“More,” she begged.
She started to rock a little harder, a little faster. He could feel that slick, swollen bud against him when she hit the bottom of his shaft. The greedy little tilt of her hips gave him the easiest access to her ass and helped her drag her clit over him.
He went back to the first breast and started rhythmically sucking, hard and deep. Her fingers dug into his shoulders, and her breathing went ragged.
He wanted to stop. To tell her to fucking breathe. But she wanted him to trust her. Trust her to take everything he needed to give her. Trust her to be able to accept it.
“Oh, God,” she whispered. “Oh. God.”
His cock jerked in her, making her walls quake around him. Moving like fingers on piano keys. Making beautiful music.
He pushed harder with his finger and sank in all the way. There he could feel the trembling too. She was going to erupt around him, and when she did, she would milk another impossible climax out of him.
“Brick, I’m coming.”
The most beautiful fucking sentence in the entire English language was Remi telling him he was making her come.
He was right there with her. Those delicate little muscles clamped down like a vise, making his cock shudder. When her muscles released, he thrust himself as deep as he could go and the first wrenching spurt of his orgasm exploded up his shaft.
He grunted against her soft breast, sucking harder, fucking harder with his finger, timing it to the waves of his own release. The waves of her pleasure surging and fading around his dick, his finger. Her greedy core demanding he surrender every last fucking drop of his seed to her.
She cried out as he filled her with everything he had to offer. He was rewarded with her shudders as she clung to him and whispered his name, loving him with her body.
No one was going to hurt her.
No one was going to get close enough to try.
33
Barely two hours later, Brick woke to the light of morning in a new world. A world where Remi Ford slept beside him.
The night before felt like a fever dream. The light those green eyes took on when she came. The way she clung to him like he was her rock. The feather-light caresses of her fingers on his back. Her body responding to his in a way that was so right he couldn’t remember his reasons for fighting.
Remi’s confession.
There was work to be done. Preparations to be made. Battle plans to be drawn. Because he wasn’t going to let anything scare her, hurt her again. No matter what the cost.
She was sound asleep on her stomach, one hand tucked into his armpit as if she was afraid he’d disappear.
In turn, his palm was splayed over one firm ass cheek, anchoring her to his side.
Her hair spilled out over her bare back onto the ivory pillows like a river of fire.
The wave of possession that crested inside him nearly took him under. Everything was different now. He had work to do. Work that required him to do the impossible—walk away from naked, sleeping Remi.
Which took superhuman effort. Telling himself her safety was more important than his need to hold her for the rest of his goddamn life, Brick quietly climbed out of bed and went in search of his clothes. His underwear were MIA, but he found his jeans and shirt.
After one hit of old, cold coffee and one of mouthwash, he crept back into the room.
“Remi? Baby?” he whispered, stroking his hand over her hair and down her back. Silk on silk.
“Mmm,” she muttered into the pillow.
His lips curved. At least some things remained the same. This new Remi wasn’t a morning person either. He had so many memories of her slinking down the stairs at her parents’， hair disheveled, grunting good morning.
Unable to help himself, he pressed a kiss to her shoulder blade and, when she still didn’t wake, he nipped at her skin.
“Mmm. Brick.”
He’d go to any length to make sure his name was the only one she muttered in her sleep for the rest of her life.
“I have to run an errand,” he said in her ear.
She grunted what sounded like a mournful whine.
“Be here when I get back,” he ordered.
“Mmph,” was her only response.
He indulged himself and brushed that long curtain of hair off her back so he could kiss her neck. “Go back to sleep, baby doll.”
He fussed over the sheets and blanket for another minute before dragging himself out of the cottage and locking the door behind him.
He locked the gate, too, and hunched his shoulders against the wind that whipped off the lake. The low-hanging clouds, an off-gray color, melded with frozen waters. But in his gut, a coal burned bright and hot. Hate for a man he’d never met. Rage for the careless disregard of something so precious. The idea of living in a world without her was unthinkable.
It was a dehydrated, thoroughly wrung-out Brick who burst into his boss’s office ten minutes later.
“Well, good morning to you,” Chief Ford said, glancing up from a stack of reports and eyeing his rumpled appearance.
“Got a minute?” he asked.
“Isn’t this your day off?”
“It is. But there’s a problem.”
“Sit,” she said, gesturing toward the chair in front of her desk.
He closed the door behind him, removed his hat, and sat.
“This must be serious,” she observed.
He crossed an ankle over his knee and tried not to look like a man who had just fucked the boss’s daughter. “I’ve got reason to believe someone on the island is in trouble. Serious trouble.”
The chief steepled her fingers and waited.
“This individual was threatened off-island. I believe it’s credible, and I think there’s a good chance trouble could come here.”
Darlene slumped back in her chair and rubbed her temples. “What’s Remi gotten herself into now?”
“I didn’t say it was her.”
Great. Remi was going to murder him. And then who was going to protect her?
“Brick, honey. You show up here in last night’s crumpled bartending get-up, missing buttons, glowing brighter than the sun with two love bites on your neck.”
He slapped his hands to his neck as if he could feel his way to the hickeys.
“You and Remi finally got horizontal, and she told you why the hell she showed up here in the dead of winter pretending everything was fine,” Darlene summarized.
“I— Uh. We—” He couldn’t focus on the conversation and rebutton his shirt at the same time.
“It took you damn long enough. Do you realize how lucky you are that she held out for you this long? My daughter has the attention span of a gnat. If she didn’t feel something powerful for you, she’d be working on divorce number two to some idiot she met at Burning Man or an organic cheese tasting by now.”
Brick’s tongue had double-knotted itself to his tonsils.
“Erm.” It wasn’t a word so much as a gulp.
“Anyway, what’s my daughter gotten herself into?”
“I’m not at liberty to say,” he said, thankful when his mouth formed actual words.
“Swore you to secrecy, huh?”
He looked at his boss, the woman who had given him a career, helped him carve out a place on this island, dead in the eyes and said nothing.
“But you came straight here anyway?”
Remi was going to kick his ass when she found out.