Chapter 28

twenty-eight

Cash

“How?” My voice comes out rough and raw. The way this little woman affects me, and she doesn’t even seem to see it. It’s shocking. Alarming. I want to prove it to her. I want to show her how she moves me. How the image of her is branded in my mind. The scent of her is scored on my lungs. The taste of her is etched onto my tongue.

If I have a soul, hers is the other half. The light to the dark. The soft to the hard. She’s tethered to the core of me by divine thread, needled into the innermost parts of me. I’ll never let her go, never walk away from her. Never love another the way I love her.

The thought stills me like a splash of cold water as I stare down into her moonlit green eyes. I’m in love with this woman. Wrenlee.

Her eyes search mine like she’s looking for something deep within. I don’t know if she’ll find it, but I know that I want her to. I want to be everything this woman needs. I want to be everything she wants. Everything she seeks.

Her body softens more beneath mine, her legs wrapping around me in a way that opens her to me more. Black dots infringe on my vision as I war with the desire to take what her body is offering me. But I don’t move. I need her words.

“Kitten.” My voice sounds hoarse, raw.

“Make love to me, Cash. Show me I’m yours.”

Ahh, hell. If words could break me.

I need to taste her. Holding back the desire to crush my mouth to hers, I claim her mouth gently. Without any hesitation, she parts her lips for me, and I breathe her in. Inhaling her deep into my lungs. She’s sweet vanilla cream and when she moans beneath me, I feel the sound in every fissure of my being.

“I think I always knew you were mine.” The confession falls from my mouth against her throat as I kiss her there. “Before I propositioned you to be my fake girlfriend, I knew. I just wasn’t ready to admit it.”

“What?” She’s breathless, blinking through lust, clinging to composure.

“I wanted you before I ever spoke a single word to you. Watched you. Wondered how I’d make you mine, knowing I’d fail—that you were too good for me. Too sweet. Then I overheard you with Addy that night—” She shivers as my teeth graze her collarbone. “I knew I had my in.”

“As your fake girlfriend.”

Pulling back, I pin her with my gaze. She’s beautiful like this, flushed skin in pale moonlight, eyes bright. “It’s never been fake. Not even when I told myself I’d keep it that way.”

“Cash.”

“You’ve always just been mine, Kitten. And I’ll be yours until the last breath I breathe.” I press a kiss to her chest where I can feel the thunderous beat of her heart. My own heart roars in response. “I love you, Wrenlee. All of you.”

Slender fingers spear my hair as she lifts herself to crush her mouth to mine. A small sound whispers from the deep of her throat, a cross between a sob and a sigh that I devour.

“Show me,” she begs. “Please, Cash, show me.”

I know what she’s asking for and I don’t want to deny her anything. Not ever. Slowly, with my hand gripping my dick between her legs, I guide the tip to her wet core, and slide between her folds. Every small sound she makes is stored into the vault of my mind. For as long as I live, I’ll never forget this night with Wrenlee.

I find her entrance and settle there for a moment, her body stiff beneath mine in innocent awareness. She knows what’s coming, but she doesn’t know what to expect. I love that she’s never been with anyone else, that I’m the first and I’ll do my best to be the last.

“You sure?” My heart is slamming so hard in my chest, I wonder if she can hear it. Feel it.

“Yes.” There’s no hesitation.

When she presses her lips to my throat, I sink in a slow inch. She’s impossibly tight around me, sucking me in even as her body pushes against the foreignness of mine. I won’t be foreign to her for long. Soon, her body will know every inch of mine. She will learn me, how to move with me, how to open to me. And I will learn her. Every dip and curve and sigh. I’ll commit them all to memory.

I push deeper, feeling her legs quiver around my waist and her breath stall in her lungs. I swallow back a groan of near pain as I hold myself above her, my mouth moving slowly over hers. She’s so wet, I thought I’d slip right in. But she’s tighter than I expect, tense.

“Relax for me, baby,” I urge gently, peppering kisses over her face before claiming her mouth again.

“I’m freaking out a little,” she admits in a small, trembling voice. “You’re taking it so—slow.”

