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One big hand lifted, long fingers raked through Jace's dark hair, and he tilted his head to the side, looking at me with a hungry but careful expression. "Should I let you go to bed?" he asked, shifting his weight like he was about to leave.
"Come in," I said, taking a step back to make room for him. "Tell me about your day?" It was a question because that was all I could manage. He was under no obligation to tell me anything, and we both knew he should have probably kept a professional distance, said goodnight and moved on. But he'd knocked. And now he was coming inside. And energy rushed through my body like freeway traffic, starting and stopping and impossible to anticipate except for its constancy.
Jace looked at me for a long second once he was inside, saying nothing. The dark eyes scanned my body, and the gaze was like being raked over with some kind of toy, some teasing implement, erupting gooseflesh everywhere it went. When his eyes found mine again, there was a question in them, a plea, maybe.
All my earlier decision making flew out the window. It was nothing in the face of the very real attraction between Jace and me. It was just a bunch of suggestions, ideas about what would be right. But this? This thrumming pulse of energy between us? This was real. And good. And how could it not be right?
I pushed the door shut and then turned back to him, taking one deep breath and then diving from the edge of the precipice on which I stood and stepping into Jace's waiting arms.
He pulled me in, crushing me to him as if I held the cure to whatever was threatening him, as if I was the answer. And even as I lifted my chin and he claimed my mouth, possessive, deep and commanding, I wondered vaguely when any other man had ever made me feel needed and wanted this way. Like a woman, not a possession. Like a person, not an accomplishment.
I melted into him, opening my mouth and my body to the strong gentle touch of his hands, his lips.
Jace walked me backward, and my legs hit the side of my bed. I wrapped my arms around the strong hard muscle of his torso, and together we tumbled onto the bed. We moved on instinct, we weren't urgent or frenzied, but deliberate. We pulled, unzipped, unbuttoned, and soon the slide of flesh on flesh replaced any need for words. My body asked and his answered, his questioned and mine confirmed. Hands, mouths, hot searing skin and wet tight spaces aligned, until Jace hovered above me. His face was a mask of sensual focus, hooded eyes, flushed skin, full lips, and his chest rose and fell rapidly as he paused.
"Is this all right?" He asked, even as I reached for him, agreeing to it all, consenting to anything he wanted, desperate to feel him everywhere.
Jace stepped back and rolled on a condom, and when he positioned himself over me again, it felt like a homecoming.
He moved slowly, with deliberate care, and when he pressed inside me, I gasped at the feeling of utter completion that washed through me then. He pulled back, sliding slowly forward a few more times until his cock was buried inside me so deeply neither of us could speak or move. I held him, gripping him with every muscle I possessed, clinging to the mountain of muscle above me, around me, inside me, and my mind spun out like spiraling arms of joy reaching for something to ground it.
Full, full, full, it chanted. But the fullness I felt was beyond physical. Being joined this way to Jace, feeling his chest on mine and our breaths synchronized with our hearts, was unlike anything I'd ever known, and it redefined the idea of sex for me in that instant. This wasn't some base, primal conquest. It wasn't one person taking and the other giving in.
This was two people locked together in an exploration of the possibility that united, they were each more—stronger, freer, more entirely themselves even as they were part of another.
When Jace began moving inside me, I was already lost, my mind having detached in its futile efforts to categorize and understand the wild unfamiliar sensations rocketing through me. I was nerves and skin and breath, heartbeat and hot, wet need.
I moaned as the joy and want mingled and built inside me—a helpless passenger along for the ride. Jace brushed the hair from my face, stared into my eyes, and then kissed me, his body pumping into mine as every thrust ratcheted me higher.
With my legs wrapped around him, my body more open and accepting than it had ever been, I was wild, I was unbound. I was his.
I was arching up to meet him, my body and heart a swirl of sensation as I felt myself nearing some terrifying abyss, some place I'd never seen or imagined. But I knew that wrapped in Jace's arms, connected to him, it would be safe to fall, safe to let myself go completely. And when his rhythm began to break down, the grunts coming from him becoming more urgent, less controlled, I dug my fingernails into his back and held on with everything inside me as we flung ourselves together from the edge.
And my life shattered into pieces that flew out far and wide in a burst of light and air and sound, as my body exploded. And then, in a tangle of breath and sweat and sheets, it came back together and I felt myself release in a different way, letting go of so many things I'd held onto for far too long, letting go of things that would make it harder for me to hold Jace.
Jace's head was bent next to mine, his body still around me, over me, inside me, as he regained his breathing. His hands still held me, his skin pressed to mine everywhere in a slick constant kiss. After a few minutes, he slid to one side and I turned with him, not wanting the separation I knew would come.
We lay facing one another, our eyes open and hands moving slowly over skin for long silent minutes. Jace traced fingers over my lips, my cheek, down the length of my nose, making me smile.
I let my fingers explore his neck, the dip of his collarbone, the bulge of his shoulder. The beautiful Celtic knot inked into his chest.
Finally, I found my voice. "Are you okay?"
His eyes, always intense, had lost some of the pain I'd seen there earlier, and they met mine as he said, "yeah."
"Your family?"
"Not as good." In whispered tones, he told me then. He told me about his little brother, about seeing him broken and beaten, suffering through withdrawal. About his mother coming to the hospital and collapsing in a desperately sad pile next to her younger son's bed. About holding them both and feeling like they were already lost.
"Don't say that," I told him, thinking about what it would be like to find Tess that way. My chest ached.
"I don't know how to help him. But I've got to try."
"Will they put him in some kind of rehab while he's in jail?" I asked. "Or give him time to go through a program before, maybe?"
Jace's hand stilled on my arm. "I don't think it works that way. Maybe in prison they have something like that. I don't know."
I thought about the little house in Brentwood, about Jace's mom, and took a chance, knowing the proud strong man in my arms might accept my help if I could phrase it the right way.
