Strong Enough Page 24

  Jasper steps through, his bulk filling the entryway. His amber eyes find mine immediately and they latch on as he closes the door behind him. He turns the lock on the knob and then flips the deadbolt. He doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t take his eyes off me either.

  He’s still for a few seconds before he slowly approaches me and stops within an inch. He smells like the night—cold and dark. But his scent, his face, his very presence warms me like nothing else can.

  With purposeful, measured movements, he bends and sweeps me up into his arms. Gazes still locked, I wrap my hands around his neck as he turns to mount the stairs. He carries me through the bedroom and back into the bathroom, where he sets me on my feet. I watch as he pulls the plug from the tub and turns to exit the room.

  I stand and wait, listening to the muffled sounds of material shifting from the other room. When he returns, the last of the water is circling the drain.

  Jasper turns on the faucet and resets the plug, reaching into the corner for the bubble bath. He pours a capful under the stream of hot water and then recaps and replaces it.

  When he straightens, he faces me. His eyes click to a stop on mine and we stare at each other. Still neither of us speaks. I don’t know what’s going through his mind, but I’m too afraid of ruining this moment to utter a single word. I’m too afraid that I might be dreaming and I’ll wake up. Or that he’s an apparition and he might disappear. That’s what’s going through mine.

  The moment stretches on, tight as a drum, until the tub fills. Jasper reaches down to turn it off and then lifts me off my feet again, setting me in the gloriously hot water. I hadn’t realized how cold I was until the heat hits my skin. I did, however, know how lonely I was, how desperate I was for Jasper. Now that’s all the more apparent.

  Eyes locked together, Jasper pushes up the sleeves of his black shirt and takes the washcloth I’d set on the edge of the tub earlier. He wets it, lathers it with my soap and then with a gentleness that melts my heart, he starts to wash me. He drags his hand under my chin, down my chest, circling my breasts several times before he applies more soap and starts again. He follows the same path, only this time takes his cleaning down my stomach where he circles and circles and circles.

  I study him the whole time. I watch his face, a face that has always been hard to read, but is now showing me a sea of distress.

  “Jasper, what’s wrong?”

  His eyes are intent, focused on his hands, but I don’t think he’s seeing them. He seems to be looking somewhere else. Inward maybe.

  When he repeats the same steps again, making his way to below my navel this time, I finally understand what this is about.

  He’s washing away what just happened. He’s doing the only thing he can to take away the trauma of what I almost experienced, the horror of being that close to rape. And to death.

  “If I’d been here, he’d never have gotten that close,” he finally says in a softly haunted voice. It slides over my skin like velvet and moves over my heart like silk.

  I catch his wrist and bring his hand up to my chest, where he can feel the thud of my heart beneath the bone. “Do you feel that, Jasper? That beats for you. I feel like it hasn’t beat since the day you left. I’d risk losing my life all over again if it meant you coming back to me.”

  Jasper drops his head and rests it along the edge of the tub. Slowly, I sit up, reaching forward to cup his face and raise his eyes to mine. Now is not the time for second thoughts or stubborn pride. I may never get a chance like this again. I have to make the most of it.

  “Jasper, I love you. I’ve loved you from the second you walked into my life. And I never stopped. Not for one minute. Nothing else matters. Nothing. And no one. All I want, all I need is you. Just you. And you’re here. Finally,” I tell him, happy tears blurring his face in front of me. “You’re finally here. You came for me.”

  I watch as Jasper’s eyes turn to dark gold. I hear his shaky breath as he exhales. I feel the tremor in his hand where it rests against my skin. We stare at each other, something more powerful than words, more powerful than the electricity swirling in the air around us. It triggers a shiver that skitters through my muscles, my body responding to the unspoken, to the undefined.

  My stomach twists into a knot and my chest swells with emotion. I gasp. I can’t help it. I want this man. I want everything he can give me, however much for however long.

  “Don’t do that,” Jasper whispers.

  “Don’t do what?” I breathe, my insides jittering.

