Chapter 12 #3
I moan — loud, unguarded, the sound filling the hotel room without apology.
The intensity builds fast and savage. I grind harder against his face, chasing it, my hips rolling in a rhythm I can't control.
My moans grow louder, more obscene, and he doesn't slow down — he pulls me tighter against his mouth and I shatter.
My legs shake violently as I squirt against his chin, my whole body collapsing forward, the orgasm ripping through me in waves that don't stop until he's lapped up every drop.
He holds me still through all of it. Patient. Thorough. Like he has a point to make. When I finally still, my chest heaving, he looks up at me with an expression that undoes whatever is left of my composure.
"I want to be inside you," he says. It comes out rough. Almost like a plea.
He grips my hips firmly, spreading my ass cheeks as he slides my body down against him — his cock already hard and ready, pressing against my entrance.
He rubs against me slowly, making sure I'm open, making sure I'm ready.
Then he lifts my body slightly and guides himself inside — all the way, in one long slide — and I gasp at the impact, at the fullness, at the specific stretch of him that I have not gotten used to no matter how many times this has happened.
He kisses me hard as I wrap my arms around his neck and begin to move.
We find the rhythm fast — my hips rising and falling, his hands gripping my ass and grinding me back and forth when I slow.
I can feel every inch of him, his girth stretching me wide, his length reaching deep into my walls with every downstroke.
He grunts beneath me, squeezing the flesh of my ass, his jaw tight with the effort of holding back.
I lean into him as I ride, letting the full length of him drive in and out, the sensation building all over again from somewhere I didn't think I had left.
He pulls my bra aside and buries his face against my chest, sucking my nipples one at a time as our movements intensify — harder, deeper, the sounds of us filling the room completely.
The wet slap of my body against his, our breathing ragged and overlapping, his groans growing louder and less controlled.
"I can't hold on much longer," he moans, his voice breathless against my skin.
I lean down and put my lips at his ear.
"Then don't," I breathe.
The sound of us — the obscene wet rhythm of my pussy against him — tips us both over the edge at the same moment.
My orgasm surges and I release around him, clenching tight, and he jerks back against the sofa with a guttural moan that I feel in my chest. His hands hold me completely still as he drives deep one last time and comes — hard, pulsing, his warm release filling me at the perfect angle, coating my walls, his body shuddering beneath mine with the force of it.
We stay there. Neither of us moves. His cock still buried inside me, his chest rising and falling hard beneath my hands, the room around us quiet except for our breathing slowly finding its way back. My body collapses against his chest.
Several minutes pass. Maybe more. I'm not counting. My cheek is against his skin, my eyes closed, his heartbeat loud and steady beneath my ear. His hand moves — slowly, almost absently — up my spine and back down. Once, then again.
Then he shifts beneath me. His hands come up and find my face.
Both of them — his palms warm against my cheeks, tilting my head up from his chest until I'm looking at him directly.
His eyes find mine and hold them, and whatever I expected to find there — the hunger, the dominance, the controlled intensity I know how to read — isn't what's looking back at me.
What's there instead is something I don't have a name for. Something open. Something careful. Something that looks, for one unguarded moment, like a man seeing something clearly for the first time and not entirely sure what to do about it.
He doesn't speak. He just looks at me — really looks, the kind that goes past the surface of a person and lands somewhere deeper — and I feel it move through me like a current. My throat tightens. I don't look away.
His thumb moves across my cheekbone. Slow. Deliberate. Then he leans in and kisses me — soft this time, unhurried, nothing urgent in it. Just his mouth on mine and his hands holding my face and the quiet of a room at whatever hour this is.
When he pulls back he's still looking at me. I try to move. My legs shift, my hands press against his chest — the instinct to reassemble myself, to stand up, to create the distance that has always been the shape of what we do after. His arms tighten around me.
"Logan—"
He doesn't answer. He stands — one fluid motion, lifting me with him, my legs wrapping around him automatically because there is nowhere else for them to go. He holds me against his chest and his arms lock around my back and he doesn't put me down.
He carries me through the adjoining door into his room.
His bed. I've been in his hotel rooms before — this isn't new territory, not the way his home would be.
But he has never carried me here. Has never pulled me through that door himself and refused to let me retreat to my own side of it.
The distinction is quiet and it lands somewhere significant.
He crosses to the bed and lays me down and the sheets are cool against my skin and he is right there, settling beside me, his arm coming around me and pulling me close without a word.
I don't say anything. Neither does he. We stay awake for a while — not talking, just present, his hand moving through my hair with the slow rhythm of someone who isn't thinking about it.
Then the hours pass and at some point we move together again in the dark, slower this time, quieter, something different in the quality of it that I feel in my chest long after it ends.
When I finally sleep it is deep and immediate, my cheek against his chest, his arm around me, his heartbeat the last thing I hear.
***
I'm still there when the first gray light comes through the curtains. I lie still and I listen to him breathe as I look at the ceiling and I let myself think the thing I've been not thinking for two months.
I'm falling for him.
I know it the way you know things you've been trying not to know — all at once, with the clarity of something that was always true and was just waiting for you to stop arguing with it.
It isn't a revelation so much as an admission.
The feeling has been there since Dallas, maybe before.
I've just been managing it instead of naming it.
I name it now. Quietly, in the gray morning light, with Logan Drake's arm around me and his heartbeat steady under my cheek.
I'm falling in love with him and I know it.
What I don't know — what I can't answer lying here in the dark — is whether Logan Drake is a man capable of falling back.
Whether what happened last night, the way he held my face, the way he carried me through that door, the way he wouldn't let me go — whether any of it means what I want it to mean.
Or whether I am building something in my mind that exists only because I want it to.
I don't know.
I lie there with that uncertainty sitting heavy and real in my chest — not despair, because I am not a woman who does despair — but a clear-eyed reckoning with what I am risking. What I may have already risked without realizing it.
Outside, Boston is waking up. I close my eyes and stay exactly where I am.