Page 49 of Gravity of Love
“I know.Now, I know that.” She sniffed and wiped another tear. “But when I saw you walking down that hall in the hospital, I wasn’t the confident, kickass, take-no-prisoners, almost thirty-year-old Frankie standing before you now,” she said sarcastically. “I was eighteen-year-old Frankie, who woke up in your bed alone and in one day lost the boy she’d loved her whole life, the one person in the world she felt safe with, and her best friend.” More tears fell, but she didn’t wipe them away.
“Frankie—”
She lifted her hand, stopping him from speaking or moving. She wanted to get this all out. “I was embarrassed.”
“Embarrassed?” he repeated it as if it was a foreign word he’d never heard before.
“Yes, Liam, embarrassed. I gotcheated on,that’s embarrassing. Think about how that would go for me.” She lifted her hand and waved at him awkwardly. “Hi, the last time I saw you, you were running as far away from me as you could after we spent the night together, and then you didn’t talk to me for over a decade. Oh, how haveIbeen? Well, let’s see, I was engaged to your brother, but he cheated on me. With who? Just the hottest supermodel in the world.” She sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
Liam’s head dropped as he exhaled, and his shoulders deflated. “I’m sorry.”
“No!” Frankie pushed against his chest with both hands as hard as she could, he didn’t move. “Youpromised!”
“What?” He lifted his head. “What did I promise?”
“I told you that you couldn’t treat me any differently after I told you what I had to say.” She hit his chest again, for no reason other than it just felt good to her. He didn’t seem to notice her hands on his chest at all. It didn’t even register as much as a fly annoying him. “I don’t want your pity. I don’t want you to feel sorry for me.”
“That’swhy you made me promise not to treat you differently?”
“Yeah.” She was confused. “Why else would I say that?”
“I thought…” He lifted his hands, then shook his head and ran his hand through his hair as his head fell back.
When he looked at her again, the confusion in his eyes shifted slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, to something darker. Frankie watched it creep in, watched the line of his jaw tense and his pupils dilate as if a wild animal had just caught the scent of its prey. The air between them charged with a different energy, all the hurt and embarrassment from moments beforecombusting into a spark that traveled up her spine and radiated out to the tips of her fingers. She’d seen that look on him before, it was the last night she climbed into his bedroom window.
She barely had time to think the thought before he said, "Fuck it," in a tone so raw and low it made her knees weak.
One second, she was standing alone, the next, his hands were in her hair, cradling her face with a shocking tenderness, his mouth descending on hers with an urgency that stopped time. His lips were soft, yes, but that was the only gentle thing about the kiss. Everything else about it was wild, desperate, and impossibly deep. He didn’t kiss her, he devoured her. He made her feel small and powerful at the same time, the center of his universe and completely at his mercy.
Frankie gasped, and he took that as invitation enough to slide his tongue past her lips, the motion so confident and searching it felt like he’d already mapped her out in his mind and was just confirming reality against memory. She expected heat and pressure, but nothing could have prepared her for how complete the sensation was, how every nerve in her body seemed to light up at once, how her pulse exploded in her ears, and how her legs turned to jelly.
She reached up without thinking, wrapping her arms around his neck, tangling her fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck. Her hands fisted, and he growled, a guttural sound that vibrated from his chest into her own. He pressed forward, pinning her firmly to the wall, and she arched up into him, needing the contact like she needed air.
The kiss changed gears then, turning softer and more exploratory, as if he wanted to memorize the shape and taste of her before he went back to conquering. Frankie responded, matching his explorations with her own, tracing the seam of his lips, then the slick inner edge, memorizing him as he learned her. For a minute, or maybe an hour, the world was nothingbut the two of them floating in a cloud of sensation, the way his hands slid down her jaw to her neck, her collarbone, then clamped at her waist. The way she could feel, really feel, the evidence of his arousal pressed hot against her stomach.
She heard herself making sounds she’d never made before, small desperate noises that would have mortified her if she’d had access to higher brain function, but Liam didn’t seem bothered. If anything, it only seemed to encourage him, his mouth moving to her jaw and then her throat, nipping and licking and kissing a rough path to the sensitive spot behind her ear. She shuddered as the scruff on his jaw scraped against her skin, clinging to him tighter, her hands roaming now, greedy for more of him, more contact, more everything.
Frankie had been kissed by a lot of men, especially during her college years on her get-Liam-out-of-her-system mission, most of whom treated the act like a closing argument, with no jury selection, opening statements, presentation of evidence, or witness testimonies. Liam kissed her as if he’d invented the concept for their mouths and was mastering it on the job.
He eased into the kiss, slower this time but no less intense, and she realized he was waiting for her to take the lead, to see what she wanted next. She tasted regret and longing and something like relief in the way he moved—like he’d been holding himself back and had finally, finally gotten permission to let go.
Frankie’s mind went blank. No, not blank, it just condensed all the static and chaos into a single white-hot stream of need. Years of wanting him, of dreaming about this, of thinking she’d never get to taste him again—all of it funneled into that dizzy, all-consuming kiss. She was half-aware that she was trembling, her hands shaking as they slid across the broad planes of his shoulders, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t have stopped if she tried.
She dimly registered that she was still crying, but the tears had changed, they were warm and sweet and cathartic now, leaking down her cheeks and mixing with his lips. The second he tasted them on her tongue, he pulled back a fraction to look at her, his thumb brushing away a stray drop with a tenderness that nearly undid her. He pressed his forehead to hers, their breaths mingling, both of them panting as though they’d run a marathon.
“Sorry,” Liam gritted out, voice hoarse, as if he had just been woken from a particularly deep dream. He set her down and stepped back, rocking on his heels as he ran a hand through his hair, which promptly stuck up in four directions. “I didn’t mean to?—”
Frankie’s laugh cut him off, but she sobered quickly. She licked her lips and breathed out words that, although they were true, she knew would drive him crazy: “Don’t you ever apologize for taking what’s yours.”
Liam closed his eyes for a brief second as his jaw twitched, when he opened them again, the look was back. She could see that he was working so hard not to touch her again, not to ravish her. The tortured pain in his gaze made her almost feel bad for teasing him. Almost.
15
Liam triedto think straight as he stared down at Frankie. Her lips swollen from their kiss. He knew what he wanted to do, he knew what every cell in his body was screaming at him to do, but what he didn’t know was if it was the right thing to do.
Hearing her say that when he kissed her, he wastaking what was hiswasnothelping the situation, but she knew that. He would bet his life, that was why she’d said it. That, or she thought it would be funny.
So many things had come to light in the past hour. She wasn’t engaged. She thought he’d stayed away all those years from her because he regretted being with her, which was true, but not for the reasons she thought. Hehadtaken advantage of her. She didn’t feel that way, but he still did.
