Darker the Release (7 page)

Caleb was silent for a long time, but his arm had tightened around her. “The woods,” he breathed at last. “That’s why you’re scared of the woods.”

“Yeah.” Her voice broke, since it was so hard to talk about, even under the false pretense. “Sometimes I feel like I…I’ve never really gotten past that day, that my whole life just circles around it.”

“That kind of trauma, when you’re young, it’s not surprising. That’s why you’ve not had many close relationships?”

“I don’t think I’ve had any close relationships. Except with Reese, my best friend.”

“And me,” he added, nuzzling her hair.

“And you.” She stroked his chest over his shirt and realized how true this was.

“What about your mom?”

“I was never really close to her, and it got worse after my dad died. She couldn’t get over his death.”

“When did she die?”

She was about to correct him but caught herself just in time. He knew she was adopted, so naturally he assumed both her parents were dead. Knowing her mom was alive would be one clue too many. “Less than a year after my dad.”

“Was it…was it suicide?”

It made perfect sense—would explain two deaths in a short amount of time. So she just nodded.

Her mom might as well have died the year after her father had.

Caleb didn’t say anything, didn’t offer any superficial platitudes. It was a relief, since anything he said wouldn’t have come close to answering the way she was feeling.

Naked. Vulnerable. But still safe somehow, as if she could trust Caleb with what she’d offered him.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a Shakespeare play,” she said after a minute, remembering her reflections earlier.

“
Romeo and Juliet?
” There was a little smile in his eyes, a dry humor that could never be fully stamped out.

She loved that about him.

She gave a little laugh. “No. They were so young—and barely knew each other. That doesn’t feel like me at all. I was thinking one of his more mature tragedies.
Hamlet
or something. Where one act sets off this whole downward spiral of events, and no matter how hard you try, you just can’t pull yourself out of them. Sometimes my life feels that way. Since my father’s death, I’ve never been able to pull out of the downward spiral.”

Caleb let out a long breath. “I know how that feels.” He was silent for a while, and then he began, “Did you ever want to…” Caleb trailed off and restarted his question. “If that had happened to me, and I knew who was responsible, I would have wanted to make the person pay.” He sounded serious, reflective, like he was genuinely thinking it through, feeling with and for her.

It hurt in so many ways. “It was an accident,” she managed to say.

“But someone did it.”

“Yes.”

“What happened to the person?”

She swallowed hard. “Nothing.”

He let out his breath. “Yeah. You’re a better person than I am. Because I would have done anything in my power to make them pay for it.”

The irony was so exquisitely bitter that she froze for a few seconds. Then she reached up to take his face in one of her hands, making him meet her eyes. “I’m not any better than you are, Caleb. Don’t tell that lie to yourself. We are just the same.”

She saw the words process in his eyes, and his expression twisted very briefly with emotion. “Okay.” He pulled her into a tight hug and murmured against her ear, “Although I think you might be a
little
better than me.”

She shook with bone-dry amusement and a different kind of feeling and let herself enjoy his embrace.

He held her against him for a long time until he adjusted their bodies enough for him to press his lips against hers. “Thank you for telling me. About your father.”

She nodded, knowing he’d realized how hard it was for her to say. “I don’t tell anyone.”

“You can tell me, though.”

“Yeah.” After a moment she added, “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Do you have anything you want to tell me?” She looked up at him and was surprised to see an expression of uncertainty on his face.

Like he was torn, like there might be something he wanted to unburden on her too.

She wanted it. Wanted to know more about him, wanted to know the contours of his soul. Wanted so much to know if she was allowed to feel for him this way.

She waited, but then she saw his face relax and knew he’d made his decision.

He wasn’t going to open up all the way with her yet.

“I love you,” he said, turning on his side and smiling at her. “Is that what you wanted me to say?”

She accepted the new mood his word and smile had shaped, since it was safer, easier. She smiled back. “You said that this morning.”

“I haven’t changed my mind yet.”

“Good. Me either. I love you too.”

