Rare and Precious Things (9 page)

“I bet you do
. I am well aware that when you say
date
you really mean sex—”

My words were lost as we
rounded a turn in the beach path and came out onto the shore. The waves lapped at the sand with the soothing sounds of water moving against earth. A sliver of moon glowed over the water, but the real beauty was the many glass jars lit up with tea lights set out on the soft sand of the beach. What seemed like hundreds of them flickering away around a pallet of blankets and pillows. Off to one side sat a bucket of iced drinks and what appeared to be little dessert cakes on a tray with some fresh fruit.

“It’s beautiful, Ethan.” I could hardly speak as I realized what he’d done. “How did you do…this?”

He led us onto the blankets and drew me down to sit beside him. “It was my idea,” he began, “but I needed some help to pull it off. Franco got it organized while we were at the party.”

I looked around behind us, imag
ining if the caretaker for our villa was lurking in the dark, hoping for a glimpse.

“I know what you’re thinking, but you don’t have to worry, baby, Franco is not in the bushes watching, trust me.”

I laughed nervously. “Well, if Franco is in the bushes somewhere, I am predicting he’s gonna get one hell of a show.”

“Now that’s what I lik
e to hear. My girl accepting the idea of a hot beach shag,” he whispered teasingly against my ear, his tongue flicking out for a lick along the shell. “You like my surprise.”

My body came instantly al
ive, needing him so badly. Ethan could get me hot with just the simplest look or touch. He reached up and worked on the messy knot holding up my hair and unpinned it. He was getting good at figuring out my hair. It made me smile to watch him as he found the pins and pulled them, knowing how he’d be fisting my hair in handfuls and using it to dominate when we were deep into the sex.

“You’re smiling,
” he murmured, as he worked over my hair.

“I just love to watch you doing simple things.”

My hair fell free.

“This is not a simple thing to me,” he whispered, fingering through the
tangled length with both hands. His gaze grew smoky as he focused on my lips. “It’s everything.”

He dropped his lips to mine, seeking entry with his tongue, tracing over my open mouth
with great care. Both of his hands gathered up my hair and tugged, forcing me to arch into him, to offer myself.

“You’re everything, Brynne,” he whispered low, dragging his mouth to my throat, and then moving lower, over the silk of my
dress to a breast. He zeroed in on my nipple and found it with his teeth, pinning it between two layers of fabric and his teeth.

“Oh…
God.” I moaned into the sharp bite of pleasure. So heated by his touch already I was slipping fast. In a moment he had moved me into that place where I didn’t want to think about anything but the sensual journey he would take me on. He was so good at loving me—so good at everything. “You’re
my
everything, Ethan.” My own voice sounded breathless even to my ears.

I felt his hands pulling my dress up, and then the warm air meet
ing my bare skin as he drew it over my head. And it was off.

“You’re my goddess. Right here, right now…like this.” He pressed me back
into the blankets and loomed over me, arms planted straight, penning me in, devouring with ravenous eyes. “Where to go first…” he muttered, “I want all of you at once.”

I didn’t care what he took first.
Didn’t matter. It never mattered. Anything he did was what I wanted. What I needed in that moment.

I moved my hands to the buttons of his shirt and started undoing them.

He smiled wickedly down at me. Ethan loved for me to undress him. Loved to watch me suck his cock. Loved to watch his cock penetrating me. Anywhere.

I pushed his shirt off his shoulders, abando
ning it when it would move no farther because his palms on the blanket kept it trapped across his back, and started in on his trousers, growing frustrated when I was only able to push them down over his tight ass.

“
My baby is frustrated…tell me what you want,” he commanded.

“I want you naked so I can see you,” I panted, moving my hands i
nto his boxers to grip his rock-hard cock. Hard as bone and sheathed in velvet skin, I wanted that perfect part of him in my mouth where I could suck and stroke until he came apart because of what I did to him. “I want your cock. I want you.”

“Fucking hell,” he moaned, his eyes wild with
need as he jerked his body up, shrugged off the shirt violently, and kicked off his pants and shorts in a vicious twist that left him breathing down at me with a look of raw, raging possession. “I love you so much.”

Ethan pushed up my bra and gripped both breasts in his hands, dipping to suck the tips into sharp pea
ks that sent a path of molten heat straight to my core. I was completely ready for his cock but knew I wouldn’t be getting it yet no matter how much I begged for it.

Ethan took charge of the pace.

