He set his mouth on my skin and started kissing his way down my body.

I couldn’t stop panting as he got lower, and lower.  Fitting his shoulders between my thighs, he put his mouth on me for the first time.

He was unskilled, but he’d always been a patient learner.  With some instruction, a shift here, a tongue there, he kept at it until he made me come against his lips in the most powerful orgasm of my life thus far.

“That’s my favorite thing so far,” I told him when I had the breath to speak again.

Grinning the most self-satisfied smile I’d ever seen him wear, he climbed up my body and started kissing me.

My hand went to his member.  He was hard again, and I started stroking him.

This time, though, he didn’t let me jack him off.

He rolled onto his back.

I sat up, leaning over him, hand still on him, still squeezing and stroking.

His palm came up and cupped the back of my head, nudging me with a light touch down his body.

Knowing what he wanted, I’d wanted to do it for a while, I was just always afraid to give him too much, I moved down.

When I was hovering over his arousal, I licked my lips and shot a look at his face.

He was watching me with heavy-lidded fascination.

I licked my lips again, and the hand on my head gripped my hair and pushed me down.

I wasn’t good at it.  What I lacked in skill I tried to make up for with enthusiasm, but as I bobbed my lips up and down on his length, I kept gagging myself.

Still, it was his first feel of my mouth so it didn’t take much.  I’d barely gotten the hang of it, my hand helping my mouth, catching the rhythm of stroking and sucking, before he was shouting a warning, and then shooting down my throat.  I didn’t know what else to do, so I swallowed.

He was still coming in slow pumps when he pinned me on my back and started kissing me.

“I love you,” he told me, over and over.

I’d never get enough of hearing those words come out of his mouth.  It still seemed so impossible, so unlikely, that a perfect boy like him could love a trashcan girl like me, but I believed him.

“I love you too,” I told him.  There was nothing in the world I was more certain of.  Not one thing.  Not the sky or the moon, not the earth or the sun.

He was my constant.  He held the vast majority of my faith in the palm of his hand.

With stuttering slowness I told him so.

His answer was to kiss me top to bottom and then go down on me again.

After he’d finished me that time, he climbed on top of me, laying naked and heavy there.

With a groan, I pushed him onto his back and he let me.

“I think I’m ready,” I told him, pressing my breasts to his chest, rubbing my nipples into his skin how he loved.  “I want you inside me.  I want you to finish inside of me.”

He groaned like I was torturing him.  “Jesus.  Now you tell me this, when we’re in the middle of nowhere?”

“I didn’t mean right this second.  I just meant, in general, I think I’m ready.”  I tried to sound more sure than I felt.

The way he looked at me then made my chest go tight with emotion.  He cupped my cheek as he said tenderly, “Don’t rush for me.  I can wait as long as you need.”

Sometimes it was like he could read my mind.  Lots of times, in fact.

No one would ever know me like he did.  Understand and indulge the darkness and the lightness in me.  The good and the bad.  The strong and the weak.  Take all of the parts of me that were toxic and soothe them with the perfect antidote.

We had all of the ingredients of forever love.

And on the immediate heels of that was a debilitating and destructive insecurity.  Did he feel the same?  Was it even possible for him?  Was I enough to make anyone feel the way he made me feel?

“Do you love me?” I asked him.

“What do you think?”

“I think that’s not an answer.”

“Because you know the answer.  I’ve told you many times just today.  Of course I do.  I’m not sure how I’d get through even one day in this world without you in it.  Why I’d even want to.”

I studied his face while he uttered every word and found that I believed him.

All I had to do now was make sure he never stopped feeling this way.

But we were never meant to last.  If only my heart had had known that.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-TWO

“Love never dies a natural death.”

~Anaïs Nin

PRESENT

I was in the kitchen, rummaging around for coffee like an irritated bear looking for honey when a now dressed Bastian joined me.

He still looked pretty freaking edible.  Leo was a crappy as hell father, but he sure made good-looking sons.  The Durant men were all of a size, uncommonly tall with straight, broad shoulders.  Bastian was dark where Dante was golden, but they still shared a certain look, something sinister around the eyes, with pretty mouths and straight, sharp teeth.  Starkly handsome but villainous.

It was my own personal kryptonite.

“Hey,” I greeted him, tone bordering on friendly, because he was maybe the only person in this entire house that I didn’t despise.

“Hey there,” he returned, tone and smile beyond friendly into outright warm.

My body was facing the coffeemaker, hips leaning against the counter as I waited for the coffee pot to fill.

I was serious about my coffee, especially the first cup of the day.  I’d basically been watching the pot filling drop by drop, mug ready to pounce the second it finished.