LITMIR.BIZ

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meant he had to go a lot slower, but Jason had never cared about that, he’d always made it clear he liked running with me.

      Just by living with him, I held him back—but he kept saying he didn’t care.

      Blood pulsed in my arteries and my muscles flooded with energy, as the sounds of the city absorbed and consumed me while we ran: cars, cabs, people. Jason had his earphones in, but I hadn’t put any music on, I was just running to the heartbeat of New York.

      When we got into the park, the noisy sounds of the city drifted into the distance and the closer noise became the birds amidst the jewel-like colors of the leaves on the trees that had changed for the fall, and there were kids and some guys playing a game of baseball. We ran a circuit around the park, then ran back to the hotel, I was breathing hard when we arrived and I doubled over in the elevator trying to get my breath back, but it was a good sort of breathless.

      Jason had pulled out his earphones and they dangled from his neck, still playing music.

      “What are you listening to?”

      He gave me a smile that was a little wider than any other smile I’d had from him today. “The compilation you gave me last Christmas.”

      I straightened up as a sound of humor slipped out of my throat. I smiled at him with parted lips. I loved him so much, it gripped in my belly as well as my chest and sent a tingle through my nerves into my muscles, that were warm from running.

      When we reached our room and shut the door behind us it was like we shut out the world.

      He’d said on Halloween we’d become us again because we’d had risky sex in the garden.

       Now I felt like we’d become us again.

      He took his cell out of his pocket and put it on the nightstand, then stripped off his sweaty top and tee. He was good to look at, his body did stuff to my belly too, and what it did to my belly was as powerful as what his love did to my heart, but this feeling didn’t touch my heart. I smiled even wider at him when he turned around and flashed his sinewy, sculpted abdomen at me.

      “What?” he asked of my smile.

      “Nothing. Are you gonna have a shower?”

      “Yeah.”

      “Can I get in with you?”

      “Yeah.” He sent a smile, like mine, right back at me.

      I pulled off my top as he stripped off his jogging pants and walked into the bathroom naked. I heard the shower turn on as I undid my bra. I took my panties off, then headed for the bathroom.

      He’d pulled the shower curtain halfway across the bath, so I could still get in around it. He was standing under the stream of water, with his back to me, letting the water run over his short hair. His hand lifted and brushed across his head. I stepped over the side of the bath and moved forward. My hands settled on his lean hips, then slid down, my thumbs following the curve of his tight butt.

      He turned and then his hand was at the back of my head and his lips came down on to mine. I opened my mouth to press my tongue into his, but he beat me to it, his tongue passing through my lips. I sucked it slightly then bit it gently. A growl left his throat, then his hands were at the back of my thighs, just below my bottom. My arms wrapped around his neck so he could lift me.

      He pressed me against the tiles as he slid into me, filling me up with a hard, slow pressure.

      I kissed his temple and he bit my neck when he withdrew and pressed back in.

      His palms held under my thighs, his fingertips pressing into my muscle.

      One of my hands clasped the back of his neck, while the other grasped at his shoulder. “Jason,” I said into his ear. All the sex we’d been having in the last week made me feel as though we were clinging to sex, trying to reclaim what had been normal between us. If we had nothing else right between us—we had gotten the sex back to being right.

      He shoved into me, over and over, working hard. Working like he loved sex with me, not just loved me.

      My orgasm exploded in a swell of sensation, and I cried out. Jason growled and bit my shoulder. I laughed. He just thrust into me harder, glancing down to watch, then he looked back up, right into my eyes.

      From the moment I’d met him, I’d had a weird connection to him—or maybe I’d just fancied the hell out of him. But I’d always known we were meant to be together.

      My butt and my back bumped against the tiles as the water fell on our sides. I laughed—but it was strange—fake. It came from my throat not my belly.

      He kissed my lips. My hand slid up and cradled the back of his head, holding his mouth to mine so we kept kissing as he pressed hard into me over and over until I came again. Then he came with a deep, long sigh that released into my mouth.

      He smiled at me, with his lips closed. But, this smile, softened the look of his eyes too and his gaze said, I love you. He was the fixer, he was working hard to fix us, and he was doing it the only way he probably knew how, with sex. I loved him more for trying to heal what had broken in me. He could have chosen to walk away.

      He could still choose to walk away. Most guys would.

      He withdrew from me, then lowered my legs. “Shall we go to Times Square after we’ve showered?”

      “Yeah. I’d like that.” It was where he’d proposed to me, after Christmas, last year. In a few weeks we’d have been married a year.

      We washed each other’s hair, ran soapy hands over each other’s bodies, then washed ourselves off under the stream of water, switched it off and stepped out.

      While Jason was drying himself with one towel, I wrapped mine around me and picked up my cell.

      “Hey, don’t tell me you’re going to call Mom because you didn’t think about Saint while we were having sex?”

      A blush flooded my skin. Because that was why.

      “He’s okay, and it’s okay not to think about him for half an hour, it doesn’t make you a bad mom.”

      But the fear that I was, was part of the one-ton weight pushing me down, and the iron chains holding me there.

      I pressed the call icon to ring Mom and Dad.

      I didn’t sleep so well, I was drifting in and out of dreams again tonight. Declan was in them, and Jason, and we were in New York with Saint.

      Saint was in the river with me, in the deep water of the Hudson. Then I was on Manhattan Bridge in the dark, watching the lights on the shifting water and gripping the grill, getting ready to climb it so I could jump.

      I’d have drowned in that water, if I’d jumped from Manhattan Bridge.

      The water was cold and dirty, it sucked me under, dragging me down, and then Saint was in my arms, and it was dragging us both down, and trying to pull him away. Declan’s face jeered at me in the murky cold.

      “Rach…” Jason’s hand touched my back.

      My eyes opened on a moment of another memory, of his hand touching my back the night I’d been climbing the grill, to jump off the bridge. He’d talked me out of it and taken me home with him. “I was dreaming,” I whispered without lifting my head off the pillow I’d made of his chest.

      “I know, and it didn’t sound all that good.”

      “Nope.”

      “The river…”

      “Yeah, that and Declan.”

      His arm came around me and his hand squeezed my shoulder. “It’ll be okay.”

      That was what he kept saying. But it was Declan we were going up against. Declan didn’t do okay. He did nasty, mean, and cruel. Never okay. Okay as an aim, or a desire, was mediocre. It was losing to Declan. He didn’t do anything without putting all

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