Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
KELSEY
It starts as the joke with the whole cannibal thing, and his breath is warm and I’m just laughing, I’m still laughing when his teeth close gently around my earlobe.
Eep!
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t rush. Just holds there, teeth on my earlobe, breath against my neck. Who does this?
But...wow. My heart beats in full jackrabbit mode. Even the night seems to change moods, from a lovely pastel evening sunset to the strange to a darkly thrilling summer storm.
I can’t remember how to breathe.
He releases my earlobe, and his lips trail—slowly, ever so slowly—down the side of my neck. Not kissing; it’s more like he’s reading me.
This crafty, crafty watchmaker.
I’m still sitting sideways on his lap with one hand on his chest, and I can feel his heart beating, strong and steady.
He draws one finger along my collarbone. It’s the same path he traced earlier, but so different now, like he’s deciding things.
I kiss his cheek.
“Bruno,” I whisper.
He continues on his excruciatingly slow and deliberate finger path. I suppose it shouldn’t be a shock that Bruno is so wonderfully deliberate, that he turns out to be a man who observes and adjusts.
His lips find the hollow of my throat, and I tip my head back.
Below us the wedding is still going, all music and laughter and the clink of glasses, and I’m up here in the dark with my fake date, and his finger is on my skin, making the thoughts fall from my mind.
“Bruno.”
He lifts his head. Looks at me.
In the low light his gray eyes are almost black, and the level of focus in his gaze is devastating in the most delicious way. I’ve been looked at as a dancer, a performer, a girl on the city street, a black sheep, but I have never been looked at like this.
He cups my face in one hand and my belly tightens. His thumb traces my lower lip. He watches his own thumb do it.
The jackrabbit inside me bounces off the walls now. It’s full-on parkouring. Is that a word?
Then he kisses me.
Newsflash: Bruno kisses like he dances—all controlled, focused intensity.
And I’m into it.
My hand finds the back of his neck. I shift my weight and open my mouth wider. He adjusts instantly, changes the angle, deepens the kiss, reading me.
Nobody has ever read me like this. Nobody has ever danced with me like this.
His hand moves from my face to the back of my neck, and then down. The dress has a low back, and his palm is electric against my bare skin.
I make a sound that’s just south of a squeak.
With exquisite yet terrifying patience, he slides his hand from my back around to my ribs, and up, and I think if he doesn’t touch my breast, I might actually die a sad and tragic death.
Instead he traces the edge of my bra inside my dress. Or maybe he’s examining the construction of the dress, or maybe just maximizing my utter neediness by making me wait.
“You’re killing me,” I whisper.
Wicked fingers slide the dress off my shoulders. He finds a nipple, and I gasp as he rolls it between his finger and thumb, adjusting the pressure until he finds the exact amount that makes my spine arch, because apparently he is just evil.
I’m grinding against him. More, please! That’s what my grinding says. More attention to more parts. For starters.
I smooth my hands over his hard shoulders, wishing his shirt wasn’t on. I find his buttons and start undoing them. “Off with this, sir!” I joke, and then I make a sound like a cat, ignoring the voice in my head that says you’re being a lot right now, Kelsey. You’re being too much.
But we are going to fuck tonight. That is a freight train that will not be stopping and it’s not like he might break up with me afterwards. This thing ends tomorrow either way. I don’t have to care if he doesn’t like how extra I am.
It’s liberating.
His other hand is at my hip and he’s not guiding me, exactly—he’s allowing me. Adjusting to my rhythm. Matching me.
His mouth is at my neck again. The hollow below my ear. Teeth, then tongue, then a scrape that sends electricity down to my toes.
I suck in a breath. “Double gasp!”
His breathing turns a little faster. A little less controlled.
His fingers leave my breast and trail down my stomach, sliding under my dress, up along my thigh. So slowly. So deliberately.
I am full-on shaking as he pushes my dress up over my thighs and pauses, toying with the elastic of my panties.
