Free ASHFORD (Gray Wolf Security #5) by Glenna Sinclair Page A

shouldn’t have done that. I could have hurt you.”
    “I’m sorry, I just…”
    There were tears in her voice. I hated myself when I heard them. I knew her history; I knew she’d been hurt. Yet, here I was, hurting her again.
    I took my hands from her and started to climb out of the bed, but she stopped me with the slightest pressure of her hand on my arm.
    “Please,” she whispered softly, “let me help you.”
    I opened my mouth to tell her I didn’t need help. I was the one who always took care of everyone else. I was the one who protected everyone else. No one needed to help me because I was in control. But even as those words formed in my mind and touched the tip of my tongue, I knew they weren’t true. Not completely.
    I touched her face, my heart stuttering in my chest when she leaned into my touch. She was so beautiful, so full of life. And I felt like life had left me in the dust a long time ago. I needed her. It was as simple as that. Even my subconscious knew that.
    She watched my eyes, watched my face, my body, waiting for some sign. But I couldn’t…I couldn’t move. But she could. She slid closer to me and slowly, cautiously, crawled into my lap. She ran her hands over my head, pushing it back so that she could look me in the eye.
    “I want to make you feel good,” she whispered. “I want to give you just a little of what you’ve done for me.”
    “I can’t,” I said, even as my eyes slid closed. “I can’t give you and Ford what you need.”
    “What more could you possibly give us?”
    I wrapped my arms around her waist, pulled her close to me, and grunted a little as her hips pressed against mine. I buried my face against her shoulder and breathed in the scent of her, loving the way she moved her hips again, pressing her body hard against mine. My cock…it’d been so long! My body screamed for release, every nerve screaming for more, for more of her touch.
    I slid my hands under her t-shirt, her skin like silk against my palms. We had never kissed, yet I felt like this had been a long time coming, a moment built on all the little looks, the little touches. Maybe I’d wanted her from the beginning. Maybe somewhere in the back of my mind I’d known that this woman was exactly what I needed to break free of the limbo I’d been stuck inside of for so long.
    Or maybe I was just a man needing a woman. Any woman.
    “I want you,” I whispered, dragging my lips against her throat to the edge of her earlobe. “I want you more than I have a right to. But I…”
    “It’s okay,” she said, her hands moving, too, sliding down the back of my head and around my neck, her thumbs pressing against my lips. “It doesn’t have to mean more than what it is.”
    “But you deserve so much more than that.”
    She groaned, rolling her head back on her neck, my hand catching her, my fingers buried in those long, silky tresses.
    “You’ve been too good to me already. Please, let me be good to you.”
    I couldn’t…I wasn’t that strong.
    I pressed my mouth to her throat, one hand sliding around to cup one full breast in my hand. She let go of me long enough to lift her shirt over her head, running her hands over my head again, tugging my mouth down over her collarbone to the valley between those perfect breasts. And then one nipple was in my mouth and the sound of her pleasure was dancing in my ears. There was a taste, a sweetness that I’d never known before. But then, everything about her was sweeter that it had a right to be.
    I pushed her back, pressing her against the mattress as I kissed my way down to her thick hipbones, to where they stuck up on the bottom edge of her newly flat, life-giving belly. And then over the edge of that thick bone to the wide dimple of her ass. Her thighs, her knees…everything was perfection. She was perfection.
    She watched me, as I tugged her panties away from her beautiful cunt. I’d done this once before, but this time was so different. Not better. But