Random Acts of Hope (19 page)

I made a sound that isn’t found in nature.

“I have,” I gasped, “every kind of condom and lube known to man.”

He let go and looked up with an expression that made me want to lick every square inch of his body. Some parts twice, even.

“I thought you didn’t…”

“Sex toy party leader. Occupational hazard. Product samples.” I reached down with my spare hand and slid the base of my palm
up his shaft, from the lowest point on up.
 

His hand snaked around my wrist, holding it, hard. Eyes that met mine fairly glowed with intensity as he let go, my other hand still stroking, his thigh muscles twitching. Veins on his neck strained against his skin as he held himself in check, sliding the condom on with precision, then picking me up entirely and flipping me down on my back, my body craving him.

The tender kiss he gave me was completely out of touch with the moment, yet so welcome, soft lips nuzzling against mine, slow tongue
e
njoying its stay. He pulled back and I opened my legs, his thickness pressed against my clit, making me buck up, seeking him.

With a shaking hand I reached down and guided him.

Guided him home.

The first press of the tip against me made color spark again behind my closed eyelids, my hands finding his corded arm musc
l
es, the slick fullness of Liam making me pulse around him. His back arched as he lifted himself up, my heels digging into his ass, our movements slow and steady, determined and enjoyable.

The languid slide of want against want, breeding friction and desire.

He dipped down, then, body so tense I knew he was barely seconds away from his own release, a vortex inside mixing all the pain, the betrayal, the questions, the sheer years that felt timeless and forging something new from it all in
this
moment, in
that
kiss, in
his
caress, in
my
abandon.

Tears formed in the corners of my eyes and I turned my head, so swept away by the wellspring of everything that his body, his hands, h
i
s mouth and his very presence brought me. Suddenly self-conscious, I could handle being naked with Liam, could welcome his face between my thighs, could savor the sensual intimacy of his mouth tasting me everywhere, could be pierced by his cock and made love to, split in half and made whole.

To let him see me cry felt like a transgression. Like the ultimate vulnerability.

He saw it, though, and slowed—but did not stop. With sad eyes, lashes so long they cast spidery shadows when he blinked, he bent down and kissed each tear away, the barest hint of his tongue coming out to taste it.

Then his salty mouth took mine, body rising up, the thrusts more insistent. Claiming. Demanding.

Erasing.

As we crested, cries of each other’s names cut through the space between us, caught like butterflies in a net, flailing and stuttering without hope of escape,
yet so beautiful
. Liam’s climax over, he leaned down on me, his breath a hollow rasp in my ear, and then the words came back.

“I missed you so much,” he rasped, his body releasing fully after the words, layers of muscle dropping deeper. Fuller. Entirely.

“Me too,” I confessed.

I’ve missed so much.

Charlotte

I woke to a man covered in red. In my bed.

A naked man streaked with red paint.

“What in the bloody hell?” I shouted, jumping out of my own bed and standing on the tiny area rug in front of my bedstand. A cold bl
a
st of air-conditioned air made me look down and see that
I
, too, was naked.

And marked for war.

Li
a
m McCarthy moved those long, lean, tree-trunk legs and the sheets twisted with him, his deliciously nude body even more delect
a
ble in the daylight.

“Good morning to you, too, Merry Sunshine.
Di
d we have an arts ’n crafts session last night I forgot about?”

His face—oh, God, the right half of his face was covered in thick, dried blood, right under the wound.

“Liam, you should have gone to the ER.”

He reached up, flinching as he touched the spot. “No need.
I
t’s fine. I don’t need stitches.”

“How do you know?”

He sat up, washboard abs curling in, the fan of rib muscles so fascinating I felt like I was watching a cable nature show. I hadn’t seen a naked man up close like this in—

Well, since Liam. And boy, had his body changed.

Mine had, too.
I realized I was standing in my own bedroom, completely naked with a man for the first time in five years, and that nagging, tingly feeling in my nether regions, the unbearable sense of needing something, was completely gone.
 

