Unbeloved (20 page)

“
We’re all a little broken,” I whispered, reaching up into my hair and brushing my fingers over my scar. “And you don’t have to do anything, just lie there and I’ll do it all.”

I nearly clapped my hand over
my mouth, disbelieving the words that had just come out of me. Those weren’t my words, they were the words of a confident woman, a worldly woman who could make her own decisions, one who saw what she wanted and went for it, no outside persuasion necessary.

I wasn
’t that woman.

But just
maybe . . . I could pretend to be.

“
Woman,” Hawk said, his voice growing significantly deeper, more lyrical than before, something I’d learned long ago was attributed to his arousal. “You can’t say somethin’ like that then just keep standin’ there. Get your damn ass over here.”

Burning with a sudden blossoming embarrassment
, I slowly began rounding the bed. I was overly aware of Hawk’s gaze on me, traveling up and down my body, and desperately trying not to blush because of it. As it was, my stomach was once again fluttering, and worse, I was starting to sweat.

Reaching his side of the bed, I paused,
searching out a way to climb atop him without hurting him, but Hawk’s hand stayed me. Reaching out, his palm grazed my side and ran down the length of me before settling on my hip.

My breath hitched
and my eyes fluttered closed. His touch on my naked skin, so familiar yet so foreign, was both comforting and disconcerting. I had to remind myself that this was Hawk, and that my love for him superseded the years we’d spent in limbo.

“
I missed you,” he said hoarsely. “I fucking missed you, D.”

My eyes flew open to find him staring up at me, at my body, with an almost reverent look on his face.
It was moving in a way that left me unable to find the right words to describe it, and crushed to dust any lasting reservations I’d been feeling.

Tears burned behind my eyes. To hell with being a strong and sure woman. This was the man I loved. I didn
’t need to be strong or sure; I just needed to be with him.

“
I missed you too,” I whispered. It was a seemingly silly thing to say to a man I saw on a regular basis, but it was the truth. I’d missed him terribly, in the way of a person who has loved and lost someone who’d remained a part of their life—close, yet never close enough.

Death would have been a much easier loss than to have
to live every day with the guilt of a mistake, a misstep that you couldn’t fathom how to ever again make right.

But none of that mattered anymore.

And maybe there was really was something to what Eva was saying about fate.

Maybe there
was . . .

Hawk
squeezed my hip lightly, abruptly ending my train of thought. Slowly, as if I were made of glass, he began to slide his hand across my stomach. His touch was so unbelievably light, a barely there fluttering sensation that caused my eyelids to grow heavy. The sensation only grew as he traveled higher, his fingertips drawing invisible lines on their upward journey between my breasts. Dancing over the top of them, he paused, hovering over one breast, his calloused palm causing the nipple to tighten beneath it, and a shiver to slither down my spine.

“
Hawk . . .” I breathed his name, nothing more than a puff of air slipping from my lips. At my sides my fingers began to twitch restlessly, my body aching for more.

And he gave me more.

His hand closed around my breast, squeezing and kneading the soft flesh, leaving me breathing harder.

It was a beautifully tortuous game he was playing with me,
and one I wouldn’t have any other way. I might have walked into this room with the silly notion that I would take control of the situation, when in reality I needed him to go as slow as he was, to be as careful as he was being, working me up to the point where he knew I’d be comfortable and ready for more.

His hand dropped from my breast, traveling slowly down the same path back to my stomach and then lower,
running his fingertips between my legs, but just barely touching the sensitive skin. I swallowed back a threatening whimper. It had been so long since I’d been touched like this and my body was a veritable volcano, threatening to erupt from the simplest of touches.

He saw this, my response to him, and his pupils began to dilate
; his breaths grew louder, and more pronounced. All his reactions told me I wasn’t the only one so affected, and that knowledge—knowing he was feeling every bit of what I was—was so incredibly intoxicating,

My moans came out in staccato breaths as h
is fingers began to play, his touch still so astoundingly gentle that I was beginning to have trouble concentrating on anything other than the feel of him and the deeply buried sensations he brought to life, to light, within my body.

My name
was a low rumble past his lips and then he slid a finger up inside me. I cried out, biting down on my bottom lip as heat roared through my trembling body, filling it with the sort of heart-pounding adrenaline that made me weak in the knees, leaving my body a mass of quivering muscle and skin. I didn’t know where I was, who I was, and didn’t care to ever know. All I wanted, all I needed, was this.

Him.

“Come here,” he said, his voice a throaty growl as he removed his hand from my body.

It took me a moment to regain my bearings, but only a moment as I was more than desperate to touch him now, desperate to have him inside me again.

Quaking knees aside, I managed to climb up over him without hurting him. It helped that I was so much smaller than him, so as I settled myself over his hips, he didn’t as much as flinch.

“
Is this okay?” I whispered.

“
This is more than okay,” he said, and through his boxers, I felt him jerk beneath me, hard and ready. The movement caused my body to clench, to fill with a rush of eager need.

Leaning
forward, I placed both my hands on his chest and pressed my mouth to his lips, and just celebrated in the act of touching him again.

His body
, like his mouth, was warm, and as I stroked his chest, his tattooed skin twitched beneath my palms. I took my time with him, kissing him slowly while tracing every line on his body—his thickly defined pectorals, the indented muscles over his abdomen, the dipping grooves of his hips . . . Until finally, I couldn’t take another second of waiting, and lifted off him just enough to slip my hand inside his boxers.