Arching my back with his hands, he grappled with the clasp of my bra, detaching it easily, before flinging it to land somewhere on the beach. He growled in pleasure as he returned to my breasts, teasing them relentlessly with his prickly whiskers framing the softest tongue that knew just how to suck and lick me into a frenzied bundle of desperate need.

His hand burrowed into the
white bathing-suit bottoms I’d worn under my dress and found my sex with a claiming touch. “All mine,” he said forcefully, pushing a long thick finger inside me.

I arched into his hand on a cry when he curled his finger
to find my sweet spot, bridging the gap between the clawing building of pleasure and the climax he’d made me want so desperately.

He did all of this to me
in mere seconds.

“Ethan, please,” I begged.

His answer was to slide over my clit with his thumb as his finger worked my passage to a blinding orgasm. One that left me shuddering and trembling beneath him, winded for breath.

“Don’t look away. I
still want your eyes on me after I’ve made you come,” he ground out. “I want to see your eyes flashing fire and your legs shaking when I’m inside you, making you scream my name.” His fingers stroked slower now, bringing me down from the drenching pleasure, utterly captive to his need to own me.

“I want to make you come.”
I panted at him, taking his cock in my hand and stroking up and down the velvet shaft, loving the sharp hiss he gave as I made contact.

“You will,” he promised
darkly.

My bottoms were peeled down my legs and a kiss placed over my mound reverently. It was often the last gentle thing he did before things got really dirty and
wicked. Almost like a final affirmation to let me know he loved me, and not to forget it when things got wildly primal. My raging sex god had a worrisome conscience, I’d learned. It only made me love him more, when he showed his care of me.

He need never worry
though. I’d take him wicked or gentle…or any way.

Ethan rolled me to my side and turned his body opposite of mine, aligning us
so my mouth could have his cock and his mouth could have me. He lifted my leg and took his time kissing up the inside of my thigh, teasing slowly toward my sex as if it were a delicacy he wanted to savor.

I
took his thick length in my hand and stroked him, adding the little twist at the top, knowing how it drove him wild. He groaned into my pussy as I brought him into my mouth and closed around the wide crest of his cock. I drew him deep and slid my hand in tandem to match the rhythm I knew he loved. Suck…twist…stroke…slide.

I brought him along, relishing the tensing of his thighs and abdomen, the sounds and words he ground out, muffled by his lips pressed between my legs
, building me up to my own peak until it all became just a swirling vortex of sex and pleasure impossible to describe in thought. We both got lost in the beautiful frenzy of finding our pinnacle together.

“So good…oh, fuck it’s so good. You suck my cock…so good, baby…”
Ethan’s gasping moans brought me out of my own swirling pleasure enough to get my body moving.

I love sucking your beautiful cock
. I scrambled around and knelt between his legs, taking his hard flesh very deep, in long sweeping sucks that bumped the back of my throat. I cradled his balls in my other hand and squeezed, feeling them tighten up in preparation to give me what I wanted from him.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck…I’m gonna come
in your mouth. Brynne—” he choked out, jerking his hips in short bursts, fucking into my mouth. His hands gripped my hair in handfuls, holding me captive on his cock…as he emptied his hot male essence down my throat.

In that final instant, as I had come to expect of him
, because it was how Ethan needed it from me; he said my name in a desperate call to look up at him.

I lifted my eyes and found the blue of
his own staring down upon me, shattering in all their fiery brilliance, with love…for me.

“I…
love…you,” he said to me in a roar that could only be described as one of utter, agonized bliss.

I recognized it because it was exactly what he did to me.

Hours later, and more orgasms than I thought possible, I lay cradled in my man’s strong arms with the soft lapping of the sea on the sand, and the flickering of candles in jars lighting the night around us with a soft glow. I knew more happiness and love than I’d ever experienced in my life, and now understood how precious it was to have that love.

How could I ever live without it now? What would happen to me if I ever lost him?
Could I even survive such a thing?

Ethan had changed me forever and there was no unringing of that bell.
Ever.

I closed my eyes and focused on where I was in the moment.
On our Italian beachside bed-of-love, with Ethan spooning behind me, his hand cradling my belly as he slept.

Holding us both against his heart, owning us, protecting us…loving us.

Such a beautiful thing…

I was almost frightened
to believe it had happened to me.

AUTUMN

Did the cold wind bite
you, did you face up to the fright?

When the leaves spin from October

and
whip around your tail?

Did you shake from the
blast, did you shiver through the gale?

