Crash Lights and Sirens, Book 1 (31 page)

And that—that’s not what Taryn’s expecting. She doesn’t understand what he’s after here, how sure he sounded at his house that day that he was totally and completely finished with her. He’s still holding on to her hand. “What do you want?” she asks him, once she trusts that her voice has steadied out.

Nick shakes his head. “You quit on me,” he tells her. “You just—you quit. And maybe I shouldn’t have gotten in between you and your brother that night, but—”

“You shouldn’t have,” Taryn interrupts him. “I was handling it, all right? I handle it every day. My whole life, I’m handling it, so you can’t just—”

“You can’t just do everything yourself.” Nick lets out a frustrated breath. “It can’t work that way. Not if we’re going to—” He breaks off, swallows. Shakes his head again.

Taryn feels herself get very, very quiet. “Not if we’re going to what?” she asks.

Nick stares. The hand on hers tightens for a second, her fingers engulfed by his warm palm. It’s achingly familiar, and all of a sudden all Taryn wants is to push herself inside his safe, steady body and stay there, protected by his rib cage like all the rest of his vulnerable organs.

“Do this,” Nick says, rubbing at her knuckles. “Not if we’re going to do this.”

Taryn exhales. Her face feels like it’s made of glass, like if she moves it even a quarter of an inch the wrong way it’ll shatter. “What’s
this
?” she asks, rattling their joined hands. “What are we doing?”

“You quit,” Nick repeats, sailing right over the question. Maybe his answer is contingent on this very conversation, what does Taryn know. “I need you to not do that again.”

Apparently it is contingent. Taryn sags. She’s a quitter, is the cold, hard truth. She quits, and then she runs. She doesn’t know how to be different. “Look,” she starts, “I can’t promise—”

But Nick’s shaking his dark head. Old Court’s doors open and close, spilling butter-yellow light across the pavement, and they both move out of range automatically. “You don’t quit on your family,” Nick points out once they’re settled again. Night is falling for real now, smudging out the details of his face. “You’ve never done that.”

That brings Taryn up short. “Well, no,” she says, trying to keep the
duh
out of her voice. “They’re my family.”

Nick squeezes her hand. “Uh-huh.”

Taryn’s throat is thick with tears, happy or sad or both. She loves him, the immediacy of it like a knife in her side. “What are you saying?” she demands, rubbing at her dry, burning eyes. It’s private here, around the corner of the building. It’s dark. “That you want to be my—”

Nick leans into her space, crowding her up against the cracked brick. It’s cold now, goose bumps popping out along her spine. “I want to try, okay?” he says, cupping her face with both hands. “I want to help with the kids, and your brother, and whatever else you’ve got going on. I want to be there. And I want that not to be a bad thing.”

“It’s not,” Taryn promises, gasping. She’s crying just a little, she can’t help it. “I like it, I swear, I want you to help.” She covers his hands with hers then slides her chilly fingers down his arms, tucking them inside his rolled shirtsleeves. It’s not enough. She wants to map out every inch of his skin.

“And I’m sorry I jumped all over Jesse like that,” Nick continues, wiping at her cheekbones. “That wasn’t helping. I just don’t always know how to—”

“S’hard,” Taryn hiccups, shrugging underneath his hold. She thumbs at the dips of his elbows, embarrassed and also not. “My family’s hard.”

“Not that hard.” Nick gets close then, lowers his voice to a murmur so she has to strain to hear him. She can smell his familiar soap-skin smell. “You love each other, don’t you?”

Taryn nods. “Yeah,” she says. She is so, so tired. “We do.”

Nick looks at her hard in the darkness, hands dropping from her face down her neck to her shoulders.
Keep touching me
, she wants to tell him.
Whatever you do, please just don’t stop.
“So then,” he says.

Taryn raises her eyebrows, tipping her head back against the brick. It started right here in the alley in the winter, how she panicked and grabbed him without thinking about what might come after. It’s not lost on her that it did. “So then,” she echoes.

