His for the Taking - By Ann Major Page 0,27
“You don’t know what you’re saying. Or what happened. You don’t know anything.”
“Because you ran away with Vernon without ever telling me anything. So all I had to go on was what your mother said.”
After his mother had been so cruel and Maddie had run from Yella, she hadn’t let herself think about Cole because it had been too painful. Then she’d been afraid she was pregnant with Vernon’s child. It was only when she’d realized how much Noah looked like Cole that she’d worked up the nerve to call him, but he’d hung up on her. So, she’d had to write it all down in those letters he hadn’t bothered to read.
“I don’t care about Vernon anymore,” he said.
“You don’t?”
“That was six years ago. You were young. I was your first. Maybe I was coming on too strong. Maybe you had to get away and be on your own to grow up. I only know that your coming back here is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” he said. “I like who you seem to be now, and I don’t want to ruin our reunion by blaming you for what’s past. Don’t cry. Please. Because I can’t bear it if you do.”
He kissed her brow and then her temples with warm lips that soothed. He’d always been so nice to her when they’d been lovers. While growing up, she’d hated feeling that she was condemned for her mother’s sins. In his arms, she’d found an escape. Cole had made her feel as though she could change her life—before Vernon’s vicious act had nearly destroyed her.
Cole seemed as wonderful tonight as he’d been that long-ago summer. His gentle voice and kind words made her swallow her salty tears. Hadn’t Vernon ruined enough of her life? Because of him, she’d been afraid. She’d kept to herself and lived an impossibly lonely life until she’d met Greg.
“I won’t cry,” she said, rubbing her eyes with the backs of her hands. “My tears are all gone. See? So kiss me. Love me. Please, just love me again.”
She needed new memories, beautiful memories with Cole, to make the bad ones lose their power.
“All right.” He kissed her, but tenderly, sweetly, undemanding. His lips fell onto her brow, onto the pert tip of her upturned nose and then lightly onto her lips. Running his tongue over her breasts, he caressed her nipples with his hands while he held her close, slowly persuading her to put aside the past and all the pain and shame Vernon had inflicted on her for the pleasure that Cole alone could give her.
Soon his touches and kisses had her so dizzy with desire she forgot everything except her need to be with him. When he finally put on a condom and slid into her, she wrapped her arms and legs around him, moaning, clinging, so that he could sink deeper—oh, so much deeper—before he rode her. Then she clung to him and wept, but this time her tears came from joy…and the rush of new hope.
When his passion made him drive into her harder, his need to claim her primitive and demanding, she reveled in it, bracing herself for the power of his thrusts, for the pleasure of them, arching her hips to meet them, needing this forceful mating as much as he did. She circled his strong shoulders with her arms and surrendered with a completeness that stunned her, that wiped her clean of everything but her fierce desire to belong to him.
When finally he shuddered as he found his release, he cried out her name as if she were everything to him, and the sound of it made her sizzle and come in a blazingly glorious explosion of her own. For a long time after that, she held on to him, their hands locked, their damp brows touching. After six lonely years she wanted to prolong the moment of togetherness. Even when he pulled away, she murmured, clinging to him. Only in his arms and in his all-consuming passion had the dark shadow of Vernon briefly vanished.
Not that Cole seemed to mind her clinginess. No, he held her tightly and brushed his fingers through her hair, murmuring that she smelled of flowers and of her.
“You’re so sweet. You’re everything to me,” he whispered. “Everything…. You always were. I don’t care who your mother was or what my mother thinks. Those things don’t matter.”
Drowsily she lay in his arms, content, feeling utterly complete and happier than she’d