He studied her blatantly, lying there sleeping, vulnerable, unable to avoid his gaze, unable to turn the tables on him. The red hair was a far cry from the creamy blonde she’d been only a few days ago, and the cut, the style, all different from the Kendra Davis he knew. Even in her portrayal of Tess she had emptied herself. She had become as nobody in order to embody the woman he had become as nobody to create. Jesus, what a pair they made! Did either of them even know who they really were?
He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been Ellis’s kid brother, even though there was less than a year’s difference in their age. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t felt inadequate to the task, the task of living up to the standards Ellis so effortlessly set from the time he was a little boy. Garrett was the other Thorne – the one who never amounted to much, the one who always found a way to disappoint. He swallowed back his bitterness. He might as well be Tess. At least Tess was somebody. It certainly wasn’t Ellis’s fault that he was the disappointing brother. Ellis was wonderful, Ellis was true and steady and always, always there for him, even after everything that had happened, even after all the pain he had caused.
He reached out a finger and traced the soft spiral curve of Kendra’s ear, exposed from the fall of her hair. He understood her. He understood her far better than she could imagine. He understood how much power one wielded when one was nobody, when one could simply fade into the woodwork and not be taken seriously. The invisible can manage so much in their anonymity. Did Kendra live in the shadow of an older sister or brother? He seriously doubted it. How could anyone so powerful, so exquisite, so brave ever live in anyone’s shadow? And yet how easily, how perfectly she had embodied Tess. To the rest of the world, she was Tess Delaney.
‘But not to me,’ he whispered, bending to brush a kiss across her hair. She stirred slightly and sighed. ‘You’ll never be Tess to me,’ he said. ‘You’re Kendra Davis, and that’s way more of a challenge than Tess could ever be.’
She stirred again and wriggled into the spoon position. The lovely naked arc of her bottom, pushing back against his usual morning stiffness, brought his cock to full attention and made his heart race.
‘You awake?’ she mumbled. The sound of sleep in her voice was outrageously sexy.
He tried very hard to hold still, to ignore the irresistible urge to shift his hips until his erection nestled tighter in the cleft between her buttocks, pressed there hopefully, eagerly. ‘You should go back to sleep.’ He brushed her throat with a kiss, and his insides leapt with excitement as her lips curved into a smile, heavy lashes fluttering over her still-closed eyes.
‘Make me,’ she whispered. Then she ground her bottom against his hard-on, and he gasped his surprise. She fumbled beneath the covers to where his hand rested on her hip and guided it first to brush across her breasts with their begging nipples full and distended. It was only a brief tease of a detour on the route to the soft curls of her pubis. They were golden curls, he recalled with great satisfaction. At the core of her, she was still Kendra Davis, and no matter how hard she tried, she could never really be otherwise. For a second she allowed him to stroke and caress her there, then she wriggled and shifted, guiding his fingers until the middle one brushed the marbled rise of her clit, causing a kitten-like whimper and a hitch of her breath. Then she rocked, first back to rub against his cock, then forward onto his fingers, which wriggled and squirmed and burrowed their way into the valleys and rises of her, desperate to tweak and probe her humid depths. Already he could smell her heat rising. Already she was open and yielding, her body gripping at the push and shove of his fingers like a nursing infant. Already he felt the weight of his own arousal surrounding and enfolding him.
Over her grumble of a protest, he pulled away and reached for a condom from the nightstand. And when he was sheathed, he slid down next to her. He eased her thighs open from behind and she pressed her bottom back toward him, meeting him, opening to him, yielding as he maneuvered his way home. As he pressed up into her, she released a long, quavering breath.
With one hand splayed low on her belly, he pulled her tighter to him, pulled her closer and deeper onto him until he could feel the full grip and release, grip and release of her need against him.
The press and strain and the rock and shift would have been barely noticeable to anyone looking on from above the comforter, but Garrett felt the gripping warmth of her, the caress of each undulation all the way to the crown of his head, and the buzz of being inside Kendra Davis was better than any drug, any drink he had ever experienced. He nibbled and caressed her neck and her nape and her shoulders. He thumbed and raked at her nipples. He ran his hand down the flat slope of her belly to stroke the softness of her tight curls, to tweak the hardness of her clit, to feel her fast, furious pull for breath low in her abdomen, to feel the tight edge of her imminent orgasm barley restrained, barely held back by her desire, by both of their desire to make it last.