“Does it hurt?” I hate myself for asking, for drawing attention to it, but I have to know.

“A little,” she admits through a wince when I push just a little deeper inside.

I feel like a virgin myself, and fuck, isn’t that a joke. My body is trembling, holding back as I try to take it slow so as not to hurt her. Why the fuck do men want virgins? This is—torture.

At her small hiss of pain, I feel myself pulling back. I’m not used to this. I’ve never been with an innocent.

“No!” She cries, her nails biting into the flesh of my shoulders as her legs lock around me to pin me there inside her.

I’m stronger than her. I could break the prison of her limbs locked around my body if I wanted. But I don’t want. All I want is to lose myself inside her. To make her mine in the way she’s asked—begged me to do.

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Cash,” she’s breathing hard. “Stop worrying about me.”

When she rocks her hips up against mine, rolling deeper onto my dick, I nearly lose my mind. There’s a crack in my control. It’s hanging by a thread.

“Wrenlee,” I warn, but she doesn’t heed it. No, the little vixen rolls her hips again. This time, she pulls back until just the tip is inside, and then she feeds my cock to her pussy again. She’s slick and wet and warm and impossibly tight. Like a fist gripping me. I groan. “Baby.”

But when she does it a third time, letting loose a delectable little moan—that’s the moment I snap.

Covering her mouth, I thrust once, sinking deep, invading her body as her cries invade my soul. I’ve never been more connected to another living being in my life, never feel as home as I do when I’m inside her.

She is perfection beneath me. Surrender around me. Mine.

“I love you, Wrenlee.” I can’t stop the words, can’t hold them back. “I love you.”

I’m moving inside her now, climbing us both to the peak we’ll free-fall from together. She’s meeting me thrust for thrust, my sweet little kitten all claws and teeth, but soft for me.

“Cash.” She’s almost there, I can feel it—the pieces crumbling around her. The pleasure consuming her. “Oh, God—Cash!”

Grinding down into her, I rub her clit and she breaks around me, crying out with teeth biting tenderly into my shoulder. She shudders in my arms as I lose myself inside her, spilling every drop of pent-up desire and need I’ve felt since the moment I decided she was mine.

We kiss as we settle from the fall, her body liquid around mine, but it’s when she pulls her mouth from mine to bury her face in the nook between my neck and shoulder that she finally confesses, “I love you, Cash. With my whole heart, I’m all in.”

“Good. Because I can’t let you go now.”

The vibration of her laughter pulses like an electric current through me. “Really? Because I happen to think you’d been close to letting me go before things even got started.”

“Not a chance.”

“Totally. I had to cling to you like a—like a…”

“Kitten with claws,” I supply. Although my tone is dry, I’m grinning like a fool.

“That works. All I’m saying is, you almost didn’t follow through.”

For a moment, I’m silent. She doesn’t pull her eyes from mine as she waits, sensing the seriousness that’s come over me. Finally, I speak, “That was my first time.”

She shoves my shoulder. “No, it wasn’t.”

“Not for sex, no. But with someone who wasn’t experienced. That was my first time.”

Her eyes turn soft as they continue to search mine. “Oh.”

I swallow. “I didn’t want to hurt you. Didn’t want it to be bad for you.”

She gives me a low, gentle, sweet laugh. Then she touches her lips to mine. “It was everything, Cash.”

Breaking the kiss, I rest my forehead against hers as I marvel. “What is it about you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t get enough of you. Can’t stop thinking of you. Wanting you.”

“Oh…” She nods, like this makes complete sense. “So, it’s working, then.”

Confused, I ask, “What’s working?”

“My witchy spell to bewitch you to me.” She’s fighting a giggle. “To make you bow to all my wishes, fall to your knees at my every whim.”

She’s teasing me, but I couldn’t be more serious when I tell her, “I’m the string wrapped around your finger. There’s not a thing I wouldn’t do for you.”

Her breath catches as the teasing light fades to something warm. Something I really like. “For however long you want me, Cash, I’ll stand beside you.”

“Always,” I vow, feeling tender and unlike myself. “I’ll always want you.”