Chapter 47 Genevieve
Genevieve
He looks like a god in this light.
The blue glow from the waterfall catches the planes of his chest, the ridges of muscle that tense when I drag my nails down his stomach, the scars that map a life I’m still learning the full shape of.
Water mists across his skin, and his hair is damp and pushed back from his face, and his eyes are dark and focused on me with an intensity that makes my blood hum.
I’m on my knees on the smooth rock, and his hands are in my hair, gentle, not pushing, and his chest is rising and falling like he’s already coming undone and I haven’t even touched him yet.
I pull the waistband of his sweats down, and he helps, shoving them past his hips.
He’s hard, thick and straining, and the sight of him makes my mouth water and my core clench around nothing.
I wrap my hand around him first. Feeling the weight of him, the heat, the way his whole body tenses when my thumb drags through the wet leaking from the tip.
“Genevieve.”
I look up at him through my lashes, and his fingers tighten in my hair.
“You’re torturing me.”
I take him into my mouth.
The sound he makes isn’t human. It reverberates off the walls and gets swallowed by the waterfall, and his head drops back, his throat exposed, every tendon visible. His hips jerk forward, just once, before he catches himself and goes still, letting me set the pace.
I take my time with him. Slow strokes with my tongue, lips sealed around him, one hand working what I can’t reach.
I learn him the way he learns me, by paying attention.
The rhythm that makes his breath stutter.
The pressure that makes his fingers twist in my hair.
The spot just beneath the head where the lightest flick of my tongue makes his thighs shake.
“Fuck. Your mouth. Jesus Christ.”
I pull back just enough to swirl my tongue around the tip, tasting the salt of him, and then take him deep again, hollowing my cheeks. His hand cups the back of my head, still gentle, still not pushing, but his fingers are trembling and I can feel the restraint coiled in every muscle of his body.
He’s holding back. He always holds back. Even now, even here, even when it’s just us and the waterfall and no one left to perform for, Lance holds back because somewhere deep in the wiring of him, he believes he doesn’t deserve to take what he wants.
I pull off with a wet sound that echoes obscenely in the alcove and look up at him.
“Stop holding back.”
His eyes are black. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You won’t.”
“Genevieve.”
“I trust you.” I press a kiss to his hip bone, right above the scar from a fight he’s never told me about. “I’ve always trusted you. Now let me have you. All of you. Not the version you think I can handle.”
The restraint dissolves, like ice in heat.
His hand tightens in my hair.
I take him back into my mouth, and this time he moves with me. Shallow thrusts that match the rhythm I’ve set, his hips rolling forward, and the sounds falling out of him are beautiful. I moan around him, and the vibration makes his body jolt.
“Like that,” he rasps. “God, just like that.”
I relax my throat and take him deeper, and his hand fists in my hair and he pulls, moaning so loud it fills the alcove, drowning out even the waterfall for one perfect second.
His thighs are shaking. His breathing is uneven. He’s getting close. He swells against my tongue, and his hips lose their rhythm. The tip of him hits the back of my throat, and I swallow him down greedily.
He pulls away. Slides out of my mouth with a curse, his chest heaving.
“Not like this.” He pulls me to my feet, his hands urgent on my arms, and kisses me hard. He can taste himself on my tongue and he doesn’t care, just kisses me deeper, his palms cradling my face. “I want to be inside you. I need to be inside you.”
“Then take what you need.”
He lifts me like I weigh nothing. And he always makes me feel tiny, but our size difference is never as obvious as when he’s got me like this, with my legs wrapped around him, and his entire body covering mine.
My back hits the rock wall, and the stone is cool and smooth against my bare skin, and he’s hot against my front, and the contrast makes me gasp.
He’s pressed against me, hard and slick, and every nerve ending in my body is screaming.
He positions himself at my entrance and pauses. Forehead pressed to mine. Eyes locked on mine. Our breath mingling in the cold air between us.
“I love you,” he says.
It’s not the first time he’s said it. But it’s the first time he’s said it here, in this place that holds the ghosts of where it all started with us, with the waterfall roaring and his body trembling against mine. The words sounds different here. It sounds like something ancient and unbreakable.
“I love you, too,” I say back. “Now stop talking.”
He pushes inside me in one slow, hard stroke.
My head falls against the rock, and my mouth opens on a moan I couldn’t contain if I tried. He fills me completely, stretching me, and the feeling of him inside me still undoes me every time. Like my body was designed to hold him.
