Inked in the Steel City Series(88)
She’d missed him. She’d said so, and he could tell it was true as he ran the tip of his tongue over the seam of her pussy, delving inside. She said his name, the single syllable shattered by several hitching breaths. When he lifted his gaze briefly, he could see that her knuckles were white, her fingers hooked over the edge of the table top.
He’d missed her too, bad. When he’d lain down in bed at the Allegheny West house, thoughts of her had come to him in the dark. For short seconds, he’d almost tasted her, almost smelled the sweet musk of her skin. And a part of him had begun to mourn the loss he’d been anticipating – the loss of true affection and true pleasure so recently rediscovered.
It was amazing, really, that he’d been wrong. He couldn’t fuck things up now, couldn’t slide back into assuming and fearing and thinking he saw her future more clearly than she did. If the past had taught him anything, it was that life was full of twists and turns you just couldn’t see coming. Maybe they weren’t all bad.
“Ahh!” She stopped breathing his name, stopped moving against the table. She was stock-still for a few moments, until a tremor shot through her, making her muscles shift and tighten beneath his hands. He stroked her clit with his tongue, unyielding as he felt the tension in her body rise to a fever-pitch. His heart raced, beating in time with an answering throb that tortured him below the belt.
She cried out when her hips began to move again, rising and falling as much as they could with him holding her steady. He let her sounds drive him on, more breath than voice. His cock was so hard against his jeans it hurt, but when she was quiet, he rose.
She leaned forward, reaching for him, and pulled him close with her arms wrapped around his waist and her temple against his heart. “Want to take this back to the bedroom?” she asked after a silent minute, “or…” She tucked a thumb into the waistband of his jeans, looking up at him with slightly hazy eyes.
He slipped a hand behind her head, cradling the curve of her skull and sweeping a lock of hair out of her eyes. “I can’t stay.”
She blinked. “You can’t?”
He shook his head. “I’ve got some things I need to do. You’ll see tomorrow.”
“Okay.” She eased back a little. “Is everything all right?”
“Yeah.” He’d have to live with the agony of unsatisfied desire for the night, but he couldn’t resist kissing her deeply, giving it a sharper edge. “We’ll do your tattoo as soon as the shop closes tomorrow night, all right? That way we’ll have the place to ourselves.”
She nodded, and he picked up her jeans and panties, handing them to her before leaving. Outside, the night air cooled his skin by a few degrees but did nothing for his aching hard-on.
As he made his way to his car, he dialed Hot Ink’s number. “You’re still there – good,” he said when Eric picked up. The studio was closing – Zoe was probably already gone, and he was lucky he’d caught Eric before he closed up for the night. “Would you mind staying a while longer? I need you to do something for me.”
* * * * *
Karen slipped beneath the sheets, a dull ache present in the pit of her chest, just beside her heart. It sharpened when she thought of Jed, remembering the look in his eyes when he’d thought she was going to relocate her business and life to New York.
How could he have thought that, and how could she not have realized that the possibility had been eating away at him? The thought of him spending lonely nights in the Allegheny West house was triply-saddening when the revelation of his thoughts came into play. And still…
Excitement sizzled and crackled through her when she thought of the next night. The sketch Jed had drawn up for her tattoo was every bit as amazing as he was. She wanted something to remember her grandmother by, something as unfading as the impression Helen had left on her life. The ink would be just that, beauty that would live and die with her.
And she trusted Jed to make it beautiful. That was the other aspect of the tattoo that had her looking forward to the following night – being tattooed by Jed. The idea made her skin tingle and all her internal muscles draw up tight, much as they had an hour ago when she’d been perched on the edge of the kitchen table. Needles still set her teeth on edge, but if she was going to be tattooed – and she was determined to be – it was going to be by Jed.
He’d shown so much concern and selflessness when it came to her future; there was no one she’d trust more to mark her permanently.
* * * * *
Jed settled onto the bed, his right side aching as his left side met the sheets. The physical pain was dull, not enough to distract him from his real purpose in spending the night alone in the Allegheny West house again.