Biker Billionaire #3: Riding the Heir (8 page)

We slept again, tangled together.

* * *

I woke to Shane's lips on mine, soft and tender and hesitant. He waited until I'd rubbed the sleep from my eyes and gazed up at him with wondering eyes. His expression was that of a man about to say something important.

I waited, my heart in my throat.

"I'm so in love with you, Leo," he said.

There it was, out in the open, spoken in so many words.

"Shane..." I wanted to say it back, but I stalled.

The only time John had ever said the words, 'I love you' was when he'd proposed. My response hadn't been an enthusiastic, 'Oh John, I love you too.' No, what I'd said was, "me too." We'd been together for over two years when he'd proposed, and told me he loved me. I think he'd only said it because he figured I expected it.

Now here was Shane, telling me loved me. He wasn't proposing, I didn't think. Although I could come up with far less romantic ways of proposing than in the afterglow of mind-blowing sex, that's for sure.

If I told Shane I loved him, it was crossing a line, within myself. Love. Seems simple: you have sex with a man, you spend time with him, you learn about his faults and peccadilloes and dreams, and you think about him when you're away from him, and your lives gradually merge until they're all tangled up. Love.

But, now, with Shane, I was finding something else. It started as lust, as adventure. I'd slept with him, thinking I'd go my way the next day and chalk it up as one wild night with a hot, exotic stranger as a rebound from breaking up (rather dramatically) with John. But...that hadn't happened. It had turned into a complete upheaval of my life, of my expectations for my future...and then I'd just kept going along with him and with the insanity of events. And now, in his family's home, after meeting his mother and father and brothers and realizing I felt a sense of belonging with him, and with them, and wanting to stay with Shane and share his future, even though I barely knew him...

I started sobbing.

Shane held me, didn't shush me or ask questions, just held me tight and kissed my tears away until they subsided.

After I'd quieted, he said, "Too soon?"

I shook my head. "No, it's not that. You've slipped a few times, like you'd almost said you loved me, but stopped yourself. But...knowing, or at least suspecting you did, that's one thing. Hearing you say it, that's another. I don't—I don't know how to deal with it. With everything. Sudan, your family, and now you tell me you love me? It's all so much."

"Why is it a big deal, though? After everything we've been through since we met, how could I not have fallen in love with you?" Shane lifted up on an elbow and stroked my skin from thigh to breast and back down. "And if you're willing to stay with me, to go public with me, then...don't you feel the same way?"

I nodded, a tiny inclination of my head. "Yeah. I do. But, like I said, knowing it and saying it is different. Saying it makes it...I don't know...more real. More permanent."

"Maybe that's how I want it," Shane said. "I don't want to let you go. I've said several times now that I'd take you back to Detroit, if you wanted to go. I'd take care of you. I mean, I'd find you a place to live, on your own. Now that you know I'm...well off, financially, you know buying you a little condo wouldn't be anything to me. I wouldn't even notice it, money-wise. And...if that's what you want, I'll do it. But to be honest, the thought of you going home, I mean back to Detroit, alone...that scares me. Not seeing you again...scares me. I want you here. I want you...period."

"I wouldn't let you buy me a condo, Shane. Sure, you could probably buy me an entire condo building and not feel it, but...I wouldn't let you." I took a deep breath and forced myself to face up to how I felt, and say it out loud. "I'm not going anywhere, Shane. I love you, too."

My heart was pounding, rabbiting a mile a minute. It felt crazy to be telling him I loved him, but...I did. I didn't want to go back to Detroit. Twelve-hour shifts at the hospital, and then back to an apartment, alone? No. Detroit wasn't home. Shane was home.

"Thank god," Shane breathed.

I felt him firming up against my thigh, his manhood hardening as he gazed down at me, his hands roving my body hungrily now. I touched him, caressed him, stroked him, took him in my hands and played with him until he was hard in my palms.

I put my hand on his neck and pulled him over me. "Make love to me, Shane."

He smiled and moved into me, kissed me as he pushed into me and filled me. It was slow and delicious, an embrace made intimate and erotic and sensual and perfect, no end to me or beginning to him, no disparate selves, only an expression of one self, one love made flesh.

When we climaxed, it was a song sung in harmony.

The End