“Yes.”
I flicked my thumb over her clit.
It was instant. The way I felt her shatter.
Spasms rocked through her body.
Her pleasure in my hand.
Pooling and throbbing and speeding.
She curled her fingers into my hair, yanking hard, a scream locked in her throat. I ran my lips over it, across the vibration that blazed under the soft, delicate flesh, silently commanding her to keep it bottled and contained.
She rode on that ecstasy, tiny whimpers slipping from her mouth while all the wicked things I wanted to do to her welled up to feel like something precious that I held in my hands.
Like it would be okay to sink into her.
Claim her as mine.
And I knew I was losing it.
The way I had the intense urge to kiss her. Hold her. Promise her it would all be okay.
Instead, I slipped out of her body while I promised myself this could never happen again.
I lifted my hand and sucked my fingers into my mouth.
All fucking woman on the tip of my tongue.
“One last taste.” It was a warning and a growl, and Grace was watching me as the shock of what I’d just done to her came crashing down.
She tried to gather herself, drawing in a bunch of breaths as she quickly fumbled to readjust her clothes. “I . . . I . . .” She stuttered, looking everywhere, maybe for an escape. “I need—”
I grabbed her by the chin, running the thumb I’d just had on her body across her lip.
She emitted a tiny groan when I dipped it inside and pressed it to her tongue.
“Shh,” I told her. “I won’t do that again. I just . . . needed to touch you one last time.”
She could barely nod, but those eyes went soft in a sad sort of surrender, the words choked when they floated out in the inch of space that separated us. “You could wreck me, Ian Jacobs.”
I brushed my fingers through her hair. “Too late, Angel Girl. I think it’s you who’s already wrecked me.”
Twenty-Two
Grace
“Jammies!” Sophie grinned her sweet, sweet smile as I pulled her nightgown over her head, her snow-white hair sticking up with static electricity as I situated it over her tiny body. She pressed her hands to her chubby belly and jumped, giggling as if it were the funniest thing in the world.
I poked her belly where she was holding it.
“Are these Sophie’s favorite pajamas?” I asked her, voice twisted in close to a song.
“Pink horsie!” She giggled again, the sweetness that rolled from her expanding my heart.
So big it sometimes made it hard to breathe.
Mallory shook her head from where she was on the floor dragging our storybook out from under her bed. “It’s not a pink horse, Silly Sophie. It’s a unicorn. Unicorns are magic and horses have no magic and you’ve got to know the difference because it’s a big one.”
Sophie giggled again and galloped around the small room. “Horsie!”
Mallory sighed and held her head in both of her hands, looking at me as if she were an adult and I would totally understand. “Hopeless.”
I tried not to laugh, but there was no stopping it. Not after I’d carried around so many uncertainties throughout the day.
My meeting with Ian had gone a direction I hadn’t anticipated.
A direction we both knew it couldn’t.
And still, it seemed as if there were no chance of stopping it. The overpowering connection that wrapped us in chains every time we were in the other’s space.
The man felt so vitally important. As if my heart remembered how to fully beat when he was there, his touch safety and sanctuary and fire, the feelings he evoked in me too conflicted and at odds for my mind to make sense of it all.
The only thing I knew was that we needed him.
All of us.
My children most.
I knew he’d been put in my world for a reason. For a purpose. And that wasn’t for me to fall in love with him, even though I could feel pieces of myself continuing to slip, slivers carved away and given to him with every moment that passed.
Thomas came into the room, dressed in sweat pants and his hair wet from his shower.
“Did you brush your teeth?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes.
At least there was that.
“I’m not a baby, Mom.”
“I know you aren’t a baby. But you’re my child, so that means I’m going to ask you if you brushed your teeth.”
He huffed an irritated sound as he went to sit at the edge of his twin bed. “You’ll probably still be asking me when I’m thirteen.”
“Thirteen,” I gasped, as if what he said was an atrocity. From where I’d been on the floor, I scrambled for him on my hands and knees. I started tickling his sides. “Thirteen? I’ll be asking you if you brushed your teeth when you’re thirty!”