And she smiled around me, her tongue twisting over my tip as I jerked and threaded my hands through her hair. Closing my eyes, I focused on her warm, wet lips and groaned as the wave of pleasure shot through my body, rolling over me like the ocean waves in front of us.
In that moment, I lost control, flexing and pulsing as hot come spurted from my cock into her waiting throat. She never slowed, working me through it, taking me deeper as I came. I couldn’t stop the deep guttural sound coming from my mouth that I didn’t even recognize as my own. My vision blurred as I tried to find my breath again.
When I’d finally stopped twitching, she pulled away and lay beside me as I fought to catch my breath.
I turned toward her, relishing the swollen redness of her lips.
“Let’s get married.” The words slipped from my mouth before I’d thought them through, but there was no doubting I meant them. I wanted to spend every day of the rest of my life waking up next to her face. I wanted to have that baby we’d been so afraid of at first. I wanted everything—with her. But I knew it was risky. She was already gun-shy. What if this was the thing that sent her packing?
“What?” She laughed, sweeping her hair to one side before lying back on my chest.
“You heard me. I want you, Bren. Marry me.”
This time, she sat up and met my eyes. “If that’s the way you react to a blow job, you must not have had very many in your life,” she joked, but her hand fluttered to her throat and her eyes gleamed.
A good sign?
“It wasn’t that, although, shit, that was so damned good. It was you. Bren, I love you,” I murmured. “Be my wife, baby.”
She blinked at me, her eyes wide. “You haven’t had time to think this through.”
“I don’t need time. I know that I love you. I’ve loved you since the first moment I saw you. I know this is fast, but we’re perfect together.”
She searched my gaze for a long moment, then shook her head and said, “Look, um, I think we’re both a little high off the vacation fumes. I’m not saying no. I’ve never felt this way, to be honest. But I just want to make sure we’re not rushing things. Let’s put a pin in it, okay? Talk when we get home…”
I bit down on the inside of my cheek, looking her over as I nodded. Even now, I could feel her edging away from me, and the deep closeness I’d felt between us was crumbling like a wall made of sand.
Sure, marriage was fast and I knew she had her issues with intimacy, but I also knew how she felt about me—I could feel it in the way she kissed me, the way she touched me.
So why pull away?
“Bren,” I said, but she was getting up and dusting herself off.
“I’m going to hit the shower and take a nap, okay?” she said.
I nodded. “You sure, baby? You okay?”
She nodded. “I’ll see you in a little while.”
I watched her march into the little outdoor shower, all the while wondering to myself if I ought to call her back and set the record straight. But there was nothing to fix. I loved her, but she hadn’t said she loved me. And she hadn’t agreed to marry me.
A knot formed deep in the pit of my stomach, the kind you get when you’ve done something rash while overwhelmed with emotion. I grabbed my shorts from the sand, pulling them on quickly before wading out into the low tide.
I’d jumped the gun because it felt right. I’d wanted to. I’d rushed it when I’d known how skittish she was, and now it remained to be seen what would happen from here.
Waves crashed in the distance. I heard the spray of the shower, but I closed my eyes, focusing instead on whether or not I’d just made the biggest mistake of my life.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Bren
I sat in the doctor’s office, swinging my legs back and forth as I listened to the ticking of the clock on the wall behind me. In truth, the clock—along with my healthy sense of panic—was the only thing keeping me awake. I was still jet-lagged from the plane ride home yesterday, and though I’d briefly considered canceling the appointment, I knew it had nothing to do with my exhaustion.
No, it had to do with fear. A dark shadow of terror had taken root deep within me, coloring every one of my thoughts, and ever since we’d touched back down in the city, it had grown in strength, threatening to choke me from the inside out. At my age, the window for having children was already getting smaller. I knew that.
But to be having irregular periods at thirty?
It couldn’t be a good sign.
Right?
I glanced again at the steel door handle, willing it to turn and allow the doctor inside. The nurse had already taken my temperature and weight along with my blood pressure and the other tests they did whenever I went into the office. With some luck, she wouldn’t mention to anyone else who exactly the patient in exam room B was, but if she did…
Well, I’d worry about that later.
For now, I just had to put all my energy into willing that door open.
All this stress and worry could be for nothing, after all. I simply couldn’t know for sure until the doctor appeared.
Which, after a few more menacing ticks of the clock, she did.
After glancing down at the tablet in her hand, she grinned at me and clicked the door closed. Carefully she made her way to the rolling stool in front of the little granite countertop in the room and then spun around to face me.
Slapping her hands against her knees, she said, “Well, Miss Matthews, I’ve taken a look at your chart and I understand you’re having a few concerns about your fertility, is that right?”
I gave her a shaky nod. “It’s just that I got my period really late last month and then it only lasted a little while before disappearing again.”
She pursed her lips, looking like she was concentrating deeply on every word I said, then tilted her head to the side, letting her brown ponytail spill onto the counter behind her.
“Has this over happened before?”
I nodded. “Once or twice.”
“May I be frank with you, Miss Matthews?”
“Bren,” I corrected her. “And yes, absolutely.”
My stomach tightened and I linked my fingers together in my lap.
“You are right to be concerned about your fertility. At age thirty, sporadic or irregular periods tend not to be a good sign. But there’s no reason to be scared, okay?”
No reason to be scared? I felt like she was the big bad wolf, blowing down my entire house of twigs and leaving nothing but a desolate patch of dirt in her wake. A whole plot of nothingness where not even a weed would grow. Mason’s face, crumpled and disappointed, flashed through my mind, but I forced myself to nod and listen to what she had to say next.
“Now, it says on your chart that you’re not looking to conceive anytime soon, but we can still run some tests and see what’s going on. From there, we’ll know what our options are.”
“And if I’m—” I started, then choked on the words and tried again. “If I can’t have a baby naturally, what are the options?”
The doctor hugged her tablet to her chest, crossing her arms over the top of it. “Well, if there’s an issue, which there may not be, you might opt for an egg retrieval.”