She thrust her ass back, taking him deeper.

“Yes, baby, that’s it. Give me your pu**y.”

He held her hips tight, keeping her forward and where he wanted her. His fingers dug into her skin. He knew he’d mark her and it only made him harder.

She kept making small, needy noises in the back of her throat, urging him on. He let those noises guide him as he f**ked into her with short, hard digs.

He let it all go, let the walls he’d built around himself fall away. Their first time had been raunchy enough, but this was hard. Hard and rough and at his whim.

She moved one hand down and began to play with her clit as he f**ked her. Christ, this woman was a f**king goddess.

“Mmm. Make yourself come again,” he said into her ear right before he bit it. He knew she liked it when her cunt rippled around him.

Harder and harder, he continued to thrust until he let his head fall back. So close. It barreled up from his heels as he came so hard he saw spots. Her muted cry and the way her honey coated his cock, sliding down to his balls, told him she’d come too.

A few more thrusts and he finally pulled out slowly, holding the condom in place. He pressed a kiss to her neck. “I’ll be right back. You can get dressed again.” At the end of the hall he called out, “For now.” And heard her laugh.

That was f**king hot. Her right hip was a bit tender and she knew there’d be a bruise or two there. In truth she loved to be marked that way. It had scared Jeremy to mark her at all, no matter how much she’d told him not only was it okay, but that she liked it.

That Todd, so powerful and strong, had just f**ked her, used her the way he wanted but hadn’t actually harmed her, showed her just how much control he had. She hoped he didn’t feel like he’d lost control when really he’d shown incredible restraint.

She looked around the front room they’d been in. Things were arranged in a feminine way, but not in the way a woman does when she’s a lover. Not in the way of a woman who has marked a space she was a regular part of. No, this spoke of mother or sister. She knew he had both, or he did before anyway.

A knot of tension loosened at that realization and then agitation rolled through her. She shouldn’t care one way or the other. Only that she wasn’t the other woman.

“There you are.” He came back into the room and moved directly to her. She liked that he sought her out, liked the way he kissed the back of her neck.

“Like I’d run away? You promised Thai food and beer. Can’t run out on that. Now is this the room you wanted to paint? If so, dude, you haven’t even moved the furniture. And, not to be nitpicky or anything, but um, shouldn’t you have more than this?”

He dragged her down a hall into another room. This one had drop cloths down, and painter’s tape had been put around the windows and at the ceiling.

“This is the room. I used to have more furniture, but the divorce, you know.” He shrugged. “She’d bought most of it anyway. I let her have it. I need to start over, I suppose.”

“Ah. I understand.” And she did. She’d come back to Seattle with very little that had decorated the home in LA she’d shared with Jeremy and Adele. “Sometimes you just need to make a clean break.”

He bent, prying open a can of paint, pouring it into a pan. The back of his T-shirt rode up, showing a work-hard, sun-kissed swath of skin. A shiver went through her at the sight, like a secret between them.

When he turned, she’d put a bandana over her hair. She took the roller brush he handed her way.

The windows were open and she heard birds chirping, children playing, lawn implements buzzing and whirring. Normal, everyday life went on, comforting her and making her feel inadequate all at once.

“You know about clean breaks?” he asked before taking his own roller brush up and putting it through the paint.

She followed suit, the wet-swish sounds of the brushes distributing paint on the walls a surprisingly warm combination between orange and yellow.

It wasn’t like she’d never told anyone what happened. But the telling was like pulling an organ out, ripping it from her flesh and nearly dying from the pain.

“Yes,” she murmured as she worked.

“You had someone in LA?”

“Yes.”

He waited awhile, as they painted. After a time he began to speak.

“When I met Sheila, she was everything I wanted in a woman.” He paused. “Everything I thought I wanted. Soft. Feminine. She went to church on Sundays. We had dinner with her family every other weekend. She was—is beautiful in that “magazine spread for Family Circle” sort of way. Perfect. Blonde, big pale-blue eyes. Her voice is so soft and sweet.”

Erin knew he had a point to make, but whatever it was, the lead up was making her want to run this Sheila bitch over with her car a few times. And kick him in the junk for telling her all this.

“Anyway, I thought once I married her, I’d feel better. I’d be doing what I was supposed to. I’d have this pretty wife, I’d be a cop, have a career, a house in the suburbs, kids in a few years maybe. I should have been happy. But I wasn’t. I came home every night to a perfect house. Dinner on the table. She was good to me, Erin, but I did not hold up my end of the bargain. After a while she sort of gave up. I can’t blame her. She wanted kids and I put her off. I think she was considering leaving me long before the shooting. Anyway, I guess sometimes what we think we want isn’t what we need, and until we admit it, we’re f**king lying to ourselves.”