I felt my inner walls contract around him, trying to hold him inside as he moved within me. I could feel how wet I was around his hardness, could feel every little internal flutter along his shaft as he pounded into me. My hips automatically lifted up to his, trying to match the fervor with which he was loving me. He was filling me up with emotion and his impressive erection. All of it felt so good I wasn’t sure I was going to survive any more of his attention. Not that I was ever going to ask him to stop or go easy on me. I liked that he was rough. Liked that along with all the pleasure there was the occasional bite of discomfort. It reminded me that Asa was never going to be like any other guy and that being with him was always going to mean I needed to stay on my toes. He wasn’t an easy man to love, and frankly that was one of my favorite things about him. No one would ever meet my needs the way he did, and he proved it by sinking one of his hands into the hair at the base of my neck and giving it a tug that wasn’t at all gentle.
I couldn’t do much with my hands, so I had to hold him to me with my eyes. I refused to look away. I watched everything. I watched the way desire and passion made his eyes go hazy. I watched the way he watched me. I watched the way it made him smug and satisfied when he could see that I was once again close to falling over that edge of completion only he had ever been able to bring me to. I watched the love that shone out of him for me when I broke, and then I watched him drown in the love I had for him as he followed me over a split second later. He collapsed on me with a groan and buried his face in the curve of my neck where it was tender from his nipping at the skin there.
I rattled the handcuffs over his head with a little laugh. “I’m ready to be able to touch you now.”
He pulled out of me, which had us both gasping at the sexy glide, and rolled so that he was sitting next to me. He shoved his hands through his hair and grinned down at me. “Not sure I would have lasted for more than a minute if your hands had been free, Red. Where is the key?”
I had put it someplace where I absolutely wouldn’t leave it behind or forget it. While playing around like this with Asa was fun, there was no way I wanted anyone outside of this room to know that my cuffs had been used for anything other than hooking up a criminal. I directed him to the pocket in my purse where I had stashed the key, and it only took him a minute to set me free. The skin underneath the cuffs immediately started to tingle as a rush of blood began to flow back to my hands, and Asa picked up each wrist and put a kiss on my pulse. It made my heart flutter and the way he smiled against the skin touching his lips made me think he could feel it.
“So this is us, Royal. Me and you from here on out, and I’m not letting you go again.”
I reached out a finger and ran it across the arch of his eyebrow. “You get one secret, Asa. Everything else is mine. I’m not going to bring it up because I’m going to trust you and believe that you wouldn’t keep something from me that I absolutely need to know in order to make this relationship between us work. I’m not going to ask about it, but this is the one and only thing you get. The rest is all mine.”
He was a man with a past. He was a man with a promising future. He was a man that had a lot to give right now, and I needed to know that he was willing to share all of it with me. I didn’t care if that made me seem greedy or unreasonable. I was asking for it all.
“You can have everything I have to give except for that.”
I let my finger trace over the slope of his nose and down so I could outline his mouth with the tip of my fingernail. He didn’t need to know that I had a pretty good guess what that big secret was. I didn’t need all the details. I just needed him.
“Then this is it. Me and you from here on out.”
He fell onto his back and pulled me over him so that I was draped across the hard planes of his chest. “The cop and the criminal. Who would have ever seen that coming?”
I traced a heart next to where his was steady and strong under my cheek. “I saw it from a mile away. It just took a little bit of time to get you to look in the same direction … and you’re a reformed criminal.”
He chuckled and twirled his fingers through the long ends of my hair where it wrapped around both of us.
“I stole your heart, didn’t I?”
I rubbed my cheek on the rock-hard muscle that made a surprisingly good pillow. “I stole yours first, Asa.” I let my eyes drift closed as he continued to pet me and rub his hand up and down my spine.
“Can’t take something that was yours all along, Red.” Oh my. That had a rush of tears rising up behind my eyelids.
“You’re so smooth.” My pillow moved as he laughed.
“I try. How do you feel about furniture shopping?”
I was almost asleep and feeling way better than I had in a long time. I gave his sides a little squeeze and turned my head so that I could put my lips right in the center of his chest.
“Whatever you want, Asa.”
Because if he was going to give me everything he had to give, then I could only do the same thing.
EPILOGUE
Six Months Later …
Living with a police officer was an interesting experience. I’d gotten used to Kevlar mixed in with silk and cotton in the closet. The sight of guns around the house no longer made me jolt in surprise, and her odd hours no longer had me staying awake when she rolled out of bed at the crack of dawn or in the middle of the night. What I was still learning to navigate was the way her job affected her. There were nights I came home to find she was crawling out of her skin with leftover adrenaline, and I barely made it through the door before she was all over me looking for some kind of release for all that pent-up energy. Then there were days that she came home and could hardly look at me. Those were the days I found her curled up in the shower crying and had to pull her out and hold her until she came back into herself. I figured out pretty quickly those were the days the bad guys won. Luckily the days I got tackled and stripped naked were far more common, so I just learned to love her through both. I still thought her job sucked but she loved it so much that I kept my mouth shut … most of the time.