Chapter 5 Declan #2
I pull out and drop to my knees, yanking the lace down her legs.
She’s bare for me now, dripping, and I hook her thighs over my shoulders, lifting her enough to get my mouth on her.
The first taste of her has me groaning, the slick heat and salt of her flooding my tongue.
I eat her like I’ve been starving for it, sucking her clit into my mouth, rolling it between my lips until she’s shaking against the glass.
Her fingers claw into my hair, her hips grinding down like she can’t help herself, riding my face.
Every moan is hotter than the last, little broken hums that hitch into whimpers when I fuck her with my tongue, pressing it deep before sliding back to lash her clit.
She’s loud now, wet sounds filling the space along with the muffled slap of her thighs against my cheeks.
“Declan—fuck—don’t stop.” She’s babbling, breathless, and I don’t. I keep her right there, tongue working her, sucking until her whole body locks tight and she cries out, coming hard against my mouth. I lap her through it, savoring every twitch and tremor until she’s boneless in my grip.
When I stand, my mouth is wet with her, my cock aching.
She turns and her hand wraps around me, warm and tight, stroking slow as she looks up with that dazed, fucked-out expression that could undo a better man.
I let her push me back a step, dropping to her knees.
Her tongue is on me in seconds, licking a slow stripe from base to tip before sucking the head into her mouth.
“Fuck, Aoife…” The sight of her like this, eyes up, lips stretched around me, has my hand in her hair, guiding her down until her nose brushes my skin.
She gags lightly, pulls back with a wet pop, saliva stringing from her lips to my cock.
Then she’s back on me, sucking hard, twisting her hand at the base while her mouth works the rest. Every slick, obscene sound echoes in the quiet, mixing with my ragged breathing.
I let her work me until I’m close—too close—then I pull free, my cock wet and throbbing, and haul her up against the glass again.
“You’re getting fucked here,” I tell her, lining myself up. I push into her in one slow, deep thrust that has both of us groaning. The stretch of her around me is tight, hot, perfect. I pin her wrists again, fucking her against the glass, the city spread out in lights behind her.
Her moans are sharp now, every thrust forcing them from her, her breasts bouncing with the motion, nipples dragging faint streaks on the cold glass.
I pound her harder, the slap of skin on skin and the filthy wet sounds of her taking me filling the space.
She’s grinding down to meet every thrust, mouth open, tongue lolling a little as she rides the edge.
“Declan—yes—fuck—” she’s gasping, nails digging into my shoulders when I let her hands go to grip her hips.
I drive into her until her voice breaks, her orgasm ripping through her with a sharp cry.
The way she clamps down around me nearly pulls me over the edge, but I hold it, dragging it out until I can’t anymore.
She’s screaming for me now, raw and breathless, and I can feel her shuddering through another climax.
That’s when I let go, burying myself to the hilt and spilling into her with a groan that rakes through my chest. I hold her there, both of us panting against the glass, the city lights and the rain wrapping around us like we’ve just claimed the whole damn world.
I keep her there until the shiver in her thighs turns to a lazy tremble and our breath stops fogging the glass, then I ease out and gather her in, kiss the corner of her open mouth, feel the aftershocks ripple under my palms like the last rings on a pond after a stone disappears.
She laughs, small and helpless, the sound pressed into my throat because she has nowhere else to put it.
“That was,” she says, and lets the rest break apart into a soft, incredulous sound.
“Public service,” I tell her, and she snorts against my jaw.
“You think the city left us a good Yelp review,” she murmurs, turning to glance at the rain-slick pane that still holds the ghost prints of her hands. “We are absolutely responsible for some neighbor’s existential crisis.”
“I will send flowers to the building across the way,” I say, half serious. “With an apology card and a confidentiality clause.”
She nudges my ribs with her heel, still trying to catch her breath. “You make everything sound like a contract.”
“Only the things I intend to repeat,” I answer, and watch her mouth curl, bright and wicked even while sated.
We stand there another long moment because neither of us seems ready to admit the window is cold and our knees might hate us in an hour, then I hook an arm under her thighs and another at the small of her back, lift her clear, feel the way she folds against me without thinking as if the blueprint for this existed long before tonight.
The bed receives her with the soft exhale of linen taking weight.
I straighten the coverlet she wrecked earlier, draw it over her hips, pause when she catches my wrist.
“I am not made of glass,” she says, but there is no edge in it, only fondness.
“No,” I say. “You prefer glass as a spectator sport.”
She hides a grin against her knuckles. “I hate how much I like you when you are smug.”
“That will make what comes next unbearable,” I tell her, and she tips her head, suspicious. I press a kiss to her forehead, step back, and add, “Do not move. I am committing a small culinary crime.”
Her eyes narrow, amused and curious at once. “If you touch my copper pots while naked, I will have to sanitize them with holy water.”
“That is slander,” I say, collecting my trousers just long enough to look respectable if a saint decides to visit. “I am a gentleman around copper.”
“And around pastry scrapers,” she says, rolling to her side, watching me as I leave. “Hurry back before I decide to judge you.”
The kitchen is warm with the last of the heat from her oven and smells like orange and clove and the faint toasted perfume of parmesan.
I pad across tile that is clean enough to confess to, open cabinet doors the way you open a well written book, and find what I need with the luck of a man who has spent his life inventorying other people’s shelves.
Cocoa powder tucked beside a bar of dark chocolate she has half shaved for a ganache, whole milk in a glass bottle with a paper cap, a jar of good honey, a pinch pot of smoked sea salt pushed back behind a tin of tea, vanilla in a small brown apothecary bottle with a handwritten label.
I find a micro plane because of course there are three, and a nub of nutmeg, and I grin into the pan because I can already taste what the steam will carry back to her.
