Fade To Midnight. Shannon McKenna

argument? Were we arguing?”

      “Don’t be facetious. We have to communicate.”

      “We are communicating. In the best possible way. And this isn’t an attempt to win an argument.” He slid his tongue teasingly across her slit. “This is just changing the subject.”

      “Yeah, right. Tell me about it.” She smothered more giggles. “Your all-time favorite subject.”

      “Busted.” He nuzzled her groin. “Now, let’s see. The new subject is better than the old one. I was just going to go on about how excellent and admirable you are. What a fabulous mother you’ll be. Your courage, your beauty, your character…” He slid his finger inside her, followed its path with his tongue, in a slow, hungry swipe that hit all her external sweet spots. “Your yummy succulent pussy. My princess, my queen, my goddess, my world. No arguments. What’s to argue?”

      She dug her fingernails into his shoulders. “Seriously, Sean. Don’t change the subject. We’re not done with this subject.”

      He raised his head, wiped his mouth. “We’re not?”

      “No.” She tilted up his chin. “You make me feel like I’m one of the bad guys in this story. Trying to make you doubt yourself. Undermining you. About Kev, for all those years. You’re so angry at everyone for doing that to you, even Davy and Con. And I don’t deserve any part of that anger. Not one little speck. You hear me?”

      The raw emotion in her voice penetrated the hot lust that gripped him, and he lifted up, sobered. “No, baby, you sure don’t,” he agreed.

      She stared up, blinking in the moonlight. Her beautiful eyes were shimmering with tears. Remorse bit him in the ass, and he slid up her body, kissing his way apologetically over the curve of her belly, and into the bounty of her even more bodacious than usual tits.

      “I’m sorry, baby,” he whispered. “Please don’t cry. You’ll make me cry, too, and I hate crying. Makes my nose run.”

      She laughed, soggily, to his immense relief. “Oh, shut up, you clown. I just want…I want…”

      Her voice trailed off, and he waited, in an agony of suspense. “Yeah?” he prompted. “What do you want?” He held his breath, hoping to God it was something he was humanly capable of granting her.

      She blew out a sharp breath. “I don’t want you to be forever yearning for something that might not even exist, for the rest of your life. I just want you to…to get over it. To be whole. And happy.”

      Whew. Talk about a challenge.

      He positioned himself carefully over her body so that he put no pressure on that precious bulge, and pressed himself inside her. They sighed, in tandem, at the throbbing clasp of her body around him. “I’m working on that,” he said. “It’s complicated. But I’m trying. Just keep loving me. That’s gotten me the closest I’ve ever been. Closer than I ever deserved to get.” He sucked in air, at the perfection of being so close. “Just keep loving me,” he repeated, his voice raw.

      “Oh, please.” Tearful laughter made her body contract, minute shudders of perfection around his cock. “As if I ever had a choice.”

      He rocked inside her. “I’m not scared about the baby,” he told her.

      She clutched at him, with arms, legs, every part of her. “It would be nothing to be ashamed if you were, doofus.”

      “But I’m not,” he protested, stubbornly. “Really. I’m so happy about that baby, it just about makes my heart explode. Believe me.”

      She gave him a tremulous smile. “Um,” she murmured. “OK. That’s nice to know. And now,” she wiggled against him, and he gasped with delight as she squeezed him, deliciously inside herself. “So. You were talking about, ah, exploding? You want to elaborate on that?”

      He grinned at her, and proceeded to do just exactly that.

      CHAPTER

       3

      The guy across the poker table in the big blind position was staring at him. Chilikers. The one who’d cornered him in the men’s room and begged him for a stake a couple of hours back. Chilikers had been desperate to get back into the game and make up his losses, so Kev had fronted the guy fifteen thou against his car. But he hadn’t done Chilikers any favors tonight. Kev could practically smell the guy’s shit luck. As bad as his foul breath. And now he was staring.

      To be fair, there was a lot to stare at. It was weird for a guy to wear sunglasses at four in the morning in a darkened room. Add to that the webwork of old scars across one side of Kev’s face, the redder, fresher scars that showed through the spiky ash-colored hair sticking up all over his scalp; mementos from the waterfall bashing and the subsequent surgeries. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. The tremor in his hands had nothing to do with the cards he held, but if his fellow players should misinterpret that as a tell, fine with him.

      Chilikers snapped to attention as the dealer distributed starting hands. Kev glanced around for tells. Laker was petting a stack of chips even before the rest of the cards were dealt. Moriarty didn’t like his hand. Kev felt it, from the set of his shoulders, the muscles contracted on either side of his nostrils. Chilikers’s eyes had a hot gleam of excitement. Kev’s eyes swept the other players, plugging in data.

      He squeezed out his hole cards. An ace of hearts and an ace of spades. In a ten-handed game, pocket aces were good almost a third of the time, but the table was modestly tight. There’d probably only be three or four players in the pot, and he’d be a 3-2 favorite. He wished he could take pleasure in it, but he hurt too much. His head throbbed, and he had a heavy knot in his guts. Sensory overload. The volume was turned up to the highest decibel, and he couldn’t turn it down. Whatever had damped him down before was gone. Going over Twin Tails Falls hugging an enormous tree had killed it.

      And ah, Christ, how he missed it now.

      Sunglasses helped, and ear plugs, and the poker game itself. But smells got him, too, and he could hardly go around with a plug on his nose. He was used to being stared at, but even he had his limits.

      He could have endured the sensory overload, if that had been all it was, but the overload came from inside, too. Emotions blazed through him, leaving charred trails in their wake. He wasn’t equipped to handle such violent endocrinal activity, after years of floating numbness.

      Still, he preferred to call this state emotional overload rather than bugfuck insanity. Not that he could really quantify the difference.

      All day, he surfed waves of rage and free-floating terror. When those eased down, aching melancholy awaited him, interspersed with jittery euphoria. And the lust was through the ceiling. He’d steeled himself to ask Bruno about that, and Bruno solemnly informed him that constant sexual awareness was more or less normal for a healthy guy, and welcome to the club, already. According to Bruno, normal guys thought about sex constantly. All night and all day, porn footage unspooled in their heads. How normal guys managed to get through their days without totally humiliating themselves was a mystery to him.

      At night, if he slept at all, his dreams were turbo-charged nightmares that spat him into waking consciousness flash-fried on adrenaline. He was taking a protracted break from sleep. He couldn’t take the stress anymore. All-night poker was more restful.

      If he could keep his mind on it, that is. He yanked his attention back to see Laker limp in with 200. Kev raised 600, three times the big blind, breathing with his mouth so as not to smell the guy’s aftershave.

      He’d been in this unenviable state since he’d woken from the second coma, the one following the stress flashback. The one which had necessitated reconstructive surgery upon the face of Dr. Prateek Patil, Kev’s neurosurgeon. Embarrassing, considering how hard the guy had worked on Kev’s fucked-up brain. Patil hadn’t deserved to get pounded all to shit for his trouble. But life was seldom fair.

      He doubted that same fit would come over him