her hotel had felt terribly long, a new and cruel sort of torture as she’d walked with a wet, needy ache between her thighs.
For so long, she hadn’t let herself feel a thing. Now, she was nothing but nerve endings rubbed raw, cells crying out for relief.
The elevator dinged at the seventeenth floor. She practically vaulted out the open doors and quickstepped down the hall in a mad dash for her room. She reached it, fumbled for her key card from the back pocket of her jeans, slid open the door, and stepped inside.
Her room was dark, cool, and the lights from the Strip winked through the windows. The door shut with a heavy groan.
Her breath was hot and fast, her hands even faster. She dropped her purse to the floor, unbuttoned her jeans, and dipped her hand into her panties.
“Oh God,” she groaned, fingertips slipping through her wetness, hot, fevered, and so fucking delirious.
This was what happened when you banished sex, what happened when you extradited it from your life, your heart, your bed. When you told yourself you weren’t ready. You’re better off without it. She hadn’t wanted anyone to touch her, and she hadn’t even touched herself in a long time, as if the mere act of masturbation would have sullied the memories of her husband and said something to the universe about her not loving him enough. Everything had conflated in the last two grief-filled years—sex, and love, and moving on, and hope, and even touching herself.
She couldn’t stop now. She was a rocket, flying to the atmosphere, hell-bent on a jet-fueled trip to the stars. The floodgates were unleashed, and she stroked herself, riding her own hand urgently as a flash of images sparked before her closed eyes. Michael’s kisses. Michael’s lips. His voice in her ear. His teeth. He hadn’t kissed like that before. Like he wanted to consume her. Bite her. Fuck her hard.
“Michael.”
She moaned his name, feeling its familiarity yet utter newness on her tongue as her fingers flew faster between her legs. There, standing against her hotel room door, shoulders rising and falling, breath tumbling rapidly from her lungs, sex on her brain, Annalise made herself come for the first time in two years.
Her orgasm slammed into her, fast and sharp as a hot knife. Seizing her body. Lighting her up. Racing across every inch of her skin. It was everywhere, rapid and furious, pulsing, and over far too soon. She was left panting, and not nearly sated enough.
His name fell from her lips once more.
She didn’t feel cold tonight.
She was burning up.
Her body was alive again, and she feared she would become addicted to this feeling before her heart was ready.
* * *
The dog’s legs flew, like a flip-book at high speed, as Michael cruised down the trail.
No one ever beat the dog. Not even Colin, and he’d recently finished the Badass Triathlon. But today Michael was a few footfalls behind Johnny Cash, and his brothers Colin and Ryan, were eating his dust.
Pent-up lust could do that to a man. Desire could drive him to finish faster, push harder, focus more intensely.
With sweat slicking down his chest and his heart pounding, Michael ran as the sun peeked over the hills at Red Rock Canyon. His thoughts cycled between the bare-bones one-foot-in-front-of-the-other adrenaline and sheer, unrepentant want.
Last night was intense, sure. But it was only physical. It had to be that way. His ex-girlfriends had simply been wrong. As he whipped around a switchback, the black and white border collie in his crosshairs, Michael felt more confident than ever that his past relationship woes were never about Annalise. He wasn’t a player. He didn’t have a string of three-and-out dates trailing behind him. He’d had plenty of serious girlfriends over the years. He hadn’t settled down with any of them because he simply hadn’t met the right woman.
Not because he was hung up on her.
That was so not the case.
As the dust churned up beneath his sneakers, his mind flashed back to his ex-girlfriend Katrina’s comments from a year ago. He’d been with her for ten solid months—so long Colin had placed bets on him getting down on one knee. Funny that the proposal possibility had crossed Colin’s mind but never Michael’s. Katrina was a massage therapist, and he’d met her working out at his gym, his home away from home. They’d had a good time together. At least, it had felt that way to him.
They’d done dinners and movies, and