her.
Gabe rose up, leaned on one elbow and looked into her eyes. She felt vulnerable, like he could see everything she was thinking, and more.
“Any regrets?” he whispered, kissing the knuckles of the hand he held in his.
She shook her head. “No.”
“Ready to do that again?” he asked.
He dropped his head to her breasts, beginning a trail that led him under the covers, and that took her breath away again, just as quickly as she’d gotten it back. And it was quickly obvious he wasn’t kidding about doing it again.
Chapter 18
The call came at five am, waking them both. There had been a screw-up at the prison.
When Ellis had been transferred to the county lockup from the local precinct, somehow the suicide watch hadn’t been communicated. At three am, Ellis hanged himself using strips of his prison sheets.
Gabe held PJ as she cried, and he spoke quietly to her, telling her it would be all right, but he knew it wouldn’t be. Her heart was breaking, and he didn’t know how to fix it.
Ellis left a note with only the words ‘I’m so sorry, PJ’ written on it. The officer who called them believed the note was proof of his guilt, and he knew the rest of the team would believe that as well. The police felt he’d been so guilt-ridden over what he’d done to PJ and to Jimmy that he’d taken his own life.
Gabe had seen the look in PJ’s eyes when she heard the words he’d written. She didn’t want to think Ellis had done this, but he saw in her eyes that she was beginning to believe he had. That maybe it had been faithful, loyal, so-in-love-with-her Ellis all this time.
It made sense. He’d had a crush on her for so long. Gabe suspected he’d seen her putting her journal away at some point and had stolen it. Probably to see if she ever wrote about Ellis. And, instead, he’d found out her biggest secret. That she’d given up a child just as his own mother had done to him.
The one thing Ellis hadn’t learned from the journal was Matt’s true identity. PJ always wrote about Matthew as her cousin. She wrote about her birth child and how she missed him, missed holding him and seeing him every day, but she didn’t connect the two up in her journal.
She had told Gabe it was a way to protect herself a bit. Never letting herself think of Matthew as that child. As hers. It allowed her to love him in the way she needed to: as her cousin, not her son.
Still, with the timeline and her cousin’s age, it wasn’t hard to think the tabloids would have put two and two together and come up with Matthew once they knew there was a baby out there.
PJ took a deep, shuddering breath. “Do you think it was him? Was it Ellis all this time?” she asked, as though reading his thoughts.
“I don’t know, sweetheart. I’d like to think he wouldn’t have done this, but something made him say he was sorry. Something drove him to kill himself. Guilt is a pretty powerful thing. Maybe he couldn’t reconcile loving you and hating you all at the same time. Loving the you he’d known all these years, but hating that you’d given up a child. Chad said Ellis’s early years were really hard. He’d been in a lot of foster homes, and even a group home situation before Lydia’s parents adopted him. To him, the happy ending you were able to find with Matthew’s adoption didn’t seem possible.”
“I just don’t want to think he could have done this. He’s always been there for me. Even though he knew I didn’t feel the same way for him that he did for me, he was always my friend. He was always so good. I can’t see him taking a life. Even someone like Jimmy. The Ellis I knew wasn’t capable of that.”
“Maybe he saw Jimmy as the reason you gave up Matthew. If he hadn’t pushed for the abortion so hard, if he hadn’t gotten such a young girl pregnant, you wouldn’t have had to do what you did. It could be that it was hard for Ellis to blame you for it since he’s loved you all this time, but easier to turn that rage on Jimmy.”
Gabe kissed her temple. “Try to get some rest, honey. We probably won’t ever know why he did any of this. You need to rest.”
