Chapter 20 Jace #2
She's settled on the opposite seat, water to her collarbones, skin flushed from the heat.
Messy knot of dark hair. Grey-green eyes catching the last of the sunset.
Lips bitten pink because she can't stop worrying them.
She's wearing a white t-shirt that is now wet and clinging to her in ways that the t-shirt did not anticipate when it was manufactured.
A bra underneath it, visible through the fabric.
What I can see is enough to make my pulse thud hard behind my ribs.
"You don't need to be nervous," My voice is hoarse with desire. "Nothing happens here that you don't want to happen."
She looks at me. Then she looks at the water between us. Then she takes a deep breath in gathering strength.
"Jace. I need to… Reid and I… We, hum…" She stops. Starts again. "This morning, we sort of..."
"I know."
She blinks.
"Maya." I look deep in her eyes, needing her to really understand what I’m saying. "Reid is the most private man alive. He didn't say a word. He doesn't have to. I could see it in both of you this morning, the way you moved around each other. And I'm not upset about it."
"You're not?"
"No."
"But... how? How is that not..."
"Weird? Complicated? Pick your word?"
She nods, fast, like she's been holding the question for hours.
"Reid practically raised me," I say. "He's the reason I'm not in a jail cell or worse.
I've watched that man give everything to everyone around him for fourteen years and keep nothing for himself.
And this morning he was smiling. Like a normal human being who has something in his life that makes him happy.
" I hold her gaze. "You think I'd be jealous of that? "
Her eyes are searching and assessing like someone who is hearing a thing she wants to believe and is checking it for traps.
There are no traps. Not from me. Not from Reid. She just doesn't know that yet.
"Come here," I say, and extend my hand across the water.
She looks at my hand. Looks at me. The war behind her eyes is shorter this time.
She takes it.
I pull her toward me, gently, letting the water do most of the work.
She drifts across the tub, weightless, her knees finding the seat on either side of mine as I guide her onto my lap.
She settles and the moment she does, the moment her weight is on me and there is nothing between us but wet cotton and the thin fabric of my boxers, she makes a sound.
Half surprise. Half something else entirely.
Because she can feel me. There is no universe in which she cannot feel exactly what she does to me, hard and obvious and pressed against her through two layers of nothing.
"That," I say, looking up at her, "is what you do to me."
Color floods her face. Rose pink, spreading down her throat, across her collarbones, disappearing below the waterline. I want to chase it with my mouth.
Not yet.
"I just." She swallows. "I don't want to cause problems between you. Between all of you. I couldn't live with myself if I came between—"
"Oh, honey." I tuck a wet strand of hair behind her ear. My fingers graze the curve of it and she shivers. "If we get our way, you will be coming between us. Multiple times."
The pink turns red. Throat, cheeks, the tips of her ears.
She opens her mouth and nothing comes out and I watch her try to decide whether to be shocked or aroused and I can see the exact moment aroused wins because her hips shift, involuntary, a tiny grinding motion against me that she immediately tries to pretend didn't happen.
It happened.
"There she is," I murmur.
I don't rush it. I bend my head and press my mouth to her collarbone, where the blush is hottest, and just breathe against her skin. Warm water, warm air, the faint salt taste of her. She goes still, only a tremor running through her that I feel in my chest because she's pressed against it.
I kiss the side of her neck. Slow. Following the color up her throat, tasting the heat of it, the specific texture of her skin under my lips. She tilts her head, giving me access, and the gesture is so trusting and so unconscious that I stop breathing for a few seconds.
I kiss her jaw. The corner of her mouth. Pause there.
"Still on best behavior," I whisper.
"I think," she says, and her voice is wrecked, a breathless, ruined version of itself, "that I'd like you to stop being on your best behavior."
"Yeah?" I pull back enough to see her face. Her eyes are dark, pupils wide, and her fingers are in my hair at the base of my skull, wet curls wrapped around her knuckles. "Tell me what you want, Maya."
She doesn't tell me. She shows me. She closes the distance and kisses me.
Not careful. Not hesitant. She kisses me like she's been thinking about it for hours. Her mouth is warm and open and her tongue meets mine and I stop thinking.
I kiss her back with everything I've been holding back. My hands find her waist, her ribs, the curve of her back through the wet t-shirt. She's grinding against me now, small rocking movements, and every one sends a pulse of heat through me that makes my vision narrow to a single point.
Her.
Her taste. Warm water and something sweet underneath it.
Her sounds, soft and muffled against my mouth.
The way her fingers tighten in my hair when I bite her lower lip, gentle, testing, and the way her hips jerk in response tells me everything I need to know about what she likes.
I pull back. She chases my mouth, eyes half-closed.
"Easy," I say, and I'm out of breath, which is not something I'm used to. "I'm not going anywhere."
"Don't stop."
"Not stopping. Adjusting."
I slide my hands up her sides, thumbs tracing the edge of her bra through the soaked t-shirt. She arches into the touch and the wet fabric pulls taut across her breasts and I can see her nipples, hard and visible through the cotton, and my mouth actually waters.
"Can I?" I ask, fingers on the edge of her t-shirt.
She nods. Fast. Almost impatient.
I take it off and slide the straps of her bra down, easing the cups away from her skin, and her breasts come free and the sight of her knocks something loose in my chest. I lower my mouth to her breast. Press my lips to the soft skin above her nipple, then close my mouth around it and suck gently.
She gasps, sharp, fingers tightening in my hair.
