A knock on Catherine’s apartment door instantly made her irritated. If the constant calls and messages she had been getting for two straight days were any indication, she knew exactly who had come over. She didn’t move from her spot on the couch.
The knock became louder.
Catherine kept reading her book.
“Catherine,” she heard her father’s muffled voice call, “you will open this door, or I will break it down.”
“And get me evicted?” she called back.
“I would pay to fix it, too.”
“Catherine, let us in,” her mother said.
Catrina sounded just as frustrated as Catherine did.
Wonderful.
“It’s not even locked,” Catherine said.
She kept her eyes on her book as her parents entered the apartment. She wasn’t reading it anymore, but she didn’t want to look at them.
Or rather, her father.
Catrina headed for the kitchen and turned on the electric kettle. Dante moved to sit beside Catherine on the couch. The moment he sat down she tossed her book aside and stood.
Dante sighed. “Catherine—”
“I’m not interested in talking right now,” she told him.
Catrina focused on pulling coffee cups from the cabinets, and not her husband and daughter. Catherine leaned against the island separating the kitchen and living room.
“We’ve been calling you for two days,” her father murmured.
“And I’ve been busy.”
“With what?”
“School,” she lied.
Catherine hadn’t gone to school since that day in the restaurant. She couldn’t focus enough to pretend to care. There were far too many other things on her mind.
Dante pursed his lips, clearly displeased. “You couldn’t pick up your phone at all? Call us back? Nothing?”
“Why should I?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I don’t want to talk to you,” Catherine stressed. “That’s not hard to figure out, Daddy.”
“Catherine!”
She did not care that she was being rude. After everything she learned, and what it meant to her, a bit of attitude was needed.
“I said what I said, and I meant it,” she said with a shrug. “You could at least respect it and not push me, Daddy.”
Catrina frowned as her gaze darted between Catherine and Dante. “How much time do you need, Catty?”
“I don’t know.” Catherine crossed her arms, and gave her mother a look. “Did you know?”
“About what?” her mother asked.
“What he did to Cross.”
Catrina let out a hard breath and admitted, “No, I did not. Apparently that happened when I was asleep in a hospital waiting room. I wasn’t filled in on the details until recently.”
“Huh.”
Catherine wasn’t sure if that made a difference to how she felt, or not. At the very least, she couldn’t be angry with her mother. That was a good thing, right?
“I was overwhelmed with everything that happened,” Dante said from the couch.
“I said I don’t want to talk—”
“Catherine, you don’t understand. I had just pulled you out of a tub the day before with your wrist flayed open like a fucking piece of meat. We had admitted you to the hospital for a seventy-two hour hold on a suicide watch. I was overwhelmed. I was enraged. I needed an outlet, and went to the person I felt deserved it.”
Catherine scoffed as she turned on her father. “That is the shittiest justification I have ever heard for beating someone nearly to death and shooting them.”
“Let’s not forget telling the young man to get out of state and stay gone,” Catrina added.
She waved at her mother. “And that!”
Dante glowered at his wife. “Not helping, Cat.”
“Own what you did,” she replied quietly.
“I am trying.”
“No, Dante, you’re not. You’re attempting to make her forgive you by explaining how you felt. As if that makes it okay. It doesn’t.”
Catherine appreciated her mother more than she could possibly explain in that moment. Catrina reached out and stroked a hand down Catherine’s hair, as though she were smoothing wayward strands. She saw the action for what it was—silent support.
“Do you know that I thought he left me?” Catherine asked quietly.
Dante’s brow dipped low. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Yeah, it does. That’s why a few months after I started seeing Cara, I had a setback and had another spiral into depression. I was doing so well. I wanted him to know it, but I thought he left me.”
“He did leave you, Catherine. He kicked you out. Two weeks later, you tried to bleed yourself out in a fucking bathtub!”
Catherine ignored her father’s shout. “No, not that, I meant after.”
“He can’t leave you a second time when he’s already left you, dolcezza.”
