Give & Take (Redbeard Cove #2)

29. Lana

Chapter 29

Lana

“ I ’m a changed man,” Raphael says.

We’re lying on our sides in his bed, facing each other. I texted Chris a while ago, and she told me the girls were sleeping over. Aurora was already asleep. “It’s too late to argue,” she said. I could practically hear another Chris-cackle through the text.

“Mark this occasion,” Raphael told me. “This is the one and only time I’m happy the girls aren’t here.”

Raph’s dark hair falls in a sexy swoop on his forehead now. It’s sometime in the early hours of the morning, and I find myself obsessed with the details. His necklace, pooling on the pillow by his tanned throat. His broad hand gripping my hip possessively under the sheet, kneading me every so often with a thumb. It’s like a ‘turn-on’ button.

I’m still coming down off the high of my last orgasm, and my heart is doing this weird swelling thing, where I’m trying to get it to chill, but it’s like a piece of paper I’m trying to form into a ball and the paper’s too thick to stay put.

“What do you mean, changed?” I ask, just to keep myself distracted.

Raphael plays a hand lazily over the side of my face, skating his fingers over my skin; brushing my hair off my shoulder. “I’m not the same man I was when I woke up this morning. You’ve altered my whole identity, Sunshine.”

“All it took was sex?” I ask, testing as always.

Raph rises up on his elbow. His opposite hand is still on my hip, but now he’s tracing circles against the slope of my pelvis. I want to melt into the sensation.

“That wasn’t just sex.”

“Oh no?”

Raph shakes his head, biting the corner of his lip with his teeth. “Nope.”

“What was it?”

He sighs, rolling onto his back and pulling me with him. I’m caught off-guard, and though the wheel in my head keeps threatening to spin, somehow this makes it find its equilibrium.

“I think that was what they call transcendence,” he says, into the sudden, utter stillness of my thoughts.

I think this is what surprises me most about Raph. Or, what surprises me about me around him. He’ll do something that should make everything worse. When I’m panicking about something, he’ll crack a joke about it. Right on the nose. When I’m feeling like we need to be serious, he’ll say something ridiculous .

Or he’ll flip me on top of him, making life a game.

I set my chin on the back of my hand, which lays flat on his chest. “How do you do that?” I whisper.

Raph brushes the hair from my cheek and tucks it behind my ear. “Do what, Sunshine?”

“Make everything sound so simple?”

“Because life is simpler than you think.”

I scoff. My first thought is Just wait. It isn’t, you’ll get it one day.

But he gives me that grin, the one that makes my knees weak; my insides turn to hot syrup on pancakes.

“Now, Sunshine,” he says. “I know you don’t believe me. But hear me out.”

He glides his broad hands over my ass, the entirety of them fitting in his wide grip.

Want tugs low in my belly.

“There are complicated situations,” he says, working his hands lower. “Complicated ideas.” His fingertips trail dangerously close to the tender, swollen part of me he’s been filling over and over again all night.

“But matters of the heart?”

He rolls us over again, flipping me onto my back. “What could be simpler than this feeling?” He presses a hand to my heart, his eyes unexpectedly serious for a moment.

Then the moment’s gone, and he’s sliding down, taking my nipple into his warm, wet mouth. My body instantly responds, my pussy clenching, legs curling around his once more.

“This is crazy,” I whisper .

He pops off my nipple, trailing kisses down my ribs, one by one. “No it’s not, sweetheart,” he says. He drops down between my legs. “This is just us.”

Then his tongue slips into my waiting heat, and I’m changed too.