She knows he’s going to kiss her a full three seconds before he does it, this wry, half-helpless look and the way his chin drops down an inch. Taryn straightens up and meets him halfway. It’s tentative at first, not like any of their other kisses—a sigh or an apology, their mouths hardly even open at all. Taryn keeps his elbows cupped in her palms. Their lips stick as it’s ending, the chap-block she put on in the bathroom earlier. Then she looks at him and whimpers and it’s like all bets are off.

“Shit.” Nick’s all over her everywhere in no time, tongue and teeth and her arms around his neck ungraceful and demanding. He presses her up against the wall so tight she can barely even breathe. Taryn doesn’t care, wants him to push and push until they’re touching everywhere, every last square inch of her skin rubbing up against every last square inch of his. She bites his lip so hard she tastes blood.

“Sorry,” she gasps, embarrassed, sucking where she hurt him. “Sorry sorry sorry, I’m so—” She’s still crying without meaning to, slow tears slipping down along her cheekbones and into the corners of her mouth. Nick nudges her face up and licks them away.

“Shh.” He slides his hands underneath the hem of her shirt then, rubbing at her stomach and her hips and her rib cage. His fingertips trace the underwire of her bra and she gasps. “Missed you,” he tells her, thumbing her nipple through the fabric. It stands up right away, swollen and stiff and aching. Taryn tilts her head back so he’ll put his mouth on her neck.

“Missed you,” she whispers back. It’s a bad angle, him nearly bending in half to get at the skin behind her ear. Taryn squirms anyway, wordlessly begging for more of it. “Missed you awful. God, Nick, it was so bad—”

“I know.” His hands have left her breasts, running down and around to palm her ass roughly, then down again to cup her thighs. He tugs, and Taryn jumps obediently before she knows she’s going to do it. Her feet leave the ground in a rush.

“So bad,” she repeats, curving her arms around his neck to help. Her entire back gets dragged up the wall with the lift, hard enough for bruises. The sidewalk is only a few feet away, streetlights and the possibility of foot traffic, of someone turning their head and seeing. Taryn doesn’t care at all.

“For me too,” Nick is telling her as he winds her ankles around his waist, as easily as if he were moving a rag doll. “It was terrible.” Which is nice to hear, but Taryn can barely process the words. He’s so hard against her, between her legs and everywhere, his burning-warm stomach and chest. Already she’s almost comically wound up.

“Please,” she gasps, trying to rock her hips. He’s got her pinned, her tailbone to the brick. “I need—”

Nick takes over the movement, pressing into her even harder, this quick, dirty grind that feels equal parts amazing and obscene. Taryn nearly sobs in relief, dragging both hands through his hair. When she uses her nails, Nick growls. For a long, long minute they stay at each other like that, desperate and clumsy as teenagers, open mouths and saliva and the jarring clank of teeth. Finally Nick gets a hand on the scruff of her neck to stop her. There’s a twitch there too, his lower body jumping in a way that makes Taryn suspect that he almost—

“Fuck,” he pants, breaking away. His lip is still bleeding sluggishly, smudged all over his mouth and probably her skin too. It’s vivid enough that Taryn can see the color in the dark. “We need to get out of here.”

They do. Taryn doesn’t want to though. She doesn’t want to go anywhere that will involve him moving, even for a second. She wants him to come in his jeans. “Where’s your truck?” she asks instead, rubbing a thumb across his lip. If she looks closely enough she can see the bite marks, two neat punctures where her teeth sliced in. Her thumb comes away red, and she sucks it clean.

“We’re not making up in my truck, Falvey,” Nick says, watching her mouth like he’s hypnotized. He lets her down far enough that the toes of her left foot touch, freeing up one hand to slide between their bodies. His fingers find her clit easily, even through the denim.

Taryn whines, rolling her hips. “We’ve done it in your truck plenty of times,” she points out, panting herself.

Nick huffs a laugh against her cheekbone. “Not now.” His lips are warm on her damp skin, hot breath and the rough scrape of beard. “Not this time.”

Taryn makes a frustrated sound, arching herself into his touch—she could get off just like this, she’s pretty sure, his strong fingers still working down in between her thighs just how he knows she likes it. “Take me home then.” She looks up at him and shakes her head, worried he won’t understand her. “I mean, like. To your house.”

