Chapter 12 #2
Salt and heat and wet and Willow. I ran my tongue through her folds, root to tip, a long, flat stroke that made her entire body shudder. Her fingers tightened in my hair. Her hips rolled up, seeking more pressure, more contact, more.
I gave her more.
Found her clit with the tip of my tongue and circled.
Not fast—I was in no hurry. Let her feel the buildup.
Let it accumulate in her nerve endings the way it was accumulating in mine.
Every sound she made fed straight into my veins.
Every twitch of her hips told me what she needed before she could form the sentence.
"Oh God—" Her thighs tensed around my head. "Right there. Don't—don't stop—"
I didn't stop. Sealed my mouth over her and worked her with a relentless rhythm that had her fisting the sheets with one hand and my hair with the other.
Her back was arched, chin tipped toward the ceiling, and I watched—from between her thighs, I watched this woman come undone and knew with a certainty that scared me that I would do this every day for the rest of my life if she'd let me.
This is it. The thought arrived without permission. This is what it's supposed to feel like. This is the thing you spent fifteen years trying to manufacture with the wrong person.
I slid two fingers inside her while my tongue kept its rhythm. She cried out—a sharp, beautiful sound that bounced off the bedroom walls. I curled my fingers, found that spot, pressed, and her response was immediate and violent.
Her thighs clamped. Her back bowed. Her hand in my hair pulled hard enough to sting.
And then she was coming—not a quiet, controlled climax but a full-body detonation that ripped through her in waves.
She said my name. Said it twice. The second time was barely a sound, just air shaped around two syllables while her whole body shook.
I brought her down the way I'd built her up. Gentle strokes. Soft pressure. Easing her through the aftershocks as her breathing went ragged and her thighs trembled against my shoulders.
When I kissed my way back up her body, she was glassy-eyed and flushed, wearing that boneless, satiated look that was, without question, the most gorgeous thing I'd ever seen on a human face.
"Hi," she said again. Dazed. Half-laughing.
"Hi."
"That was—" She blinked at the ceiling. "Okay. I need a second."
"Take your time."
"You're being smug."
"I'm being patient."
"Same energy." She pulled me up by the shoulders and kissed me—tasting herself on my mouth, not caring, a confidence that torched me. Her hand slid down my stomach, found me through the thin cotton of my boxer briefs, and the noise I made was not patient.
“Fuck me now,” she breathed against my lips.
I reached for the nightstand. She used the interval to strip my briefs off, and when I rolled the condom on and turned back to her, she was propped on her elbows, hair wild, chest still flushed, grinning at me with a satisfaction that bordered on predatory.
"Come back here," she said.
I lowered myself over her. Forearms braced on either side of her head. Her legs came up, calves hooking behind my lower back, and I held there—poised at her entrance, forehead pressed to hers, breathing the same air.
A beat. Two.
Her eyes found mine. Open. Unguarded. Trusting me with her body, trusting me with her morning, trusting me with a version of herself that existed nowhere else.
Tell her. The voice in my head was insistent, almost angry. Tell her you're falling so hard you can't see the ground. Tell her you're scared. Tell her she's the best thing that's happened to you in two decades and you don't know how to keep her without destroying her.
I pushed inside her.
Her lips parted. A sound escaped—low, throaty, the sound that made men start wars. Her nails found my back.
I moved. Not fast. Deep, deliberate strokes that let me feel every inch of the connection.
Her body welcomed me, tight and wet and warm, and I had to close my eyes.
Looking at her face while I was inside her was overwhelming.
Too real. Too close to the edge of whatever cliff I'd been approaching for weeks.
"Callum." Her voice, rough. "Look at me."
I opened my eyes.
She held my gaze. No shield, no deflection, no joke to cut the intensity. Just her. Brown eyes shot through with gold and green, watching me with an honesty that peeled back every layer of defense I'd built.
I hooked my arms under her knees and lifted her legs up, guiding them over my shoulders. The angle shifted and she gasped, her head dropping back against the pillow.
"Oh—" A sound that was halfway to a sob. "Oh, that's—"
Deeper. The new position let me drive into her with a completeness that bordered on overwhelming.
I could feel everything. Her thighs against my shoulders.
Her hands clutching the sheets above her head.
The way she rocked her hips to meet each thrust, hungry for it, greedy in a way that made me feel like a god and a demon at the same time.
Her breasts bounced with each stroke—a rhythm that matched the one building in my blood. I watched, transfixed, as her body absorbed every movement I gave it. Not passively. Willow was never passive. She met me, matched me, arched and rolled and took what she wanted.
And I gave it. All of it. Every stroke carried the thing I couldn't articulate.
Every thrust was a promise I wasn't ready to make with words.
My body had been more honest than my mouth from the beginning—it had reached for her in elevators, at dinner tables, in crowded rooms—and now it was telling her the whole truth while my brain scrambled to keep up.