His smile widened and he leaned forward, kissing her gently at first until he wrapped one arm around her and the kiss deepened dramatically. “Do you know what?” he murmured against her mouth, his voice throaty and erotic when they finally broke the kiss.

“What?”

“This is the first time in my life when I’ve ever wanted a woman for more than her body. Is that strange?”

He was definitely getting into sex mode, but she could tell that his last question had been a serious one. He wanted an answer.

“I don’t know. Maybe a little. Forty years is a long time to want nothing but sex from women.”

Her mind felt rather blurred and overly warm as he kissed her again, deeply and leisurely. She pressed her body against him, wound her arms around his neck, opened her mouth to his tongue, felt all of him giving to her, taking from her, both at the same time.

When he finally pulled back from the kiss, he was smiling. “Well, truth be known, I didn’t start pursuing women when I was four, so it’s been a little less than forty years.”

It took a minute to register the words through the cloud of lust and feeling in her mind, but when she did, she couldn’t help but giggle. “Thirty years, then. It’s still a long time. You’ve really only thought about women’s bodies in all that time?”

“In work contexts, it’s different. I can respect them as much as men. But beyond that…” He shook his head. “You’re the first woman I’ve ever wanted beyond just the physical.”

She couldn’t help but like that idea, no matter what it said about Caleb’s sexual history. She liked that he’d never felt for any woman anything close to what he felt for her.

She knew those kinds of feelings were dangerous, knew the more she entertained them, the harder it would be to ever do what she was here to do. She knew the smartest thing for her to do right now would be to change the mood between them to something simpler—something hot and sexy and not filled with this kind of soft emotion.

But instead of saying something dirty, she asked, “So what exactly about me do you want?”

His expression was unusually soft, tender, with something almost happy warming his eyes. “Are you fishing for compliments?”

“Not compliments.” She was smiling the same way he was. “Just an explanation of what you meant. How hard can that be?”

He kissed her again, with even more depth and urgency than before, and started to undress her. Soon she was writhing in desire and a deeper kind of emotion that just wouldn’t go away. She was making strange whimpering noises into his mouth, and her hands were stroking his skin eagerly. His body was pressing into hers, and she loved the weight of it, how hot and heavy he was on top of her.

When she was afraid she might drown in how much she was feeling, she angled her hips up and tried to rub her growing arousal against his hip. Then she moved her hands—which had begun clawing at his back—to his shoulders and pushed him up.

“So you’re not going to tell me?”

Caleb blinked. He looked a little dazed himself, so he must have been just as affected as she was.

After a moment Caleb finally found his voice again. “Well, one of the things about you I love,” he murmured, “is that you never give up. I’ve never met a woman with such a strong will.” He brushed a kiss against her lips. “It’s intoxicating.”

“A strong will doesn’t sound very attractive.”

Caleb gave her his feral smile, his pelvis lowering again to rub his hardening cock against her. The heat flaring up again in his eyes, he said, “You have no idea how attractive it is.”

He knew her. He might not know who she was, but he still knew her. So his words weren’t about a made-up woman. They were about her. She felt them wash over her. “What else?”

Arching one eyebrow, Caleb shook his head and then lowered himself until his mouth was hovering over one of her breasts. “I love how you can let yourself go.” He lowered his face. Mouthed her breast a few times before he tightened his lips around her nipple.

She sucked in an urgent breath at the responding tug she felt at her center. Arching up in pleasure into his mouth, she gasped, “I don’t ever let myself go.”

Caleb relaxed his mouth around her breast, giving her just enough time to catch her breath before he flicked her tight, sensitive nipple with his tongue in a few quick, delicious strokes.

Kelly gasped again. Couldn’t help it.

Slanting her a surprisingly teasing look, Caleb raised his head just long enough to say, “Yes, you do. In bed. It’s like you’re able to throw off any inhibition and lose yourself in the moment. You did it on the first day we met, and I love that about you. I want to be that way too.”

“I don’t know—” She couldn’t finish the comment. Caleb was busy at her breast again—this time mouthing it softly for long enough to lull her before he gave the flesh a little nip with his teeth.

