Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance (63 page)

I wanted him inside me, ached to have him take me right then – but he wasn’t done exploring.

My hands fell from him and I sank back onto the bed, gasping. I was exhausted and full of racing energy, blissful and tense, happy and frustrated and aroused all at the same time, and I sincerely wanted to murder him so bad when he left my breasts and moved on down my body.

Once more he cataloged every curve and dimple and shivering stretch of skin, taking his time while the body he was memorizing burned with the need to be plundered and taken and satisfied.

Devon kissed down the center of me, down over the rising curve of my stomach, around the ripe hills and valleys of my body, the body that I’d once been so nervous about displaying to him – but now I showed him all that I had without shame or fear, because I knew he saw the woman within the curves.

While he kissed my stomach and swirled his tongue into my navel for a silly second or two, his hands followed on either side of me. Warm and sure and knowing, his palms eased down my flanks and over my hips, cupping and holding every curve in turn, keeping me close, as if he was afraid I might escape before he could remember all of me.

Then in a single sweet moment, he pinned one hip down with his left hand and kissed me there, while his right hand slipped between my legs and reached deep into my wetness.

I moaned and bucked, pushing myself into his hand as he eased one finger and then two inside me, gently, with care, probing and pleasuring as my clit ached for his touch – and then he pulled his hand from me.

Before I could scream or hit him or kill him, though, he bent down, planted a kiss on either side of my mound, and then went lower – he went lower and he tasted my center.

His tongue eased through my wetness, licking over the tender folds, almost entering me but not quite. I quivered at each delicate, dancing touch, waiting to feel more, aching with the need for release – I was so close to coming, so close to losing it before he ever even took me, and then his mouth was on my clit.

He pressed his lips to the swollen bud, and then he sucked gently.

I jumped, I made a noise I’d never thought of before, I felt the orgasm building inside me, surging along my nerves, an earthquake powering to the surface – and the crazy man stopped what he was doing again, pulling his mouth away and kissing the inside of my right thigh instead.

He was so lucky I didn’t have a knife or a gun or something handy right then.

But I didn’t, he knew I didn’t, and he continued on down my body – he’d said he wanted to file all of it away in his mind, and he was a man of his word.

But hey, I was not too proud to beg.

“Devon, I need to come, please – stop teasing, okay? Please?”

Yep, pitiful and horny and needy, that’s Ashley Daniels.

Then arousal took a left turn as Devon stroked down my thighs, all the way down to my knees – and yes, he knew I was SO ticklish there, the bastard.

He dug his fingers into that one certain place at the edge of each kneecap, and I giggled like a helpless fool, laughing and twisting in his arms as he kept up the assault. He got my kneecaps, he also found that super-tickle-monster spot in the tender fold behind each knee, and I dissolved into a goofy, shaking lump, as he laughed with me and my arousal bled away – a little.

Just a little.

He kissed each knee goodbye and then descended further, kneading my calves with his strong fingers. He rubbed and pressed deep, probing into the muscles, and you know how massages are supposed to be so relaxing? Not this one – the longer and harder his fingers caressed me, the faster my heart ran. Warmth flared deep inside me again, rising higher as he moved lower still.

Now his strong hands and fingers kneaded my feet – he’d never massaged me there before, never pressed his thumbs into the soles, never handled my toes and rubbed hard against the arches and my heels … and I had no idea until that moment just how arousing, how maddening, a foot massage can be.

Just like that, I was aching for him again, needing him to touch and pleasure me everywhere, and needing more than anything to feel him deep inside me – and that was when he moved back up my body.

Devon eased over me like a panther stalking prey. He moved above me in the darkness, a great weight of muscle and bone and desire, and I reached up the pillars of his arms to pull him down to me.

His hips bore me down into the mattress, his hard, hungry cock surged against me, and he lowered himself onto his elbows. I slipped a hand around the back of his neck, trying to pull him close for a kiss – but he leaned to one side and whispered into my ear instead.

“Stay with me, please, I need you. I do not deserve you, my impossibly beautiful and loving Ashley, but I need you at my side and in my heart, for all the fleeting time that we have left.”

Then his hands clamped tight to my shoulders as his mouth tasted mine in a long, searching kiss – but now arousal fought for my attention with the alarm bells ringing inside my head.

We had a lifetime left – didn’t we?
            I was young, he was young enough, and we were both healthy. I loved him more than I loved breathing and I knew how he felt about me, even if he never had said the words …

So why did I hear that countdown clock ticking louder and louder with every pounding beat of our hearts?

A thousand questions shouted to be heard as Devon moved to rest his face in the hollow of my shoulder, and I didn’t have any of the answers. But then he shifted his hips against mine, his breath came faster, his fingers dug into my shoulders, my own aching need rose to meet his – and it came to me that no matter how many answers I didn’t have, I was certain of one simple thing.

So I said it.

“Devon, I promise I will stay by your side, no matter where you go and no matter what happens. I promise I will never leave you.”

Then the time for words was over, and he took me.

He kneed my legs wide apart and dove into me with one powerful thrust. His teeth sank into my shoulder, I tore my nails down his back, and we rocked together as one. Over and over he drew back and then plunged deeper into my body, forcing himself further into me with every stroke, his massive cock stretching me to the limit, to the point of pain and beyond, as I clamped my legs around his hips and clung to him.

