“Baby, I already hurt, but not from the damn sutures. I want to be deep inside you right now. I want to be buried in you, in your heat, until I burn.”
Stepping back, she ran her hand down his chest, savoring the flex of muscle beneath her fingers. “You’ll have to settle for this,” she told him in a sultry voice as she followed her hand and dropped to her knees on the tile.
“Emily. No,” he said in a husky, tortured groan.
Her hand continued to stroke up and down the shaft as her tongue flicked out to lick the velvety head. “No?” she questioned.
“Oh, fuck yeah,” he panted harshly.
Smiling, she took him into her mouth and did one long suck, bringing a strangled groan from Grady as she repeated it again. She moved her tongue down his long length, and then took as much of him as she could manage. Her hands moved, needing to touch his body, finally settling her palms on his ass and gripping it hard as she devoured him.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck,” he groaned. “That feels so damn good. I won’t last.”
His hips thrust, and one of his hands came down to thread through her soaking-wet hair, guiding her head as she opened her jaw as wide as she could, trying to take his cock deeper. Her throat squeezed tight with every entry, massaging the front of his shaft, bringing a strangled groan from Grady with every thrust. Her fingernails dug into his tight ass, pulling him to her with every stroke.
“Sweetheart . . . Fuck . . . I can’t . . . I’ll come in your mouth,” he growled incoherently.
That was exactly what she wanted. She wanted to taste him, and her hunger for him was ferocious. Sucking harder and faster, she felt him shudder before his hot release flooded the back of her throat, flowing warmly into her as he gasped, threw his head back, and released a satisfying groan of ecstasy.
He tasted tangy, slightly salty, and so completely like Grady.
She protested when he hauled her up before she could get to her feet, not wanting him to lift anything. He brushed off her concern and kissed her passionately, and then pulled her against his chest. He rocked her again, just like he’d done when she’d climaxed.
Emily didn’t know how long they stayed wrapped together, their bodies humming and their souls singing. All she knew was a feeling of total happiness, and the sense that in Grady’s embrace, she was exactly where she needed to be. She thought she had come home to Amesport, but with Grady, Emily felt like she had finally found her real home.
CHAPTER 6
“Do you want to tell me what happened to you at the party?” Emily asked quietly in the dark, her body spooned with Grady in his huge bed.
“I got shot,” he answered gravely, his baritone vibrating against her ear.
She knew that he was hedging. He knew exactly what she was talking about. “Before that. Your panic attack,” she said patiently.
“I don’t like parties,” he said hesitantly, stroking his hand along her hip absently.
“It’s more than that. But if you don’t want to share it with me, it’s okay,” she told him softly.
She might have ended up going to business school for her MBA, but she’d done her undergrad work in psychology. She recognized social anxiety when she saw it.
“It isn’t that I don’t want to share everything with you. I’m just not really sure how to explain it,” he admitted reluctantly, letting out a long, masculine sigh. “When I was young, I stuttered pretty badly.”
“Lots of kids do. And you obviously outgrew it.” But she knew it probably hadn’t been easy. “Kids can be brutal sometimes. They teased you?”
“Yeah. But it wasn’t so much the teasing at school. It was at home.”
“Your siblings?” she asked, confused.
“My father,” Grady said, his voice rough. “I was a Sinclair, and no Sinclair is supposed to have any defect. I could never get my words out, and my father thought I was stupid. He never let a day go by without reminding me that I wasn’t the son he wanted. I was supposed to be social, one of the Sinclair elite. I wasn’t. I was a computer geek. I didn’t really like business. And I had no desire to play the socialite games. None of it was real.”
Emily’s heart felt like it was in a vise, seeing visions of a young Grady feeling like he never measured up to his father’s rigorous standards. “But you’re a genius,” she argued. “Look at all you’ve accomplished.”
“Didn’t matter. I wasn’t like him. And he didn’t think I was smart. He thought I was defective. Even though I did eventually outgrow my stuttering, he never saw me as anything but an idiot.”
Not sure if she wanted to know, she asked hesitantly, “And the party thing?”
“We had the Sinclair annual Christmas party every year, an event that every Sinclair had to attend. My father was an alcoholic, and he got even more verbally abusive when he was drinking. Since he couldn’t claim me or accept me as his son, he did his best to humiliate me every year, showing all of his rich friends that he shunned me, making me the family joke. And almost every one of them went along with it, laughed it up with him about me being the Sinclair moron. I guess it’s okay to have one of those, but he couldn’t exactly claim me as part of his family. I was nothing to be proud of.” Taking a deep breath, he finished, “I was always . . . different.”
“I’m glad you’re different. It’s better than being a carbon copy of a mean drunk,” Emily said fiercely. “No wonder you learned to dread Christmas. Did you celebrate at all as a family?”
“Only the party,” Grady admitted. “We were Sinclairs,” he said, as though that explained everything. “We decorated because of the party.”
“Where are your parents now?” she asked, wondering if she could strangle his father for putting those kinds of fears and insecurities into an innocent boy.
“My father is dead. He passed away right after the Christmas party when I was eighteen. My mother remarried and moved to Europe. We almost never see her. I think we were a part of her life that she wanted to forget. I don’t think she was ever happy,” Grady mused.
Emily breathed a sigh of relief. She didn’t want to commit murder, and if she were in the same room as his alcoholic father, she might have been tempted. “Are you close to your siblings?”
“As close as we can be considering we’re never together,” he answered quietly.
She had a feeling they had all suffered from being brought up in a home with very little love and an alcoholic father with a short fuse. “How did you ever turn out so special?” she queried softly.