  “Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”

  “Make what harder?”

  “Me keeping my hands off you.”

  “I never asked you to keep your hands off me.”

  “But after what just happened . . .”

  “It didn’t happen. And I can’t think of anything I want more right now than to have your hands on me, erasing the touch of anyone else.”

  “Muse, I—”

  “Make love to me, Jasper. Please.” I move his hand down my body. I guide it between my legs. The thought that someone else might’ve forced himself on me only makes me want Jasper that much more. The touch of the man I want. The touch of the man I love. The touch of the man I think loves me.

  He holds perfectly still for a few seconds until I press one of my fingers onto his and guide it between my folds. Tentatively, he rubs me, his eyes never leaving mine. Long ovals, fluid, teasing, until my stomach tightens with a different kind of emotion.

  Jasper lengthens his stroke until he is moving ever closer to my opening. When he reaches it, he eases a single finger inside. Sweetly, tenderly.

  Desire gushes through me and I feel my muscles clamp around his digit. Our eyes are still glued together. Inseparable. Desperate. Jasper brings his thumb into play, massaging me with it as his finger gently explores me from the inside. He increases his rhythm just enough to take me up to the next notch. I press the back of his hand with my own, a silent plea for more.

  Jasper wets his lips and slides another finger into me, thrusting deeper, yet still only slowly forcing me higher and higher. My breath is coming faster. My hips are moving against his hand. Jasper’s eyes are darkening and the world around me is fading.

  Then, with a growl that thrills me and movements so fast they surprise me, Jasper lifts me to my feet to stand in the tub in front of him. He leans forward and buries his tongue between my legs, like he couldn’t wait another minute to taste me. A starving man offered a feast, and he accepted.

  The heat of it, hotter than the bath water. The wetness of it, wetter than the bath water. I fist my fingers in his hair and hold him to me. He curls his arms around the backs of my thighs and nudges my legs apart before pulling one up onto his shoulder, opening me to him so that I am at his wonderful mercy.

  Like a man possessed, Jasper devours me. His hunger is so voracious, it sizzles in the air around us. I’ve never been so wanted. And I’ve never wanted so much.

  With swirls and licks and thrusts of his tongue, Jasper pulls me apart at the seams. My straining body convulses and my locked knee buckles. But I don’t fall. Jasper supports me with his strong arms and his relentless tongue.

  When I can neither stand nor speak, Jasper rises to scoop me into his arms and carry me purposefully into the next room. In one smooth motion, he turns me toward him and sits on the end of the bed. Just as I’m noticing that all the sheets are in a pile on the floor, I hear the zip of a zipper and then I’m being impaled on him.

  My body responds as if we weren’t separated all this time. After a moment’s adjustment to his gasp-inducing size, I stretch around him and take him into the very center of me. All the way in.

  I throw back my head, air lost in my lungs, speech lost on my tongue, and I just feel. My arms are draped around Jasper’s shoulders, nowhere near touching in the back, and I feel him tremble again. When I open my eyes to look at him, his hot whiskey gaze is fixed on me.

  The longer we watch each other, the more pro
nounced his tremor becomes. My heart and mind are intent on him, but my body is thinking more about where he’s seated within me than anything else that’s happening.

  “Jasper?” I ask, my voice coarse and rough, even to my own ears.

  He closes his eyes and I see his jaw clench. “Just give me a second.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  At this, he opens back up and looks at me. “You’re perfect. I just want to enjoy this. Just . . . this.”

  “Does that mean you’re not already?”

  “No. I just don’t want to go too fast and risk—”

  He stops abruptly, provoking my next question.

  “Risk what?”

  A fine bead of sweat is breaking out on his brow.

  The pause is long before he answers. “Risk hurting you.”

  I take his face in my hands, my eyes boring into his. “You won’t hurt me. You never have. I want all that you have to give, Jasper. Rough or gentle, sweet or dirty. I love it all.”

  I sit up slightly and then ease back down onto him. Jasper grabs my hips to still me, air hissing through his teeth. “Muse, I’m warning you . . .”

