“Ah, ahhh, ughhh.” He shouted incoherent sounds over and over, his muscles jerking in spasmodic bliss, his heart tripping in his chest.
His head hit the pillow, the remnants of his climax thrumming through him, tingling his skin. When he regained his voice, he shifted his weight to his arms, bracketed her face, and searched her eyes.
“I intended to last longer than two thrusts.” A smile pulled at his lips, and he let it loose with a laughing sigh. He circled his hips, still seated deep inside her, with no plans to pull out. Ever.
She shook her head, biting down on her own smile. “Just like a teenage boy.” She kissed him, gliding her tongue and heating his mouth. Then she pushed her hands through his hair and leaned back. “But you fuck with your heart.”
“Then my heart is aching to move.” He rocked his hips, relishing the connection. Grinding harder, he circled his pelvis, feeling her everywhere, and worked into a furious tempo.
She cupped his jaw and arched a brow. “Again?”
“As long as you’ll have me.”
Her legs and arms hooked around him, and she rolled them. With his back against the mattress, she straddled him, folding her arms behind her head. “My turn.”
What a glorious vision. With her body bared before him and a gleam in her eyes, she rotated her hips, breasts swaying, waves of dark brown hair cascading around her. “You gave me a gift, Joshua Carter. I’m keeping it. Always.”
He gripped the curves of her butt, holding her to him, lifting his hips, and sliding deeper. “Good. Because I’m yours. Always.”
When she came, she took him with her, milking him, crying his name. He would never forget that moment. The merging of their passion, peaking together. Two parts of a whole, lost together.
They curled up in silence, her back to his chest. She laced their fingers and brought them to her mouth, kissing the cuts on his knuckles.
A few moments later, her musical laugh tiptoed through the room. “You’re hard?”
He bit her shoulder, stroked his erection along the crease of her butt. “I’ll never get enough of you, Liv.”
She angled her hips, reached between her legs, and guided him inside. He was home.
Hours passed. Outside, the sun would’ve been climbing the sky, but he didn’t care. He had so much light in his arms, it was easy to pretend nothing else mattered. Just for a little longer. They made love incessantly and intensely, slow and fast, hard and soft. He was lost in her body. Lost in her.
Eventually, exhaustion pulled him under with her curves against his, limbs entwined.
When he woke, it was with a head full of sexy dreams and blood swelling him to a full hard-on. Never enough. He grinned and reached a hand over the mattress, searching for her. Not finding her.
He lurched to his knees. The mattress was bare. The room empty of life. His heart went wild, his thoughts crazed. Maybe she was checking on Kate. Or making breakfast. He climbed to his feet, and something crinkled beneath his toes. A white piece of paper with scrawled handwriting. Beside it, a car key.
He dropped to his knees and a picked up the letter with shaking fingers.
Joshua,
Van called with the buyer’s pickup location. Meet me at the Sleepy Inn on 35. If I don’t make it there by tomorrow morning, go home. Go home to your family.
The code is 0054. The key belongs to the black Honda parked out front.
Liv
The letter wadded in his clenching fists, a fog of red clouding his vision. All business. Nothing from the woman he’d spent the day in bed with. She might as well have signed it Deliverer.
He spun to the trunk and found his clothes inside. Hers were gone. She wasn’t coming back. He shoved his hands through his hair.
The code is 0054. Number fifty-four. She was freeing him. What would happen to her Mom and daughter?
His heart collapsed, spilling panic through his blood. What the hell was she planning?
CHAPTER 33
Liv drove the van out of Temple, with Kate strapped to the floor in the back as she headed west on 190 to make her seventh and final delivery. Darkness descended over the horizon. Street lights flickered on. Her pulse beat a frenzied vibration in her ears.
Josh would be driving to the motel by now. A motel that would never be one of her destinations. If he obeyed her instructions, and hopefully, without revealing his identity to the motel clerk. God, she needed him to just wait somewhere safe and hidden until morning. By then, everything would be done. Surely, he wouldn’t go to the authorities before going to the motel?
Fuck, it was a risk, made more excruciating after spending the previous seventeen hours in his arms. She’d tried to keep him at a cold distance when they’d first returned from the meeting. She’d been fighting through her uncertainty about Mom and Mattie’s future and trying to come to terms with what she had to do. She needed to protect him from her, refused to endanger him with the details. But most of all, her plan would’ve devastated him.
When they became entangled, they brought with them all their convictions, pursuits, and pains. Whether it was scriptures from religious study, record-breaking interceptions, or delivery deadlines with sex traffickers, he’d taught her that one’s purpose in life had no sway on who the heart latched onto. And while she’d managed to keep her plan hidden, he exposed the rest of her with a fierce loyalty behind his gorgeous green eyes and a blaze of determination burning in his touch.
She yanked the seat belt pinching her chest, strangled and trapped by the tragedy of her miserable fucking life. She loved him, goddammit, but she had to let him go. Covering her mouth, she smothered a sob between trembling fingers. Fuck, it hurt so
