I pull back and look into his eyes so chock-full of concern. “I can’t … We can’t keep—”

“Sh-shh!” My finger is on his lips, stopping him instantly. “We are,” I whisper to him, looking at his lips and then back up to his eyes to reinforce the words I’ve just said. His mouth falls lax as he sucks in a breath from my unexpected answer. “I need you, Becks.”

And I’ve never spoken more honest words in my life.

His eyes widen, the pupils overtaking the irises and his mouth smiling cautiously beneath my finger. I lean forward—praying he doesn’t reject me—and slant my mouth over his again. And this time he responds. He parts his lips and allows me to slip my tongue between them and lick softly against his. It’s a soft sigh of a kiss, so very different from the earlier frantic energy, but there’s still an underlying desperation that I can sense … and I’m just not sure if it’s on his part or mine.

But I choose to push the thought away. I choose to get lost in him instead. So I reach down with the hand not resting against his cheek and make quick work of the buttons on his jeans. I take a second to savor the warmth of his skin before pushing down his boxer briefs so I can take him in my hand. It takes a few uncoordinated moments of him raising his hips and helping to shove the waist of his jeans down.

No words are spoken—none are needed as we use the intimacy of our mouths to express what we feel about the chances I’ve just given us.

I continue to kiss him softly, gentle draws of mouth on mouth, while my hand encircles him and slides over his length. Every moan he emits as I repeat the action makes me crave another from him.

He reaches over and puts his hands at my waist, and I can feel him jolt with the awareness that I’m already naked and ready for him. And I can’t deny the charge I get in knowing that I can come to him completely naked and know he’s going to want me. There is something most definitely sexy and empowering in that feeling.

His hands direct me to rise up and settle over his hips so that I’m on my knees with my hand still stroking him between my parted legs. I look at him now. Run my eyes up his golden skin, the tightened disks of his nipples, to the bottom lip his teeth are biting into as he fumbles to put on the condom that he’s produced from his wallet. When he’s protected, his eyes meet mine just as I line him up at my entrance and lower myself onto his wide crest. I can see and feel his whole body tense at the partial sheathing—my tease to his more than ready cock—and his hands reach back up to my hips to urge me to lower myself onto him.

I don’t even fight the smile when I choose to ignore the pressure at my hips and sink down at a torturously slow pace. It’s absolutely killing me with a potent combination of pleasure and anticipation, so I know it has to affect him just as much, if not even more.

He hisses out when I’m over him root to tip. For a moment, I just sit there, letting the slow burn of his girth subside, before I pop my hips forward so that I slide up and down on him, earning a soft hiss of pleasure. I continue controlling the pace, the movement, and angle myself expertly so I can make sure that my inner hot spot is hit each time.

The pleasure is so strong, so intense that I’m in a state of indecision—I want to slow down, draw it out so I can enjoy every single withdrawal and subsequent settling back down onto him, and at the same time, I want to be impatient and selfish and push myself to climax as quick as I can. Find my release so that he can chase his.

He’s so incredibly deep inside me—feels so fucking good—that I don’t even realize my eyes are closed, face angled up to the ceiling, and hands are gripping Becks’s hands, which are still holding on to my hips. The pressure begins to build, spears of white-hot heat shooting sparks up my spine, causing my breathing to quicken but my rhythm to remain even and seductively slow, despite his hands urging otherwise.

I lose myself in the feeling for a moment, letting the current of our union overwhelm me until Becks shocks my head forward when he adds a subtle grind to his hips along with my motion. I look to meet his eyes—lids half-closed as the sublime sensations begin to pull him under.

But when our gazes meet, the intimacy of the moment as we keep moving—our bodies, our thoughts, our souls connecting all at once—is so powerful that we falter for a minute. My body is damp with sweat, and goose bumps threaten, the intensity of the emotion so overwhelming, it drowns me momentarily.

His dick involuntarily pulses within me, causing a sly smirk to shadow his lips. His arrogance is unexpected and sexy as hell. I squeeze around him, and I love the groan my action garners from him. He begins to urge my hips to move again with our linked hands, and I want to keep this steady course, not rush it because damn he feels like fucking Heaven.