At the sharply pleasurable stimulation, Kelly let out a helpless exclamation. Her arousal was almost throbbing now, and she occasionally had to shift her hips uncomfortably in an attempt to ease it.

When he lifted inquisitive eyes toward her—clearly waiting for her to finish—she said, “I don’t know if that’s always a good thing.”

Caleb smiled again. “I don’t care if it’s good. It’s you, and it’s one of the things I can’t help but want about you.” Since he was nuzzling between her breasts, the vibrations sent ripples down through her belly as he spoke. He tongued a wet trail along her collarbone, close enough to her sensitive breasts to tantalize her. When she thrust her chest up toward him involuntarily, he kissed a path along one swell of flesh but failed to connect with her nipple. “And you’re so brave and resilient. You can still laugh and really mean it, no matter what has happened to you in your life. I love that.”

She was squirming in obvious need now, trying to relieve the ache between her legs and the urgent tingling in her nipples. But her heart was even more affected. “Oh, God. Caleb!” she demanded, taking his head in her hands and moving it back over her breast, pressing his mouth back down where she wanted it.

He took the breast in his mouth, teasing it with his tongue. But what first was satisfying stimulation soon became sensual torment. When she discovered that she was grinding her pelvis up into his and digging her fingers into his hair, she pulled his head up again from her breast.

He was fully erect now—she could feel it against her thigh—and he was gradually becoming just as tense and breathless as she was. But he smiled at her almost fondly. “And I love that you’re not afraid of making sure you get what you want in bed.”

“I’d think that was a pretty common trait.”

“It’s not.” He lifted his head to meet her eyes. “I promise you, it’s not.” He adjusted so he could comb the fingers of one of his hands through her tousled hair, smoothing the long strands out and staring at the way they rippled against the sheet. “Fuck, Kelly, you take my breath away.”

His gaze as hot and possessive as she’d ever seen it, his eyes lowered from her face to her naked breasts to her flat belly. Raising himself up a little, his gaze crawled even lower. And then his hand followed his eyes.

He fingered her open, slowly sliding his finger along the hot, swollen flesh of her arousal.

At the first feel of his finger, she jerked her hips and let out another breathless sound When his finger sank fully inside her, spilling the wetness that had gathered there, she hissed out, “Yes!” and stretched her arms up to grab at the headboard.

Caleb’s eyes seemed to be devouring her, moving from his hand working between her legs to her flushed face. “Oh, fuck, baby, I love how you respond to me, as if it’s so good you just can’t stop yourself.”

He’d read her exactly right. So precisely it should have been frightening. But it wasn’t. It made her feel safe and known and understood. And loved.

She was just like him. She’d never felt that way before.

Caleb shifted his hand slightly until his thumb brushed against her pulsing clit. “Now I want to see you come for me, blossom.” His voice was just another caress.

Kelly had jerked uncontrollably when he’d first rubbed across her clit. And when he started to massage it with skillful purpose, she felt the intense ache at her center suddenly swell up into the beginnings of an orgasm.

“Yes,” she said, the word barely more than a taken breath. Her hips were pumping up into his touch rhythmically, and she had to clutch at the headboard for support. “I’m going to come.”

Caleb adjusted his body, moving even farther down the bed and pulling off her pants and panties. And she knew what he was going to do.

And this time she wanted him to.

He shifted his eyes up to check her face, and she gasped, “Oh, yes, please, Caleb. Please.”

He made a guttural sound and lowered his mouth to her pussy, nuzzling and then parting her folds with one hand.

She cried out when he teased her clit with his tongue, and then arched up helplessly when he slid his tongue inside her, pumping it like he was fucking her.

“Oh, yes, please, Caleb,” she cried out as the sensations collected too fast for her to control them. “Make me come.”

He made another sound in his throat, one that was pleased and masculine and almost animalistic. Then he closed his lips around her clit and started to suck.

She came hard, bucking up off the bed as the pleasure swept through her, and she was filled with the knowledge that he’d wanted to give her that experience—give without taking anything in return.