Chapter Eight #3
I planted my hands flat on his chest and started to ride him.
I drove down on him hard, and his hands tightened on my hips, helping me set the punishing rhythm, his gaze never left mine.
Sweat beaded at his temple. A drop traced down to his jaw and dripped onto the worn mattress between us.
The bed creaked under us in a steady, brutal rhythm.
My hair fell across my face and I shoved it back, dragged my nails down his chest in the process, four red lines blooming across the dark ink of his tattoos.
“Veda.” His grip on my hips tightened until I knew I’d have more bruises by morning, and I welcomed every single one of them. “You keep doin’ that, this is gonna be over real fuckin’ fast.”
“You stop fucking me now, you’ll never fuck me again.”
One second I was on top, riding him with my own brutal rhythm. The next he had flipped us, his hands locked around my wrists and pinned above my head against the mattress, his weight settled between my thighs but not inside me anymore.
I arched up off the mattress and bit his shoulder. Not hard enough to break skin, just hard enough to feel his pulse jump under my teeth.
He fucked me with my wrists pinned and his weight pressing me down, and somewhere in the middle of it I lost track of where my body ended and his began.
The bruises on my ribs ached and I didn’t care.
The cut on my palm throbbed and I didn’t care.
The thing in my chest that had been screaming since I watched Carl’s face hit that desk finally had somewhere to go, and I let it out in the sounds Griffin pulled out of me, ragged and ugly and honest.
His mouth found mine. The kiss wasn’t gentle. He used his teeth and tongue, and I bit his lip hard enough to taste copper. He didn’t flinch. He kissed me harder, his cock pulsing impossibly tight within me as he continued to fuck me with brutal shoves of his hips.
When I came it caught me off guard, a wave that started low and rolled up through my whole body until I shook with it.
I choked on a cry and turned my face into his shoulder.
My whole body locked around him and I felt him swear against my neck, his rhythm breaking, and then he was following me down, his groan muffled against my throat as he buried himself deep and held, his cum shooting into me in a hot, sticky explosion.
For a long moment neither of us moved. His chest heaved against mine. His grip on me loosened. He didn’t roll off me right away. He pressed his forehead against mine and just breathed.
“You still alive?”
His breathless laugh rumbled against my chest, low and warm and a little wrecked. “Barely. Pretty sure you killed me, woman.” He dipped his head to kiss me gently.
“Good.” I let my fingers drift through the damp hair at the nape of his neck. “Then I don’t have to worry about you running off.”
“Wasn’t plannin’ on it.” He lifted his head just enough to look at me, and the lazy smile he wore was nothing like the man I’d watched at the fence last night. “Couldn’t walk if I tried.”
He pulled out gently and shifted off me, but he didn’t go far.
He pulled me against his side instead, my head settling on his chest where I could hear his heart hammering.
His arm came around my back, his hand splayed warm against my skin.
The sheet had ended up bunched at the foot of the bed somewhere.
The air was cool against my sweat-damp skin but his body was a furnace, and I burrowed in closer.
For a while we just lay there. His heartbeat slowed under my ear. My breathing evened out.
“Hearing you call me your woman.” I started before I could second-guess myself, my voice barely above a whisper against his chest. “Last night. To that prospect.” His hand stilled on my back.
“It changed something. I don’t know what.
I know you probably didn’t really mean it, at least, not like I took it to mean.
And that’s OK. Just… thank you, Griffin.
” I looked up at him, meeting his gaze. “For this. I needed it. And you.”
“I meant what I told that bastard.” He stroked a strand of hair away from my face. “I’m a pretty fun-loving guy, but I don’t do or say things I don’t mean. You hearin’ me?”
I stared at him, studying him for a hint of bullshit. I didn’t find any. “I hear you.”
“Good.” He pulled me back down against his chest. “Get some sleep.”
“You always this bossy?”
He shrugged. “Not usually. You seem to bring the bossy out in me.”
Should have pulled away and gone back to my own apartment to sort out what the hell had just happened.
Instead I closed my eyes and listened to his heartbeat under my ear and felt the warm weight of his arm across my back, and the exhaustion I’d been holding off for the better part of two days finally caught up to me all at once.
The last thing I remembered before I went under was his hand at the base of my skull, his fingers threading through my damp hair, and his low voice saying something I didn’t quite catch but felt like a promise anyway.