Too Much: A Loveswept Contemporary Erotic Romance (All or Nothing) (27 page)

“Corn,” he finished and walked to her, taking the bag out of her hand and setting it on the granite countertop.

His smell, clean, masculine, and quintessentially Jeremiah, had her mouth watering even more and she opened it, afraid that if she drew his scent in too deep she’d lose her mind. Would there ever be a time when she didn’t want him?

No. The answer was simple. Far simpler than she ever would have made it before she’d headed to The Underground a week ago.

He pulled a huge bowl down from an upper cabinet and emptied the bag into it. He then pulled an enormous bag of M&Ms out and emptied it in too. “What are we watching?”

“Watching?”

He tapped her mouth closed and she raised her gaze to the dark blue-gray of his. So much was there, unspoken between them, but he’d given her the words earlier. He had never given her the words before. Even when she’d spent two years with him, loving him with everything she was, he had never returned those three words that meant more than she’d ever realized.

“Movie?” he asked as he grabbed her hand and led her out of the kitchen to the mammoth living room that had a sixty-inch wide-screen television and more gadgets attached to it than she’d known existed.

He knew what he was doing to her. She knew he knew it and strangely, it made her heart turn over in her chest that he wasn’t calling her on it. Daly was smitten with him. Absolutely, head-gone, over-the-moon smitten.

“I love you.” Three dangerous words, but her throat refused to call them back. Just sent them winging into the air between them.

Jeremiah’s head came up from his perusal of the remote control. His face went hard, cheeks going ruddy and mouth flattening, though his lower lip was so full she automatically wanted to lick across it.

“You’re going to make me fuck you before we have fun time,” he ground out.

“Fucking you
is
fun time, Jeremiah,” she said, and finally found a smile.

“Imp. You’re still begging for that paddling, aren’t you?”

Daly wondered if there was a big, old wet spot in the crotch of his light gray sweatpants. She hadn’t bothered to put on a pair of the panties she’d left behind. Those were the past. In fact, she was going to get rid of them as soon as possible. Not tonight. But soon.

“You keep promising and threatening, my man. I’m starting to think you’ve forgotten how to do it,” she teased him.

He grunted, but turned a look so full of heat and lust on her she almost glanced down to see if she was on fire. “Still trying to top from the bottom, I see,” he said with a grimace as he adjusted his hard cock in the confines of his jeans.

Daly put her hand on her hip and winked at him. “I know the lines,
Sir.
But what fun would it be if I didn’t push just a little?”

“You keep pushing and you won’t sit right for a week.” He walked to the couch and sat down, patting the space beside him. “Now what fucking movie are we watching?”

She sat down, desperate to feel his warmth surrounding her. She couldn’t remember a time when he’d allowed her to be so playful. Though even now, Daly recognized she was pushing a very dominant man. He’d make her pay, she was sure, and she’d love every single minute of it.

“We aren’t watching a fucking movie. I want to watch a comedy.”

He hauled her legs up and laid them over his lap. The hard ridge of his erection called to
her. It was a hot, iron bar against her leg. Her insides somersaulted. She brushed her leg against him and he shot her a dark look. “Stop that,” he ordered.

When he used that tone, that hard-line, obey-me-now tone, Daly nearly lost her mind. She shifted, feeling the moisture from her pussy soak the fabric of his sweats, and she moaned when Jeremiah’s nostrils flared.

He knew.

“What. Movie.”

He was all hard demand now.

“Something. Funny.”

“I’m about to give you funny and it ain’t gonna be all ha-ha-ha up in here,” he snarled.

Daly leaned up then and pecked him on his lips, laughing, thoroughly enjoying how easily she disgruntled such a difficult man.

“How about
Identity Thief
?” she asked hopefully.

He shrugged, found the movie on the satellite, and turned on the surround sound. She watched him until he glanced at her questioningly. Then she turned her gaze to the screen and concentrated.

Comedy. She needed a laugh. But his hand drifting higher on her thigh was making laughing impossible. Daly picked his hand up and held it. He simply replaced the one she’d taken with his free hand and smiled knowingly.

