Come Out Swinging (Reach for the Moon Book 2), Sam Hall [leveled readers .TXT] 📗

But that didn’t mean it wasn’t agony walking away from him. I pushed back into his hand, when he worked me higher, when he slapped it down, harder and harder, needing it, needing him.

The last one cracked across my arse, my cunt, my clit, sending an explosion of pain and ecstasy through me. A scream slipped from my lips, getting bigger, louder, my chest and throat feeling like they opened wider to let it all out. Higher and higher, louder and louder, the sound brought sensation, washing through me like little hot prickles, making me writhe and buck against him, needing more and less, until finally, I wrenched myself away from him.

“Of course I hurt! I fucking love you,” I shouted. “I always did. You were the first. You got in here before anyone else, and I let you dig down so far that it was only when we broke up that I realised what I’d done. I let you in so deep, you destabilised me, left me off balance. I crawled to Mason on my hands and knees to try and fill that fucking ache that had my jaw clamped so tight, I feared my teeth would crack. I was tired of curling myself around that pain, of sobbing over it, weeping for what I’d lost. I needed something, anything to make it stop.”

When I looked up, it was Mason looking down on me with that same endlessly patient expression. It wasn’t an easy one to bear. It made you feel like he could see all the way inside you, that he accepted all of that but wasn’t entirely happy with it. But he endured it. That was always the key to Mase. He endured my neediness, Dad’s strictures, the town’s pressures, my return, all with a kind of stoicism other men admired, but it made me wonder what that cost him.

“But then you were there, always there. Over and over, I’d come crawling to you on my metaphorical hands and knees, and you’d pick me up and hold me close…” He moved in, sweeping me up, holding me against him like I weighed no more than a kitten. But then he curled his arms, making sure my cheek pressed against his bare chest, creating the perfect cocoon of him and me. His lips pressed against my forehead.

It was the gentleness inside Mason that cut me the deepest. I’d seen him take down guys older than him with brutal efficiency. Stop threats, hold off pushy townsfolk, basically keep order where another man of the same age would have struggled. Not Mason. He was always this hard façade of relentless competence, providing a face of calm invulnerability.

Until this.

He made me feel like I could see under the mask of perfection, that when I settled against him, letting out a long sigh, that finally he was softening, opening for someone else. That somehow, I was special, the only one to see past Mason’s Great and Powerful Oz and curl up with the man behind the curtain.

“You were.”

I stiffened at the words, said quietly, calmly, and when I looked up, we were both reflected in the mirrors, seated now on a worn down recliner I knew well. A hand rubbed up and down my leg, slow and soothing, but also, now I was old enough to acknowledge it, something more. When I met his eyes, they were molten brown, staring without blinking.

“When your father told me what I had to do?” He nodded slightly, the pain starting to build in his eyes like a growing thunderstorm. “It fucking killed me. I’d left Mum’s, run away because I couldn’t cope with the chaos of her household, figuring I’d just scrub out an existence on my own.” He snorted. “Turns out I wasn’t real good at that. There’s only so much rabbit you can eat, even in fur.”

He stroked a hand through my hair. “To be taken in by your family, to grow up with a man like your dad stepping up to help steer me on the right path? It was beyond anything I could have hoped for. Too far from the reality I knew to even conceive of, and yet that’s what happened. I got bigger, stronger, faster, better than any other enforcer, rising in the ranks and standing by your father’s side, feeling something I’d never dared—pride. That’s probably what was my undoing.”

I counted the breaths he took, one, two, three, before he spoke again.

“When you came to me. When you crawled into my lap and made yourself small. When your tears soaked my shirt, when you pushed your face into the crook of my neck, instinctively seeking my scent, I felt it again—pride. You and me, we fit together like puzzle pieces. I knew Adam respected me, only wanted what’s best for you, and he told me early on that wouldn’t be Declan. Or that’s how I heard it.”

He smiled when he looked at me, but it was a painful thing.

“‘Declan won’t be alpha of this town,’ is what he said, but that’s what I took it to mean. He could have you now, give you some experiences, take you to parties that just bored the crap out of me, be involved in all that school girl shit, but when you were a woman…” His eyes travelled down the length of me, cataloguing all the ways my body was different to the way it looked then. “You’d be mine. He’d be the boy of your heart, but I’d be your man. And then Adam told me how it was meant to be.”

They meant this place to be one of cheap thrills and jolts. Something to get your heart rate pumping as well as a few laughs before you stumbled onto something else. So why was I getting flayed alive?

“I should’ve told you. Adam told me not to, but it was a fucking mistake giving him my loyalty. He was a good man and I’m proud to have served under him,