I was lost in the surging flood of sensation. The aching pleasure of his shaft thrusting into me, the pressure and friction as I felt him moving inside me, the arousal pulsing through my clit with each rocking movement, his chest hair brushing against my tender nipples as he moved above me – it all built inside me, one feeling upon another, and I felt the tide of my release rising, pouring through every inch of my body, a force that rose to meet his own overwhelming need, a force that neither of us could deny.

We came in the same instant, as one person, and the world fell away in the darkness.

White-hot as the sun, my orgasm pulsed through me in waves, from my center out to every nerve ending in my body – it took me and held me, seizing me again and again, and it held Devon too. Deep inside me, at my core, I felt the pleasure surging, claiming him, driving him over the edge as he thrust into me with one final buck of his hips. He shuddered as his own release took him, groaning low in his throat, and then he sank down on top of me.

Welded together, his weight holding me beneath him as his shaft shifted inside me, we rested. We breathed in exhausted gasps, as sweat ran off our two bodies that were now one. We rested, we breathed, and we held each other. That was all we were in that moment, and all that we needed. Each other, and nothing else.

We made love again that night, and again, and I can’t tell you how many times, exactly – but that first time, afterward, as we lay together as one, I realized something. It came to me in an instant, in one of those flashes of insight that really do hit us sometimes, and it came to me as the absolute truth.

The countdown thing was bullshit.

It was real, yes, but it was also bullshit because it didn’t matter. I didn’t care. I didn’t care because in that moment I knew I was staying with this man to the end and beyond, no matter what, and whatever dark future was coming for him could just take us both. So there.

***

Of course she would leave me. How could she not?

Everyone left. Well, they left or I destroyed them – it came to much the same thing, in the end.

My father left me, and took my future with him.

Mama left me, and left without saying a single word about her monstrous son. She abandoned me alone in this darkling world, and it was only right and proper that she did so. It was no more than I deserved.

Uncle Sheridan was a rock, and even he left me. I don’t think he meant to, but something in him was loyal to the last, and allowed fate to steer him to that crosswalk. He knew without knowing it that I needed a final lesson in just what would happen to her if I was weak and selfish and failed to see the special project through to its true end.

I had to go through with it now. How could I not?

I had to save her from what I was, and was not. I had to save her, and the only way was the same path I’d chosen all those years ago, before I knew she even existed.

Staying at my side would destroy her, and so I had to leave her behind. Once I left, she would be safe.

I knew that for a certainty, because I also knew that no matter how brave her loving heart, Ashley could not follow where I was going.

41. No Hiding Place

Something was wrong.

I blinked the sleep from my eyes, and something was still wrong.

Was it the light? It was morning, sure – but even in Montana, morning came after night, didn’t it?

Was it the sound? I pried my ears open and heard the river, but it rumbled and hissed in the distance just like always, just like it had for thousands or millions or however many years – nothing wrong with that, was there?

I rolled over, pulled one satin comforter, two well-worn quilts, and a thick mohair blanket around me into a warm cocoon, and gave serious consideration to leaving it at that and going right back to sleep.

Ashley? The light not being right, the sound that’s off – remember all that?

I yawned into the down pillow, cursed the invention of mornings, and sat up. I did it slowly, like someone who was sitting up for the first time in a hundred years or so, but I got vertical.

I sat up on the soft, warm, welcoming bed. I held a kazillion-thread-count silk sheet and the closest comforter around my body, thought with a vague smile about how sore and well-used various parts of that body were, and I looked around at the room with half-open eyes.

The TV was on.

The TV that had hung dead and forgotten on the wall for all our time together in the wilderness was on. The glowing screen displayed the Weather Channel, where a supremely bland man in an off-the-rack suit waved at a storm front that was moving across the country.

I dropped the sheet and the comforter, and sat staring at the source of the weird light that had forced my brain to wake up. The sound was muted, but there was no mistaking the warm electronic beacon of civilization.

Why did I want to stumble across the room and snap it off again?

After a hypnotized moment or two of staring at the screen hanging in the far corner of the cabin, my eyes dropped to the desk below it.

My iPhone sat there in plain view. A certain someone had hidden it on Day One, but now it was back and sitting next to the laptop, which I saw with a sigh of relief was still closed and asleep.

Why was I relieved about the internet still being on vacation? Why wasn’t I sprinting to my phone’s side and checking the five million or so texts that had to be waiting for me?

And what was that sound?

Buzzing, harsh, like a wasp on crack …

“Ashley?”

Electric razor – in the moment my head snapped around at the sound of Devon’s voice, my brain reported in that the mystery sound belonged to an electric razor.

So why was he shaving?

I got my feet to the floor, stood up with a waver, and realized I was still running on naked – so I snatched up one of his flannel shirts from the floor where he’d abandoned the night before, draped it around me, and fastened the buttons with fumbling fingers.

Ashley, why is he shaving all of a sudden and for the first time, after all these days of growing his way toward a full beard?

Get moving and find out, girl.

I didn’t so much as glance at my phone or the TV as I stumbled around the bed and headed across the cabin, my eyes locked on the open bathroom door. I got there, poked my head inside, and was just in time to see the last few strands of Devon’s promising, almost-full beard landing in the sink.

“Baby, why are you shaving?”

My voice shook, though I had no idea why. The TV was on duty, my iPhone had come out of hiding, I’d had a major personal revelation about how I was going to kick that countdown clock’s ass, and all should have been well with the world – and he’d grow the stupid beard back if I asked him to, I knew it.