Wrong.
Catherine didn’t bother to explain the promise Cross had made to her that day almost seven years ago. A promise she thought he had broken without care. To be honest, she didn’t think her father would understand.
“You know what,” Catherine said quietly, “I’m really not ready to talk to you, Daddy. I need to figure out how I feel without you trying to tell me how you would like for me to feel right now.”
“I’m not—”
“Not intentionally,” Catherine interjected fast. “I know that, but you will. You will want me to be okay, to talk and talk and talk, or to forgive you. I am not ready to. I need to take time and figure out how all this makes me feel. Or how it changes the things I thought I knew.”
“Changes what things, exactly?”
“Things like Cross.”
Dante’s gaze narrowed. “That man—”
“Is not your concern,” Catherine interjected firmly. “He’s my concern, and that’s it. It’s for me to deal with, and I want you to let me do that.”
“No, I think it would be far better for you—and the rest of us—if you don’t see Cross again. Not at all, Catherine. Mentally, he’s bad for you. We’ve all seen where it takes you. No one wants you to go to that place again, and certainly not me. In fact, I want you to stop seeing him. I’m not requesting it. I’m demanding it.”
Catherine’s anger over being told what she could or could not do spread through her body like a wildfire. Still, she managed to hold it back from spilling out. She would not let it consume her and devastate when it escaped from her mouth in the form of words. She loved her father too much to hurt him that way.
“You don’t get a say,” Catherine said simply, “not after this.”
“Excuse me?” Dante stood. “Catherine, I don’t make demands of your life. I never have. On this, though, I will not budge. You are not to see that man after today.”
“It’s not your choice.”
“Catty, it is for your best interests.”
“I’m a grown woman who can decide what is in my best interests.”
Dante stood firm.
Catherine didn’t move an inch, either.
Catrina cleared her throat behind them. “Dante, maybe we should go.”
“Not until I’m finished.”
Catherine shook her head, and spread her arms wide. “This is my home. My apartment, Daddy. Not yours. You don’t get to finish if I don’t want you to.”
“And you are my daughter!”
“What I said remains the same.”
“I told you what I told you,” Dante said, a warning ringing loudly in his words.
“Yet, it means nothing to me,” Catherine replied. She put her back to her father, ready to ask him to leave and be done with the whole conversation and day. “Had you not did what you did to him, I wouldn’t have thought he left me again. He didn’t have to be with me to love me; that’s something you can’t possibly understand. Except when I found him gone, I thought he didn’t love me at all anymore. That was your fault, not his.”
“Would he have ran if he really loved you?”
Her father’s words felt like a slap to bare skin. Still, she stood still and refused to move. She didn’t want to look at him, so she kept her back turned to him.
“Wouldn’t you have run, Daddy?”
“What?”
Catherine’s gaze met her mother’s. Catrina, always calm in the middle of a storm, kept her expression blank. She could see her own pain and sadness reflecting in her mother’s eyes, though. Still, Catrina’s silent strength was a pillar for Catherine. It was something she strived for. It was one of her mother’s greatest qualities.
“It’s okay,” her mother mouthed to her.
He can take it.
You can say it.
Go ahead.
Catherine heard all of those things with two words.
She turned to face her father.
“What would it have meant if Cross didn’t run like you told him to do, or worse, if his step-father had wanted an answer for what you did to him?”
Dante blinked. “Many things, I suppose.”
“Wrong. One thing. I was raised being told to always respect others in our life because disrespect leads to only one thing. You know what it is, and what it means. Say it.”
“I don’t know that’s what it would have been.”
“Yes, you do,” Catherine argued. “Say it.”
Dante scowled. “A war between our families would have likely been the result of everything.”
“And who would that have put in danger?” she pressed.
Her father stayed quiet.
Catrina was the one who answered. “Everyone. All of us.”
“Including his mother,” Catherine said, “who he adores. And his sister, who grew up thinking he was her very best friend.”
