Need throbs inside me, and Jamie feels it, pressing my legs wider, grinding his pelvis against mine as he thrusts harder, faster, just how I need.

The bed starts to creak, and we laugh—the intensity broken for just a moment before our expressions turn serious again, our eyes lost in each other’s. The headboard knocks against the wall as we kiss, as I clutch him tighter.

A new, tender ache begins inside me, so deep, where Jamie strokes into me. I pull him close, rubbing his hard, beautiful ass, tangling my fingers in his hair, calling his name as he moves faster, faster—

The ache blooms into a breathless, free-falling bliss as I come around him. I cry out, shaking, clutching Jamie tight as I call his name.

“Bea,” he groans, pinning my hands over my head, lacing our fingers together. Finally, he lets go, hips driving into me. Fierce, tight breaths, hair wild. How I’ve always dreamed I’d see him.

On a hoarse shout, he buries his face in my neck, his arms like a vise around my waist as he fills me, hot and long, his hips pumping frantically, like he’ll never get enough.

It’s a moment, suspended in time—our jagged breaths, the soft, intimate sounds of our bodies moving, slowing, growing still. We sigh and kiss as our hands wander the other in newfound reverence. Wordlessly, we clean each other, then draw close, tangled limbs, naked, content. I kiss him until I can’t stay awake any longer. And under the starry night sky Jamie gave me, sparkling on his ceiling, I sleep.

· THIRTY-FOUR ·

Jamie

I wake up to sunlight burning through the curtains and roll onto my back. Bea sits, legs crisscrossed, eyes on her sketchbook, charcoal flying in her hand. I smile.

And when she glances up at me, she smiles, too. “Good morning,” she whispers.

“Good morning.” I tip my head, assessing her, naked but for a blanket thrown around her shoulders. “How’d you sleep?”

She arches an eyebrow. “This implies I slept at all.”

I smile. “A dozen little deaths, as promised.”

Leaning in, she kisses me softly on the lips. “You’re a man of your word.” When she straightens from bending over to kiss me, she tries and fails to hide a wince.

Guilt knifes through me. I sit up in bed.

“Dammit, James.” She drops her sketchbook. “Now my perspective will be off.”

“I hurt you.”

She sighs, then sets aside the sketchbook and charcoal pencil, looking at me patiently, like she expected this. “No. I had sex after a two-year dry spell.”

“It’s my—” I gesture between my legs. “My—what did you call it?—bludgeon’s fault.”

“Jame.” Bea shakes her head and then leans in for another kiss. “A pencil eraser would have made me sore, and all the lube in the grocery store wasn’t going to prevent it. It’s nothing to do with you.”