The saucepan is small and black, seasoned by use, the handle warm in my palm.
I warm the milk low and slow, listening for the hush of its surface, break the chocolate with the heel of my hand, dust in cocoa to deepen the color, whisk until the first bubbles gather and dissolve.
The smell lifts, heavy and soft at once.
I add a stripe of honey on the back of a spoon, a drop of vanilla, a pinch of the smoked salt because she understands balance and I want her to taste the same honesty she cooked into that duck.
I take one of the blood oranges from her counter, draw the micro plane across its skin once, twice, just enough to perfume the drink without turning it into a confection.
The last touch is for me, a whisper of ground chili that sits behind the warmth and makes itself known only after the second sip.
“Declan,” she calls from the bedroom, voice sweet with suspicion. “If you are ruining chocolate, I will ruin you.”
I carry the two mugs in carefully, set them on her dresser for a moment, then lift one and offer it to her with the solemnity of a peace treaty. “I would never ruin chocolate, spitfire. I was raised better.”
She sits up against the pillows, hair a tumble, cheeks still pink, the sheet tucked loosely across her chest, and takes the mug with both hands. She inhales first, as any good cook will, and her lashes lower. “You put orange in it,” she says, pleased and accusing at once.
“I follow the theme of the evening,” I reply, claiming the other mug, settling beside her so our shoulders touch. “Taste.”
She does. Her eyes go wider, that greedy light sparking there for a moment, and then she tries to hide it by pretending to parse what I added.
“Chocolate, obviously,” she says, as if she is not a witch who could name each ingredient in order.
“Milk, not cream. Honey, not sugar. Vanilla, a pinch of salt, a mistake’s worth of chili. ”
“Calculated mischief,” I correct.
She laughs softly around the rim. “You are infuriatingly good at everything you should not be doing.”
“It is my most endearing flaw.”
She drinks again, slower, licks a small mustache of cocoa from her upper lip without ceremony, and hums under her breath. “I do not usually drink hot cocoa after committing a public indecency,” she says. “But I will make an exception for a man who respects orange zest.”
“You are a generous woman,” I say, and tilt my mug toward hers. We clink like a promise held between porcelain.
“What did your mother teach you?” she asks after a minute, curled against me now, one knee nudging mine under the sheet, “because if Moira O’Connell taught her son to whisk like that, I want to send her a thank you card and also a strongly worded letter.”
“She taught me that rituals keep the roof on,” I answer, watching the steam ribbon up, letting the heat soak my hands.
“Hot chocolate after midnight Mass when I was a boy. Dark and not too sweet, a little salt, a scrape of nutmeg if we had it. Father would tell a story about the old country, nothing soft, he did not care for sentiment, but something about saints who wandered and left candles in windows, and for the length of that mug we were allowed to be ordinary.”
Aoife’s head tilts against my shoulder. “You do know how to make a person ache in three sentences,” she says, not unkindly.
“Occupational hazard,” I tell her. “You have your own ways.”
“I bribe with butter,” she says, drowsy humor threading her voice. “And salt and vinegar. And the occasional miracle.”
“You served miracles tonight,” I say, and mean it.
She turns her face into my arm, rests there, breath warm on my skin. “That is unfair,” she murmurs. “I cannot be adorable and terrifying in the same hour.”
“You manage,” I say. “You manage very well.”
We drink in companionable quiet, the kind that arrives only after heat has burned off the edges of caution.
She finishes first, sets her mug on the nightstand with a small decisive click, and tugs the hem of the sheet up to her chin like a child who has just remembered what blankets are for.
I take her empty mug and mine to the dresser, come back, and find her watching me with that soft-lidded attention that feels like recognition every time she turns it on me.
“Lie down,” she says. “I want to steal your warmth without asking nicely.”
“You always ask nicely,” I tell her, lowering beside her, drawing her in until her leg is hooked over my hip and her arm is tucked between our chests. “You just disguise it as an order.”
“That is slander again,” she says, but she is already settling, one hand fisting in the sheet like she means to keep the bed from drifting out to sea. “Do you snore, O’Connell.”
“I conduct,” I say. “My breathing sets a tempo, like any good metronome.”
She snorts in a way that would embarrass a lesser woman. “If you keep being charming, I will have to pretend to dislike you on principle.”
“Pretend away,” I say into her hair, and she hums, content.
The fairy lights glow along the windowsill, a constellation small enough to pocket.
Rain keeps its patient drum outside. Her weight on me is not heavy, it is anchoring, and it takes very little for my body to learn her rhythm and ease into it.
She sighs once, the last of the day leaving her in a single long breath, then slips under quickly, the way people do when they have trusted themselves into exhaustion.
I lie there and count her inhales, match them to the seconds ticked by the small clock on her dresser, let my own eyes close and open without falling all the way through.
Her phone is dark. Mine sits face down on the nightstand, the world held at bay by an inch of wood and the decision to not look.
I try to keep it there. I succeed until the vibration starts, steady and insistent, a quiet summons that does not care about cocoa or fairy lights or the way a woman’s hand curls in sleep when she has nothing left to hold.
I slip my arm from beneath her carefully, trade my chest for the edge of a pillow, tuck the sheet back around her shoulders because she makes a small sound when air cools the skin she has just warmed.
She does not wake. I reach for the phone, shield the screen with my palm so the light does not find her face, and read.
Problem at The Copper Clover. Owner’s been moving money for the Italians. You want it cleaned up?
The room stays as it was, warm and quiet, but the temperature inside my chest changes.
The words are simple, nothing I have not seen a hundred times with different names attached, yet the shape of them fits too neatly beside the shape of her sleeping mouth and the mugs on the dresser and the scent of orange resting in the air.