Jethro Tull ~Weathercock

30th September

Somerset

AS
the mother lay dead in the street, the boy cried over her body they’d left abandoned in the dirt. The hours dragged as slowly as the sun moved overhead. It became harder and harder for me to tune him out. The wailing just zeroed in through my ears, and straight to my motherfucking heart. That boy was me. I’d been right where he was. I couldn’t stand hearing him for another bloody second. So I swooped in to grab him. A decision I cannot take back, because what I did was his death sentence. He never had a chance. None. They used him like bait to lure me in. No take-backs for what I did…

I crashed awake gasping for breath. Like a
film in super slow motion, then fast-forwarded, defying logic, but making acceptable sense to where I’d just been in my dream. One moment I was buried under with the oppressive weight of darkness and despair closing in on me, and then in a split-second, shoved to the surface to face the blinding light of freedom.

I fucking hated it.

The dreams fucked with my head.

I was fucked up
because of them.

I was also sleeping in the same bed as my pregnant wife. This is the part I dreaded more than anything. The moment when I had to lie there suspended,
too panicked to look over at her and see if she was peacefully asleep…or
unpeacefully
awake. Had she caught me this time? Or had I slipped through the net again?

I dared to look. Turning my eyes toward her without moving my head very much, afraid to cause any movement—which
was absurd because people moved around in their sleep all the time—in hopes that she didn’t see, didn’t hear…didn’t know.

Asleep
on her side facing away from me.

Blessed Jesus, thank you!

My girl slept less soundly now that she was pregnant, and I dearly wished I couldn’t say the same. Trying to rationalize the reasons for my nightmares, attempting to figure out why they’d been triggered so suddenly after being buried for years, wasn’t impossible to work out.

Brynne was the reason. Finding her, falling in love with her, had
initiated every possessive instinct inside of me. She had switched me on, and that was it. I’d been driven to have her, yes, but it was Brynne loving me back, putting me in a position of being worried over for the first time, it was her offering comfort to me that made her so different.

Before
Brynne, I could just bury the bad and horrible, detaching myself from what had happened to me, and not allowing myself to feel. I was disconnected, aloof, emotionless. Not now.

Now when I had a flashback, the
sequences of events were even more deranged than usual. In my head, the past and present melded together in a confused clusterfuck that rattled around in my subconscious, but wasn’t anywhere close to direct reality. Shit that had happened, mixed up with what could have happened, but hadn’t. And then there was the cocksucking future… That bastard would be the death of me, I was certain.

There’
s a shit-ton of crap to worry about in the future.

Falling in love with a person changes everything. You learn this, after the fact of course, because you quickly realize you didn’t really
ever have anything to worry about before you had someone to lose. Once you do have them?

Newsflash, motherfucker.
You
can
lose them. And in more ways than one, too. You have a lot of fuckin’ things to worry about. Like whether or not you’ll be able to breathe through another day if some deranged lunatic takes the only person on earth you can’t live without.

Brynne was that person for me.
I needed her in order to live now.

And thankfully she was sle
eping right now, undisturbed by my subconscious ravings and safe in the bed with me.

I breathed in deeply and told myself
I could do this. I was getting better at separating the past from the fear of the unknown down the road in the future.

So I focused
on her comforting scent and slid over to spoon up against her body, getting my face right next to her hair on the pillow, where I could breathe in the intoxicating smell of floral and citrus that belonged uniquely to her.

I rested my hand over her belly which had grown more since our honeymoon, but still didn’t look
very big to me—just a curved mound where she used to be very flat. Eighteen weeks along and we now had a sweet potato according to the TheBump.com, which was bookmarked in “favourites” on all my devices. I liked knowing what to expect.

Brynne didn’t want to know the sex
of our baby. And we didn’t know yet anyway because it was still too early to tell, but she amazed me with her ability to wait for something that most people would beg to find out, if the information was available. She said she wanted to be surprised. I had to respect that. Plus, if I did know, I would undoubtedly fuck up and ruin the surprise anyway, and then I’d be in massive trouble. Better if both of us were in the dark about whether we had a Thomas or a Laurel coming.

Either one would be perfect.

I started drifting off again, very loose and soothingly peaceful with her softness against me, when she grew restless. Her breathing picked up and her body tensed. She touched her belly and found my hand already there.

“Ethan?”

The sound of her voice was agitated, almost frightened, in an oddly muffled pitch that told me she was sound asleep and dreaming.