“Yes, well—”
“Me, too, Daddy. It would have put me in danger, too. No matter what Cross and I were—together or not—he would never put me in danger. Because he loved me. He always did.”
Loves, her mind whispered.
“So wouldn’t you have run, too?” Catherine asked again. “Had it been you and Ma, wouldn’t you have run, too?”
Dante scrubbed a hand down his face.
“Well?” she demanded.
“Of course, I would have,” he admitted softly.
Catherine nodded. “I know. Everyone knows. I stand by what I said. I need time to figure out how I feel about what you did. Then maybe if I need to, we can talk more about it. Or maybe I won’t need to talk about it at all. But no, you do not get a say about Cross, me, or what I do with him. You’ve already said and done more than enough, Daddy. It’s time to let me decide the rest.”
“Except no,” Dante said, “because I have already decided this. Do not push me.”
Catherine stared him down.
Dante was unaffected.
Well, if he wanted a fight …
She didn’t mind giving him a war.
Catherine was his daughter, after all.
Catherine entered the quiet café, but stayed back from nearing the table Cross was currently sitting at. Behind the booth he sat in, a little girl—maybe five or six years old—had turned around to talk to him. The girl’s mother chatted away on a phone, seemingly oblivious to the fact her daughter was making a friend.
“What’s your name?” she asked him.
“Cross.”
“That’s a cool name.”
Cross grinned. “Thanks. What’s your name?”
“Kenna. I’m almost six.”
He nodded dramatically. “Almost a big girl, then.”
“I am a big girl!”
“I bet you are. What grade are you in?”
“First grade,” Kenna answered with a toothy smile. “What grade are you in?”
“I haven’t gone to school in a long time,” Cross replied.
“Oh noes. Only bad kids don’t go to school when their mommy says so.”
Catherine could see that Cross was making a great effort to be serious when he said, “Make sure you’re a good girl then, huh? Not bad like me.”
“I will!” Kenna promised.
Then, Cross’s gaze turned on Catherine. She had no doubt he knew she was there from the second she walked in. “Seems my friend has finally come, Kenna. You don’t mind if I talk to her now, do you?”
Kenna peered at Catherine with curious eyes. “Well …”
“Hmm?”
“I guess not,” Kenna said with a pout. “But only because she’s pretty.”
The little girl said that with a fierce nod that made Catherine laugh under her breath.
“Kenna, eat your muffin,” the girl’s mother said without even looking at her daughter.
“Bye, Cross!”
“Bye, Kenna,” he said with a wink.
Catherine sat down in the booth when the little girl turned back around. “Making friends?”
Cross shrugged. “Can’t be mean to kids just because I don’t like people, can I?”
“I mean, you could. It might make you an asshole, though.”
“Might?”
“Definitely would,” Catherine assured.
Cross chuckled, and cupped his to-go cup of coffee. “Noted.” Then, he pushed an extra to-go cup toward her. “Two sugars, extra cream. Right?”
“Yep.” Catherine shoved the sleeves of her wrap sweater up to her elbows, and reached for the coffee. She didn’t miss how Cross’s gaze dropped to her wrist with the tattoo. He quickly averted his eyes, but she still saw it. She hadn’t put any bracelets on before leaving the apartment because she didn’t see the point anymore. It was there. The scar no one could see beneath a tattoo that she loved too much to hide. “You can ask about it, if you want. It’s been a long time. I don’t really talk about it because no one brings it up. It’s like they think if they do, it might make me do it again. That’s ridiculous, by the way.”
Cross let out a long exhale. “I’m not sure I should ask anything, to be honest.”
“Up to you.”
Catherine sipped her hot coffee.
Cross’s dark gaze ventured over her face, and his tongue peeked to wet his lower lip. “Could I …”
“What?”
He put his palm up on the table, and opened his fingers with a wave at her hand. She placed her left hand upside down in his, leaving her wrist turned up and her tattoo exposed. Cross’s thumb stroked the tattoo once, then twice. Careful and soft. Slow and gentle.
