Claiming Serenity(52)

“Donovan, go harder. Go deeper.”

One thrust, two and he shook his head. “Not yet, baby. Not just yet.”

And Layla stilled completely. In all the months they had been sneaking around, touching and feeling and fucking behind closed doors, he had never once called her that. It was always “brat,” a sarcastic “princess”, or “Layla”; sometimes he’d call her a “sexy motherfucker” which she pretended to hate. That filthy little endearment never failed to make her wet, but he had never been sweet. Not like this. Not once.

She was too stunned to comment or do much more than to let him fill her, let him kiss her neck, hold her head, her shoulders as he moved inside her. She did not deny him anything that night; not her body, not her labored, weak breaths, not her loud voice screaming, moaning her gratitude as she came over and over, each orgasm harder, more powerful than the one before it.

And Donovan watched her; even with her eyes slammed shut in orgasmic bliss and her voice amplified into the dark room, she could feel his eyes on her. She could hear the awed whisper of her name from his lips as he took his own release. It was soft, all of it and Donovan had never been soft with her like that.

God, how she would miss this. From the very core of her being, she wished it wasn’t just make believe…





Donovan was a whisper in the back of her mind. That small, persistent voice that called to her every night since she’d walked out of his apartment.

Three weeks before.

She would not go back. It was too dangerous. He was the spark that would inflict the worst damage—the blazing tinder that could ignite her completely and Layla could not allow that to happen.

“Stay in bed with me. All day. You and me and this bed.”

Three sentences. A great temptation followed by the sweetest, slowest kiss Layla had ever been given. It would have been easy for her to accept. It would have been a mind numbing indulgence that allowed Layla to forget that she was not Donovan’s. There were no promises. There were no emotions. There were no commitments. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—pretend that there ever would be.

But he’d wanted her to stay. He’d wanted to stay bare, raw with her as he had been all night. He’d wanted her to be honest and open and real with him.

That was not what she’d signed up for. It went against their guidelines, those loosely agreed-to arrangements they’d made to protect themselves from each other.

She had to walk away.

“Layla, move your ass. Come on, Mollie’s got two minutes on you!”

She hated her best friend’s boyfriend. Vaughn Winchester, the psycho CrossFit Nazi that had her presently sweating so much she looked like she’d just stepped out of a hurricane. The entire studio smelled of sweat and defeat. People came here to have Vaughn mold them, stretch their muscles and strengthen their cores until the flab and pliable muscle became firm and brutish.

All around them were men and women running through their fast intervals; swinging from rings attached the high ceiling, jumping like idiots from boxes elevated in different heights. All insane. All intensely competitive and Layla felt like a fraud, a fake among those driven, obsessive athletes trying to out-exhaust each other.

Vaughn, lucky for Layla, decided he’d help her with her desire to forget the pressures that waited for her back in Cavanagh. She hated how he ran his studio like he was still in the Marines. She hated that Mollie didn’t join her in the quick rebuke of his orders. The big traitor followed Vaughn’s instruction with a damn smile on her face.

When he got in Layla’s face, coming so close to her that she could smell the faint scent of cologne and, oh God, Mollie’s perfume, Layla decided to scream right back at him. “Bite me, Winchester!”

“No flirting with my man.” Mollie seemed pleased with her small joke, smiling despite how red her cheeks had grown and the steady flow of sweat pouring down her temples. Layla wanted to kill them both.

“Layla, use your body weight. Come on, three more reps.” Vaughn looked determined, looked fucking evil, staring at them both, stopwatch in his hand as she and Mollie jumped up and down on that ridiculously high plyo box.

She swore she’d hear Vaughn’s grating, booming voice in her sleep that night. But she’d needed this. Three weeks and her muscles had turned to lead. Three weeks of exhausting herself to keep thoughts of Donovan’s body out of her head had worked, for the most part. After the first week of Vaughn’s torture, she could just manage to fall into her bed at night before she was out.

Three weeks in, though, she was getting slow, slipping and had nearly bypassed the turn toward her house for the long road that led to Donovan’s apartment.