Kimberly #2
He showed me. He gripped my thigh, hitching it higher, changing the angle, and the sound I made when he drove deeper was loud enough that I would have been embarrassed if I were capable of feeling anything other than the relentless, building fire of him.
We moved together in the dark, urgent and graceless and completely real, and the sounds filling the room were ours alone, his groans mixing with my gasps, the creak of the bed frame, the sharp catch of breath that meant we were both climbing toward the same edge.
The wave built from somewhere deep, a gathering heat that turned my bones to liquid.
It crested before I could warn him, and I came apart with his name on my lips and my hands locked behind his neck, and he followed me over the edge two breaths later, his whole body going taut against mine, a shudder running through him that I felt in my own chest. He buried his face against my throat and made a sound that was half surrender, half relief, and I held him through it with both arms and didn’t let go.
For a long time after, neither of us moved.
His head rested on my chest, my fingers combing through his hair, our legs tangled in sheets that had been thoroughly destroyed.
The rain had started again, tapping the windows in a soft, steady patter that settled over us like a lull.
His breathing slowed under my hand, and I felt his heartbeat return to something human against my ribs.
"You’re still the most maddening woman I’ve ever met," he murmured into my skin.
"Good." I pressed my lips against the top of his head.
His arm tightened around my waist, pulling me closer, and I felt him exhale against my collarbone, releasing a breath he seemed to have been holding for years.
I drifted toward sleep against him. Certain. Terrified. All in.
The necklace lay warm against my throat in the dark, and I slept.
I woke to sunlight and his mouth on my shoulder.
"No," I groaned, pulling the pillow over my face. "It’s morning. Morning means coffee and responsibilities and the reconstruction of my dignity."
"Dignity is overrated." His voice was rough with sleep and warm with amusement, and his arm slid around my waist, pulling me back against him. "I have a counter-proposal."
"Jackson, it’s seven o’clock."
"My schedule is flexible." He pressed his lips to the curve of my neck and I felt him grin against my skin. "I’m the CEO. I decide when the workday starts."
"You have never taken a personal day in your life."
"I’m extremely motivated this morning." His hand traveled the length of my side, hip to ribs, fingertips dragging slow enough to leave a trail of heat behind them. "Besides, I believe there were several items on last night’s agenda that didn’t receive adequate review."
"The agenda was thoroughly covered."
"I’m a thorough man, Ms. Bishop." He pulled me onto him, his hands settling on my hips, his dark hair a wreck against the white pillow, his grin the most dangerous weapon I’d ever seen in his arsenal. "I prefer to revisit the minutes. In detail. Repeatedly."
"You are absolutely insatiable."
"I’ve been told it’s one of my more competitive qualities." He sat up, pulling me with him, and his mouth found that spot below my ear that he’d mapped last night and my resolve to be a functioning adult evaporated in approximately three seconds.
He was playful. That was the part that surprised me. The Jackson Whitlock the world knew didn’t play. He strategized, he commanded, he won. But the man in this bed, with morning light across his bare shoulders and my hair in his face and a grin that could have melted glaciers, he played.
He teased me with his mouth until I was grabbing fistfuls of the sheets.
He pinned my wrists above my head and kissed down my throat and told me, against my collarbone, that if I wanted him to stop I should use a word from the English language, which I was currently failing to do.
He laughed when I bit his shoulder in retaliation, a real, full-chest laugh I’d never heard from him in any boardroom, and the sound of it was worth more than every share in his company.
When we reached for each other again at first light, it was slower than the night before, deeper, unhurried.
His eyes stayed open, watching mine, and there was something in his face that made my chest ache, a vulnerability he would never put into a sentence, offered to me in silence with his body and his hands.
I pulled him close, and we moved together as the sheets pooled around us and the sunlight made everything gold.
After, we lay there in complete ruin, laughing, my hair looking like I’d been caught in an electrical storm and his composure reduced to rubble, and I thought that if someone had told me two months ago I’d be lying in Jackson Whitlock’s bed watching him grin like a man who’d won a negotiation he didn’t expect to survive, I would have called them clinically insane.
Three hard knocks on the bedroom door.
I froze. My eyes went wide as the pillows. I looked at Jackson. He looked at me. I grabbed the sheet and pulled it completely over my head, flattening myself against the mattress like a woman trying to achieve molecular fusion with the bedding.
"For the love of everything sacred, do not answer that," I hissed from inside my cotton bunker. "If Hollis walks in here and sees me, I am going to move to another hemisphere."
Jackson muttered something unrepeatable under his breath, threw the covers off his side, and found his trousers on the floor. He pulled them on, dragged a hand through his hair, which accomplished nothing, and crossed to the door.
I lay perfectly still. Not breathing. A twenty-seven-year-old woman impersonating a mattress, and frankly nailing the audition.
He cracked the door open two inches. "This had better be an actual emergency, Hollis, because my morning is—"
"It’s me,"
"Logan?"
Every molecule of blood in my body turned to ice.