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Belonging to this man, loving him, of that she had no doubt. Telling him that she didn’t know what she felt wasn’t an indicator that she had doubts about their relationship as he had taken it to mean. It meant she didn’t know how she felt about Cuckoo coming into their lives to take over at CI. Instinctive emotion made her want to oust the woman who’d once been intimate with her man. But Zara didn’t want the burden of carrying CI alone. Brodie would never adopt Grant’s position and without a steering hand, the company would flounder.
The hand caressing her chest was joined by its partner, doubling his ability to tease her breasts. With no other contact between their bodies, she could only focus on this act while being unaware of where Brodie was or what he had planned for her next. If she had to guess, she’d say he was kneeling beside her. But what he was doing felt so good that location didn’t matter.
When he stopped groping, he skimmed his calloused palm down her belly and she rose into that caress, hoping to encourage him and to highlight her delight, but he used his strength to force her down and hold her still for at least half a minute.
After releasing his pressure on her abdomen, he unzipped her skirt and moved from the bed to pull it off with her underwear. He picked up each of her legs to separate them, then he parted her folds with two damp fingertips and began to rub her clit.
Damming a whimper in her throat, her toes pointed and her legs tensed because glittering arousal was sending her muscles into spasm. He hummed when he slid one long finger into her and her mouth opened to gasp in the oxygen she’d been denying herself.
“You just can’t do it,” he murmured and his address gave her implicit permission to release the moan that was lodged in her chest. Another escaped in reaction to the second finger he probed her with.
“I love it when you touch me,” she whispered. “I feel amazing. You know what I need.”
His being left hers, and she relaxed her eyelids enough to get a slit-high view of him grabbing his tee shirt behind his neck and pulling it off.
“Tonight, you need to feel, not think,” he said and dropped onto his knees. Lifting her knees to his shoulders, he leaned in to kiss the button between her thighs that he’d heated up. Writhing under his tongue, she stroked her body, experiencing the ticklish flesh beneath the upright hairs stimulated by Brodie’s attention.
Just before the rush of adrenaline that hailed the onset of orgasm, she gasped and rubbed her hands over his soft, short hair. It wasn’t yet long enough for her to take handfuls of it, but that didn’t stop her from trying when the gush of climax clenched each inch of her inside and out.
With strong hands on each of her inner thighs, he forced her legs wide. As he stood to unbuckle his jeans, she scrambled back to give him room to get on the bed with her.
He climbed aboard, pulling one leg his way so he could get between them. Focused on linking their bodies, he glanced up at the last second and reading his intent expression made the slippery slide of his shaft plundering her all the more potent.
“You won’t be going anywhere after this,” he said, grinding out the words as he pumped faster.
It felt like months since she’d smiled, but she did it as she propelled her fingernails into his pecs and marked their route up to his shoulders. “I love you, beau,” she said, cupping his face and scratching his shoulders to his upper arms until he growled at her. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“It’s cute that you think you have a choice,” he said with a half-smile that widened hers.
Tightening the grip of her legs around his hips, she panted out the words, which were punctuated by his plunges.
“Yes! More! Harder!” Variations on each of these got louder and his grunts got closer together. Another shower of pleasure stretched her bones and tightened her muscles until none of her nerves or limbs seemed to connect.
Pushing so hard into her that her pelvis was crushed by his, Brodie swore once, then twice and kept on going until every drop of his gift was soaking into her cervix. Products of their agitated pulses and overworked sweat glands, their hot, sharp breaths mingled, but he stayed with her, on top of her.
“How do you feel now?” he asked, proud of his ability to claim her.
Leaving him would never have occurred to her, Brodie gave her reason. “My feelings for you were never in doubt,” she said, stroking his stubble. “I was never going anywhere.”
As her hand drifted from his face, he rolled off her to lie beside her. “You’re grieving, that’s why you feel so screwed up inside.”
Grieving, like Brodie had done after losing Art. She had grieved for the mentor, too, but the label reminded her of losing her mother and that was a memory she liked to ignore as much as she could. Without classifying the cause, she recognized that some of the difficulty she faced at CI was because she knew the truth of what had happened to Grant. People there asked about him every day, but she couldn’t tell the truth and had to keep smiling. Grant was gone and she still had questions. But that wasn’t the whole truth.
Her vision blurred and her chin fell toward her chest in time with the balls of moisture that rolled off her lashes. She didn’t want Brodie to see her crying, but it was too late. Brodie was with her, pulling her forward until she was in the grasp of his solid arms.
Brodie had lost his parents. His guardian. And now his brother. Since she’d come into his life, he’d lost person after person and yet he wasn’t the one falling apart. She was the one sobbing into his chest, clawing at him, clambering for the reassuring chill of oxygen in her lungs. But her breaths were so short they got only as far as her throat.
“I got you, baby,” he whispered, tightening his hold.
She hadn’t cried for Grant, no one had, and that in itself was sad. This wasn’t the first time she’d lost grip of her emotions in front of Brodie and despite his aversion to being too emotional himself, he always managed to comfort her in the cocoon of his arms. All she needed was his embrace. It could protect her from all kinds of pain, even the imaginary kind.
With reddened eyes and damp cheeks, she pushed back and blinked up at him. “You make everything better,” she murmured, brushing her thumbs over his lips when she squeezed her arms up between them.
“I don’t know how,” he said and his grimace made her smile. “When you’re upset, I want to shoot the shit out of something.”
“That’s how,” she said, rising to rub her cheek on his and kiss his lips. “You feel what I feel… in your own way.”
He searched her face and was as confused as she was certain, but that only made her kiss him again before yielding his hold and putting some distance between them. There were things she had to say and if she stayed in his arms, they’d either relax into sleep or divert their energy into more sex.
