“You are so much more important to me than my career,” she told him and the light that flamed in his eyes filled her with intense joy. He crushed her to him, buried his face in her hair, and if she didn’t know better because he was a big, tough cop, she would almost have thought he was crying. They stood like that for a long time, wrapped up in each other, holding each other, squeezing the breath out of each other.
“God, I love you,” he whispered. And then their mouths met, in a long, devouring kiss. She slid a hand to the back of his head, kissed him over and over, lush kisses of hunger, gratitude, complete surrender, total abandon.
She felt his heart thudding against her, her ears buzzing, her skin sizzling. She couldn’t get close enough to him and she pressed herself to him, kissed him deeper, open mouthed, her tongue licking into his mouth to find his.
“Keara, God, Keara.” They paused to gasp for breath, staring at each other. “We’ll fight later about who’s going to move where.”
“No, we won’t. I’m moving to Kilkenny. Maeve is there. Your parents are there. They need you.”
“Apparently not.” His wry smile made her pull back and look inquiringly at him. “They told me to get lost and quit bugging them.”
“Whaaat!”
“I’m kidding. Sort of. I went over there tonight and they told me they’ve been thinking of moving to the new seniors’ complex.”
“Really?”
“Yup. They also gave me a big lecture about sacrificing the woman I love to look after them when they don’t even want me to.”
“Oh.” She touched his face. “Oh Shane. I think they do still need you.”
“Yeah. I guess. It just felt like a smack in the face. Kind of like you do to me all the time.”
She jerked back. “What the hell does that mean?”
He laughed. “It’s a good thing, Keara. I go around thinking I need to protect everyone, look after everyone. Well, the truth is, I can’t. I felt like crap when you left, partly because I was worried about you. I wasn’t there to look after you, after the crazy things that had been happening. And then I get here and come charging in like a freakin’ white knight, and you didn’t even need me. You had the whole thing under control.”
She smiled at him, filled with a swelling tenderness. “I did, didn’t I?” A feeling of pride nudged inside her. “I’m okay, I think. I went back to work without a full-blown panic attack. It was hard, but I did it. I even made some decisions. Nothing like having to fire people. But if I ever have to make that kind of decision again, I know what I have to do.”
“What?”
“If it’s the right business decision, I just have to make sure I’ve looked after the people part of it. I still have to make the decision. But I’ll try to understand the human impact of it, and try to address that too, if I can.”
He smiled down at her, and she could tell he was proud of her too.
“But I do need you,” she continued, holding his face in her palms. “I need you so much. Not to protect me. Well, maybe sometimes. I need you because you make me better. Because you make me feel good about myself. Because I…I love you. I just need you.”
“I need you too.” His eyes shone. “I realized that too. I thought everyone needed me, and they don’t…”
“We do, Shane. We do.”
“Well. I need you. To keep me in line if I try to take over people’s lives. To give me a smack and make me realize I’m not in charge of everyone, all the time.”
She gave a soft laugh. “Okay. I can do that.”
She went onto her tiptoes and kissed him again, a kiss to show him how much she needed him.
“Did you bring any of those toys back with you?” he murmured a long moment later.
“Mmmhmm.”
Their mouths met and clung again.
“You do realize we owe Maeve for this?”
She paused. She pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “The Irish Sex Fairy. She was only partly right.”
“How so?”
She kissed the other corner of his mouth, licked across his bottom lip. He groaned. She liked it. “It wasn’t just the sex that made me better. It was sex with you. It was love.”
“Mmm. I like that.”
They forgot about the toys. For a while.
About the Author
Kelly Jamieson is the author of several sexy romance novels. Her writing has been described as “blisteringly sexy” and “a spicy delicious read”. If she can stop herself from reading or writing, she loves to cook. She has shelves of cookbooks that she reads at length. She also enjoys gardening in the summer, and in the winter she likes to read gardening magazines and seed catalogues. She also loves shopping, especially for clothes and shoes.
But her family takes precedence over everything else (yes, even writing). She has two teenage children who are the best kids in the world, not that she’s biased, and a wonderful husband who does loads of laundry while she plays on the computer writing stories. She loves hearing from readers.
The author welcomes comments from readers. You can find her website and email address on her author bio page at www.ellorascave.com.
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