Leave a Trail (57 page)

“Fuck, baby. You can’t think one blow job is gonna give me stamina I haven’t needed in seven and a half years.”

Opening his belt and jeans, she grinned up at him. “You mean you haven’t been training? Building up your stamina? All that working out, and you neglect this muscle? Well, that’s okay. We’ll catch it up today.”

He groaned. “Fuck, just seeing you there”—she pulled him out of his boxer briefs and he flinched, his breath catching—“Lilli—fuck, I’m…fuck.”

His cock, his huge, gorgeous, perfect cock, weeping with need of her, was in her hands. After so long. She could have wept for the joy of it. In the tension of his body—still familiar even though it had been so long—and in the throb of his rod in her hands, she knew that he was near orgasm already. Tipping her head so that she could see him looking down at her, she sucked him into her mouth.

He shouted and came, just like that, filling her mouth, his big hands clutching her shoulders so hard she could feel his short nails digging through her t-shirt. He shouted again and again as she swallowed and sucked until she’d taken him all. He tasted like Isaac, and she exhilarated in the power of reclaiming that knowledge of him.

He took her by the arms and pulled her to her feet as he stood, too.

Confused, she asked, “What’re you doing?”

“We are overdressed for this event.” He took her t-shirt by the hem, and she helped him pull it over her head. Then she unhooked her bra and discarded that.

“Sweet Jesus, look at you, Sport. Oh, sweet Jesus.” He put his hands over her breasts, plumping them gently. The skin of his palms was so rough and hot—her nipples went hard instantly, and she pushed deeper into his touch with a moan. No hands had touched her in all these years but her own. The thrill of him was almost more than she could stand.

Almost.

She glanced down to see his cock swelling again to its full length and girth. Then his hold on her breasts changed, and he pinched her nipples between the pads of his thumbs and forefingers. When she jumped and gasped, he pinched harder, and she arched her back with a cry.

“Isaac, God. I missed you so much.”

She opened her eyes to find him staring down at her with a wild hunger. “I need to taste you, Lilli. I need you on my mouth. I need to breathe you in and suck you down.” As soon as she nodded, his hands moved from her breasts to her waist, and he lifted her onto the bed and stripped the rest of her clothes off.

Before he joined her on the red satin sheets, he stripped naked, too. He really had gotten more massive than he’d even been before—at least not since his days in physical therapy, when his upper body had been all of his strength. His chest and belly were as defined as she’d ever seen, the oblique muscles running over his hips to his cock stood out in stark relief, his biceps and forearms were like something out of a superhero comic. His thighs and calves were massed with muscle. He was spectacular. He’d always been, but damn.

As he knelt on the bed between her legs, his rigid, heavy cock bouncing, she grinned. “You look
good
, love.”

He grinned back—that beautiful, cocky as hell, lopsided smirk that she adored. “You, too, baby. I love your strong, fuckin’ gorgeous body, and…damn.” He pushed his hands under her ass and lifted her hips high as he bent down and, without preamble, shoved his face hard against her pussy.

“Oh, God! Isaac! Fuck!”

He sucked and bit, and licked and rubbed, his beard brushing against her thighs and over her clit, while he made a constant, rolling growl that vibrated against her most sensitive skin. She flexed and arched, reaching down to hold his head hard to her, grinding herself on him.

Gasping, he pulled back just enough to mumble, with his lips on her flesh, “Baby, I forgot. I thought I remembered, I thought about it every fucking day, but I forgot how fucking good you taste. Fuck, Lilli. How could I have forgotten this?”

She opened her eyes to see him staring at her from between her legs. She was so close, but she answered, dredging up the ability to speak from the far reaches of her head. “It’s okay. You won’t forget again. We’ll never forget anything about each other again.”

He nodded and focused his mouth again on her clit. He bit down on the meat around it and sucked, his tongue moving rapidly over the bud. He hadn’t forgotten that.

