Mother, Please! - By Brenda Novak & Jill Shalvis & Alison Kent Page 0,92
could name. It was almost as if he wasn’t sure he should continue—which was ridiculous.
Making love to him, with him, was the fulfillment she’d been looking forever to find.
She pushed up to her elbows. “What’s wrong?”
David’s gaze swept her from belly to breast before settling on her face. His voice was a gruff tremor when he asked, “Why are you here?”
She longed to be flip, to continue their teasing banter of earlier but knew playtime was long gone. The next few moments could possibly be the most important of her life and deserved her full honesty. Yet she wasn’t sure she could give it. She was too lost to trust what she might say.
“I can’t talk now. I really can’t talk now,” she pleaded, lifting her hips and urging him to finish stripping her of her clothes. “Please, David. We’ll talk. I promise. But later. Later.”
He wasn’t happy about it. She was certain he wanted to hear of her feelings, yet she feared she would say anything to get her way. And that would hardly be fair.
He gave in at last, pulling both pants and panties from her legs. She lay bare before him, and his chest heaved with his effort to breathe. He muttered a curse as he shucked off the rest of his clothes, and then it was Avery’s turn to struggle and gasp.
She’d thought him beautiful before. Now she was without words to describe the gorgeous perfection of David’s body. She wanted to cry, moved to tears by the sweet and tender emotion of wanting him.
He returned to her then, settling his weight fully, his sheathed erection probing between her thighs. She opened for him, adjusting the angle of her hips, the position of her legs, shifting and squirming until he found her entrance and pushed slowly inside.
She cried out softly as he filled her, panting sharply in order to hold on. His gaze remained locked with hers, and she saw him waging the same battle for control. His jaw popped, his pulse throbbed in his temple. And just as she saw his eyes grow damp and redden, he buried his face in the crook of her shoulder and began to move.
She held him tightly, her heels pressed to his hips, her hands roaming his back in loving strokes. Her heart was so full, so full, and when joyous tears fell from her eyes she knew she could hold back no longer.
As David loved her, she loved him back. Their bodies moved together. The completion they reached came as one. She cried his name. He groaned in response, his hands beneath her bottom holding her tight for his finishing strokes.
And then she shuddered and collapsed, knowing that she had reached her future and would never return to the past.
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, having come awake to an empty bed, David dressed and left the house. In the end, he and Avery had never talked. They’d done nothing more than move from couch to bed, where they’d spoken only with their bodies.
It had been a hell of a bad way to wake up, finding the side of the bed that she’d warmed all night ice-cold. Her scent remained on his pillows, in his sheets and blankets. He hadn’t even stopped to make a pot of coffee. He’d just gotten the hell out of Dodge.
Now, for the first time in fifteen years, he stood beneath the bleachers on the scruffy grass field behind Tatem High. The field wasn’t in a whole lot better shape now than it had been then. Such was the reality of the West Texas heat.
The bleachers, however, were new. They were still constructed of metal rather than the heavy-duty concrete found in larger school districts, but the wooden seats had been replaced with the same galvanized aluminum as the frames.
With the school year winding down and summer on the way, the grounds had been manicured to within an inch of their life for the upcoming graduation ceremony. He didn’t know why, when the dry heat baked graduates and attendees alike, the powers that be insisted on the tradition of sending seniors off into the big bad world with the setting sun at their back.
He could appreciate the symbolism, just not the temperature. And damn if he didn’t wish that he’d been able to graduate with his classmates from Tatem High.
No wonder Avery was hesitant to have anything to do with him. She’d finally bedded Tatem’s bad boy and now she could get on with the