He lifts me for a second then shoves his sweatpants off and brings me back down with one hand on my hip, that lone hand strong enough to ease me down and impale me on him. Big. Hot. Hard. Mine. I moan and lick his neck, lost as my walls stretch to take him. He grabs my head and takes my mouth harder. He’s moving, loving, lifting, and lowering me with one hand, the other on the back of my neck, holding and cupping me as he kisses me, his mouth strong and commanding, opening and tasting, retreating, teasing.
I come fast and hard, and his arms tighten like vises as my contractions ripple through him. I hear him growl softly as he lets me milk him. Then he lifts me up and carries me across the ring, resting me on the ropes. One of his arms protects me, and he hasn’t for one second pulled out from inside me. He starts moving again. I moan softly. I feel like I’m floating, suspended in the air by a thread and his arm, the only connection in my body to his arm and his c**k in me. My ponytail falls behind me, my throat arches, and he’s there to devour it. I mew as he moves and sink my fingers into his bulging arms, feeling his biceps flex and contract with his body as he pumps me.
We don’t speak. We don’t need to speak with words; we speak like this. I lift my head and bite and lick him and gasp as I hear his breath, his muscles flexing and moving as he moves in me until I come again. He never, ever comes before me—he waits, primes me, watches me. His eyes darken as he watches me come now; then his jaw works and his body hardens as he sinks deep and holds himself there, and that’s where he explodes, when he’s all the way in, and I’m coming around him, hugging him within me, rippling and grasping him.
Instead of sagging this time, we tighten our hold around each other when we’re done. “Stay in me,” I plead to him. I’m catching my breath, my nails gouging his shoulders.
He pulls me closer and sinks his head between my br**sts and breathes hard, like my skin is his air, then he lightly bites the top of my breast.
“I want to live in you,” he tells me in his gruff, tender voice that makes me melt, and he clutches me tighter and licks and laves his bite, his jaw rasping my skin. “God, I want to die in you.”
My bones feel liquid in my body, but even relaxed, I feel that pull of all his tornado energy working on mine. “You’re so possessive, I know you’ll take me with you.”
“No, I’d never hurt you.”
I laugh softly. “It won’t be your choice. You’ll take me with you because I will go where you go. You’re going to be the end of me, Remington Tate, but that’s the way I want to go.”
His face twists with pain as he drags the backs of his knuckles along my jaw. “No, Brooke. I will protect you even from me.”
We stare at each other for a moment, and the determination in his eyes to protect me only reassures me that, whatever happens, my life will always be intertwined with his, come good or bad. I will walk by his side, run, fight, cling, and chase his dreams, which have now become mine. “Like you said, I’ll love you if it kills us,” I whisper as I stroke his face. “We all die. I’d rather die loving the hell out of you.”
“Baby, I’m the one who’ll love the hell out of you,” he says thickly, squeezing me, making me laugh in complete and total happiness. “Remy . . . where are we going to have the baby?”
He straightens up and lifts me in his arms, with my legs still locked around his h*ps as we cross the ring. “Wherever you want to have it. It’ll be off season. I can take you anywhere you like.”
“I was thinking I could keep my apartment. At first, I wasn’t going to renew. But it might be smart to have somewhere to touch base. And I have a spare bedroom I used to do yoga in and could turn into a nursery. Melanie’s all for decorating it. . . .”
He sits us down on the stool at the corner of the ring, where a basket of towels and drinks awaits us. He grabs a towel and eases me onto his lap as he slowly starts cleaning me up, his profile calm and relaxed. “I’ll ask Pete to renew your lease for another year while we look for something else,” he tells me. “You can use the card I gave you to charge anything you’d like.”
I wind an arm around his neck and poke a hidden dimple. “So I’m to be your kept girlfriend and employee? Officially?”
He grabs the back of my head, angles my face up almost to the ceiling, and licks a path from under my chin right up to my mouth, where he roughly engulfs my mouth with his. “Officially, you’re Mine.”
“WILL WE GO through the usual route for vaccinations, or will we find a doctor who works with us a different schedule? There’s so much evidence vaccines could be the cause of autism,” I tell Remington one night.
I’m eating tons of vegetables. I’ve read that different-color vegetables provide different antioxidants. Green veggies provide different ones than purple and orange ones, so I’m eating a rainbow every morning, noon, and evening. The best for Remington’s baby.
Also, pineapple is the fruit of the moment. It is all I want to eat. As soon as we reach every location, Remington orders Diane to bring all the organic pineapples she can find. I blend them with bananas to make smoothies. I eat them with cayenne pepper. Diane sautés them for me with little bits of turkey. I am a pineapple freak and Remington is amused like hell because of it.
“I’d say it’s a girl,” Diane told me yesterday, “because you’re craving sweets. But you look too good. When you have a girl—at least, when I had my girls, I looked like shit.”
“Why?”
“Girls steal your beauty. And your man’s love.” Her lips curl as she studies my stomach with narrowed, curious eyes. “But I wouldn’t trade my girls for anything. Have you done the string thing with a ring?”
“No,” I say and she explains how you wrap a string around a ring and hold it over your belly and watch it do either circles for a boy or lines for a girl. It sounded silly, but, of course, now I lie na**d in bed and hold the ring I borrowed from Diane over my tummy. Remington is playing chess on his iPad, the backs of our heads pressing as he does his thing and I do mine. We’re going to Austin in a few weeks, and I know it’s starting to make him restless, because he’s not getting a lot of sleep.
I really marvel at the way he uses chess to center himself. All those nights he would be restless before and grab his iPad, resting it on me, I had no idea he played chess.
Now, I tie the ring onto a thread as he tells me, “We’ll get a doctor we like and have him work with us on our vaccination schedule,” and I nod as I finally hang the ring over my stomach and watch it move. “Is it a circle or a line?” I ask.
He stops playing and sets the iPad aside, turning to watch. I think it’s a boy because I’m carrying low and sleep on my left side, and my hair is full-bodied and shiny, but I’m not sure how true those old wives’ tales are.
“It’s doing both,” I answer myself of the damn ring, laughing. “What failure!” I squeak when he grabs me by the underarms and drags me to him.
“What do you want it to be?” he asks, spreading out over me and brushing a loose tendril behind my ear.
“Anything. I’m just so curious to know.”
“You can know,” he tells me, kissing the tip of my nose. “I’ll take you to a doctor so you can know, but I don’t want to know.”