He doesn’t move. He stays buried deep, his face in my neck, his breath hot against my skin, and his heart hammering against my chest.
“You feel…” He exhales, shaky. “Every time. Every fucking time, it’s like the first time.”
I tighten around him deliberately, and he hisses through his teeth.
“Do that again and this is going to be embarrassingly short.”
“Then you’d better make it count.”
He pulls back slowly, the drag of him making my toes curl, and then snaps his hips forward.
Hard. The force of it pushes me up the wall, and I cry out, my fingers digging into his shoulders.
He does it again. And again. Setting a rhythm that’s deep and relentless, each thrust driving into me with the kind of precision that reminds me this man knows how to use his body like a weapon.
The sounds are obscene. Skin against skin, wet and loud, echoing off the stone. My moans bouncing off the alcove walls. His low groans vibrating against my throat where his mouth is pressed, teeth scraping.
“Harder,” I manage. “Please.”
He grips my thighs tighter and drives into me so deep I see stars.
My back scrapes against the rock and I don’t care, can’t care, because every nerve in my body is lit up and the only thing that exists is him inside me and the roar of the water and his voice in my ear telling me I’m perfect, I’m his, I’m everything.
“You take me so well,” he says against my throat, and the praise makes me clench around him. He groans. “That’s it. Do that again.”
I do, tightening around him with every thrust, and his rhythm falters for a second before he picks it back up, harder. His hand slides between us and finds my clit, and the first press of his thumb makes my vision white out at the edges.
“I can feel how close you are,” he says. “You’re squeezing me so tight.”
“Don’t stop.” I’m begging and I don’t care. “Please don’t stop.”
“Never.” He circles my clit in time with his thrusts, fast and precise, and the pressure builds so quickly it’s almost violent, coiling tighter and tighter at the base of my spine. “Give it to me. I want to feel you come.”
His free hand comes up and wraps around my throat.
The orgasm hits me like a wave. Not a slow build this time but a detonation.
I shatter around him, clenching hard, my whole body locking up as it tears through me.
I scream his name, and the waterfall catches it and holds it, and he keeps moving, keeps driving into me through every pulse and clench, extending it until I’m shaking so hard I can barely hold on.
“That’s my girl,” he breathes. “There you go.”
He’s close. His thrusts go erratic, tension coils through his arms, and his breath fractures against my neck.
“Come for me,” I whisper against his ear. “Let go, Lance. I’ve got you.”
He buries himself deep and stills, and the sound he makes when he comes is broken and raw and the most honest thing I’ve ever heard.
My name, torn out of him like it’s the only word left in his vocabulary.
He shudders against me, his face pressed into my neck, his arms shaking where they hold me up.
And I hold him through it. My hands in his hair, my legs wrapped tight, my mouth pressing kisses to his temple, his cheekbone, the shell of his ear.
He doesn’t pull away immediately. He stays. Forehead against my shoulder, still inside me, our breathing melding together. The waterfall still roars. The mist settles on our skin. And for a long, suspended moment, the world is just this. Two people behind a wall of water, holding each other up.
A knight and his queen.
“Genevieve.”
“Hmm.”
“I think the Lady of the Lake might be jealous.”
I laugh so hard my head tips back and hits the rock, and the pain makes me laugh harder, and he’s laughing, too, real laughter, the kind that crinkles the corners of his eyes and shows his teeth and makes him look like the boy he might have been if the world had been kinder.
He lowers me down slowly, and my legs are jelly, and when my feet touch the ground, I wobble and he catches me with a hand on my waist.
“Steady.”
“Your fault.”
We dress slowly. Or try to. He keeps pulling me back to kiss me, his hands finding excuses to touch my skin before I can cover it, and I keep letting him because I’m incapable of denying this man anything and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise, even when it’s freezing outside.
When we’re mostly clothed, he sits down on the rock floor and pulls me into his lap. I curl against his chest, my head tucked under his chin, and listen to his heartbeat slow down.
The waterfall sounds different from this angle. Softer.
“I talked to Paxton yesterday,” he says after a while.
“About?”
“I want to start something. Here in Rosebrook. A training program for kids. Self-defense, but not just that. Discipline. Confidence. The stuff I taught Percy, minus the part where it almost got him killed.”
“Lance, that sounds amazing.”