  I smile down at him, pushing at his shoulders so that he’ll lie back. Reluctantly, he does. I lean over him, letting him slip nearly all the way out of me. “Consider me warned,” I say just before I press my mouth to his and move back onto him.

  There is another pause, this one shorter, just before one big hand cups the back of my head to crush our lips together and the other one splays at the top of my butt to hold our bodies tight while he grinds his hips up into mine.

  With a guttural grunt and the thrust of his tongue, Jasper pulls out of me and pumps back in. I know instinctively this is the moment he’s giving up his fight. Seconds later, with a near-violent abandon, he begins to ravage my mouth, both hands now at my hips, guiding me into a wild, hard rhythm on him.

  He moves me on him, grinding and sliding, the friction unbearably delicious. When his hand slips between us and his finger finds my folds, I tip over the edge I was so precariously clinging to.

  “J-J-Jasper,” I half pant, half moan.

  “God, you’re amazing,” he growls, rolling over until he’s on top of me, pounding his body into mine.

  Sensation ripples through me in explosion after explosion. His thick, rigid body inside mine, his lips sucking at my nipple, his hand wrapped around the top of my thigh, holding my hips up and keeping me open.

  And just before I catch my breath and begin my descent, I feel Jasper stiffen in my arms as his cock pulses and throbs within me. Heat pours into me and I take it all in, hoarding it greedily and milking him for more.

  “I can’t be without you again,” he breathes into my ear in a harsh and winded voice. “Ever. Not ever, Muse. Do you hear me?”

  He flexes his hips, spurting the last of himself into me just before he tips me up to take him a fraction deeper. Like he wants to bury himself in me as far as he can. And I want him to. I want anything he’ll give me. And I don’t ever want to let it go.

  I wrap my arms around his shoulders as far as they’ll go and I hold Jasper to me. We are as joined as two people can be, the indelible bond we share transcending even that which just happened between our bodies. I know this moment has changed everything. I don’t know what tomorrow holds, I don’t know what heartbreak might lie ahead, but I don’t care. I can’t care. He is the ocean that swallows my emptiness. He doesn’t fill it; he makes it as though there was never a space there. He is a part of me and with him it’s all or nothing. And I’ve had the nothing. I’ve lived with the nothing for months. I’m not interested in one more minute of it.

  “I love you,” I mumble, my lips pressed to the salty skin of his throat. “Iloveyou Iloveyou Iloveyou.”

  FORTY

  Jasper

  I have to make myself pull out of Muse, regret setting in once my mind returns. I roll away and sit up, running my hands through my hair as I think of the best way forward.

  I feel the bed shift as Muse sits, too. She presses her front to my back, draping her arms around my neck. I can feel the delicious points of her nipples pressing into my shoulder blades and my mouth waters reflexively.

  I stand, breaking free of her hold as I pace to the other side of the room.

  “I’m sorry,” I confess, unable to look back at her. I can picture perfectly what she must look like, sitting on her haunches, legs spread to reveal that beautiful pussy, lush nipples now a darker pink from the assault of my mouth.

  “Why?” Her voice is small. Hurt.

  I turn to find her head downcast. “I let you go so that you wouldn’t get hurt, so that I would never hurt you, and yet here I am . . .”

  “You didn’t hurt me, Jasper,” she says, raising her liquid green eyes to mine. I can see the glitter of them in the moonlight streaming through the window behind her.

  “I came inside you, Muse. What if you get pregnant? Do you think you’ll ever be able to get rid of me then? I took your choice away from you tonight.”

  “No you didn’t. I let this happen. I was here, too, you know. And I don’t want to get rid of you. I want you here. With me. Always. And I thought that’s where you wanted to be.”

  I say nothing. She’s right. I knew what I was doing. And I knew I didn’t want her to have a choice. I want to be bound to her forever. And her to me.

  “Your last painting,” I begin. “I saw the hurt in it. I saw the pain and the anger. I did that.”