I love you.
The realization hit me with the force of a wall coming down. Not a gentle epiphany. Not a slow dawning. Structural, catastrophic, total. It rearranged the architecture of my interior in a single stroke.
I love you and I have no idea what to do about it.
"Harder." Her voice cut through the spiral. "Please—"
I gave her harder. Drove into her with an urgency that was as much emotional as physical. Her legs tightened on my shoulders. Her moans came faster, higher, each one stripping another layer of composure from a man who was running out of layers.
Her breasts jiggled with each impact and the visual—God, the visual. Willow Monroe, naked and arching beneath me, hair spread across my pillow, body moving in a rhythm I set and she perfected. Every detail sharp and vivid and seared into my brain with the permanence of a tattoo.
"I'm close," she managed. "Don't stop, I'm so close—"
I reached between us. Found her clit. Pressed circles while I drove into her, and she detonated for the second time—this one louder, more raw, her back lifting off the mattress as the orgasm ripped through her.
The sound she made—my name, shattered into fragments—pushed me past the edge I'd been clinging to.
Everything went white.
Not a visual. A sensation. Every nerve fired at once, a full-system overload that started at the base of my spine and tore upward through my body.
I drove into her, deep, held there, and came with a force that emptied me of everything—every defense, every wall, every carefully maintained distance I'd constructed between myself and the world.
A sound tore from my throat. Not a word. Not a groan. A surrender.
Forty years of holding it all together, and this woman had dismantled me in a Saturday-morning bed while the sun rose over a city that kept spinning without us.
We lay there. Tangled in sheets and each other. My face was in her neck. Her fingers were drawing absent patterns on my spine.
Her heartbeat drummed against my lips—rapid, decelerating, returning to normal. Mine was still a disaster.
"Best alarm clock ever," she murmured.
I laughed against her skin. It came out shaky. I hoped she didn't notice.
She noticed.
"Hey." Her hand stilled on my back. "You okay?"
"Perfect." I pressed a kiss to her collarbone. Composed my face before lifting my head. "Why?"
"You made that sound."
"I made several sounds. You'll have to be more specific."
"At the end. It sounded like..." She studied me with those impossibly beautiful hazel eyes. "Never mind. It was hot. I'm not complaining."
She let it go. Moved on. Smiled that lazy, sun-drunk smile and stretched beneath me with the self-satisfied grace of a woman who'd been thoroughly taken care of and knew it.
"I'm starving," she announced. "You destroyed me and now I need food. Those are the rules."
"Whose rules?"
"Mine. Orgasms of that quality require carbs and something sweet.”
"I'll make a note for future reference."
"You do that." She kissed the corner of my mouth. Rolled out of bed. Grabbed my t-shirt from the floor and pulled it on—an act of casual possession that sent a bolt of want through me all over again.
She padded toward the kitchen. Bare legs. Bare feet on my heated floors. My shirt hanging past her thighs.
I stayed where I was. Staring at the ceiling. Counting the beats of a heart that was doing things I hadn't authorized.
In the kitchen, I heard her open the fridge. Heard the clatter of a pan. Heard her start singing—off-key, uninhibited, a pop song I didn't recognize—and the sound filled my apartment in a way eight years of silence never had.
You're in love with her.
Yeah. I was.
You have no business being in love with her.
Also true.
You're going to ruin this.
I stared at the ceiling and hoped—in a way I hadn't allowed myself to hope in years—that the voice in my head was wrong.
From the kitchen: "Callum! Where's the maple syrup? If you tell me you don't own maple syrup, this relationship is over."
"Top shelf," I called back. "Behind the protein powder."
"Of course it's behind the protein powder. Your pantry has the personality of a CrossFit brochure."
I got up. Pulled on sweatpants. Walked toward the sound of her voice—toward the singing and the sizzle of a pan and the woman who was falling for me at the same velocity I was falling for her, neither of us talking about it, both of us pretending the freefall wasn't happening.
At the kitchen doorway, I paused.
She stood at the stove, spatula in hand, hips swaying to whatever song was in her head. Hair a wreck. My shirt riding up every time she reached for a plate, giving a glimpse of that delectable heart-shaped ass.
The most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
And the most dangerous.
I walked up behind her, wrapped my arms around her waist, and pressed my mouth to the side of her neck.
"Your ass is showing,” I said.
“Is that a complaint?” She leaned back into me.
“Never.”
She laughed. I held on.
Outside, the city was waking up. Traffic sounds rising. A siren in the distance. The ordinary orchestra of a Saturday morning in February.
Inside, a man who'd spent eight years eating breakfast alone stood in his kitchen holding a woman who'd burned the pancakes—I could see the charred edges from here—and felt a swell of pure, uncomplicated joy that didn't belong to him.
Except it did.
It did, and that was the part that scared me most.