My shaking hands fumbled a bit as I tried to align our bodies.

Unused to the act of sex, unused to having a man inside me, I could only slowly move up and down, easing him gently inside me with unsteady and unsure maneuvers until finally, I felt my body give way and allow him full entry.

“
Dorothy . . .” Hawk more groaned than spoke my name.

Breathing hard, I raised my head to look at him.

“You’re so crazy tight,” he whispered, his eyes unusually wide, surprise tingeing his tone.

I blushed, partly because Hawk was inside me and instead of making love we were having a conversation
, but mostly because I
was
so incredibly tight. I could feel everything—every ridge, every pulse, the way my body was throbbing around his, absolutely everything. And although it was slightly uncomfortable, it was beautifully filling.

“
It’s . . . been a while,” I whispered.

“
How long?” he whispered back.

I looked down at his chest, feeling silly
, and even more embarrassed that all our foreplay had led to this. Talking about how tight I was. Good God.

Then I felt
Hawk’s fingertips touch beneath my chin, lifting my head.

“
How long?” he repeated. But he already knew the answer. The look on his face was one I’d only seen once before, the one and only time we’d ever been able to spend an entire night together. It was years ago; the club had been empty, everyone had gone to a bike rally across state lines. I’d woken up curled beside him to find him already awake and watching me sleep.

“Good morning,” I’d said sleepily
that morning, stretching as I’d yawned.

He
’d never answered me, just given me that look, a look that spoke more than words ever could. A look that told me I was his world.

“
Was it me?” he asked, and I could tell, not by his tone but by his eyes, the way they darkened when he asked, that he wanted it to have been him.

And, oh G
od, I wished it had been him, more than anything I wished that now. But it wasn’t true and I refused to ever lie to him again.

I opened my mouth, an apology already forming on my lips, but he cut me off by pulling me forward and into a kiss.

“Never mind,” he mumbled against my lips. “That shit don’t matter anymore.”

And then, when I couldn
’t take much more and had to break the kiss in order to start moving my hips, needing to relieve the building pressure inside me, I pushed myself upright and, gripping his pectorals, began to rock my body over his.

“
Hawk . . .” His name fell from my lips, over and over again, each time more and more breathless, while I grew more and more senseless.

His eyes, firmly fixed on me, were black liquid fire, searing every inch of me, his body a hot and throbbing volcano
below me, within me. Me, I was mere kindle, alit with his every attention. And together . . . together we burned.

Gasping, whimpering, crying out his name, clawing at his
skin . . . I fucking burned.

We burned the way I
’d remembered us, young and full of lust, and then it was more than that, more than it had ever been. It wasn’t just sex or lust, it wasn’t just love, it was something else entirely, a feeling I couldn’t explain, a word without a sound.

But it was everything I
’d been searching for.

He was everything I
’d been searching for.

What filled the
unfillable hole inside me.

And when it was over, when I was lying on my back half atop him, half on the bed, and Hawk was running his hands over my body, he paused over the scar on my abdomen, softly tracing the result of my C-section.

I couldn’t help but think of Christopher in that moment. And Hawk’s eyes, when we turned to face each other, softened exponentially. His son did that to him. To us. Made him a different man. A better man. And me a better woman.

H
owever brief the moment was, the warmth it left me feeling as Hawk’s hands resumed their traveling was unparalleled and left me reeling. To love someone was one thing, but to share a child with someone you love, to share the love you both had for that child . . . together . . .

It was a heartbreakingly beautiful revelation that gave me the insight I
’d been missing.

And suddenly I knew.
In that very moment, I just knew. It all made sense.

It had always been meant to be.

My lifeless marriage had led me to Jase, and Jase had led me to Hawk. And Hawk and I had created a child we both cherished.

None of it had been a mistake
. It had just been my path, my cracked and broken road to home.

And if I hadn
’t loved him already, I would undoubtedly love him now.

It had taken me half a lifetime, years filled with heartache and one bad decision after another
. But I’d finally found him, my prince, hiding inside a man who’d been there all along.

• • •

Dorothy had been naked.

Granted she was still naked, had been naked for a while now and they
’d already fucked, but still, Hawk couldn’t get that image of her walking out of the bathroom butt-ass naked out of his head. She’d never done shit like that, not in all the years they’d been together. It had always been him who’d made the first move, him who’d undressed her, him who’d initiated sex.

This. Her. Naked. Them. It was like Christmas fucking morning.

Now she was lying on top of him, her back to his front. Because he couldn’t lie any other way except on his back without the accompanying pain, he’d had a hard time touching her while they’d fucked. Unable to touch her the way he’d wanted had pissed him off so badly that for the last hour, he’d forced her to lie on top of him so he could easily grope all those parts of her he’d missed out on. Because of how short she was, this worked out perfectly for him, and also allowed their heads to rest side by side.

At the moment
he had one hand between her legs, a finger up inside her, softly stroking inside and out, over and over again, while his other hand alternated between stroking her breasts when he could focus long enough to switch it up.

When he bit
down softly on her shoulder, she let out a small gasp, and Hawk grinned against her skin, biting down harder, thrusting his fingers faster.