“What about the other one?”
Catherine cleared her throat, and said, “I, uh, was drunk when I did it, and dehydrated from not eating or drinking anything in days. I didn’t realize how deep I had cut, I guess, and I didn’t really feel anything. I was kind of dazed by all the blood in the bathwater. I was starting to pass out by the time I even thought about the other one. So …”
“I’m sorry,” Cross murmured thickly.
“Don’t be. It wasn’t your fault, or anyone else’s. It was mine. I chose to do it. No one else.”
Cross’s fingers tightened around her wrist, holding her in place. “Still, Catty. Maybe not for this, but other things. I am sorry. That day when I made you leave … after, too, I guess, when you thought I left.”
“You did leave, though,” she pointed out gently. “Technically.”
“I figured …”
“What?”
Cross’s eyes met hers again. “I figured you would find me if you needed to. If you wanted to, you would find me. We always came back together before, didn’t we? I thought going to Chicago wouldn’t make a difference to that at all.”
“Chicago. That’s where you went?”
“Three years,” he said quietly. “Three long years.”
“Why did you finally come back?”
“My parents needed me home, and I hoped enough time had passed that me coming back wasn’t going to cause problems with the Marcello family.”
“It didn’t, clearly,” Catherine said.
He laughed darkly. “Not until last week when I assaulted your father. How is he, by the way?”
“Pissed off.”
Cross didn’t even seem surprised. “I figured.”
“If he knew I was here with you, he would probably lock me in the basement until I was an old woman.”
His smirk grew sinful. “Come on.”
“No, I’m pretty serious. He’s forbid me from seeing you, but he forgets I’m not a child.”
“Then why did you call me, Catty?”
Catherine expected him to let her go when he was done looking at her wrist, but he didn’t. Instead, she did what felt good and right for her by turning her hand over to lay her palm inside his. Their fingers intertwined together tightly.
“Because I’m trying to figure things out,” Catherine whispered.
“What things?”
She looked at him, and smiled. “Everything, Cross.”
“Can I help?”
“Maybe.”
For some of it.
He didn’t push or ask.
Then, he looked down again. “Why a cross like that?”
Catherine swallowed the nerves in her throat. “Reminded me of the one you had drawn on the same spot once.”
“I remember that. Black Sharpie. Nosy girls all around. My birthday.”
Her laughter felt light when it escaped. “Yeah.”
“I thought … I don’t know, maybe to remind you of why.”
“It wasn’t because of you. It’s far easier for everyone else to feel guilt for someone else’s choice when it comes to suicide, but you don’t have to feel that at all, Cross.”
“Easier said than done, my girl.”
My girl.
Catherine let the invisible butterflies beat inside her belly. She had never felt that with anyone else—only ever Cross. Sometimes, he hadn’t even needed to do anything but look at her and she would feel it.
It didn’t seem to have changed.
She liked that.
A lot.
“It did remind me of you, though,” Catherine admitted. “That was another reason why I chose it.”
“Oh?”
“I got the tattoo done a year after I made the attempt. Months after I went back to see you and found you gone.”
Cross looked away.
Catherine kept talking. “I got the cross done after all of that because a part of me was still holding onto a part of you.”
His fingers tightened around hers. She answered that back with her own squeeze.
“Do you want to do something?” Cross asked. “Go somewhere, maybe?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something.”
“Sure.”
Movement in the next booth quieted them both. Kenna and the girl’s mother shrugged on their jackets and turned to head out of the café. Not before Kenna stopped at Cross’s side, though. She beamed up at him. He smiled back.
“Here you go,” the girl said, holding out a napkin for him.
Cross took it. “Thank you.”
“Be good and go to school,” Kenna told him.
“I will.”
The girl’s mother laughed, and tugged her daughter along.
Cross looked at the napkin, and then set it on the table. He pushed it across to Catherine for her to see, too. The messy handwriting and shaky hearts made Catherine smile.
