Free Caught (Prequel to Hawk) (Sex and Bullets) by Jo Raven

loose sweater. How long has he been here? When was the accident?
     
    But he doesn’t give me time to ask. The moment I look up, his mouth comes down on mine, and he kisses me like he’s breathing me in.
     
    Hungrily. Then softly. Then he backs me up against the bed and I don’t stop him.
     
    I don’t want him to stop.
     
    Sifting my fingers through his longish, silken hair, I draw him down with me, on the bed. He could have died in the accident. I might not have known until it was over.
     
    But he’s alive, and he’s here, and he’s beautiful.
     
    He pulls down my leggings, and I push up his sweater. He lifts my blouse, and I tug down his pajama pants. He’s already barefoot. I slip off my ankle-high boots and we roll on the bed together.
     
    He comes on top.
     
    He likes that.
     
    Pressing my hands to the covers, he licks and strokes and makes love to me with his tongue, then he enters me, and we rock together, our panting breaths echoing in the room.
     
    “Missed you,” he rasps as he thrusts deep inside me, each stroke stoking the fire in my belly. “So much.”
     
    “Need you,” I whisper back, lost in the haze of desire. “Don’t leave.”
     
    Then there’s pleasure, and a plunge into space, and more, crazy pleasure that has me writhing and moaning and shouting his name.
     
    And less than a week later… he’s again gone.
     
     
     
     
     

 
     
     
     
    Chapter Seven
     
     
     
     
     
    “I’m not doing this again,” I tell Dorothy after a week of phone silence. “I can’t.”
     
    So it’s not been weeks and weeks of him gone without a word this time.
     
    But I feel closer to him. More worried about him, after the accident and his comment about his parents only visiting once. The thought of him sitting alone in that hospital room for days and days without visitors just about broke my heart.
     
    He could have called me.
     
    He didn’t, and I need to remember that.
     
    Same now. Whatever is happening in his life, he chose not to make me a part of it. He cut me out before I even edged in a little. Promised me from the start that he couldn’t be with me.
     
    And that I wouldn’t be with him.
     
    A man of his word.
     
    Mom is really pushing for me to visit her, and I’m looking into flights, because, why not? Nothing keeping me here.
     
    “Give him a few more days before you bury him,” Dorothy mutters.
     
    “Why are you on his side?”
     
    “Because he’s way too handsome to give up on?”
     
    Good point.
     
    But not good enough.
     
    “It’s soul-sucking, okay? I can’t do it.”
     
    “You care about him,” Dorothy states, matter-of-factly, as if she knows. Have I told her anything? Have I talked in my sleep?
     
    “I don’t,” I protest at last.
     
    A bit too late, it seems, because Dorothy’s eye gleam. “Call him.”
     
    “No frigging way.”
     
    “Come on, Laylay. Last time you got pissed at him, it turned out he was in an accident. Maybe something else happened now, keeping him from you.”
     
    “What, his fingers are broken and he can’t text? Oh wait, he got amnesia and can’t remember me anymore?”
     
    “Yikes, you’re really mad at him, aren’t you?”
     
    I blow out a breath. “I shouldn’t be. He hasn’t done anything he wasn’t supposed to do. I shouldn’t expect more.”
     
    “But you’re human, Layla.” Dorothy comes around the kitchen table and gives me a quick hug. “Of course you expect more. Maybe it’s time to move on? I promise I’ll let up with the teasing.”
     
    Maybe.
     
    I thought I had this under control. That it was all fun and no strings attached, and that it was a good thing—but I don’t know what I’m doing, or feeling anymore.
     
    Only that it hurts.
     
     
     
    ***
     
     
     
     
     
    I turn and look over my shoulder at my reflection in the mirror, checking out my legs in my boots and short skirt.
     
    The boots Hawk asked me to leave on whenever I wore them as he fucked me into