I swirl my tongue around the peak, slow, learning the shape of her, and then I bite down, just enough.
She moans, and the sound goes through me like a current.
"Sensitive," I murmur against her skin.
"More." She demands.
I grin. There she is. The real Maya, the one who demands more while her hips are rolling against my cock and her hands are pulling my hair and she's panting in the steam-thick air of a Montana sunset.
I could live in this moment forever.
But I want more. I want to taste her. I've been imagining the sounds she'd make and I want the real ones.
"I need you to do something for me," I say, lifting my head.
"What?" Her voice is barely there.
"Sit up on the edge."
She blinks, processing. I help her, hands on her waist, lifting her until she's seated on the wide rim of the tub, legs still in the water.
The cold air hits her wet skin and she hisses, goosebumps racing across her arms, her stomach, her thighs.
The contrast again. Heat and cold. The thing that makes every sensation sharper.
I'm kneeling on the submerged seat now, the water at my chest, her knees at my eye level.
I look up at her. The sunset is behind her, gold and rose, turning her edges into light.
Her chest is heaving. Her bra hangs loose around her belly.
She looks wrecked and luminous and slightly terrified and I have never in my life wanted anything more than I want to put my mouth on her.
I run my hands up the outside of her thighs, slow.
The skin there is cool from the air and pebbled with goosebumps and impossibly soft.
My thumbs trace circles as I go, feeling her muscles tense and release under my palms. She's wearing underwear.
Simple, cotton, soaked through. I hook my fingers in the waistband and look up at her.
"Yes?"
"Yes."
I slide them down her legs. She lifts her hips to help and the movement is shaky and eager and something about the eagerness, about the way she wants this too, makes my cock throb so hard I have to reach down and squeeze the base to keep from losing it before I've even started.
I spread her knees apart. She lets me. She's trembling, fine tremors in her thighs that I can feel under my hands, and when the air touches her she makes a sound that's just a sharp intake of breath and a small, involuntary roll of her hips toward me.
"Look at you. You're so fucking beautiful, Maya."
I press my mouth to the inside of her thigh. She jolts. I kiss a path upward, slow, deliberate, tasting clean skin and the faint mineral trace of the water. Her hands find my hair again, gripping, and I can feel the tension in her fingers. Not pulling me closer. Not pushing me away. Holding on.
I exhale against her center and she whimpers.
And then I taste her.
The first stroke of my tongue is slow. I circle her clit with the tip of my tongue, light, testing. Her thighs clench around my head and her hips buck and I press my hand flat against her lower belly to hold her still.
"Easy," I murmur against her.
She whimpers again. Her grip in my hair tightens.
I take my time. Because I want to learn every response she has, every sound, every involuntary jerk and shiver and catch of breath. I want the full catalog. I want to know what makes her gasp and what makes her moan and what makes her grab my hair hard enough to hurt.
I find it. A rhythm, a pressure, a specific spot just to the left of center that makes her spine arch off the rim of the tub and her mouth fall open.
I work it. Consistent. Relentless. Circling and pressing and then pulling her clit between my lips and sucking gently and her hand flies from my hair to the deck behind her, bracing, because her whole body is shaking now.
"Jace." My name in her mouth, broken, desperate.
"I'm here." I slide two fingers inside her and she clenches around them immediately, hot and tight and slick, and I have to squeeze myself again, hard, because the sound she makes when I curl my fingers against her front wall is the most obscene and beautiful thing I've heard in my entire life.
I work my fingers in slow, deep strokes, curling on every pass, and I close my mouth over her clit again and suck and circle and she's not quiet anymore.
She's loud. She's loud in a way that tells me she's forgotten where she is and who might hear and everything except my mouth and my hands and the thing building inside her that I can feel, feel it in the way her thighs are shaking and her walls are fluttering around my fingers and her voice is climbing.
"Don't stop. Jace, please don't stop."
I don't stop.
I press deeper, curl harder, suck her clit between my lips and hold it there while my tongue works the tip in fast, tight circles. Her back arches off the deck. Her hand finds my hair again and pulls, sharp, and the sting of it fires straight down my spine.
She comes.
Hard. Clenching around my fingers in waves, her whole body locking up and then releasing in shudders that I feel in the water, in the deck, in the sounds she makes that start as my name and dissolve into something wordless and raw.
I stay with her through it, easing the pressure, gentling my mouth, letting her ride it down while her thighs tremble against my ears and her breath comes in ragged, broken gasps.
I press a kiss to the inside of her thigh. Then the other. She's still shaking.
I look up at her. The sky behind her has gone deep violet, the last gold at the horizon line. Her hair is half down, her eyes are closed, her mouth is open, her chest rising and falling with each breath. She looks destroyed. She looks like the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
She opens her eyes. Looks down at me. And smiles, slow and dazed and unguarded, and the smile hits me harder than anything that came before it.
I ease her back into the water. She slides down against me, boneless, and I pull her in, her back against my chest, her head falling to my shoulder.
The warmth of the water envelops her. I wrap my arms around her and press my mouth to the side of her neck and breathe her in and I am hard and aching and I don't care.
That can wait. What can't wait is this. The feeling of her against me, unguarded, trusting me with the trembling, post-orgasm version of herself.
The steam rises around us. The pines are black against the darkening sky. Somewhere in the valley a coyote calls, high and thin, and another answers.
I know two things.
The first is that I will not be going to the in October.
The second is that I am completely, irreversibly addicted to this woman.