Page 44 of At Last

The shivers turn to shaking, and the shaking intensifies. I know it’s going to happen. Soon. Now. The hardest. My muscles don’t tense this time, but seize up completely, all while he keeps up the thrusting. I open my mouth to scream his name, but no sound leaves. And I break apart.

Still high off my orgasm, he keeps slamming into me until I feel his neck, shoulders, back and abdomen pull taut and he buries his face against my throat, exploding inside me. He slows way down, stroking in and out a few more times before he stops moving to kiss me, sweet.

“Woman, I think you’re gonna be the death of me,” he says, looking in my eyes.

“No. I’m as good a doctor as I am a cook,” I reply.

He chuckles, and it’s such a new sensation because he’s still inside me, so through our connection, I feel his laugh. I’ve never had that with another lover, not that I’ve had many of those.

This man, my man, might be a sexual demigod. And as he’s managed to fuck the last of my energy out of me, or maybe I did that to me seeing as I started it, he scoops me up in his arms the way a groom would carry his bride on their wedding day, and walks us back to the master. He sets me down inside the bathroom to take care of business and is waiting when I open the door to exit. Back in his arms, he carries me to sit on the bed, folds back the blankets, scoots me over the sheets, then flips the blankets back.

After helping, he leaves the room only to come back a few minutes later carrying all our discarded clothing.

“Didn’t wanna chance her waking up before us and seeing our clothes in a heap by the sofa. Hard to explain away a pair of panties.”

I’ve never had a man take care of me, not since I became an adult and left home.

Even in the dark, the man carries himself with such power and confidence. I watch the patch tattooed on his back shift as he moves. It’s the same flaming devil head as on his cut. The symbol of their brotherhood. The ideals they hold most dear. But unlike on his cut, the flames on his back seem to flicker and dance as he walks to my side of the bed to hang my nightshirt over the headboard, then tosses my panties and his clothes in the hamper before crawling back in the bed next to me.

Both still naked, he lays flat on his back and rolls me to tuck against his side with my head on his chest, arm slung over his middle and my bent knee resting on his thigh. Lying in the dark next to Duke, this is where I’m most comfortable. This is when I feel safest. And he deserves to know it, despite how tired I am.

“Thank you, Chief.”

He gives his is arm around my shoulder a gentle squeeze. “For what?”

In the following silence, listening to him breathe, I can almost forget about the evils of the world outside the compound.

“For taking care of me,” I say, finally settling on an answer. “I’ve not had a man take care of me since my father when I was a girl.”

“Not even Peaches’ father?”

“Especially not him.”

His arm squeezes me again, but this time tight. It feels more out of surprise. “Explain,” he orders.

The last thing I want is for Duke to learn how foolish I’d been when I was younger, but he deserves to know about the woman he’s sharing his bed with.

I suck in a lungful of air, let it out slowly, and explain. “We met when I was in medical school. He was going for his Ph.D. in research virology. So a few of our science classes overlapped, in the sense that he was the one teaching the classes on virology.

“I thought he was smart, funny and charming, those qualities made him handsome in my eyes. Plus, he was from Ireland, grew up only a county over from where I spent my summers growing up…”

Duke bends down to kiss the top of my head. A sweet gesture to let me know he’s listening and once again, that it’s safe to go on.

“We had a fling for the last semester he was in our country. He told me if I found myself in the old country, to look him up. Well a couple years later, my grandmother got sick and I arranged to do my residency program over there, so I could take care of her, too.

“I looked him up. And we fell back in to how we’d been pretty quickly. But this time, my schedule kept me from being the doting girlfriend I’d been when I was a new med student. Apparently he wanted a doting girlfriend, someone who took care of him. I guess the two-way street concept was foreign to him. I could be on a twenty-four hour rotation and get bitched at because I didn’t have dinner on the table for him and he had no clean socks.”

“Doc.”

Whatever he’s about to say, I cut him off because it feels too good to get this off my chest. “Forget about when I was pregnant. They had me working nights in the ER at a class-one trauma center and I was sicker than I’d ever been in my life. I couldn’t keep food down, and survived on PediaSure.

“Thesmellof food kicked in my gag reflex and I’d get home dragging, and have to make him breakfast before I went to sleep. He seemed to love Jade, though, when she was born. He doted on her. Right up until the day he told me he just wasn’t ready for domesticity. He needed Aiden time. He needed someone to give all her attention to him. And that he’d met that woman online, and he was moving to Australia.

“Oh, I forgot to add, my grandmother had taken a turn for the worse and passed away two days before he left us.” I laugh, though none of this is funny.

“Jesus, Doc. Good thing he lives in Australia because I’d kill that motherfucker for treating you the way he did. But then I’d give thanks over his dead body because he was stupid and threw away the best thing to ever happen to him, and I got Peaches down the hall and you in my bed.Jesus,” he repeats himself, then bends to kiss my head again.

I’m so overcome by his words, and at too high a risk of blurting out something neither he nor I am ready for me to say, that I force myself to change the subject completely. “Will you take me on your bike?”

“Honey, this weekend. You and me are going on the bike.”

“What about Jade?”

“I’ll figure something. And Caitlin, don’t you worry.”

Don’t worry. If it were only that easy.

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