Is he waiting for a yes, or just trying to drive me insane?
“Keep going!” I gasp.
His fingers dive under and find me. I’m embarrassingly wet, but the rough sound he makes tells me he’s into it.
“Don’t stop,” I say as he finds my clit and does wicked magic on it. He’s adjusting, reading, like he’s working on something small and precise that he has to get exactly right, which he does, finding the exact best mind-blowing rhythm, and it comes to me that this might be a watchmaker thing.
A really good watchmaker thing.
I bury my face in his neck, mumbling OMG into his skin, fingers clutched in the fabric of his shirt.
Below us, someone laughs and the music plays on, but it’s like another reality down there, a far lesser reality, because I’m on Bruno Blackwood’s lap, and he can play killer croquet, and make watches just right, and apparently these skills definitely, one hundred percent, transfer to sexytimes.
“Don’t stop,” I say yet again like a maniac.
He presses a fraction harder, keeps the rhythm, his other hand firm at my hip, and I can feel this tight, bright coil building like crazy, and his mouth is at my ear, breathing, just breathing, because that’s him, Mr. Metronome, making me shatter apart into a thousand pieces while sitting on his lap while the party goes on below.
He holds me through the aftershocks, fingers moving gently, reading me, easing me down. Like he knows the exact moment the sensitivity tips from good to “no no no too much!” Like he can feel it in my body before I can.
I’m panting against his neck, legs trembling. I put my lips to his neck and make a sound of exactly how I’m feeling, which might be described as a weird hum of happiness. This is something I would never do with another man because weird, fun sounds fall in the category of Kelsey is a lot.
I wait for him to pull away. To say something dry and deflecting.
Instead he growls.
What was that?
Right then, something inside him seems to snap. He hooks an arm beneath my knees and another around my back, and he lifts me clear up from the couch in a rough, urgent motion, like instinct has seized control of him. We’re moving into the suite before I can even catch my breath.
I loop my arms around his neck, nibbling at his jawline. He holds me so tightly my ribs can feel the force of it. Most notably, his breathing is uneven against my skin. Like whatever iron fist of control Bruno had over himself is slipping loose.
He carries me through the dark living room without turning on lights.
His jaw is set. His breathing is controlled again.
He’s gotten his control back, but I saw it go, and I loved it as much as I love the unruly cowlick at the back of his head or the crinkles where his eyes give him away.
He’s like music that’s a lot of build, and the payoff may be subtle, but you so want and love it.
He sets me on the bed and stands over me, seeming to try to master his emotions.
I grin. “Come here.”
His breaths come heavily. He removes his jacket and unbuttons the rest of his shirt, slowly, one button at a time, watching me watch him.
“Are you tormenting me?”
“Maybe.”
His chest is broad and shadowed and I want to touch him but something about the way he’s doing this—the pacing, the control—makes me wait. He’s setting the tempo like with the waltz and I’m here for it.
His hand stops on the last button, fingers frozen mid-task, watching me, because he is a wonderful, evil watchmaker who will make me wait, and I am loving it, but two can play at this game.
I sit up and pull the dress over my head and throw it across the room.
He finishes with his own shirt and settles it over a chair back. His body is dense and powerful; it’s the body of a man who runs punishing distances and hulks around on a boat doing things with anchors, probably.
He leans over me, one knee on the bed, one hand flat against my stomach, warm and wide, urging me back.
His hand moves up. Over my ribs. Between my breasts.
He traces the line of my sternum with one finger, all the way up to my throat.
He sees so much, and I’m feeling suddenly shy, but then his mouth goes everywhere his hand went, down my throat, between my breasts, down my stomach.
He moves like he has all the time in the world to explore this strange new land that he’s learning with his mouth and his hand.
He hits the realm of the nipple, and I arch into him and my hands find his hair, thick and slightly damp. I hold on.
“More of that,” I breathe.
He gives me more of that. Then his mouth is on my other breast, and his hand is sliding down my stomach again and I’m grabbing at his belt.
