30. Victoria #2
His grip on my hair tightened as he lifted my half-hooded eyes to the mirror. He looked positively beastly with sweat dripping down his face and those icy blue eyes of his holding my reflection in the mirror.
“I said thank yourself,” he glowered.
He rolled his hips slowly, grinding me against the countertop.
Before I could even move my hands to cover the harsh edges, his hand moved to where I would have moved mine.
Not only did his hand blanket the swell of my stomach against the edge of the countertop, but it gave his knuckles access to my pussy as I stood onto my tiptoes, wanting more of him inside of me.
His knuckles grazed my clit with every thrust that bucked me against his hand.
“Oh fuck. Oh fuck. Oh fuck.”
He paused. “Say it.”
“Rhett,” I whimpered. “Do you want me to beg? I’ll beg, I swear. Just… just one more. Please.”
His grip was impossibly tight against my scalp as his lips fell to the shell of my ear. “You know what I want.”
And finally, I relented as I ground my ass against his hips. “Thank you, Victoria.”
“Again,” he said as he pumped into me once.
“Thank you, Victoria,” I said as I looked at my reflection.
“For what?” he growled.
He punctuated my sentences with a thrust as if rewarding me for everything I said. “For always being the strong one.” Thrust. “For always being the dependable one.” Thrust.
“Keep going,” he commanded.
“F-f-f—for always… being there for family.” Thrust. “For keeping the team afloat.” Thrust. “For staying alive, even when I didn’t want to be.” Thrust, thrust.
I groaned at the back-to-back, but I kept going, my voice nothing but a hoarse, pathetic whisper.
“For always waking up.” Thrust. “For always taking the next breath.” Thrust. “Thank you for always finding distractions when things got bad.” Thrust, thrust.
“And thank you,” Rhett growled as he picked up the pace, “for hanging on, even when you didn’t have a reason to.”
He pounded against me, my clit bouncing against his scarred knuckles. He took what he wanted from me, and I allowed him. I let him overwhelm me as he pounded into my body. I lost myself in the motions. In the thrusts. In the way he manipulated my body perfectly.
And before I knew it, the two of us fell over the edge together.
Orgasming together.
Shivering together.
My legs gave out first.
I didn’t even feel it happen. One second I was braced against the countertop and the next my knees simply stopped working and I was going down and Rhett’s arm was already there, already catching me, hauling me back against his chest before the bathroom floor had any say in the matter.
“Whoa,” he said. Not alarmed. Just present.
I laughed. It came out broken and breathless and completely undignified and I did not care even a little bit.
I laughed into his shoulder while my legs dangled uselessly and the bathroom mirror fogged over and somewhere in the house a clock ticked and the rest of the world just kept going without us.
He held me up. Both arms locked around my waist, my back to his chest, his chin dropping to the top of my head. He wasn’t laughing. He was just holding me the way he held everything, like he’d already decided and the deciding was done and now this was just what it was.
I caught my breath in stages.
The bathroom was wrecked. Every surface had evidence of us.
The mirror still had our handprints on it.
The floor was a disaster. My heels were somewhere in the bedroom.
I was going to need to call a housekeeper in the morning and I was going to be absolutely incapable of looking the woman in the eye.
“You okay?” Rhett asked against my hair.
“My legs stopped working.”
“Yeah, I noticed.”
“That’s your fault.”
“I’m aware.” He pressed his lips to the side of my head. “I’ll take full responsibility.”
I turned in his arms, my legs coming back online just enough to hold me.
He looked wrecked too, which was deeply satisfying.
Sweat-damp and disheveled and breathing harder than he probably wanted to admit, with that particular look on his face that I was only just learning to read.
Not smug. Not triumphant. Just settled. Like a man who had arrived somewhere he intended to stay.
“Shower,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“You’re carrying me.”
He didn’t argue. He just picked me up.
Before somehow, some way, Rhett moved us into my shower together.
Just so he could hold me under the hot stream of water that sprayed from the pathetic showerhead I had yet to change out.
“Hmm,” Rhett said as he reached up and tightened it a bit, “we need to change that out.”
I made a mental note to have James call the contractor in the morning. The fact that it had been on my to-do list for six months and I kept deprioritizing it was, frankly, embarrassing.
I just sank against him, allowing him to prop me up while he fiddled with the showerhead. Somehow he got the water pressure to come out just a tad better, and I sighed with relief as he battered against my back.
“There we go,” he said, his voice much lighter and less animalistic. Though his low notes still rattled my ribcage. “Now, where were we?”
“Still no,” I said.
He chuckled. The sound of it moved through his chest and into mine and I felt it the way I felt everything with him, more than I expected to, deeper than I had room for.
I pressed my face against him and breathed.
The water was hot and the room was steamed and outside the window Las Vegas was doing whatever Las Vegas did at this hour, loud and lit up and completely indifferent to the fact that something had changed permanently between us.
I’d said it three times in the dark with his hands on my skin and my voice gone raw and I hadn’t meant to say it any of those times, not planned it, not prepared for it, it had just come out of me the way things did when you finally stopped holding them back.
I wasn’t afraid of it.
That was the part that surprised me.
I’d been afraid of everything for fourteen years.
Afraid of hoping too much. Afraid of wanting something and having it disappear.
Afraid of letting someone close enough to matter because mattering meant losing and I knew exactly what losing felt like and I had decided a long time ago that I would rather be alone than find out what it felt like twice.
And then Rhett Calloway changed my tire in the dark and sat on my couch and watched Golden Girls with me and showed up every time after that whether I asked or not, and here we were.
Standing in my shower at whatever ungodly hour this was, his arms around me and my face pressed against his chest and the whole city humming outside like it had no idea.
He’d never told me much about his mother.
Not really. Bits and pieces, sure. The grandma who raised him on Bea Arthur reruns and roast chicken every Sunday. The dad who never quite arrived in the same room he was standing in. But the mother he never quite got around to.
I’d worked it out anyway, though. Three years of paying attention will do that to a woman.
Some of it from the things he didn’t say when I asked about family.
Some of it from the way he watched Brynn and Colton in a doorway like he was committing every second of it to memory, in case he never got to see it again.
But mostly from the simple, undeniable fact that this man had spent three years showing up for a woman who had not once asked him to.
And there was only one kind of man who learned to show up like that.
The kind who had once been the kid waiting for someone to.
Somewhere along the line, quietly, in the kind of decision Rhett made with no fanfare and no announcement and no need for anyone to clap for him, he had decided he was going to be the opposite. Not the one who left. The one who stayed.
Goddamn it, Rhett Calloway.
He didn’t need me to know that about him.
I knew it anyway.
I tilted my head back.
He was already looking at me. He did that. He was always already looking.
“I meant it,” I said. “In case you were wondering.”
“I know you did.” His thumb traced along my jaw. “I’ve known for a while.”
“How long?”
He considered it. “Long enough that you don’t need to worry about it.”
I held his gaze. “I’m not worried.”
His expression went quiet in a way it didn’t very often. The version of him that lived underneath the easy grin and the boyish charm and the years of patient, deliberate, infuriating waiting. The real one.
“Good,” he said.