Do you love the pretty girl?
Check yes or no.
It was too sweet.
“Well, do you?” she asked, looking up at him. “Yes or no?”
Cross’s intense stare pinned her in place, made her throat tight, and her body hot. What he did to her with just a look … it never failed. She already knew his answer before he said it.
She wished she knew what to do with it.
“When did I ever stop loving you, Catherine?”
Catherine stepped out of her Lexus, and held her wrap sweater tighter to her chest as the cold air sneaked beneath. She looked out to the damp sand and water of Jacob Riis Beach. With darkness falling, and the smell of rain in the air, the place seemed all but abandoned. The parking lot was basically empty. A couple walked about a half of a mile down with a dog, but in the opposite direction of where Catherine parked.
Cross’s Range Rover was right beside her Lexus. He had backed into the parking spot, and the hatch on the vehicle was opened wide. Catherine found Cross sitting in the back of the Rover’s hatch. His leather jacket rested open, and he had an arm sitting on a propped knee. One of his legs dangled over the edge as he looked out at the water.
“This was not what I thought you would pick when you asked if we could do something,” she admitted.
Cross looked down at her. “No?”
“I thought a club, dinner … something.”
“Those are good things to do, too.”
“Sure.”
“But I prefer this when I want quiet,” he admitted.
Catherine hugged her torso. “Do you do this often?”
“More often than not lately.”
“Why?”
“Things on my mind, Catty.”
He didn’t offer more.
She chose not to push.
Turning to look over her shoulder, Catherine admired the darkness of the sky and the calmness of the water. “This is good, though.”
“Yeah?”
She found him looking far too sexy for his own good over her shoulder. Grinning. Content. Cool, calm, and collected.
“Yeah, Cross.”
Thunder boomed overhead.
He leaned forward and looked up at the sky. “It’s going to rain.”
“You can feel it in the air.”
It made goosebumps bloom over her skin. Then again that could have been Cross when he grabbed her around the waist without warning, and pulled her into the hatch with him. Catherine laughed as she settled in Cross’s lap. He tugged a blanket from behind him and tossed it over their shoulders. She snuggled into the warmth—his and the blanket.
Things were always easy with Cross. Like they never missed a beat. Time kept going; they had just stopped for a while.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you that day you came to the college,” Catherine murmured.
Cross’s fingers sifted through her hair. “It’s all right.”
“It’s really not.”
“You feel the way you feel, and for good reason. You were right, anyway. I did what you said. I left when I said I would be there.”
“Yes, but—”
“Reasons are excuses, Catherine. I made a choice because of a circumstance, but the choice was still made at the end of the day.”
A choice that hurt her.
Catherine heard what he left unsaid loud and clear. It was what she wished her father would understand, too. He had made a choice, and it hurt her. It was not as simple as getting an explanation, an apology, and then she would be okay.
Not at all.
“I was so fragile,” Catherine said, watching the first drops of rain fall after another boom of thunder. “Back then, I mean. I worked for months to be clean, okay mentally, and strong physically. I worked hard. All it took was one single day—you being gone—and I was reminded that I was still nothing more than a china doll.”
“What did that make you feel like?”
“Fragile. Breakable. Pretty on a shelf. Painted on smile. Dusty …”
“And?”
“Forgotten,” Catherine whispered.
Cross’s arm tightened around her waist, while his hand stilled in her hair. She felt his lips press to the back of her neck as he said, “You are none of those things, Catty.”
“I was,” she countered. “Even when I was good, I had to learn I was still fragile. Now I’m not, though, because I learned to put myself back together. I fell hard, and for once, no one was there to catch me. No one patched me up. I did it alone. I don’t ever want to go back to being that fragile doll again. I won’t let anyone make me feel like that again.”
Cross rested his chin on her shoulder. “You shouldn’t.”
“Except I feel like I might be her again with you. Or I’m scared that’s how it’ll be. Do you know what I mean?”
