MC BIKER ROMANCE: Bad Boy Romance: BETRAYED: (New Adult Motorcycle Club Navy SEAL Romance) (Contemporary Military Romance Thriller) (51 page)

Chapter 10

Emma

I could think of nothing, see nothing, hear nothing. Only his hand, grasping mine firmly and pulling me along, was real.

For so long! For so many years! I had imagined what it would feel like. I had seen and heard of men and women doing foolish things, mad things, so that they could make love. And I had thought them absurd! But I was the one who was absurd! No one could have been so blind as I had been. His touch was all that mattered. His hands and where they would go … where would he put them?

The walk wasn’t long, I knew, but it felt like miles and miles before we finally came to the gate. And from there he did not bring me in! I couldn’t figure out why we were not going up the front steps into the parlor. Instead he was leading me around back.

In another mood, at another time, I might have protested. I might have stopped and demanded he tell me where we were going. But there was nowhere he could have taken me where I would not let him. There was nothing he could not do to me. My body was his, entirely, so long as he would touch my breast again as he had touched it. So long as he gave me that feeling, there was no border of propriety that I would not breach for him.

He brought me into the little cottage before the house, meant for the groundskeepers, and I saw immediately that it was where he had been living. It was a mess, and my skirts overturned empty wine bottles as we went through the gate.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I never bring women here.”

And I didn’t care! He looked so concerned, and I couldn’t have cared any less! I laughed at him, and he was taken aback, hurt. He didn’t understand that I was laughing from the absurdity that he could imagine my attention drawn to anything but his hands, and his mouth and his body.

I had to make him see! So I drew close to him, and kissed him, hard and deep on his mouth. And he kissed me back, leaning me over until I was hanging from his arms. My hair had fallen mostly out of its clasp and nearly swept the floor.

Then he forced me away from him for a moment – cruelty! – before regarding my breasts again. I was breathing too hard, and the neckline on this dress was too low and too tight. If I were not careful I would burst out of it.

I brought my hands up to the back of my dress, fumbling with the buttons to undo them, but then I felt his open mouth on my neck and became too distracted to continue. He had never kissed my neck before. No one ever had. I felt a pulsing deep in me, between my legs. My heart was pounding, but it seemed to be from there. I was dimly aware that he was undoing the buttons of my dress. But it was too slow! One by one by –

He’d ripped the rest of them, and his lips were again on mine, his tongue in my mouth. I could feel nothing but his mouth and the pulsing desire in me, but after a moment I felt my corset begin to loosen, and then I was stepping out of all of it, all of that hateful cloth, standing next to him in only my thin cotton undergown.

Then I felt his hand on my legs, lifting up the skirt of my undergown. It touched my skin only fleetingly – only barely. It felt almost accidental but he must know it was driving me mad! I could not stand it. I wanted his hand to touch there, where I was soft, and wet, and had been saved only for him.

But his hand glanced right over it, and touched only my stomach, tracing a line up to my full, round breasts. This way felt much more natural than when he had touched me by the river. His hand cupped one, teasing my nipple with his thumb.

Oh, how did he know? The gentlest touch there made me almost fall. It was like he was controlling me as a puppet.

Then I felt my arms move. My light undergown had come up over my head, and I was standing before him, completely naked. And his mouth … his mouth was on my neck, kissing me there again. And then his lips were gingerly touching my collarbone. And then just at the very top of where my breast began to bulge out and then …

I felt a moan begin, deep in my body. His mouth was on my nipple and my knees were weak. I was falling! But he caught me, and lifted me, and carried me to the bed where he draped me over it like an empty dress. And there he began where he had left of, with his mouth on my nipple.

The feeling was so strong! So much stronger than I’d ever imagined it could be. I
needed
him to touch me lower. I could not wait. And if he would not then I would need to. My hand, lying by my side, began to creep towards myself. I had to be touched there, I had to feel it.

Suddenly, his hand was on my wrist, pinning it to the bed. He would not let me! I let out an involuntary cry into the stifling, hot air of the room, warmed by our bodies.

And then I felt his lips on the skin just below the curve of my chest. He was moving down, down, further … he kissed my bellybutton and kept going. It was a mystery to me what he could be doing. No one had ever told me, no one had ever taught me how this was going to be, or how desperately I would want it.

And then I felt it – his mouth where I had longed for his fingers to go. The warm soft tongue that had just minutes ago been in my mouth now gently caressing my other lips.

That was when I began to feel it: the pleasure was building on itself. Something was growing inside me. The pleasure was becoming more and more intense.

I thought I couldn’t stand it before, but now I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was making noises: first more moans as I had made before but then building to half-animal cries. I was losing myself. Soon I wouldn’t be anyone. I wouldn’t be anywhere. I wouldn’t be anything. The pleasure was all there was.

It felt like waking up after a long, restful sleep, though I knew from where he was that it had only been a moment. Where I had been so excited and exhilarated before, now I felt only peace and a sudden, intense, deep affection for the man in front of me. I would do anything for him. I would go anywhere he wanted me to go. I put my hands on the sides of his head to urge him up, closer to my face, where he kissed each of my breasts. I stopped to look at him.

I traced his face with my fingers. His eyes. His bushy, unkempt eyebrows. I looked at every inch of his face in the soft moonlight from the window. He was beautiful. He was a beautiful man. I saw what my time away had done to him, written here on his face, and I felt sorry. This was more than the guilt I’d felt. It was different. Instead of just feeling bad I wanted to make it up to him. I would do whatever it took to erase what I’d done to him, and dedicate everything in me to give him just a small piece of the joy and the pleasure he’d given me.