She tried so damn hard. She really did, but it was all to no avail. The movie was supposed to be funny as hell. Her body didn’t care. Her legs fell open and before long, instead of laughing at the antics on the screen she was gasping at the magic of his hand, which was now in her pants and stroking her lightly.

Casually, and as if it were perfectly normal, he pulled his hand out and licked the fingers he’d been teasing her with, then reached into the bowl of popcorn and picked up a handful.

She growled. His gaze sliced to her and he smiled. “Want some?”

She lifted a brow and he laughed.

“Really, it’s great. The chocolate of the M&Ms and the salty popcorn—”

He grunted as she took the popcorn, set it on the table, and stood. She lowered the jogging pants and smiled when she heard him inhale. It was dark in the room, the only light coming from the windows and the television. Long shadows were thrown, and Daly decided she loved the semi-darkness. There was something freeing in the muted light that taunted her inner hussy.

She removed her T-shirt—well,
his
T-shirt—and stood there, back to him, completely naked. Tension snaked in the room, wrapping velvet shackles around her body and puckering her nipples. She could feel his gaze and slowly Daly backed up until she sat on his lap, still facing
away from him.

She spread her legs to either side of his body, and this left her core directly over his jean-covered cock. Daly leaned forward and balanced herself by placing her hands on his knees.

“You’re so beautiful, Daly,” he whispered.

His voice was loud in the silence of the room. He’d muted the TV.

His warm hand skimmed over her back, running over her skin in delightful swirls that made her shiver. Daly rolled her hips, letting the cotton of his jeans rub her clit. She moaned and reached between her legs as she lifted onto her knees.

It took her a minute to get his jeans unbuttoned and unzipped, but once she did, his cock sprang out and she stroked it lovingly.

“We’re supposed to be having fun,” he said in a rough voice.

She rose, positioning him at her entrance, and lowered herself over him. His hands wrapped around her torso, cupping her breasts, thumbs pulling at her piercings.

“Oh, Jeremiah, it doesn’t get much more fun than this.”

He licked her neck and her head fell back on his shoulder. “Good thing it’s a spend-the-night party, huh?”

She tightened her inner muscles on him and his strangled groan had her smiling. “Yes. It’s a very good thing, baby.”

Her words lit a fire under him and it didn’t take long for him to take control, pulling her back and canting her hips so he could push into her from behind. He took her body like he owned it. He took her mind like a thief.

And before he was finished, there was no part of Daly that did not belong to Jeremiah Copeland.

* * *

“I remember the night I left you,” she said into the quiet of his bedroom.

His hand roamed along her side, caressing from her shoulder down the curve of her body to her hip and back again. “I remember it too.”

“No,” she said as she turned over and faced him, settling on her side and placing her hand over his heart. “I remember it like it just happened. The hurt is still vicious.”

“It’s in the past, Day. Leave it there.”

“I can’t, Jeremiah. If I do that, if
we
do that, it’s like it never happened. And I need to explain to you …”

He veiled his gaze from her and panic slithered through her. “It happened, Daly. There’s
nothing we can do to change it. The only thing we can do is acknowledge our mistakes and move forward.”

“But I never explained it to you and I need to do that,” she pleaded.

Something about her tone must have gotten through to him, because he raised his storm-tossed gaze to hers and nodded.

“When you received David’s ring three years ago and then decided you were going to help him, you never came to me. You never took the time to explain what was going on. All of the information I managed to gain was through my own methods.”

He remained silent, but his gaze was unwavering.

“You wouldn’t tell me so I went snooping, tapped into some contacts I’d made in school, and discovered David had managed to get himself involved with a drug dealer who was threatening to kill him if he didn’t get those drugs moved and get the dealer off. What I could never figure out was how you played into things.”

“Had David never come to me, I wouldn’t have,” he said, and his deep voice was full of remorse and a certain cautionary tone.

