She cried out, her hands tugging my hair as I slid her back down my body and kissed her open thigh.

Her watery eyes met mine and in a hungry kiss I grabbed her body and flipped her onto her back, sinking myself between her thighs.

I reached for the nightstand, but she grabbed my hand and winked shaking her head and whispering “pill” just as she hooked her legs behind me and pulled me all the way in.

“Damn,” I muttered across her mouth.

“So now he talks,” she joked softly as I moved against her.

“He’s kind…” I thrust slowly, so many feelings, her warmth, her body clenched around mine, hard verses soft, warmth and searing heat. My brain was firing so fast that I couldn’t focus on one single thing that made the moment amazing, but everything at once, in this huge epic combustible explosion of nerve reactions, not to mention privilege, that she was opening up to me—trusting me. “…of busy…right now.” I finally finished my sentence as she cried out, her breathing heavy as liquid heat surrounded me.

I wanted this forever.

No. Longer than that. I wanted it longer than that.

She kissed me deeply, her tongue sliding against mine, it was too much, the feel of being inside her, the feel of her tongue as it flicked inside my mouth, mimicking my every movement.

“You can lose control, you know.” She said pulling back. “It’s us.”

“It is us.”

I swallowed her scream as I fell over the edge, and felt her come right along with me.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Fallon

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Zane sat up in bed while I held up my hand motioning that he needed to give me a minute. When I returned with a bag of marshmallows his grin was so huge it took over half of his face. “Best sex of my life and you bring me marshmallows in bed? Who are you?”

I rolled my eyes, feeling myself blush. “I figured you’d need some sugar after all that yelling, mainly on your part.” I tossed him one. “Cursing, which by the way, still you.” I tossed him another while he rolled his eyes. “And collapsing across the bed… still you, by the way.”

“I had a lot of pent-up sexual aggression that was just released.” His naked chest was impossible not to stare at. “You can’t just release the beast from its cage and not expect it to tucker itself out.”

I covered my face with my hands. “You did not just say that.”

“Why are you blushing?” he asked innocently. “Why do you keep trying to take all of my jobs away from me, damn it! I’m supposed to be the innocent maiden, blushing at the loss of her innocence.”

I threw a pillow at his face. “British accenting me while eating mallows in bed is not the way to get laid again, sir.”

“My bad.” He opened his mouth.

I tossed another marshmallow at him then crawled into bed next to him, placing my hand against his chest, the steady rhythm of his heart. “Tell me.”

His heartbeat picked up. “Tell you what?”

“Everything.”

I expected him to hesitate, to make a joke.

He didn’t.

Instead, Zane stayed Zane, the guy I liked, the one I was head over heels for, and he started sharing.

“My first foster parents were nice. I hated the orphanage, my sisters were adopted right away. They were younger and closer in age.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Yeah well, for some reason the parents didn’t want a troublesome boy.”

My heart broke for him. “You were a bad kid?”

“I cried.” He shrugged. “Apparently, that was enough. Weakness was enough, you know? When my sisters said goodbye, they didn’t really understand what was happening, and I felt like I was letting them down. It wasn’t abandonment to me. It was more like, I was letting my grandmother down.”

“Oh, Zane.” I hugged him tighter.

“I wrote them, they wrote back—for a while at least. I was able to visit them at their perfect house. With its white shutters, blue paint, and ice tea on the porch. They were always laughing and smiling and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t.” He swallowed. “Foster home after foster home, until the end, when I was accused of raping or trying to rape my own foster mother, the jealous bitch.”

He sat up a bit, I followed. Please don’t leave, please don’t leave.

“I had three more months in the system, three months before I could go to college on a full ride scholarship. But you can’t stay in the dorms until registration. So, I stayed on the street, worked where I could, sometimes slept on friends’ couches, and basically lived the life of a bad ass nomad until school in the fall.”

“Thus the education.”

“Yeah.” He trembled. “I took music as one of my elective courses, fell in love with basically every instrument I could get my hands on, lucky for me, my professor was…” He smiled. “He was incredible. He wasn’t even my academic advisor and he let me be his TA for a semester so I could have keys to the music building. I basically slept in there.”

I frowned. “Probably better than the streets.”

“Better than anything.” His voice grew wistful. “Music surrounded me, and music has this way of feeling alive. It didn’t scare me, my anxiety wasn’t as bad because I had life around me, buzzing, comforting me, all I needed to do was hop over to the piano—with my bag of marshmallows, mind you—and everything was good.”