So fucking gorgeous I couldn’t breathe.
My heart pounded out between us. Pleading for her to see. To get it. To understand when I hadn’t given her a reason to, not when there was all this bullshit I had to keep hidden in the shadows. But the shame I felt over the corruption hadn’t come close to the kind I’d felt when she’d walked out on me this morning.
The shame I’d felt when I couldn’t speak it.
When I’d rejected the gift that Dakota had offered. When I’d refused our truth.
I wouldn’t refuse it any longer.
A tear streaked from the corner of her eye, and I groaned a pained sound as the energy shifted.
The room enclosed and the air grew dense.
“Cookie,” I murmured. “Tell me I’m not too late. Tell me you still love me, too.”
“Do you think I could ever stop loving you?”
The second she said it, I snapped, and I was across the room.
I crashed into her in a landslide of greed.
One hand dove into her hair and the other curled around the side of her neck as I crushed my mouth against hers, kissing her for the first time.
Nothing had ever felt quite like kissing Dakota Cooper.
Her lips against mine.
It was flames and heat and pure relief.
I sucked it in, imbibing the feeling as I devoured her mouth.
Sugar and vanilla and all things sweet.
My chest nearly blew with the power of it. With the way my heart thrashed violently at my ribs. With the devotion that surged from the sacred place that had always been meant for her.
Our tongues tangled in a clash of desperation, and she clawed at the fabric of my shirt, pushing up onto her toes to get closer.
I spun her as I kissed her, lips plucking and rolling over her plush bottom lip before they did the same to the top, urgent in their plea, unable to break for a second as I backed her toward the bed.
“I love you, Ryder, I love you,” she mumbled at our connection. The sound of it reverberated through me, slipping down my throat and spreading through my cells. It seeped all the way down to my spirit because this woman would always possess my soul.
We stumbled and spun, and I kissed her deeper, hands on her face so I could get her closer. “I love you, Dakota. So fucking much.”
The back of her legs knocked into the side of the bed, and she giggled a blissful sound, and I was smiling against her mouth, whispering, “I love you,” again.
My palms smoothed down her neck, and I wrapped my arms around her so I could get to the zipper at the back of her dress. I dragged it down, then spread my hands flat, riding them up the soft skin of her back and over her shoulders to push the dress out of our way.
It skimmed down her body, landing in a pool at her feet.
Dakota was in a black bra and another pair of those high-waisted underwear that had made me lose my mind the other night. Back when I should have known everything was getting ready to hit a boiling point. There would no longer be any resisting this.
“Goddess,” I rumbled as I kissed down her throat, and I reached around her back to unlatch her bra and dragged it free of her arms.
Shivers rolled beneath my touch, and Dakota’s hands slipped under my shirt, lighting a fire as she pushed it up. I eased back for the flash of a second so I could rip it over my head.
Then I was back on her.
Skin on skin.
Her pebbled nipples pressed against my chest.
Her warmth and her sweetness and her soft against all my hard.
Lust spun with the devotion.
A need unlike anything that should exist.
Greater, more powerful than any sin I could ever commit.
And I was kissing her again.
Frantic.
Frenzied.
Dakota’s fingers fumbled at my jeans, tugging my fly loose as I kicked off my shoes. She pushed my jeans down around my waist and took my briefs at the same time.
“I need you,” she wheezed, her hands grabbing at my ass while I shoved my jeans the rest of the way down with one hand while I backed her onto the bed.
She edged onto the mattress, and I twisted free of the heavy fabric around my ankles. Without missing a beat, I angled in to grab the edges of her panties and ripped them down her legs.
Dakota whimpered, her hips coming off the mattress. “Ryder.”
“Fuck. The sight of you, Cookie. Sweet thing.” The words rolled off my tongue.
Praise.
Adoration.
A fire raged at the center.
I rushed to crawl over her and made a spot for myself between her thighs.
Urgency spiraled around us as she kept lifting her hips to mine.
I grabbed my dick and drove into her in one deep thrust.
Possession.
It splintered through the middle of me.
Shattering out in surrender.
Dakota cried out, her words ragged as she raked her blunt nails down my back. “How is it possible you feel so good inside me?”
I slipped my arm around her back so I could hold her close, staring down at the one who’d found me in the dark. Called me out of the barren desert where I’d lost myself. The one who’d made me believe again. “Because this is the way we’re supposed to be, Dakota. You were meant for me. You’re mine, Cookie, mine.”
But it was me who belonged to her.
Knew it as I pulled almost all the way out and sank back in.
I nearly blacked out with the way her walls hugged my cock.
So tight.
So perfect.
I groaned her name, my forehead dropping to hers as I drew back and thrust in deep. “Dakota.”
It was so different than it’d been this morning. It’d been so fucking good, but it’d still felt like torture. I’d felt like a thief taking something that he wasn’t supposed to have.
But Dakota and I were always meant for something more.
And I couldn’t do anything but keep kissing her as I moved in her. Because I wasn’t stealing but giving her everything that I had.
Dakota met me thrust for thrust, giving it, too.
“I love you,” she kept whispering.
Touching my cheek.
My brow.
My jaw.
Our bodies roiled, liquid in the middle of the bed.
Swelling and surging.
A tide.
An ebb and flow that always crested at the perfect time.
Her hands were all over me and mine were all over her.
Touching.
Worshipping.
Loving her in a way I never thought I would get lucky enough to do.
The connection I’d always shared with her glowed in the room.
Covered me in her bright, blinding light.
Dakota whimpered and begged as I drove us higher, and I could feel the tension gather at her middle.
Her gasps and her pleas.
I drove into her harder, deeper and faster, and I swallowed her cry with a desperate kiss when the orgasm blazed through her body.
Her nails sank into my shoulders, digging in as she rolled beneath me, clinging to me like she might float away if she didn’t.
And I gave her mine as I split, the roar of rapture that burst in my blood.
The streaks of pleasure that whipped out to touch every nerve in my body.
My cock throbbed as I poured inside her, and both of us were gasping as we rode that high.
A high I was never going to come down from.
I held her like that as we trembled and shook, both of us relishing the aftershocks, before I eased back a fraction so I could look down at her face.
Cinnamon eyes watched me with the kind of tenderness I couldn’t fathom.
I ran my knuckles down the soft curve of her cheek and down to her chin. “Nothing could ever feel as good as being loved by you, Dakota Cooper.”
“That’s good, Ryder, because I promise you, I’m going to be doing it my whole life.”
THIRTY-FOUR
DAKOTA
“You might as well not bother getting dressed.”
At his words, I stumbled to a stop just inside the doorway.
I had the same sheet wrapped around me as I’d had this morning, but this time when I’d slipped off the bed to go into the bathroom, I’d promised I’d be right back.
Redness flushed across my skin as I looked at the man propped on a pillow against the headboard, a blanket coming up to cover him just to his hip bones that jutted out from his waist, his arms tucked behind his head.
A cool, casual king.
One that dripped midnight.
Covered in all those colors and designs.