  “You’ve been watching me.” Not a question. A statement.

  “Yes.”

  “I hoped you were.”

  “You did?” That surprises me.

  She nods. “I also hoped that one day you’d let me see you.”

  “I had no intentions of that ever happening, but when I saw him on you . . .”

  My blood boils instantly. I curl my fingers into fists so tight my joints ache.

  “If you had no intention of ever being with me or letting me see you then why did you come? Why do that to me?”

  “I wasn’t doing it to you, Muse,” I snap a little more harshly than I mean to. “Don’t you get it? I’ve never loved someone before. Not the way I love you. I can’t sleep. I can’t think. I hardly eat. For months, I prayed to go back to the way I was, when I didn’t feel. Didn’t want. Didn’t love. But it wouldn’t go away. The more I tried to run from it, the worse it got. Nothing could make me forget you. Not drinking, not drugs, not other women, not—”

  “You were with other women?”

  “I tried to be, but damn you, I couldn’t do it. They weren’t you. They didn’t smell like you, didn’t taste like you, didn’t feel like you. I couldn’t get past a kiss, a simple touch. But God, I tried.” I’m out of breath. Bitterly angry. Frustrated. “So I’m here now. To overdose. You’ll either kill me or heal me. Either way, I can’t live like this anymore. Without you.”

  Muse gets up and walks to where I stand in front of the other window. “But I don’t want you to. I don’t care about the danger or what might happen. My life isn’t worth living without you, so I’ll take the risk. That’s what you saw in the painting. You saw how miserable I was without you. You saw that there was no sun even on a sunny day. You saw that the beauty around me wasn’t beautiful anymore. But now it is. You’re here. With me. And I don’t want to spend another minute of another day in that kind of misery again. I knew if we’d ever have a chance, you’d have to come to me on your own. You’d have to be as ready for me in your life as I am for you in mine.”

  “I’m ready. I’d give up everything I am to be with you. Staying away didn’t help my mother. It didn’t save her. It only hurt her. And me. If you’ll have me, I’m yours. I think I have been from the day I met you, when the man I’ve always hated started to die. You showed me love, real love. The kind that changes you from the inside out. I just didn’t know if you could still love me, after all that’s happened.”

  “Like I said, love doesn’t let you go.
And neither will I. I’ll hang on until I draw my last breath, whether you do or not.”

  Hearing that brings me an odd sense of relief. It’s almost an assurance that when Muse loves, she loves forever. No matter what happens, no matter who you turn out to be. She just loves. Even the monsters.

  “So you aren’t upset that I was watching you?”

  “Now I’m not,” she says with a grin.

  “I felt like a creep.”

  “Doesn’t look like that stopped you,” she teases, dragging her fingernails up and down my biceps. They tense in response to her touch. That’s all she has to do—touch me, smile at me, walk too close, the smallest thing and it’s all over with. I’m done. Or maybe undone.

  “I needed it. I needed you. A little bit of your heart, your soul. Even a glimpse of it—through your paintings, through your window, through the crowd on the street—just to keep me going. To keep me putting one foot in front of the other.”

  Her expression takes on one of sadness. “It didn’t have to be that way.”

  I smile. “I had to try and let you go. For your sake. So I did. I tried like hell, but God! Every time I tried, I didn’t get more than a hundred miles. Before I knew it, I was on my way back. Back here. Back to you. I didn’t want to be anywhere that you weren’t.”

  “Please don’t leave me again, Jasper,” Muse pleads, her eyes glistening, her chin trembling. “I don’t think I can survive it again.”

  “I won’t. I can’t. I’m strong enough to kill, to maim, to survive things that would destroy other men. I’m strong enough to do whatever it takes to keep you safe, to protect you. As long as it’s not from me. The one thing I’m not strong enough to do is live without you. Sarò sempre pensare a te.”

  “You don’t have to think of me anymore. I’m right here. And I always will be. Wherever you are.”

  “I want you to know that I will do anything to make you happy as long as you never ask me to leave.”