Page 12 of Reckless Woman
“Tell me I’m enough for us.”
“Joseph—”
“Don’t lie to me,Luna,” I say harshly.
“I won’t,” she gasps out. “I’d never—”
“Tell me!” I thrust against her, soaking up her sharp cry of surprise. “I want the truth, even if I have to fuck it from your lips. What would make us even more perfect?”
“Words,” she whispers reluctantly. “There are never enough words between us.”
“Words are for shit, baby. They’re a fucking flea circus...it’s too damn easy to lie.” I kiss her again, imposing my violence on her mouth, her greedy moans doing dark and twisted things to my lust. I’m too far gone now. I’ll take her through her clothes, if I have to. “What else?”
“The truth,” she rasps, as I palm and pinch her nipple through her jogging vest, making her squirm and fight against my touch.
“This is all the truth we need.” Reaching down between us, I push her jogging shorts and panties to her knees and rip open my zipper. “We never did dates. We’re every season of fucked-up, but we save each other remember?”
Rising up on my knees, I remove the rest of her clothes, and then sink back down on top of her.
“We can’t have a future without the truth,” she argues breathlessly. “Let me in. Let me see all of you, even the broken parts.”
“What if I can’t do that?” I move my hand to her clit, trapping the swollen bud between my fingers, feeling her throb against my skin as her heels hook into the waistband of my jeans and drag the material down.
“The future—”
“Youaremy future. You’re the only thing that matters.” Fisting my cock, I line it up with her pussy. The insides of her thighs are slick and trembling. The scent of her is pooling lava at the base of my spine, and the need to defile is warped and blinding. I run the head of my shaft up and down her entrance, soaking up the juices, brushing against her clit again. “What else do you need from me?”
“A family of our own,” she whimpers, bruising us with the one thing I can’t give her.
“Marry me,” I roar, driving so deep inside her my balls are crushing against her soft skin.
With each brutal thrust, I demand an answer from her, but it’s on the wings of her breathless comedown that she finally gives it to me.
“Yes.” Tears blur her green eyes as she wraps her fingers around the two rings I wear on a chain around my neck. The same rings I bought the day I vowed to find her, fix her, and never let her go. “Yes, I’ll marry you, Joseph Grayson.”
It’s only when we’re lying next to each other on the white sand, matching the rise and falls of each other’s chest, with twilight as a flickering canvas, that I realize I’m a thief, as well as a killer and a liar.
Those tears aren’t just happiness. They’re confusion. They’re a torn-up agreement that I back-tracked on.
I promised her something in Colombia. I swore it on my own life, and then I broke it, drunk and demanding, on this very beach when I fucked her the way I did.
That’s not the worst of it.
I just sold her a future to cover up my own certainty.
She is all the family I will ever need.
Chapter Five
Anna
If places were emotions, Greens Therapy Center in Miami would be a black and white kiss in Times Square on V-J Day. It’s relief, dressed up in a smart white building and emerald green lawns that are allergic to weeds.
I didn’t always feel so warmly about this place.
Last year, when I was checking in and out of here so fast I was giving myself whiplash, it was cold and depressing—like a prison cell on death row. Turns out, self-destruction requires dedication, and I was well on my way to a PhD in screwing up my life.
All that changed when I bought a one-way ticket to Colombia and found my rebirth in sex, death and violence. I found guilt, too, but I left that behind in South America because of love.