I laughed, and this time he understood why I was laughing. It was laughter of pure, concentrated joy. And he kissed me for it, and our bodies intertwined.

We lay like that for a while. I could feel him, beneath his trousers, stiff and huge with desire, but he took his time, and let me undress him, button by button. His skin was a new world to me, hidden as it had always been under clothes. I couldn’t keep my hands off of him. I ran my hand from his neck all the way down to his trousers, and let my hand linger. I could feel the excitement that he’d exhausted in me earlier building up again. He was smiling, seeing my eagerness. I must have seemed so inexperienced to him, but he was only loving and guiding. He undid the buttons on his trousers and guided my hand inside.

His manhood was so smooth, and so very, very hard. It was like a rock covered in silk that he had hidden away. My pulse was rising, and I found I didn’t know what to do. I wanted it. I wanted
him
inside me. My mind began to grow fuzzy again. The clarity I had gained when he had done whatever magic it was he had done to me before was quickly disappearing. And so he took over, and laid me down flat again on the bed.

He took my hands from where they were near his waist and pinned them above my head. Then he kissed me, softly, deeply, for a long time, and I didn’t even notice that he’d opened my legs with his knees.

He drew back, just for a moment, but my lips missed his and I lifted my head towards him until I felt him enter me, and I fell back on the bed, in awe. It was beginning to rise in me again, the wild desire and pleasure that I had felt earlier. But this time it was even greater as I saw the same pleasure rising in him. My hips began to move with him, feeling him farther and farther in me. We moved faster and faster until I was on the edge of what I had felt before.

But he didn’t stop, he just held me there, on the edge, feeling that rush, that absence of mind, for what felt like hours. I couldn’t take it. My body couldn’t last any longer.

Finally, when he was ready, he pushed me over the edge and I felt the absence, and the sudden clarity, and when I came back to myself I was wrapped in him. His skin on my skin, and our arms and legs again intertwined.

We lay like that for some time before either of us spoke. I only listened to his breathing and watched his chest rise and fall. Then we readjusted, and he lay on his back with my head on his chest, his fingers lightly stroking my arm. From here I could see his room entirely. I’d barely seen it when we came stumbling in, but now I had the chance to observe it more closely.

It looked like
him
. In a very real way I could see him living here. The chairs were the sort of chairs he would like. The walls were decorated with some old paintings I’d known his family to have for years. It was just like him, I thought, to have saved these paintings even when the entire little cottage showed sure signs of being in money trouble. There were newspapers strewn about, which I figured he probably stole from the club. Certainly he’d still go there. And there were scribblings on papers that made me smile. It was a thing he would always do, to write down a thought he had of something he needed to do and wanted to remind himself not to forget, or an idea he had in the middle of the night. When we’d been together before I would always find these, and gather them up. But here, with no one else to see them, they just accumulated.

I wanted to get up and run around picking them up and reading them, smoothing out the crinkled ones and ordering them. It felt like some of the years of his life that I’d missed could be found in these little papers.

But nothing in the world, not even that, could have pried me from the tight, warm embrace of his arms.

After a long time, he spoke.

“You can’t imagine how I’ve longed for this.”

I turned my head so that I could see him, and then couldn’t stop myself from kissing his lips.

“I didn’t even know it would be like this. I didn’t know this was even something to long for. I thought it was only a thing that men wanted.”

With a smirk on his face, he adjusted us so that he was on top of me, looking down on me with my hair splayed all out across the pillow.

“Did you really?” he asked. “And how did you think it was that men talked women into this if it wasn’t enjoyable for them?”

The thought was amusing to me. Such a blind spot I’d had in the middle of my mind. What a hole there had been in my perception of things!

“I’d never really considered it.”

He seemed equally amused, until a thought struck him like a dart in the neck, and all amusement vanished from his face. He was instantly serious, and my pulse raised with a threat to our newly found joy.

“Do you think, if you did know what it was like, and you knew what I could offer you, you would still have left?”

He wanted an answer, but I didn’t have one for him. What answer could there be? I couldn’t tell him why it was I had to go, and in the absence of that, what would one variable more or less matter?

“Would you have had this to offer me, though? Just the same?”

That brought back his playfulness, and his smile. But the troubled look he’d had on his face for a moment haunted me, and haunted the rest of the conversation.

“Perhaps not,” he admitted.

“Yes, it seems you’ve had some practice.”

The words weren’t harsh as they left my mouth. I wasn’t threatened by them anymore. Whatever other women there were, they were not a threat to me, and with the pleasure that this brought us, I could not imagine condemning him for having done it before. If any of his actions made him the man that could make me feel this way, then I could never complain.

He began to try and reassure me that they meant nothing, and that he’d only been mine, in his heart, the whole time. But I didn’t need those reassurances. I didn’t doubt his heart. I’d never doubted his heart. I lifted my finger to his lips.

“Shhhh,” I said, and then lifted my head so that my lips could go where my finger had just been.

“Did you ever get close?” he asked, and I found my mind casting back.

“Not really,” I said, and I meant it. “I mean to say I was never close to passion. I found myself somewhat on the edge of what may be thought of as business marriages. They would have been advantageous for me and for him. This happened a few times. My family money made for that. And the title. I was a catch.”

“Yes,” he said, dour again. I wished there was some way to avoid these traps in the conversation if I could know what would disappoint him and avoid saying it.

“I waited for you,” he said. “I waited for you for two years. I thought you might come back.”

What was one to say? I was never coming back. I never meant to. His hope had been in vain.

“I didn’t wait. I just decided not to ever go on that way. I never took my heart back from you. I left it with you. And I went on without a thought that I would ever need it for anything. There was never going to be anyone else but you that I was going to love.”