“
Shh… Right here beside you, baby.” I gently rubbed the swell in slow circles over her nightgown, and nuzzled at the back of her neck through her hair until she quieted from whatever dream had disturbed her.

I closed my eyes
, finally ready for my own sleep, when she spoke out again, this time, as clear as a bell…

“A
lways here for you, Ethan.”

My eyes snapped open
.

Her revelation floored me, not because of what she’d said, but the fact that even in sleep, even in her dreams
where the consciousness is blurred, my girl was right there loving me—showing her care and concern for me all the time.

We were that deeply connected.

No matter what fate held in store for me, I could never let her go.

THIS
house was really big. Too goddamn big for our needs, I decided. This was confirmed by the size of the modern garage I was parking the car in at that moment. It still retained its original façade, appearing on the outside as the carriage house it had originally been built as, over two hundred years before. As in big fucking coaches and carriages pulled by teams of horses and driven by a coachman. It was more than a little strange for me because I had always lived in the city. Born and bred. But still, we loved this house already, and in my gut I’d known it was right for us to make a home here. We couldn’t live here full time yet, but three- or four-day weekends were working out for now. And we couldn’t abandon London altogether because the business was there, and Brynne’s studies, which she was determined to return to once the baby was born.

The estate
agent had shared some history of Stonewell Court with us. The foundation had been laid down in 1761, then several years to build it, before being occupied by a London gentleman who wanted a country cottage to wile away the lazy summer days at the seaside when the heat of the city got too oppressive. And the stink of the city probably.

London of c
enturies past was not as pleasant as it was now in the modern age, so it made sense as to how all the big country mansions were built in the first place. Funny to think that we were doing the same thing the owners of centuries ago had done. Living in London and visiting the country for a break. We were having fun playing house and that’s all that concerned me.

Still made me laugh
to think that they’d referred to this monstrosity of stones as a “cottage.” I shook my head as I headed around to the back of the house to find her. I’d given Robbie strict instructions to keep her occupied while I was on a stealth errand to pick up her birthday present. Yeah, my girl was twenty-five years old today and had a celebration coming her way this afternoon.

I came out through the arch that led to the gardens and looked for her, and there she was.
Playing in the flowers. She wouldn’t call it playing, but she looked like she was having a good time, garden gloves and trowel in hand, planting an ancient looking urn with some lacy green vines.

The gardens
had appealed to Brynne from the first day we set foot on the property. I thought it was interesting even though she claimed to not know much about plants. She’d been talking about wanting to learn ever since she’d seen my mother’s garden at my dad’s London house. The place where I’d asked her to marry me.

Robbie James, the
gardener we’d inherited when we bought Stonewell, was helping her with the different beds and plantings, getting everything refreshed from some years of neglect when the house had been empty. I was happy to see she had chosen
a lot
of purple flowers, which were her favorites.
I knew that, of course
. I’d sent her purple flowers the very first time…and she had given me a second chance. I glanced up at the clouds and gave a silent thank you to angels who believed in second chances.

So Brynne was really taking to
this part of her new life, and that made me glad. If she wanted to play in the dirt then she should. But, she was strictly an observer on the labour aspect though. I made sure Robbie understood no lifting anything heavier than a garden hose for her. If she tried to do too much I’d better hear about it, so I could put a stop to it.

I waved to him
from across the turf, letting him know I’d returned and that his Brynne duties were finished. I gave him the thumbs up and he saluted back. Birthday gift was sorted and everything ready to go. I grinned at what she would say when she saw what I’d done.

I snuck up behind her and covered her eyes with my hands. “Guess who.”

“You’re very late, you know. We’ll have absolutely no time for our lover’s tryst now. My husband will be back any minute and he’ll go crazy if he finds you here.”

Damn,
she’s quick with the mouth.
“I work fast. I’ll be in and out before he knows a thing.”

“Oh
, my God.” She spun around and put her hands on my chest, laughing and shaking her head at me. “You did
not
just make that joke to me.”

“What joke?
” I deadpanned. “If we want to get in a quick shag before your jealous husband comes back we need to hurry up.”

She laugh
ed and stepped back from me, making a great show of taking off her garden gloves, enjoying the hell out of this game we were playing. Her hair was up again, just the way I liked it to be, so I could have the pleasure of taking it down when I got her in bed.

The coy and mi
schievous smile on her face was a sure sign telling me she was up to something though. I held on for her to make her move, both of us doing the stand-off, waiting, plotting, and grinning like fools.

She dropped the gloves
at my feet.

My cock woke up.