Nick raises his eyebrows at that, ghost of a smile across his good, good face. “Okay,” he agrees quietly. And making up, that’s what they’re doing, they’re finally finally— “Let’s go home.”

He’s parked in the lot on the far side of Old Court. Taryn texts Doc a super-quick
don’t worry
as they spill into the bucket seats and speed out in the direction of his neighborhood. Nick runs every yellow light on the way across town. The one red they get caught at Taryn all but climbs across the seat with impatience, licking her way into his mouth as gently as she can manage. They’re still kissing thirty seconds later when it flicks over to green, both of them startled by the honk from the car idling behind them.

“Whoops,” Taryn mutters, giggling, sitting back and sliding one hand down to chart the length of him through his jeans as he hits the gas in the Tahoe. Nick groans low and deep in his throat. She feels wound up and giddy, relief and anticipation battling it out in her chest. She scrapes one fingernail along his zipper and wonders idly if she could finish him before they make it to his house. She wants to watch his face when he comes.

It’s five or six miles, maybe. It feels like it takes all night.

He holds her hand on the way up to the porch, keys jingling, the sound of Atlas skittering down the hallway as the tumblers fall in the lock. Nick nudges her inside the door. Taryn feels shy all of a sudden, like now that this is happening she doesn’t know what to say to him, like she wants to tell him he’s already her family and she doesn’t know how to start. She bends down to scratch the dog behind the ears. “Hey, Atlas,” she tells him, grateful for the furry distraction as she was the first day she ever came here, when she was so new and so nervous and trying like hell to convince them both she wasn’t either one. “Hey, buddy.”

“Taryn.” Nick kisses her again then, his durable body sturdy against hers, fingers threaded. Just like that, Taryn feels herself steady out. “Come upstairs with me.”

“Yeah, okay,” she says, pressing her face into his neck. “That sounds good.”

Here’s how Nick finally lets himself believe this is happening: together in the master bedroom, both of them stumbling on the IKEA area rug as they kiss their way to the four-poster, Taryn pulls back and says, “So, like. Just to clarify, I’m really sorry.”

The whole trek up here, she hasn’t let go of him once. Even on the stairs, which were too narrow for both of them, she twisted her arm around to keep holding his hand.

“I’m sorry too,” Nick tells her, smoothing back that pretty red hair. It’s already mussed, a leftover work braid not quite surviving the transition to night. He reaches around for the elastic, tugging the whole mess free and running his hands through the tangles. “We’re fixing it. We’re gonna fix it.”

Taryn nods wordlessly, stopping at the edge of the bed and holding up both arms so he’ll pull her shirt off. Nick takes care of her bra too, a plain, familiar black, feeling something close to relief at the sight of her peachy nipples. He missed her. It’s all hitting him at once, how badly he did.

At least he’s not alone. “Come here,” Taryn murmurs, even though he’s standing right in front of her. She yanks off his thermal and presses their bare chests together, going up on tiptoes to get the contact she wants. Underneath the softness of her breasts, her rib cage expands and contracts violently. “Fuck,” she says, curving shaking hands around his shoulders. “Fuck, Nick, I can’t—”

“Shhh.” He nudges her to the bed and sets to work on her jeans, peeling them down her freckled legs. She’s wearing those flat, slip-on shoes that mean it’s finally spring. “Me too.”

Taryn wiggles, breathing hard. “Hurry,” she commands. Her underwear is a heathered gray, so completely wet through it’s startling. Nick cups her through the sticky fabric, dropping down on top so they’re face-to-face again. “Please,” Taryn says, butting her head at his. Her fingers scrabble for his belt as soon as it’s in range. “Please, I just need—”

Nick has an idea what she’s after, this all-consuming impatience to fit them together. He wants it too, needs the contact like icing a bruise. He lets Taryn tug his cock free and yank her panties down her legs, bent on skipping all and any preliminaries.

But then, just as soon as she has him there, she stops. “Is this okay?” she asks, sitting up and peering through the dim. “I mean.” She pushes her hair out of her face impatiently. “I didn’t, with anyone else. Did you—”

Nick feels the air whoosh out of him in a rush. “No,” he promises, right away and fervent. “No, of course not, I didn’t—”