“You know I won’t do that to you, right?”
“Consider it like … a warning.”
Cross smile grew against her skin. “Oh?”
“I don’t mean to be difficult, but I’m always fighting the idea that someone might think I’m going to break apart. Or worse, if someone makes me feel that way. I just might make this hard sometimes while I’m still trying to figure it all out.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay?”
“Okay, Catty.”
“And also, I don’t know what I’m doing. Or what I want to do about you, us, and the rest. So, there’s that.”
Cross’s breath puffed against her skin with his chuckle. “But it’s easy, right?”
“We were always easy, Cross.”
Like breathing.
That kind of scared her, too.
It was easy with him.
Harder without.
She didn’t want to be so dependent on Cross that she couldn’t even keep herself happy, yet she knew exactly what it felt like to be without him.
Terrifying.
All at once, the rain turned from a few fat drops to a heavy sheet with another boom of thunder echoing. The only thing saving them from getting wet was the open hatch door that acted like a roof of sorts. Water fell from all around the hatch like thin walls.
“There goes that,” Catherine muttered.
“Yeah, but here goes this, babe.”
Cross’s hand snaked up from her waist to her jaw. He grabbed tight and turned her head to catch her lips in a kiss. Catherine figured he had been holding back on kissing her considering he made no attempt to be soft or sweet. He wanted to taste. She didn’t mind letting him. His tongue snaked between her parted lips to war with hers. Their familiar dance of teeth, and tongue, and lips moving in perfect sync took over, and Catherine turned in his lap.
Straddling him, Catherine felt the blanket fall from their bodies. She wasn’t really feeling the cold anymore, anyway. She didn’t feel anything except Cross’s kiss and his hands skimming over her ass. His fingers dug into the denim covering her ass as she cupped his jaw. She didn’t want him moving an inch.
Catherine wanted to stay just like that in one perfect moment where nothing else mattered except her and Cross.
She could pretend things weren’t a mess.
The world didn’t exist.
Pain was a distant memory.
Life on pause.
Right there, with him.
Catherine couldn’t even be surprised when it didn’t take long before they were shedding clothes. The rain kept falling, and their clothes piled into a corner in the hatch. All she heard was the heavy sheets of rain coming down, and their breaths as she sat naked in Cross’s lap. His hot hands roved over her cool skin as she rolled a condom down his length.
Cross kissed her mouth once more, and then his teeth found her bottom lip. One of his hands palmed her ass while his other dipped between her thighs. His fingers skimmed her pussy, stroking softly and smearing her juices with every touch. His fingers sunk in deep as her hand wrapped around his already hard cock.
Catherine stroked his dick, he fucked her with three fingers, and they kept kissing until her fucking lungs burned.
“I want you inside me right now,” she told him.
Still, he fucked her with his fingers. Cross’s dark eyes never left hers, and his grin turned wicked when his fingers curled against the right spot to make her soaked and shaking.
“Fuck,” Catherine breathed. “Come on, don’t you want to fuck me?”
“More than you know, Catty.”
“Then fuck me.”
“When you come like this, I will. Don’t you know? You get so fucking tight after you come, my girl. So tight I feel like I can’t breathe when you’re squeezing my dick. So you fucking come, and then you’ll ride my cock. Not before.”
A shiver raced over her skin.
Cross’s lips chased the sensation, kissing her jaw, down her neck, and her breasts. Her hand shuddered on stroking his cock, but only because she could feel that orgasm starting to build.
Catherine’s eyes fluttered shut as she focused on letting that cliff form so she could fall off it. She grinded her lips into his hand, riding his rhythm and getting closer by the second. Cross’s murmurs, and his lips ghosting over her neck only made it that much better.
“Come on, Catty,” he taunted darkly in her ear, “come for me. I’ll let you climb on my dick while I get these fingers deep in your ass, huh? Won’t you like that, my girl? You can ride my cock while I fill up your ass, too.”