He catches my wrist and pins it gently by my hip. “Not yet.”
“Eep!”
The shape of his cheek changes, like he might be smiling, and he kisses my hip bone, and then he kisses the crease where my thigh meets my torso. He traces it with his tongue.
At this point, I’m vibrating like a tuning fork, every nerve in my body hanging on what he’ll do next.
What he does next is to put his mouth on my sex. And licks. Once. Again.
I make a noise like an animal caught in a fence, and maybe a little bit liking it.
He keeps on with the locked-in focus, the relentless consistency, just like on the veranda, except his tongue is involved now, and his hands are gripping my thighs demon-tight.
“Bruno—God—”
He stops and looks up at me, eyes dark, breath ragged. I reach down and grab his hair. “Come here.”
Something flickers across his expression, and he lets me pull him up. I reach for his belt, and this time he doesn’t stop me.
His pants come off and I was right—everything about him is serious. I wrap my hand around his cock, and he hisses between his teeth. His head drops forward. He pushes my hand away and fumbles around, and somehow, he has a condom, and he’s rolling it on with steady fingers. Well, almost steady.
He positions himself over me. One hand braced beside my head, the other guiding himself. He looks down at me.
“Kelsey.”
“Yeah?”
Nothing, apparently. He just wanted to say my name.
He pushes into me slowly, inch by inch, watching my face. Reading me, the way he reads everything.
“Yeah,” I say, and this time it’s not a question.
When he’s all the way in, he stops.
We both stop.
He’s large and the fullness of it is intense and neither of us moves; we’re just breathing, foreheads close, his weight on his arms, and for a moment it’s not about sex at all. It’s about being this close to another person. It’s about staying right in there.
Then he moves.
Slow, deep strokes, and the rhythm is mind-bendingly perfect.
I wrap my legs around him and tilt my hips and suggest something faster, and he goes for it.
It’s like a dance with us, and I’m not being polite with what I want or toning it down or anything.
I’m not softening myself into a pleasing shape the way I sometimes do on dates.
I’m just here. Full volume. Pulling him closer, wrapping tighter.
And let’s just say we’re good together. Great together. At sex, anyway.
I run my hands up his back. Feel the muscles working, the controlled power, the heat of his skin. I pull him closer and he allows it, his chest against mine, his face in my neck, and the intimacy of it is everything.
His breath is ragged at my neck. “Fuck.”
He says it like he’s angry at himself or something.
I tighten around him with my wicked dancer’s muscular control and his whole body jerks.
“What are you doing to me?” he gusts out.
Backatcha, I think, as the pressure builds in my spine, in my thighs, in the soles of my feet.
“I’m going to—”
“I know,” he says. “I’ve got you.”
He changes the angle ever so slightly, one hand shifting my hip. I come with his name in my mouth and my fingers digging into his back and my whole body clenching around him.
He follows me. More than that: his precision shatters when he comes. His breath goes all wrong, and he presses his face into my neck, and there’s this vulnerability there for a split second, there and gone.
He lies on his back after, and I’m on my side, facing him, head propped up on my hand. Our breathing is slowing down at different rates—mine first, because I’m used to recovering from physical exertion.
“So deliciously ill-advised,” I whisper.
He looks up at the ceiling, and I get the feeling that he’s reassembling, somehow, like his whole precision-engineered way of being is clicking back into place like the components of one of his watches.
Though he’d probably have a problem with that description.
I’m sure his watches don’t click into place. I’m probably thinking of Legos.
I press my palm to his chest. His heart is still going fast. “Where did you go?”
He rolls onto his side, facing me, and his hand comes up and moves a strand of hair from my face. His touch is precise again. “I’m right here.”
I move closer and kiss his chest, feeling suddenly sad that this is it, our one and only night. But maybe that’s why it’s amazing. We were stolen out of our worlds and thrown together, the most outlandish pair possible.
I fall asleep with his heartbeat against my forehead.