I’d had sex. Sex. Last night.

And it had been amazing. AH-MAZE-BALLS.

But right now, Liam’s eyes were combing over me, his mouth curling into a smile that made that tingling come right back with a big old roar, but he looked like a man out of
The
W
alking Dead
who was three seconds away from being zombie feed.

“We need to clean you up.”

“I don’t mind being dirty.”
H
e lung
e
d across the bed, pu
l
ling me down by the (naked) waist, all my soft, squishy parts pushing against his hard, chiseled parts, and it felt
soooo
good.

“I don’t want to reopen that wound, and if you—” He tried to kiss the words out of me, but Professional Charlotte kicked in.
I
f this were one of my students I’d insist they seek medical treatment, right?

Then again,
if
this were one of my students, I wouldn’t have
c
hipped a clipboard at their head and then fucked them three times in the course of six hours.

So I should
n’t
be throwing my professional standards into the mix, here.

Liam, thank God, was not a student.

“I’m not getting stitches,” he insisted, sliding reluctantly off me and walking into the bathroom. I turned ove
r
on my belly and propped my head in my hands, enjoying the view. How could a man’s ass move like that, without the padding on the hips, and with so much animal grace that you just wanted to watch it forever?

The muscles around his spine were like a vine of ivy—turn just an inch in one direction and the whole chain moved. The thick little spot of hair at the cleft of his ass was new. Hadn’t been there five years ago. He’d thickened out everywhere, and I do mean
everywhere
.

“Shit!” he called out. “You reall
y
got me.”

I winced. “I told you it was bad. Let’s go to a walk-in clinic. Insurance will—”

“Don’t have insurance,” he said quietly. “I’ll just clean this up. Myself.” He turned on the sink and the running water made it impossible for him to hear me.

Which was the point.

“No insurance?” I
aske
d as I walked into the bathroom. A huge wave of self-consciousness struck me. Cover up? Throw on a robe? Wear pajamas? But Liam’s openness and casual nature rubbed off on me. I decided to go with the flow, even as I was an internal wreck, trying to reconcile the flood of eight thousand emotions inside.

Right now it was easier to worry about his gash.

He waved his hand. “Dad was supposed to keep me on his plan, but he says he’ll
only
insure me if I come work for him.” Liam’s dad’s dealership was enormous.

“Pressuring you?” I leaned against the doorjamb as he wiped the blood away. I struggled not to laugh inappropriately.
H
e had dried blood in, um, some inter
e
sting places. Along his ribs,
in
his belly button.

I pulled back and opened my mouth to start another question and he burst out laughing, staring at my belly. “What’s so funny?” I demanded, instantly worried that my curvier figure was now under scru
tin
y.

“Check out the
Liam
trail.”
His chest puffed out with pride.
 

I looked down. A little rust-colored line from one nipple to the other, then right down the center of my torso to my mons.

“You’re better than GPS,” I joked.

“That is one trail I don’t need a map for,” he said, then winked. Then winced, because he used his injured eye to wink.

“Your dad wants you to work for the family business?”

“Yep.”

“What does he think of your stripping?”

“He’s so proud.”

“You know I’m going to ask all these hard questions, right? You can go all quiet and taciturn like you always do, and I’ll just keep poking and asking until you open up.”

“Nothing’s changed in five years.”

“Everything’s changed in five years.”

He pulled away from the mirror and looked at me, his fingers
p
eeling back the skin of his scalp. I could see pink, but not white, thank
G
od. I hadn’t gotten him to the bone.

“You have any
S
uper
G
lue?”

“What?”

“I need to glue my head.”

Liam

Some part of me couldn’t quite believe I was standing
in
Charlotte’s tiny little tiled bathroom, naked, covered in dried blood
with
the scent of her on my nose, in my stubble, on my lips and coating my cock, while she nattered at me like a nervous mother bird.