Sensation exploded right there and sent long, sparking tracers of ecstasy through every nerve, every vein, every tendon and muscle and cell of her body. “ISAAC! YES! GOD, YES!” she screamed, and then he dropped her and pulled the full length of his body up and over hers, plunging his perfect cock deep into her core. They had not needed birth control since Bo’s birth, which her womb had not survived.

The move kept her at her peak, and she gritted out through her clenched teeth and taut throat, “Fuck me, Isaac. I need it hard. Fuck me hard. Make me remember.”

He hooked a massive arm around her thigh, pulling it high up near her chest. “Hard as you want it, baby,” he growled, then tucked his head to her shoulder and clamped down on her with his teeth as he slammed his body into hers.

Both of them grunting like animals with every savage thrust, this fuck wouldn’t last long. But Lilli was so enthralled by the filling, brutal glory of his cock pistoning inside her that she didn’t need long to go a second time. Just the experience of his body on hers again, at long last—the hair on his chest, his arms, his legs, scratching against her bare skin, against her nipples, between her legs—just that was enough to have her throbbing and drenched, but his cock, so scalding hot and solid, hitting her deep with every grunting plunge, brought her so high she wasn’t quite sure how they were still on the bed. They had somehow found a new level of ecstasy.

Isaac released his teeth from her neck and groaned. “I gotta go, baby. Fuck, that’s it.”

She nodded and picked up her own pace, flexing her hips as hard and fast as she could, countering his frantic thrusts. As she came, she bit down on his shoulder, tasting his blood, clutching her hands over his back. Then, as her release exploded, his did, too, and he yelled incoherently and drove deep.

Isaac dropped his weight onto her, and they lay, drenched in sweat, silent and perfectly still, except for their uneven, desperate breaths. He was inside her yet, beginning to soften. She felt his full weight, his whole body. Lilli wanted never to leave this position again in her life.

But finally, he lifted up onto his elbows and looked down at her. “Hi, Sport.”

“Hi, you.”

“I fuckin’ love you.”

“Stay with me, then.” With her fingertips, she traced the scarring across this throat, and then lifted her hand and brushed it over his perfect face, lined now with care and hardship. He had been through so much.

He turned into her touch and kissed her palm. “I’m not goin’ anywhere.”

~oOo~

They stayed in bed together for another hour or so, touching and talking, renewing their memories of each other’s body, and then they joined the party that was being thrown in Isaac’s honor. He kept Lilli close for the couple of hours they stayed. Then, when she told him that she’d arranged for Gia and Bo to spend the night with Uncle Show and Aunt Shannon and Millie and Joey, Isaac kissed his children, hugged his friends, and led Lilli to his bike. They rode back to their home, Lilli wrapped as tightly around him as she could get.

He took the long way.

~oOo~

In the middle of the night, Lilli woke surrounded by Isaac. Her back to his chest, his thighs tucked behind hers, his arms coiled around her, his face in her hair on the pillow behind her. She opened her eyes and, in the bright light of the moon and stars beaming in through their bedroom window, saw, before anything else, his arm crossed protectively, possessively over her chest. The ink on his forearm:
L’amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle
. And her name. Gia’s name. Bo’s name.

He was home.

They were whole.

She nudged her head forward and pressed her lips to the ink. At the touch, taste, smell of his skin, feeling surrounded and safe, feeling
not alone
for the first time in seven and a half years and overwhelmed with relief and love, Lilli began to weep. As the tears came, they came freely, a dam inside her giving way. She pressed her face to his arm, her own hands coming up to clutch him, and she cried years-old tears.

Isaac woke as soon as her tears came, but he didn’t try to stop them. He simply tightened his grip on her, and allowed her the comfort of his body, his presence. As she began to find the bottom of the reservoir of sadness, the full expression of which she had denied herself so that she could find a way to go on without him, Lilli felt his mouth on her shoulder. He kissed a line to her neck, then up. With his lips on her ear, his whispered, “I promise.”

She moaned at that, and fresh tears started. When she flexed backward, needing to be even closer, more surrounded, needing to be connected, to be one, to be indivisible—he pushed his thigh between hers with a feral grunt, and then, when she kicked her leg over his hip, he shoved his cock, steely and ready, into her.

