Embers (Blaze Series Book 3) by Erika Chase

to how big he is. How good he is at
this. The friction is getting intense and his breathing comes in short, hard
gasps.
    He pulses inside me and then his hardness
breaks in shot after shot of his warmth, pouring out inside me. I push back
against him, feeling my ass flatten against his hips, desperate to capture
every last moment of this.
    My breath is like a hurricane as I collapse
forward on the bed, my chest heaving and my hair flattened against my forehead.
    Finally I stretch, and the moment breaks.
    “I’m going to get us a drink,” I tell him.
“I’ll be right back.”
    There’s a bottle of diet soda in the fridge.
It’s about as close as I get to a drink for a special occasion.
    The air is chilly on my naked body and I
hiss at the cold of the wooden floor on the soles of my feet. I’m halfway back
from the kitchen when I hear the front door opening and my housemate Sarah
coming back in, I guess from a shift at the hospital.
    Fuck.
    I sneak as quietly as I can through the
corridors of the house, my heart thumping in my chest, as Sarah, making as much
noise as a baby elephant, goes to her room. I’m finally around the door to my
room as she’s rounding the corner. She may or may not have been treated to a
flash of my ass, before I make it back to my room.
    Gabriel drinks deeply after I pour him a
glass. I gulp mine down, my body desperate to get some fluids back, even though
diet soda probably isn’t the ideal choice. The glass makes a heavy clunk when I
put it down on my bedside table. All my coordination is gone as my muscles try
to recover from the workout they just got.
    I nestle into his chest, feeling warm and
happy, a blessed out drowsiness starting to descend. He’s quiet, as if he’s
thinking. Then he speaks.
    “OK,” he says. “I need to tell you some
things. About me.”
    And just like that, I’m wide awake.

 
    CHAPTER TWENTY
     
    He breaks away from me, leaving a cold space
in my arms where his warm, solid body just was. He reaches into his jacket, hung
over my crappy wooden desk chair, and takes something from the inside pocket.
He turns on the bedside lamp and warm yellow light floods the room. I blink
painfully as it hits my eyes and when I open them again I can see it reflecting
off something silver.
    A long, delicate chain hangs from his hand.
Without saying anything, he slips back into bed, next to me, but not touching
me. There’s something about the way he sits, the way he talks. It’s like he’s
put on an invisible suit of armor, keeping me away from him. Wordlessly, he
opens his hand, letting a silver pendant fall. He catches the chain and the
pendant bounces, swinging gently in his grip.
    It’s beautiful. And old. I don’t know much
about jewelry—probably because I could never afford any—but I can at least tell
an antique from something modern.
    “It belonged to my mother,” he says, and I
shiver at the sound of his voice. It’s hoarse, and raw. There’s none of the
control, none of the arrogance, none of the laughter I’ve heard in him before.
    “My father died when I was young,” he goes
on, and his muscles tighten. He’s like a statue, but a statue full of pain. “I
can still remember being taken out of school to be told. It was the quietest
day in my whole life.”
    He takes a deep breath and lets it out. I
want to reach out to him, to touch him, to comfort him and make everything okay.
But somehow I know that doing that right now would just make him put his guard
up again, and I want so badly for him to keep going, with whatever confessional
this is.
    “My mom . . . my mom was devastated. But
after a while we repaired things. I started doing more around the farm, and the
neighbors helped out wherever they could. They were good people.”
    He stares out the window, into the blackness
of the night.
    “She found a new man a few years after that.
I was a bit older by then but I was still just a boy, really. Thirteen years
old. And that’s when Hank started