Broody Brit by Naima Simone

Chapter Twelve

Axel

“If you’d have told me when I woke up this morning that I would be eating eggs, sausage, and toast hours later, I probably would’ve given you both fingers. No,” Zenobia says, pinching one eye shut and holding up her fork, “I would’ve first christened the toilet and then given you the fingers.”

I stare at her, sitting with her legs crossed in the middle of my bed in a nest of tangled sheets and blankets that still holds the scent of our sex. Plate balanced on her thighs, she scoops up more scrambled eggs that I cooked for her and slips them between her lips. It probably makes me a bit of a caveman that pride balloons in my chest as I watch her eat food that I cooked for her. Or that I’m more concerned with her hunger being satisfied than cleaning my plate. But I can’t deny the truth. I want her full, content. Wanting for nothing.

“Here.” I pick up her cup of coffee of the bedside table and pass it to her.

She sets down her fork and eagerly accepts it, humming. Her lashes lower as she sips, but they snap back open, surprise flaring in the golden-brown depths.

“Three creams and one sugar,” she murmurs. “Just the way I take it. You paid attention.”

I don’t answer, but of course, I did. There isn’t much about her that I haven’t noticed. Like the small, faint, sickle-shaped scar that runs under her jaw. Or that when she’s trying not to smile, her throat works likes she’s physically swallowing laughter. Or when she finds something incredibly idiotic, she quietly mouths, wow.

And when she comes, her tight pussy clamps down on my dick like one of my table vises, and her eyes go from golden to the darkest amber.

She’s fucking gorgeous.

And even more so, now that I know the greedy sounds she makes as she swallows my dick; the scent of her skin, damp from twisting under me; that stunning, thick body begging for more of me. Now that I know this hungry, relentless craving inside me isn’t one-sided.

When I received that text from her last night, I’d thought she’d had me right up the garden path and had waited for a follow up message with the punch line. But no other text had arrived, and as I read it over—and over and over—again, lust crawled through me, gaining power, speed, and strength until I stalked to the kitchen, ready to take her up on her offer. Willing to enter into another doomed, temporary whatever-the-fuck-it-is knowing she would walk away, and in some way, I would fail or disappoint her.

I always did.

All I had to do was glance behind me at the dry bones of my relationships littering my path to confirm that truth. My parents. Simon. Calliope. My ex, who’d only been the latest in a short but doomed list of exes.

This thing had no good ending, and if I’d stopped thinking with my dick for half a second, I’d end it right now.

“Earth to Axel.” She tips her head and studies me with the intensity of the hottest torch. “What’re you thinking?”

“Why’d you send that text?” The question barrels out of me before I can corner it and wrestle the fucker back into whatever emo hole it skulked free of. But shit, it’s out there now. And I want to know.

She sighs, shifting the nearly empty plate from her lap and handing both it and the mug toward me. I accept the dishes, not taking my gaze from her as I set them on the bedside table. Zenobia pulls her thighs to chest, tugging my T-shirt over her legs and crossing her arms over her knees.

“Honestly?” She scoffs, wrinkling her nose. “Don’t you hate when people say that? No, lie to me.”

She huffs out a laugh, rocking a little.

“I was drunk as hell.”

My gut clenches, and ice slides through my veins. “You didn’t mean any of that.”

Her mouth twists into a smile that isn’t quite a smile. “Oh, I meant it. Every word. Now did I mean to send is a different question.”

She thrusts a hand in her curls, closing her eyes, her lips soundlessly moving. “Alcohol gave me the courage to type out what I’d never have the lady balls to say to your face in real time. But it also had me hit send when I didn’t intend on going that far. This”—she flicks a hand back and forth between us—“isn’t the smartest of ideas, Axel.”

Seconds ago, I’d said the same thing to myself. But now, I keep my mouth shut. Because the idea of uttering anything that would keep me from getting inside her again has every primal instinct in me roaring in outrage and horror.

“Why were you wankered?”

A faint smile flirts with her mouth. “Wankered? God, I love you British.” All hints of amusement disappear from her lips and voice, and shadows enter her eyes, muting the gold.

I don’t think. Don’t question the wisdom of the gesture or the meaning she could assign to it. I just hold out my hand. “You need me?”

She stares at my palm, and just when I’m about to lower my arm back to my side, she lunges forward, grabbing ahold as if she’s a shipwreck victim grasping for a lone piece of driftwood. In a matter of seconds, she’s in my arms, her firm arse cradled against my thighs and cock, her head pressed to my chest. Those curls, which I’m beginning to suspect I have an unhealthy obsession with, graze my throat.

I don’t pressure her. We sit there, my arms wrapped around her, lending her whatever she requires to get through these next few minutes.

“After you left,” she finally begins, her words whispering over my skin, “Bethany’s mother found me. She…” Her breath hitches, and I stroke a hand up her back, cupping the back of her neck. “She knew who I was and ordered me to stay away from Bethany. That if I tried to contact her again, she’d have me slapped with a restraining order and fired.”

A tremble quakes through her body, and I absorb it, shelter her with my body, though I can’t protect her from the hurt already inflicted on her. This is a decades-old wound, and there’s nothing I can do to heal it.

Helplessness surges within me, anger quickly nipping at its heels. I want to fix this for her, and it’s gutting me that I can’t.

