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What are you looking at? his gaze seemed to ask. But in the same glance, she could read the contradicting subtext. Don’t you dare look at anyone on this field but me.
“It means I won’t always run off so fast. Not if I want to give you the opportunity to catch me.”
“I can’t be with you again,” he rasped. “It makes me forget everything and I don’t deserve that.”
Tying him up in knots and leaving him reeling in her wake was only possible if she walked away intact.
Pretending she’d never felt the organ race out of control in her chest, just hearing another person’s name. Who would want to forget that kind of insanity?
It made her wonder. Was she really back in Ohio to make Elliott’s life hell? Or her own?
“We’re the only ones here, Elliott,” Peggy continued, her voice dreamlike. “You’re the ruler of your own world right now.” She dipped her bottom, sliding it back up the fullness his pulsing cock. “Wield your power.”
Maybe it was the way she made light of something he found so heavy. Maybe it was simply a buildup of tension inside of him, starting on the day she’d left town. Or the day she’d returned. He didn’t know. Only knew he was so damn aware of the strain in his hands, his neck, his chest…and it needed to go somewhere. Preferably to the person who’d caused it.
Because the curtains were lifting to reveal what her heart should have been telling her all along, instead of mourning the loss of her first love. Elliott didn’t deserve her.
Right now, his wounds were bleeding, but Peggy hadn’t been the one to put them there. Had he made her believe otherwise? She’d stumbled on a broken beast in the woods and tried to bandage him up, but he’d bitten her instead. Continued to bite her.
Bad habit. That’s how he’d always seen her. Spoken to her. Touched her.
“No, you stop that. I don’t need to be told I’m pretty or I have a nice body.” She nipped at his mouth and he nipped back, both of them bearing their teeth. “You rip off my panties, fill me full. Hold me down while you take and take a-and repeat the Our Father.”
He’d made her the embodiment of sin. He’d foisted that on her when she’d only wanted to comfort him in a dark time, offering her body and heart as a way to forget. Because she’d felt something for him. A feeling he’d returned, but hadn’t known how to handle. So he’d twisted it, turned it into something shameful. Goddamn him.
“No one ever touched me like you did. I’ve needed it, baby. I’ve been dead without it. Dead inside. Please.”
“I was at the bottom of the ocean. Everything was dark…and then Peggy showed up. She was the surface. And I finally saw something to kick toward.” He cleared his throat. “I know that doesn’t make sense—”
“You deserve a man who’ll do that and more.” “Yeah.” She breathed the word, life snapping in her eyes. “I think I finally realized that. Right around the time I figured out it would never be you.”
“You made me into a sin,” she whispered instead, truth jostling free. Maybe it had reached its limit on being kept secret, or perhaps she wanted to see the misery in his eyes again. The kind she’d been feeling forever. “When I look at you, I see the word Alice called me last night,” she breathed in a wild gust, realizing for the first time how truly fucked up she’d allowed her self-image to become.
“She’s the interesting one. I’m lucky she ever looked twice at me.” He turned serious. “Trying to figure out how to make her do it again.”
A skill he’d honed constantly afterward until Peggy could get wet just looking at his mouth.
know.” He stepped closed. “That’s why you’re going to give me the guilt. Right here, right now. You’re going to hand it over to me and I’m going to carry it for you.”
“When I came back, though, you were still angry with me.” “No.” His voice was two knives sharpening. “I was terrified. I spent the years without you playing defense against feeling a goddamn thing. And you walk in and find every hole in my resistance, just like you always did.”
“Done. It’s mine now, Peggy. I made us go without one another for three years and these failures are mine. They were mine when they happened. And they’re mine now.”
Twice in my life you’ve turned me back into a living, breathing man, and missing you…missing you, Peggy, doesn’t even begin to cover it. You revive me.”
“Baby…I’m going to fucking break you like this. You’ve got me so awake. I can hear your heartbeat, all your little gasps…the slap of my dick sinking in. Cut me off.”
“A fool is the kind of man who pushes away someone who makes him laugh. Makes him think. Makes him want to try harder and love harder and live harder. Live at all. That’s what Peggy Clarkson did for me. Twice in my life. Twice more than I earned. And this heart she woke up inside me loves her. It’ll beat for her until it stops altogether.”
