He took my wrist and brought it to his lips, kissing the tender inside. “How could you want such a fuckup?”
“I don’t,” I said. He looked at me with surprise, and I let it hang there. “I don’t want a fuckup. I want you.”
He snapped open the tabloid and held it up.
“This is what you want?”
“What is that, even? I don’t know those people.”
I reached for it to take it away, but he held the paper out of my range and took me by the waist with the other hand, pulling me close.
“You’re going to make me crazy about you,” he said.
“I have that effect on people.”
He kissed me long and hard. He tasted like cold water and chips. While we were still locked, I reached for the paper, and he held it away. We laughed, kissed, and fought for the paper at the same time.
Finally, he took his lips off mine and held me at his side. We looked at the picture together. He inspected it closely. I didn’t know what he was seeing.
“It’s all little dots,” he said.
“Yeah. You’re not that handsome in dots.”
I put my hand on it and pushed it down. He crunched it up.
“You’re a sexpot in dots,” he said. “But in real life?” He tossed the last of the paper away. “You’re still a sexpot. But more. You turned this bombshell from six years ago into a family. You’re a magician. Do you know? I wasn’t ready for that little girl, and now I am. I can still be me and have a family. I’m never going to read this article, but I bet there’s nothing in here about what you mean to me.”
“You’re probably right,” I said. I took the paper and threw it away, letting the lid of the dumpster land with a slap.
“This town, those kids, my fucking family,” Brad said. “That house I grew up in. I feel right when I’m here. All that stuff I was doing, the parties, the . . . the women . . . was because I didn’t feel right. And you make me feel right, and I know that means you and I are going to be on the cover of magazines, but I want you to tell me you can live with it. Tell me you don’t care. Say you’ll deal with everything they say.”
“I only care about you.”
He pulled me to him.
“Well, Cara DuMont, people are going to think you don’t have a heart of ice.”
“I don’t care what people think.”
“I do.” His palm cupped my face. “I want everyone to know what kind of person you are.” I thought he was going to kiss me, but he stopped himself an inch away. “Except in bed. That dirty little mouth is my private business.”
“Then kiss it,” I said. “Just kiss it.”
His kiss was defined by what he didn’t do. He didn’t crash into me or devour me. He appreciated me with that kiss. He brushed his lips against mine as if he valued every place they met. The entirety of what he wanted to say was in that kiss.
His tongue flicked against mine, and I drew it in, opening my mouth for it. He pushed me against the car, and in a burst, my body burned for him. He breathed through his teeth, pinning my arms to the passenger window.
“I want to fuck you right here, teacup.”
“The engraved invitation’s in the mail.” I raised my leg over his waist and he tucked his hand behind my knee. “It says, ‘Your dick is cordially invited to come inside.’”
He laughed, but not for long, because the hand that was behind my knee trailed over my thigh and went right under my underpants. We both gasped at the same time. I was wetter than I thought, reactive to his touch. I felt as if lightning had struck where he moved.
“I can’t fuck you fast enough,” he said, yanking at my underpants. I got them down, pulling a leg out while he got his fly open.
“Go.” I got my leg around his waist again. “Take it. Take it hard.”
I barely had the last word out before he took my breath away, entering me in two fast strokes.
He pushed forward, and I wrapped my legs around him, digging my fingers in his hair.
Sometimes, not very often, but sometimes I looked at him and couldn’t believe he wanted me even once. Sometimes he was even more gorgeous than a human should have been allowed to be. Sometimes I felt broken and unwanted, and his desire didn’t match how I felt about myself.
This wasn’t one of those times.
He was as beautiful as ever, but starkly human. Flawed beyond belief. Emotional and broken. He needed me to fill his empty places and in letting me do that, he filled mine.
My heart almost spoke through my lips, but he moaned in my ear first. I thought he’d give me pure filth, but his heart was doing its own speaking.
“I never . . . Cara . . . I never wanted a woman like this before.”
He kissed my neck, fucking me standing, and I couldn’t hear myself think past the roar of emotion and pleasure.
“I just want to get inside you,” he said, lip to lip before he rammed into me again with his dick wedged between my legs and his tongue in my mouth.
I felt as if I was getting fucked on both ends, fast and hard, as deep inside me as possible.
Never. I’d never been fucked like this.
My lungs emptied when I cried out. His tongue was still in my mouth when I came. He held me up when my legs stiffened and my back curved like a cat’s. He sped up his motions, hitting my center over and over. I pulled away from his mouth and gulped air in his rhythm.
“Coming inside you,” he grunted, then got just a little deeper inside me and whispered, “Cara Cara Cara. I’m sorry, Cara.”
I thought he was apologizing for what he’d done in the past, but he wasn’t. He was apologizing for what he would do in the future.
CHAPTER 65
BRAD
Cara’s phone came in the mail with a dead battery. She plugged it into the outlet by the toaster and didn’t say a thing.
“Cara?”
“Yeah?”
“The phone?”
“It’ll take just a couple of hours to charge.”
“I left it in the hotel.” I cleared my throat, because she wasn’t getting what I was trying to say. “On purpose.”
“Why?”
“The pictures. If you were connected, you’d see them. It was fucked up. Very fucked up. I’m sorry.”
Fists on hips, she leaned on one foot.
“Is there anything else you need to tell me?”
Mom and Nicole came in before I had to answer.
But yes. I had more things to tell Cara. One thing. The thing I’d forgotten because I was preoccupied with an airplane-bathroom blow job. But there’s only so much a guy can do. Only so much a girl can hear. I was getting to it. I swore it. But not now. Just not now.
Before I’d gone to the kitchen to discover the box of dyslexia books, Paula had gone over the details of my youthful stupidity in fine detail, sending me a letter from Brenda Garcia’s lawyer five years before.
It took me an hour to decipher words that seemed created just to confuse my scrambled-egg brain.
Mr. Sinclair,