her legs still hanging off the bed.
Sweet, sweet home.
“Bryce!” she cried out, her quivering walls encasing me with glorious suction.
“God, Marj. God, yes.” I pumped into her again and again.
I wanted her to come. I wanted her to have as much pleasure as she was giving me. I wanted to take the time and make sure she climaxed.
But I was all about me at the moment. All about this place, about exorcising everything hellacious in my life.
Somehow, in my warped mind, I felt that if I made love to Marjorie here, it would burn away the rancid ash my father had left.
I pumped.
And I pumped.
And I pumped.
“Gone,” I said through gritted teeth. “Gone. Be gone. Be gone.”
If Marjorie was surprised by my words, she didn’t indicate it. I closed my eyes, continuing my devilish chant.
Gone. Gone. Gone.
Until I erupted inside her tight heat, emptying into her beautiful body that so willingly accepted me for all I was.
And all I was not.
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to prolong the intensity of the orgasm, holding on…
Holding on…
Holding on…
Until finally she squirmed beneath me. I moved off her, turning over in the darkness, my arm across my eyes.
I’d done it.
I’d fucked her in this cabin.
I’d wanted to, no doubt.
But it hadn’t worked. It hadn’t exorcised anything from me or from this place. All I’d accomplished was an even more intense desire for her.
Worse yet, she hadn’t come. I’d truly been self-absorbed.
I needed her again, and I wanted her to come the way she had during our last time together—again and again, rolling from one orgasm into another.
That was when she’d said, “I love you.”
Perhaps she’d say it again.
I longed to hear those three words in her soft voice. Even more, I longed to say them back. For I meant them. I meant them with every cell in my body, every beat of my heart, every tiny sliver of lightness and all the darkness in my soul.
With everything. I meant them with everything.
“You okay?” she finally said.
I nodded. Sort of.
“You sure? Because you kept saying ‘gone’ over and over again.”
“It didn’t mean anything.”
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll play it your way for now. But you can talk to me, Bryce. Always.”
If only I could. How could I show this beautiful woman my deepest weaknesses? How could I tell her the horrid things that haunted me?
And how could I do this when, even as I was tormented, nothing had actually happened to me?
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe someday.”
“Better make it soon. I leave next week.”
Was she still determined to run away?
“Fine,” I said. “Go. But not before I show you exactly what you’re leaving.” I rose from the bed and knelt before her, spreading her legs. God, she was perfect. Even in the darkness, the glistening of her pink pussy was visible. Her thighs shone from her juices. I trailed my fingers over her smooth flesh…until I came to the jagged scar.
It was scabbed over, which meant it had recently bled.
“What’s this?” I asked.
She tensed and tried to close her legs, but I was between them. She squeezed my shoulders with her thighs.
“Marj?”
“Nothing. I scratched myself.”
“Over a scar?”
She scooted backward on the bed, away from me. “Yes.”
She was hiding something. Marjorie Steel, who I’d thought was an open book, had her own secrets. I couldn’t bear the thought of her being in any kind of pain, but if she was? Then we had something in common.
Pain from something we had nothing to do with, through no fault of our own. Pain when neither of us had been abused as countless others had.
Pain.
Pain that seemed insurmountable sometimes. Pain that was, at its root, cloaked in self-absorption.
At least mine was.
Marjorie wasn’t even close to self-absorbed. She’d stayed on at the house to help Talon and Jade with the boys when their housekeeper left.
The boys. She’d stayed with the boys, and she took care of them. And I couldn’t take care of my own son.
Self-absorption versus selflessness had never been so clear.
And I’d never felt so low.
Marj had been determined to stay…until now.
Now she was going to Paris.
Was it self-absorbed to do something you wanted?
No. It was not.
She did want this. But she was also running.
From me.
This all had something to do with me.
Or did it? I shook off the self-absorption. This was about Marjorie, not about me. Something new rose within me—something I hadn’t felt in a long time. I embraced it.
“Tell me,” I said. “Tell me why you did this to yourself.”
“Did what? I told you. It’s