“Last week, I’d sent a request to the Mavises through my adoption counselor to meet Bethany. They’d turned me down. One of the terms of the semi-open adoption was that not only do I receive pictures and letters from them about Bethany, but that I would one day get to meet her at their discretion. Since she’s about to be a teenager, I thought it might be a good time. They didn’t. But now…” Her shoulders hunch, and she curls into me. “Now, they’ll probably never agree to let me meet her before she’s of age. I fucked that up and have nobody to blame but myself.”

“Stop,” I order in voice that’s far harsher than I intended.

She jolts a little, but my arm around her tightens, cradling her closer and squeezing her nape in assurance. Dragging in a breath, I try to slow the sudden thudding of my heart, realizing she can probably hear it with her ear pressed to my chest.

“Axel.”

I squeeze her again, gentler, but the message is clear. Hold on. Give me a minute.

After several moments, I try again, staring straight ahead at the wall. “We make do with what we have left.”

She stirs, and her head tips back—or she tries to tip it back, but I don’t allow her. I tuck it under my chin. I can’t say this and stare into those honeyed eyes too.

“When my brother Blake died, my life changed forever. The happy, idyllic life I’d known had been obliterated, like a bomb had been dropped on it and we were left with the wreckage, the rubble. Then we were tasked with scraping it together to form this new… existence.”

Her arms slide around me, hands hot on my back. Small, gentle kisses are brushed over my chest, directly over my still pounding heart.

“What I’m telling you is we make do with what we have left. I turned further into my art, took to metal.” There’s a magic, a sort of resurrecting power in taking the forgotten, the rubbish and, for all intents and purposes, the dead, and birthing new creations. “And you, having given up your child, maybe you poured that love to caring for others with your nursing. And when your child came into hospital, right or wrong, you made do with that moment of time you had with her. Let it go, pet. Not even God can change the past and let the future take care of itself. Especially since I’ve learned in the worse of ways that it’s not promised to us.”

This time, she doesn’t let me stop her from leaning back. Doesn’t prevent my arms from restricting her movement. Zenobia shifts on top of me, straddling my thighs, the heat from her sex pressing against my cock through my sweatpants. But I barely feel it as I grip her waist. Because she cups my face, tilting me head back, and stares into my eyes. And only the intensity, the beauty of that golden gaze can compete and win over the power of her pussy.

“I’m sorry about your brother, Axel.” She skims her fingertips over my eyebrows. The bridge of my nose. My cheekbones. My mouth. Then retraces those same paths with her lips. My work has been praised before, but I’ve never personally felt revered. I can no longer say that. “And I’m sorry that the only comfort you had was art and not family.”

Shock ripples through me, and my instinctive reaction is push her away. To reject her and that statement—no matter how accurate it is. It’s why I need away from her. Because the truth literally hurts.

“No,” she whispers, locking her arms around my neck, squeezing her thighs to my hips. Yes, I could remove her, but it would require force, and that I can’t do. And fuck. She knows it, takes advantage of it. Her lips graze the rim of my ear, her warm breath a sensual caress that, dammit, has a hard shudder passing over me. “I’m not going to let you push me away. Too many people have let you be alone in your head, in your art. I’m forcing my way in, Axel.”

She raises up, lowers an arm and reaches between us. In seconds, she has my cock freed from my pants and is sinking, sinking… Jesus, she’s taking me inside her liquid, tight heat and that shudder transforms into a quake. My grip on her hips must be bruising, but I can’t ease up, can’t let go.

“I’m so sorry you lost the brother you loved.”

She lifts over me, dragging her grasping pussy up my dick, then in an excruciating slow glide, slides back down, claiming me, embracing me. A groan rips from my throat, and I squeeze my eyes shut against the exquisite and punishing pleasure. I’m bare—the knowledge slams into me like a sledgehammer. With a condom, the kiss of her sex had been pure heaven. Without that barrier, it’s a blinding, brutal combination of beautiful heaven and fiery hell.

“And I’m sorry that you also lost the world you knew. You deserved more. This beautiful, gifted, broken heart deserved more.”

She places a sweet kiss below my ear. In direct contrast to the filthy caress her pussy delivers to my cock as she rides me. Breath catching, she cups my shoulders, gently pushing me back against the mattress and falling over me. Her curls are an enticement I can’t deny, and I bury my fingers in them, tangling, dragging her even closer to me. For moments, nothing but the sounds of our fractured moans, the slap of our damp skin and the wet suck of her pussy fill my room.

“I’m in, Axel,” she breathes, her gorgeous face twisted in a grimace of pleasure that makes her even more beautiful. “I’m in, and you won’t even be able to push me out.”

I grind my teeth together, trapping anything that would make a prison break from me without my permission. Least of all, a demand of a promise. That she swears to this even though the very nature of this relationship we’ve entered is temporary.

But I don’t say it. Still, her words snap the rapidly unraveling threads of my control. Wrapping one arm around her waist, I pump into her clenching sex and snake the other between us, easily finding her clit. I pinch the engorged flesh, rubbing it once, twice, and that’s all it takes to have that sweet, tight core clamp down on me, milking my cock, coaxing me to follow her over the edge.

And I give in.

Electric pulses race up and down my body, seizing the base of my spine, sizzling in the soles of my feet. But before I totally surrender to the siren’s call of oblivion, I wrench her off me, fist my dick, and stroke, cum spurting out of me. My back arches with the hot pour of it, and fuck, for a moment, I don’t think it’s going to stop. I don’t want it to stop. And as she collapses against me, I don’t want this to stop either.

Which is foolish wishful thinking, even for me.

Because as I told Zenobia, nothing is promised.

Everything has to come to an end.