Chapter 8 #3
I find the spot just below her ear, that sensitive hollow where her pulse is racing, and I bite down gently, then soothe the sting with my tongue.
She shivers violently, her fingers raking into my hair and tugging hard enough to sting.
She tips her head back and exposes the long line of her neck, and I kiss my way down to the collar of her sundress.
I get the strap off one shoulder, then the other, peeling the fabric down until the swells of her breasts are barely contained by black lace. Her nipples tighten beneath the material when I palm her and she gasps, arching into my hands.
She’s reaching for my shirt with hands that aren’t patient. I hear at least one button skitter across the marble floor, and I genuinely could not care less. Her fingers drag down my bare chest, leaving heat in their wake.
“Jake.” My name, broken, and the sound of it nearly takes my knees out.
I get a hand under her dress, up the smooth heat of her thigh, and she arches into it with a curse I’ve wanted to hear out of her disciplined mouth for a long time.
“Fuck.”
I reach the apex of her thighs and find her soaked through the thin cotton of her underwear. I press in once, dragging the fabric against her, and her hips roll forward immediately, chasing the contact like she can’t help it.
“Jake.” There’s a warning in her voice now, desperation underneath it.
“Tell me what you want. Say it, Emilia.”
“Touch me properly. Right now.”
So I shove the fabric aside and give her exactly what she asked for.
She shudders and grabs the edge of the counter behind her like she needs to hold onto something real.
“Tell me to stop,” I say against her mouth, because if she asks, I will.
“Don’t you dare.”
That’s all the permission either of us needs.
It’s fast and graceless and furious. She gets my belt open, shoving the leather aside.
I grab a condom from my wallet.
Emilia catches my wrist before I can roll it on.
“I’m on the pill,” she says, breathless. “And I’m clean.”
I hold her gaze. “Yeah. Me too.”
Something shifts in her expression at that. Trust. Relief. Then she drags me back between her thighs, and I nearly lose my mind.
I roll the condom on anyway, because I need this to last longer than thirty goddamn seconds.
I yank her underwear aside and pull her to the edge of the counter.
I push into her in one slow, deliberate stroke, and we both stop breathing.
She’s so tight, so hot, so perfect around me that my vision blurs for a second. I press my forehead to hers and just stay there. Not moving. Hands shaking on her hips. Because if I move right now this is over in thirty seconds, and I’ve waited too goddamn long for this.
“Move,” she breathes. “Jake. Move.”
“Give me a second.”
“Now.”
So I do.
It’s relentless and furious, exactly what this between us was always going to be.
Her heels dig into my ass, her nails bite into my shoulders, both of us making sounds we’ll be embarrassed about later, guttural and relieved.
The whole world narrows down to the two of us and the impossible relief of having her like this.
“Fuck,” I grind out against her shoulder, my voice completely gone. “You feel…Christ, Emilia, you feel—”
“Don’t stop.” Her mouth is at my ear, her voice low and yearning and nothing like the woman who runs board meetings. “Don’t you dare stop.”
“Not a chance in hell.”
I thrust harder and she gasps and her nails drag down my back and she says against my jaw, breathless, “I’ve thought about this.” The admission sounds like it costs her something. “I’ve thought about this for months.”
That nearly finishes me right there.
“Yeah?” I manage.
“Shut up and—” She loses the sentence entirely when I hit the right angle, her head dropping back, a sound tearing out of her that I’ll hear in my sleep for the rest of my life.
We move together like we’re trying to win something. She meets me stroke for stroke, rolling her hips, chasing her own pleasure with a single-minded intensity that’s so fundamentally Emilia it makes my chest ache.
Her head drops back, breath coming in sharp little gasps, and I get a hand braced flat on the counter beside her hip just to stay upright because she’s unmaking me one second at a time.
Years of wanting her and calling it irritation.
It was never irritation. It was this. The desperate aching need to be inside her, to consume her, to make her feel as undone as she’s made me feel every single day since she walked into the foundation with those sharp suits and that sharper mouth and those soft green eyes that saw right through me from the first minute.
Her eyes open and find mine, and neither of us looks away.
Her pupils are blown wide, her lips swollen and bitten, her hair a wild tangle of dark curls around her flushed face.
She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and I’m not gentle about telling her with my body what I can’t say with words yet.
She comes apart first, sudden and total, her whole body locking up, thighs squeezing hard around my hips, my name breaking in half in her mouth. The feel of her clenching around me, the sound she makes, the way her nails go deep into my shoulders like she’s drowning.
I follow her over the edge before I can do a damn thing to stop it, my hips driving forward one last time, burying myself as deep as I can get while the pleasure crashes through me in waves that hollow me out completely, until there’s nothing left.
For a long moment, neither of us moves.
Just breathing. Her heartbeat slamming against my chest, gradually slowing. The ocean outside, going on like nothing happened. The tropical breeze drifting through the open window, carrying the scent of plumeria and salt and the wreckage of years of pretending this was never going to happen.
Reality lands fast and cold.
Emilia moves first, sliding off the counter, reaching for her dress, and getting the straps back up over her shoulders with hands that are unsteady. She won’t look at me. She’s smoothing the fabric, fixing her hair, putting Executive Director Hart back together piece by careful piece.
“That…” She stops. Starts again. “That wasn’t—”
“Don’t.” My voice comes out harder than I intended. “Don’t stand there and tell me that was nothing.”
She finally looks at me.
I’m standing here in a shirt missing two buttons in my mother’s kitchen, and I should have a joke right now. That’s always been the move; that’s my whole damn thing.
But I’ve got nothing.
“That wasn’t nothing.” I hold her gaze. “Don’t pretend it was.”
She doesn’t argue.
That’s what gets me. She doesn’t argue, doesn’t reach for a rule, doesn’t rebuild the wall. She just stands there in the dark kitchen looking as undone as I feel.
I don’t regret it. That’s the problem. If I did, I could call it a mistake and move forward cleanly. But I don’t, and the way she’s still standing here instead of walking out the door tells me everything.
“Jake,” she says quietly. “What do we—”
“Can I have juice?”
We both freeze.
Poppy stands in the kitchen doorway in her flower sundress, one boot on and one boot missing, rubbing one eye with her fist. She squints into the dim kitchen at the two of us standing too close and breathing too hard, surrounded by the wreckage of dropped containers.
She blinks at Emilia.
Then, with the devastating precision of a half-asleep four-year-old: “Your dress is on the wrong way.”
Emilia looks down. I look at Emilia. Poppy looks at both of us, patient and unbothered, thinking about juice.
And standing here in my mother’s dark kitchen, the woman I’ve wanted longer than I’ve admitted is staring at me with wide, panicked eyes, my daughter blinking sleepily between us.
I understand, with a certainty that drops straight through the floor:
Nothing about this is pretend anymore.
Not one single part of it.