Page 119 of The Woman By the Lake

“I see you see how things are now,” I noted. “But I feel I have to tell you, we’re very new, and we’re easing into it, and we don’t even know what this is yet.”

“Did you experience the same thing I just experienced when my son walked in this house?”

I did.

Don’t hope, Nadia, don’t hope!

I nodded again.

“He’s never, not once, even as a teenager, had a relationship with a woman that lasted more than a couple of weeks, and I don’t count that woman who bore his child.”

Oh my God.

He hadn’t?

Abigail kept going.

“He’s terrified of becoming his father in every way, and he loves me very, very much. And the thought he has that in him, what his father did to me, his sister, eats at him. But I see the progression. How he is with Ledger. How much his son is devoted to him. How he’s not making the same mistakes his father did. And now, I see he’s learned he’s able to give himself you.”

“I’m not sure, in that way, Gail, he’s a man that can be tamed,” I cautioned carefully.

She looked to the door Riggs had come through, and she did this pointedly, before she looked at me.

And then she said, “We’ll see.”

I came, and per usual, I did it hard, digging my heels in Riggs’s back, arching my spine, fisting my hand in his hair.

He lapped at me through the aftermath of my orgasm, then he gently pulled my legs from his shoulders before he kissed the skin above my pubic hair, then my belly, my midriff, between my breasts, the base of my throat, finally, Riggs, and his stubble, marked my neck, something he had a fondness for doing.

I’d woken up with mild beard burn every day for three days, and it wasn’t just around my mouth.

I also wasn’t complaining.

He rolled us so he was on his back, I was tucked to his side, and since he’d had his earlier (and I’d also had my first, Riggs was just a man driven to overachieve—again, not complaining), he pulled the covers over us.

I settled in.

“Think that went good,” he murmured.

“Yeah,” I replied drowsily. “You just ate more pussy leaving a woman satisfied. Fuck you, Bubbles.”

His body moved as his chuckle sounded, his arm tightened around me, and he said, “I mean telling Mom and Ledge about you and me.”

Oh.

“It did, after you shouted at your mother. Then you jumped the gun and told Ledger about us when you two were up here washing your hands.”

“I changed my mind and decided it should be him and me alone when I told him,” he began. “It was a good time to do it. We could get into it and give you more time to finish talking…and finish dinner. You hadn’t even whipped the potatoes.”

God, it was good he was so talented with giving head (among other things), because he wasn’t just a man, he was a guy.

“That wasn’t the part that went wonky,” I remarked.

“You and I have talked a lot, honey, and I haven’t made you cry,” he pointed out. “She can be harsh.”

“It’s called direct.”

“When she makes you cry, it’s harsh,” he stated, and his words were steely.

---