So I take control and move our joined hands to his chest so that I can hold them there while gaining some leverage to maneuver my hips in different angles. I lean forward and press my lips to his, slipping my tongue in between. My forward motion exposes more of his dick, from the crest just to the opening of my sex, so that when I slide horizontally, his head hits every damn nerve I possess. I moan, his mouth capturing the sounds he’s coaxing from me, and with each thrust of his hips upward and my push downward, my body jolts with even more awareness, the precipice of bliss that much closer.

I tell myself to take note of everything—the slide of my chest against his, his taste on my tongue, his complete domination of every fucking sensation below my waist, the soft exhale of pleasure he makes when I take him completely inside me. All of these factors help heighten my sensations, push me up and over the edge.

The sex this time is so different from last time between us. Whereas before it was a discovery of bodies and a proving ground of abilities, this time it is slow and mesmerizing. When my orgasm hits with a violent intensity, I’m not prepared for the breath it steals from me.

Yes, my toes curl and my back arches like normal, but I’m shaken irrevocably as the flash of vulnerability streaks through me. My body is left trembling as the intense sensations of pleasure ricochet back to my core, my heartbeat a thunderous roar in my ears, and my body starving for the air my brain can’t seem to tell my lungs to suck in.

My name falls in a strained exclamation from Becks’s mouth as his hands hold my hips still. He grows iron hard within me, making my body sing with the added pressure, and then he’s lost to his own onslaught of sensations. His body tenses as his hips thrust fervently and his neck arches upward, his fingers digging harder into my skin as a guttural moan fills the silence around us.

I lay my head against his chest and listen to his heart, which I’ve helped send into its current rapid beat, my own feeling like it’s quickening too but for a different reason. I close my eyes as Becks presses a kiss to the top of my head, his fingertips trailing lazy lines up my spine and then back down in a way that gives me goose bumps. We sit there for a few moments, coming down from our orgasmic hazes. He begins to soften so that he slips out of me, and I move so he can clean up, but instead he just wraps his arms around me and holds me against his chest.

“We are,” he murmurs, repeating the words back to me before emitting a satisfied moan. “We are.”

My breath hitches with his comment, my own response tangled in the confusion in my head. This feels so right with him at the same time that I’m worried I’m only going to cause us pain. But I push the worry from my head because everything will be okay. It has to be.

“’Night, City.”

“’Night.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, both satisfied and scared by the man who’s at fault for breaking the first link in the chain I wrapped around my guarded heart. Whereas I used to use sex to quiet my thoughts, this time it’s had the opposite effect.

My thoughts are screaming so loud now that they can’t be ignored.

The transition between sleep and waking is gentle. I’m in that dreamlike haze where my mind is drifting softly, trying to fall back under the pull of slumber so that I can return to sitting with Lex by the pool, where we were talking. Where we were laughing and I felt closer to her than I had in forever. Every single thing I feared I had forgotten about her—the pitch to her laugh, the line of her posture, the ease of her smile—was there, allowing me to grasp it back and hold on to it a little longer.

I’m not startled or surprised by the fact that I’m pressed up against Becks’s naked body or in his bed. I vaguely remember the feel of his arms carrying me in here from the couch. I note the rise and fall of his chest beneath my hand where it lies over his heart. I’m oddly the most at peace with myself that I have been in a long time, and I snuggle into the feeling as well as into Becks.

My thoughts tumble aimlessly as I will myself to go back to sleep to steal a few more hours ensconced in this feeling of relaxed contentment. But I’m at an awkward angle, my breasts smashed uncomfortably up against Becks’s firm torso. I begin to shift at the same time he turns in his sleep and find myself emitting a muffled cry as he lowers his arm and pinches a part of my breast.

It’s a split second of time. I’m sure thinking about it later I won’t even be able to process how fast the awareness hits me. The pain is quick and fleeting, and when I move in reflex to pull away from where my breast is pinched between the mattress and his back, I become conscious of the fact that I feel something there.