“It’s not a big deal.”
“It is a big deal. It’s a huge deal.”
“It’s just an idea.”
“It’s a perfect idea.” I press my hand to his cheek. “You’re good at this. You’re good at teaching people how to be strong. You did it for Percy. You did it for me.”
“Pax said he’d fund it. Set it up through WayMont’s community outreach. I’d run the program.”
“Of course he did. Because it’s brilliant.”
His ears go red. Lance Calloway, who has bled in front of hundreds of people and never flinched, is blushing because I told him his idea is brilliant.
“It’s not—”
“If you say ‘it’s not a big deal’ one more time, I’m throwing you in that waterfall.”
He grins. “You could try.”
“I landed a clean hit on you this morning. Don’t test me.”
He pulls me closer, and I settle back against his chest, and we sit there behind the falls, in that ethereal blue light, with Cavall barking happily from the other side of the alcove.
“Hey, Half-Pint.”
“Hmm.”
“Did you know Dante’s head chef walked out last week?”
I go still. “Dante’s? As in the restaurant Paxton owns?”
“That’s the one. He said to tell you the job’s yours if you want it.”
My heart flips. “He doesn’t have to do that. I don’t need charity, I can interview somewhere, or figure something out.”
“It’s not charity. He tasted your cassoulet. Said, and I quote, ‘If she can cook like that here, imagine what she’d do with a real kitchen.’”
“Paxton ate my cassoulet?”
“I may or may not have given him some to try.”
My heart soars, and I press my face into his chest and make a sound that’s somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
Head chef. My own kitchen. My own menu. In a town that tried to destroy me and failed.
“Hey.” He tips my chin up with one finger. “Because you’re the best chef I’ve ever met, and your coq au vin made a grown man cry.”
“My dad cries at his own coq au vin, so I’m not sure that counts.”
“I was talking about me.”
Laughing, I kiss him.
“Is that a yes?” he asks against my lips.
“It’s a hell yes.”
He smiles.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.
Seven seconds for my seven minutes.
And I know I’ll see Lance Calloway at the end of every single one.
From Cage Fights to Court Dates: The Fall of Rosebrook’s Prince
If you’ve been living under a rock (or, say, under a certain tavern), let us catch you up.
Arthur Penngrove, beloved son of Mayor Franklin Penngrove and the so-called People’s Prince of Rosebrook, was arrested at a warehouse in Boston as part of a federal RICO operation that has left this town reeling.
The charges? Conspiracy, racketeering, and—brace yourselves—operating an underground fighting ring. Yes. That kind.
The Round Table Tavern, our charming HillPoint institution where we all pretended the beer was better than it was, has been shuttered indefinitely after FBI agents raided the building and discovered an elaborate subterranean facility beneath it.
The Rag’s sources describe a “full-scale arena” with seating, a bar, and a cage. We wish we were making this up.
Mayor Penngrove has resigned, effective immediately, just weeks after winning reelection. His office released a statement calling the situation “a family matter” and asking for privacy. We’re giving him exactly as much privacy as he gave the WayMont Compact, which is to say: none.
An emergency session of the town council will determine interim leadership, but insiders are already whispering about a special election.
And in a town where the mayor’s seat has been a Calloway funded revolving door for generations?
Let’s just say the field is wide open for the first time since the WayMont Compact was signed.
But here’s where it gets interesting.
Arthur Penngrove isn’t fighting the charges. Sources close to the case say he’s cooperating fully, providing testimony that multiple participants in the underground operation were coerced, trafficked, and held against their will. He is, by all accounts, falling on his sword.
For whom? We have our theories.
Meanwhile, Lance Calloway has been cleared of all involvement.
Federal prosecutors classified Lance as a “cooperating victim” under the trafficking statutes, and his attorney (one Leo DeGrance of Boston, who also happens to be the father of a certain bartender we’ve been tracking) confirmed no charges will be filed.
Benjamin Voltaire’s case is currently ongoing, and you know that we’ll be front row at his trial. The real question is: Will his parents?
As for Brutus and Cassandra Troy, the sibling duo allegedly behind Badon Hill’s sprawling criminal network? Currently at large. The FBI has issued a federal warrant, and sources say the manhunt extends well beyond state lines.
The Rag will be watching. We always are.
#RoundTableRaided #PenngroveDown #CallowayCrisis #WhoAreTheTroys #RosebrookRagExclusive