“But you never told me that. You never explained what the ring meant, how deep his trouble ran—hell, you never explained any of it. And there I was, left alone most nights while you went about doing whatever the fuck you were doing to save a brother who’d never done anything but cause problems.” She took a deep breath and willed her tears back. That pain was one she’d never known had run so deep. The abandonment she felt had been pushed to the wayside. “You never pulled me aside and said, ‘Hey, this is what’s going on and this is why I’m doing it.’ You just continued to come in at all hours of the night and day and you were secretive, Jeremiah. So damn secretive. I felt you pulling away from me and it hurt.”

“I never meant to hurt you, Day,” he responded as his hand closed over her own and squeezed.

“But you did. Do you know how you hurt me?”

“I didn’t tell you—”

She shook her head. “You didn’t
trust
me.”

“It’s not that I didn’t trust you, Daly. I wanted to protect you.”

She nodded at that, accepting his belief that that was what he’d been doing. “I understand your thoughts. I was yours, and you felt it your responsibility to control my exposure to the bad things. But while you were protecting me, I was slowly drifting farther and farther from you and you were allowing it to happen. I felt it in your touch, your kiss, the stroke of your flogger on my flesh. It was everywhere and I couldn’t fight it.”

“That’s not what I was—”

“Let me finish this. Please, Jeremiah,” she begged.

He went silent.

“I thought I was so smart, snooping and putting the pieces together. And my resentment grew. For every piece I managed to connect, I wondered why in the hell you wouldn’t be honest with me. Why wouldn’t the man I loved with all of my heart come to me? You were in danger, Jeremiah.
Danger.
” Her hand fisted beneath his where it rested over his heart. “You could have been killed, and where would I have been then, Jeremiah?”

A tear fell and she didn’t bother to dash it away. There was a cleansing to be had here.

“I heard you talking to Toby the night before I left. You were planning the route the drugs would take, how you’d get them in safely and distributed, and I broke. Something inside me cracked. My man was willing to engage in something illegal to save a brother who had never given a shit about him.”

“He was still my brother. And ultimately, I never had plans for those drugs to see the light of day.”

She nodded, and another tear slipped from her eyes. “A fact I didn’t discover until my brother told me the other night, Jeremiah—
three years
later. And it also affirmed that I made the right decision leaving all those years ago, Jeremiah.”

He winced and his face went blank. She’d scored him with her truth. So be it.

“Do you want to know why I feel it was the right decision? Or are you going to shut me out?”

“Tell me.”

“You never trusted me enough to give me the truth, Jeremiah. I thought we’d been working toward forever the whole time, but you’d been lying to me.” She held up a hand to cut him off. “Before you start in, your lie came in the form of omission.”

“It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one,”
he said earnestly.

Anger shot through her. He wasn’t getting her point at all and desperation was creeping in. “George Washington was seriously misguided. It wasn’t an excuse, it was a lie, and a lie by omission cuts just as deeply as one voiced with full intent to mislead.
Among other common lies we have the silent lie—the deception which one conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth.
”

“Mark Twain,” he said immediately and then quieted. Contemplation danced across his face and finally his gaze met hers, and in his eyes she saw that he was finally beginning to understand.

“You didn’t trust me to hold you close, to offer you comfort, to give you what you needed as a man. You didn’t trust my counsel, my heart, or my will. You dug yourself up from the gutter, Jeremiah. When I was younger I watched you go through hell trying to stay out of jail, even as you worked for a damn crime syndicate to feed your brother and sister. The same brother
who was seeking to drag you back down. And I thought you were willing to dive right back in without even giving me the option of throwing you a lifeline. You took away my rights as the woman who loved you. That’s why I walked away.” Daly pulled her hand from his chest and wiped her eyes. “If I couldn’t trust you to tell me the truth, to love and trust me enough to give it to me, how could I give you all that I was?”

Jeremiah’s face was tortured and he sat up and turned away from her.

She sat too and rubbed her face. Daly was tired. This last week with Jeremiah had turned her inside out. And now he’d turned away again.

She felt him get off the bed and heard the sounds of him pulling on his clothes. Then he was in front her, on his knees, his hands cupping her cheeks, thumbs wiping her tears away.

“I’m sorry, Daly,” he whispered at her lips. “I’m so fucking sorry.” He grabbed her up and held her close, sitting back down on the bed and leaning against the headboard.