Epilogue

EPILOGUE

Riven

Five years later

Isat on the screened-in porch, watching Parrish as he walked around the backyard, talking on the phone with Becca. She and her husband were expecting, the child due in a few months, and Parrish and I were going out to see them.

We liked Stephen a lot. They’d been together three years now. He loved Lainey and Soph like they were his own, and he was going to adopt them. Initially, Bec had been hesitant to get into a relationship again after everything she’d been through, but Stephen had been patient, and he’d been a huge help with the girls while Bec went to beauty school. He wasn’t the kind of guy I would have seen her with at all—a little nerdy, an accountant, for fuck’s sake. They hosted board-game nights with their friends once a month. But he was crazy about Becca, and she was crazy about him.

“Betsy is doing great,” he told her as he came up the porch stairs. She’d moved out East with us when we left Oregon four years ago. In the later parts of the investigation, as they’d gone through the recordings, they’d found some where Rex and Frank talked about Jerry’s murder…and the fact that it had been Rex who’d done it and not me. It had been enough to clear my name. I was no longer a felon who had been convicted of killing someone and it was the best damn feeling.

Now, we had a little house that was our own, with a mother-in-law suite or whatever they were called where Grandma lived. As badly as I’d wanted her out of Clayton, I’d understood how much the house there meant to her, but it had been Grandma who had decided it was just a house and that she wanted to move with us.

We didn’t live on the ocean or a lake, that shit was too expensive, but we lived in the mountains of North Carolina that had a lake in town, and for us, that was good enough. We kept a firepit in the backyard, and sat around it at night, like the campfire we’d had that first time. We lay under the stars beside it, and did yard work on our days off. We’d never wanted or needed much in life, just normalcy, some kind of peace and quiet. Clayton might not be as shitty of a place to live with Rex dead and Les, Bill, and Frank in prison, but it held too many bad memories for us.

“Yeah, we’re going out with our friends tonight,” Parrish told her, then looked at me. “Bec says hi.”

“Tell her hey.”

I still wasn’t a man of many words, and honestly, I was still getting used to the whole friends thing. If it wasn’t for Parrish, I wasn’t sure it was something I would worry about at all. Trust was and always would be an issue for me, but he was right, and it wasn’t healthy to keep to ourselves too much. And as much as I hated admitting it, I always had fun when we went out. We were on a bowling team, which was the craziest shit I could imagine. But I liked it, and we were good at it. That’s mostly what we did when we went out with friends.

“I miss you too, Bec. Tell Lainey and Soph their uncles love them,” Parrish said, then ended the call. “You ready to go kick some ass at bowling?”

“Yeah…then when we get home tonight, there are a whole lot of other things I want to do to your ass.”

He quirked a brow at me. “I mean, we don’t have to go to our bowling league tonight. We can fake sick and get going on the butt stuff now.”

I chuckled, knowing that as much as he loved my dick in his ass, he didn’t want to miss the games tonight. “First kicking ass, then kissing ass,” I said with a wink.

“I like the sound of that.”

We went to dinner with Ivan and Brody before heading to the bowling alley. Ivan was a contractor our construction company worked with sometimes—that’s how we met him and Brody. We didn’t make a lot of money, and we’d never be wealthy, but we’d accomplished Parrish’s dream, the one he’d loved me enough to share with me, and that was all that mattered.

Our team won, like I knew we would. We got home and showered together, and then I told Parrish, “Get on the bed and show me your hole. You got five strikes. I think that deserves my tongue up your ass.”

“So if I didn’t get them, you wouldn’t eat me out?”

We both knew that wasn’t true.

“Baby…there’s nowhere my tongue would rather be than in your hole.”

“Just your tongue?” Parrish got on his hands and knees on the mattress, looking at me over his shoulder, tempting me.

“Every part of me.” I knelt behind him. “I was made to fuck you. You were made to be mine.” I circled his rim with my thumb and watched him tremble. “Mine to finger…mine to fuck…mine to eat my load out of.”

“Jesus, Riv. Put something inside me,” he begged.

“Stop being a bossy little bottom.”

“You like that I’m bossy but also listen. You like that I match you. Don’t pretend you don’t. Now get your tongue inside me before I take matters into my own hand.”

My dick jerked against my abs, my hunger for him just as potent, hell, maybe even more so than it had been five years ago.

I dived into his ass, licking and kissing him, tasting soap on his skin, along with his natural musk that I loved so much. I wanted to get him sweaty so I could lick him clean again, but instead I focused on softening him up, making him go crazy as he pushed back against me, riding my tongue.

I pushed two digits inside him, working him open, loving that I knew exactly how to get him onto the edge. I alternated between finger-fucking him and giving him my tongue as Parrish said my name over and over again.

I loved being dirty with him, loved that in some ways, we lived a stereotypical life, but we’d never be the everyday guys next door. Not after what we had seen or the things we were willing to do to be happy.

When I thought I was going to bust my nut just from watching him, I pulled my fingers free, lubed my aching erection, and thrust into him.

I tugged Parrish up so his back was against my chest, one of my hands on his throat, the other jerking him off while I fucked him.

We were both on edge, I could feel it in how we moved, in the way he breathed when I allowed him to have air.

I turned his head, pushing my tongue into his mouth, savoring the tight glove of his body and how I never felt as whole and as good as I did when I was inside him. That was when I was at my best, the man I was supposed to be—a good man. His man.

“Let me feel your ass milking my cock. Come for me, Parrish. Give me your cum so I can fill your ass with mine.”

He spasmed against me, his ass tightening, his body rigid as he shot his release. It was all the motivation my orgasm needed to rip from my balls and spurt into him over and over again.

He went limp against me, breathing heavily, like I fucked the life out of him.

I laid Parrish down, kissed each knot of his spine, then licked his cummy hole. When we kissed, we shared it, and then I pulled him into my arms.

“I love you so much,” Parrish said into my neck.

I never had any choice in falling for Parrish. Hell, something about him had connected me to him from the start. I’d always wanted more for him, and in that, somehow, I found more for myself too. It was worth everything we’d been through, every risk, every shitty thing that ever happened to us, that brought us here.

“I love you too.”

It was the one thing I was most proud of in my life.

Looking for more Riley Hart? Check out my standalone novel, On the Mountain!

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