Jesus Christ.
His mouth was something else.
To make his point, the hand palming her ass slapped hard against her backside. Heat bloomed from the smack. Catherine’s orgasm came raging through like an out-of-control wave she couldn’t possibly spot.
Cross laughed huskily in her ear. His fingers deep in her pussy massaged her G-spot through the orgasm with just enough force to make her eyes roll back. It took her breath away and made her arousal run down his hand.
“Holy shit, yeah, babe. You’re fucking soaked now,” he told her. “Get on me, Catherine. Fuck, get on me.”
She lifted just high enough to reach between them and get his cock fitted against her sex. She didn’t take her time coming down on his length, either. All she wanted was to feel him filling her up, and stretching her open.
She loved that.
No one fucked her like he did.
No one had ever owned her like he did.
Once Catherine had herself fully seated on Cross’s cock, she circled her hips just to feel.
“So full,” she told him.
Cross grinned against her mouth. “You like that so much, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Fucking ride me, babe.”
He kissed her hard as she rode him fast. Never once did he break their kiss, not even when she couldn’t hold back her sounds. His kiss swallowed each and every one of them. His lips urged and teased and taunted.
“Take my cock, Catty.”
And …
“You better fucking soak me again, babe.”
She loved his mouth, too.
Just like he promised, those fingers he had used to fuck her pussy slid around to her ass. He worked one in the tight ring of muscles, and the burn made her shake. It felt like every single one of her nerves were suddenly tuned in and turned on. She could feel more, and it drove her crazy. The second still-slick finger slid into her ass easier.
Cross worked her ass while she rode his cock.
“You better come for me,” he taunted.
Catherine whined. “I wanna. I wanna come so bad.”
“You better fucking give it to me, Catty.”
That third finger stretching her ass did it. She didn’t even feel the orgasm coming until it was already there. Cross’s other hand lifted to tangle into her hair. He grabbed a handful, and yanked to bring her ear to his mouth.
“There it is, there is it,” he soothed in her ear as she shuddered her way through the orgasm. “Next time it’s going to be my fucking cock in your ass, Catherine.”
His fingers came out of her ass and his hand let go of her hair. He grabbed her hips and worked her into him harder, driving his cock impossibly deeper. It ached, but it felt so fucking good, too.
Catherine could barely breathe, but she didn’t care. Cross’s teeth cut into his lower lip as his gaze focused on his cock and her cunt. Catherine leaned back and used the floor of the hatch as a support, so she could watch, too. The sight of his length, hard, the veins pulsing, and slipping into her over and over was intoxicating.
So beautiful.
She didn’t realize she was panting until her air caught altogether, and a third orgasm slipped through her nervous system. It wasn’t as strong, but it still made her high as hell.
“Oh, my God,” Catherine mumbled, letting her head fall back.
“Shit, get up,” Cross grunted.
He lifted her up so that his cock slipped out of her clenching pussy. He ripped the condom off, tugged on his length with two hard strokes, and then painted her stomach with white ropes of warm, sticky cum.
“Jesus Christ,” Cross said through clenched teeth. He pulled her back into his lap, and she felt his cock throb as he smeared his cum over her skin with the head of his cock. “Way better than coming in a goddamn condom, babe.”
Catherine laughed. “Yeah, but you made a mess.”
His thumb swiped the fluid, and he lifted it up to her. She didn’t even hesitate to take his thumb in her mouth and suck it clean. The distinct taste of him was unmistakable.
It only made her hotter.
“Yeah, fuck that’s hot,” he breathed out.
Catherine grinned around his thumb before he pulled it out.
“Stay here with me for a bit, babe.”
“I have to go sometime.”
“Not yet,” he urged. “You’re going to go, and get all stuck in your head for a while. I know it, and I won’t see you. So stay.”
Catherine looked away. “You don’t know that.”
“I do. You might make this hard for us, remember? Your words, Catty, not mine. Stay.”
How could she say no?