It was exactly what she’d needed, and she cried out even as she wept. As they flexed and thrust and surged together, he kept up a steady whisper in her ear, like an incantation, a spell of protection against any trials of the future.

I promise. I promise. I promise. IpromiseIpromiseIpromiseIpromiseIpromise.

~oOo~

Kodi didn’t remember Isaac, and he had not yet decided whether he approved of the giant man who was not Showdown in his house. He clearly he did not approve of said giant man in his mistress’s bedroom, or of the fact that the bedroom door had been closed between him and her all night.

Because Lilli had accepted Isaac, Kodi was torn, watchful but not overtly aggressive. Still, whenever Isaac came near, the dog growled—just low, not quite a warning, more of an assertion. Lilli could see Isaac’s hurt at the dog’s suspicion. The two had been close when Kodi was a pup—he’d been more Isaac’s dog than anyone’s. On top of that loss, Kodi was labeling him a stranger in the house Isaac had literally been born in.

So, in the morning, home again after they’d made an early, quick ride back to the clubhouse for her truck, while Isaac took a shower, Lilli took Kodi out for a short run, hoping that paying some attention to the dog and wearing him out, while leaving Isaac in the house to be there when they got back, might realign his canine thinking. He was getting old and didn’t have the stamina for long runs anymore, but he could do a couple of miles. Then he’d probably crap out and be too tired not to give Isaac a chance.

Lilli realized that she was conniving to get both her son and her dog to love the man they’d once loved fiercely, and she knew Isaac was just as keenly aware of that as she was. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like for him to rejoin a life that had moved on without him.

When they got back, Kodi dropped, exhausted, to the rug in the front hall, and Lilli went looking for Isaac. She found him in their bedroom, sitting on their bed, dressed only in jeans, his long, thick hair—still dark, but now threaded with grey, like his beard—loose and wet from his shower, spread over his bare back and hanging over his broad shoulders. He was deeply engaged in what he was doing and didn’t hear her approach. She took a couple of beats and just basked in the sight of him. Her man. Her beautiful, beautiful, strong, magnificent man.

Then she realized what had him so transfixed, and her heart fell to the floor.

He had her nightstand drawer out and on the bed, and he was reading the pages of letters she had not sent.

Seven and a half years’ worth of pain and loss and fear that had been too great and encompassing to burden him with.

“Isaac, no. Don’t.”

He raised his head at her voice and turned his stricken eyes to hers. “Lilli. God, baby. My God.”

ISAAC

I’m so lonely, Isaac. The pain of it is physical. It’s like all my muscles and organs and veins are full of rocks. Sharp, gouging rocks. I don’t know how to keep going.

and

Gia and I added pages to her calendar book today. She was stoic and brave, but God, her eyes.

and

I’m not enough. I can’t be enough for Bo and Gia both. He needs too much, and she lets me put her aside for him. I let her let me, because it’s too much, and I’m not enough.

and

Today was the day we first thought you’d come home. This is the worst day so far. By far. This day seemed so far away once. Now it’s here, but you’re still gone, and the days ahead without you just seem infinite.

and

I can’t do it.

and

I can’t do it.

and

I can’t do it.

And so much more. Page after page after page of pain, desolation, inadequacy, disappointment.

Isaac had come out of the shower to find Lilli and Kodi still gone and, feeling disoriented in his own bedroom—in his own house, his own town, his own life—he had started reacquainting himself. This room had seemed like a good place to start, the one he shared only with Lilli. There were changes, but not too many. New curtains—the ‘new’ cats, when they had been kittens, had torn the old ones up. A couple of knickknacks from the kids. A television on top of his dresser. He’d been looking for a remote when he’d come across the drawer full of the scented purple paper he loved so much. That drawer was chock full of the paper, all of it covered in Lilli’s handwriting. He’d seen his name on a top page and had pulled it out.

And then he’d fallen into a heaving, vicious vortex of guilt and sorrow.