And I liked it.

She was so lush. My eyes couldn’t stop landing on that body, her belly a little curved slope that begged for me to rest my cheek on it, those hips needing to be palmed, that ass womanly and divine. I was getting hard again looking at her, and I knew that if she saw me standing at att
en
tion it would be awkward. There’s only so much making up you can do when you’ve had a breach like ours.

So far, so good, though.

A weird hissing sound started in another part of the apartment. “Boiler?” I asked, searching through her medicine cabinet for alcohol or hydrogen peroxide. I found the H2O2 and prepared for pain.

“Coffeemaker.”

“You’re a goddess.”

“A goddess who made you bleed.”

“A goddess who will bring me coffee in bed.”

“That an order?”

“A fantasy.”

“You have low expectations.”

“You set a high bar for all other woman.”

“And given how many women you’ve been with, I am going to hope that’s a compliment.”

And…game. Set. Match.

I kn
e
w when to quit. The sting of the hydrogen peroxide helped drown out that little zinger. Soon I had my face cleaned up, though I was still covered in my own blood. Charlotte looked like something out of an anthropology student’s grad school project.
She’s refused to give me Super Glue—said it was in her office and she didn’t want anyone to discover I was here.
 

“I almost hate to take a shower with you,” I said as I took my first grateful sip.

“Who said anything about showering together?” Her eyes bugged out. But she stayed naked, legs crossed casually, as if it were the most normal thing in the world for us to be
nude
at her kitchen table, drinking coffee on a Saturday morning in her little university apartment.

And it was.

But it wasn’t.

“
I did.”
 

A slow, sultry smile stretched that beautiful face, making her more of a woman, mature and blossoming. And…I was hard.

“I see the caffeine is waking
part
of you up.”

I took a deep sip. “That’s not the caffeine.”

She looked down at her breasts, eyes flicking between them, then look
ed
down the crest of her belly. “I do think a shower is in order.” Keeping her chin down, she tipped her eyes up, those orbs framed by long lashes. “Care to join me?”

I abandoned the coffee and sprinted to the bathroom so fast, reaching in to turn on the hot jets. Charlotte followed, laughing, still carrying her coffee. I pointedly found my jeans, pulled out a condom, and felt her eyes on me every inch of the way.

Why be coy when we both kn
e
w the score?

I tucked the condom on the bathtub’s edge and reached for the mug in her hands. My dry palms smoothed her hair, her face turned up to look at me, the worry lines that I’d noticed between her eyes now gone.

“This,” I said
a
s steam rose up from behind her shower curtain, “feels so good.”

Her hand wrapped around my cock.

“This?”

I hissed as I inhaled, the
n
reached down and reluctantly peeled her fingers off. I had a point to make before anything else, and I couldn’t make it with her fingertips milking me. That’s the surest way to make my brain take a vacation to Lustland.

“This,” I said, enveloping her in a hug more intimate than most sex acts. I just held her, so sure and happy to be back where I knew I belonged. All the hurt, all the unspoken pain was still there, but it was less potent somehow. More dull. The edge had been filed off, and while it needed to be handled, we’d do it. One step at a time.

She pulled back, lip quivering a bit, eyes shiny with unflowing tears. “This,” she said with a sigh.

I reached into the shower and tested the water. Then I pulled back the curtain and took one look at the shower head.

“There is no way that is university regulation plumbing equipment.” The shower head had two parts to it and looked like something out of a half espresso
machine
/half sex toy catalog.

“That is the single, celibate woman’s guide to nirvana.”

I sized it up. “My competition?”

“My
hydro-
boyfriend.”

Charlotte

There are times when you’re in the mood for deep, penetrating, soulful lovemaking where you’re in the groove with each other’s hearts and bodies, warm flesh shocking the other’s
blissful skin
with the allure of desire and need, mutual pleasure the pinnacle of the day’s activities.