11. Sebastian
— ? —
Sebastian
It’s a flight and a borrowed back office two states away to reach the one person finally willing to say out loud what my brother has really been doing. A full day in airports and depositions with my brother’s wife, both of us pretending the only thing between us is the work.
By the time we’re done, our flight is already boarding.
We miss it by three minutes.
The plane pulls away from the gate while Noelle stands beside me, laptop bag over her shoulder, her expression caught somewhere between exhaustion and disbelief.
“Well,” she says. “That’s inconvenient.”
“There’s another flight at 6:00 a.m.”
“That’s eight hours from now.”
“I’m aware.”
The next forty-five minutes disappear into trying to find a hotel room. Conference season, apparently. The entire city is booked solid with pharmaceutical reps and insurance salesmen, every decent hotel displaying cheerful NO VACANCY signs.
The only rooms available are at a property so far off-brand it doesn’t even have a star rating. A motor lodge on the outskirts of the city, the kind of place that accepts cash and doesn’t ask questions.
Two rooms left. Adjoining. With a connecting door that the front desk clerk admits “sticks sometimes.”
“This is fine,” Noelle says, but her voice is tight.
“It’s one night.”
“I know.”
“The door has a latch.”
“I know.”
Things between us have been tense since the car. Three days of careful distance, of pretending nothing happened, of acting like I didn’t have her in my lap with my tongue in her mouth while my brother watched.
We check in separately, like that means anything.
My room is exactly as depressing as expected. Thin carpet, thinner walls, a bedspread that’s seen better decades. The connecting door is flimsy, decorative, really. A polite suggestion rather than an actual barrier.
The latch catches when I try it, but barely. One good push would send it swinging open.
Kissing her was a mistake.
That knowledge has been turning over and over in my head for three days now, a problem without a solution. She’s still technically married. She’s my brother’s wife. And in a few weeks, if everything goes according to plan, she’s going to help me destroy my family’s company.
This is not the time to develop feelings.
The shower is small and the water pressure is pathetic, but it goes on anyway. Cold, at first. Trying to shock some sense back into my body.
It doesn’t work.
Every time my eyes close, her face appears. The way she looked at me in the car, all that softness and understanding. The way her mouth tasted when I finally kissed her. The sound she made when she settled into my lap, that breathy little moan that went straight to my cock.
Three days of being half-hard. Three days of cold showers and clenched fists and pretending everything is fine.
Restraint gives up somewhere around the five-minute mark.
My hand wraps around myself, the other arm bracing against the tile wall. The relief is immediate, the pressure, the friction, everything I’ve been denying myself since that night in the car.
Root canals. Tax season. My mother’s face at Christmas dinner.
The distraction techniques fail immediately.
Noelle fills my head completely. The weight of her body against mine. The way her dress rode up her thighs when she straddled me. What would have happened if Dorian hadn’t interrupted, if I’d slid my hand between her legs and found out how wet she was for me.
She would have been wet. I’m certain of it.
The fantasy builds itself without permission: pushing her panties aside in that car, feeling her slick and hot against my fingers. The sounds she’d make as I worked her open, those breathy moans getting louder, needier. Her hips rocking against my hand while she begged for more.
“Fuck,” I groan, my hand moving faster.
The images keep coming. Pulling her dress up to her waist. Freeing myself from my pants. Sinking into her right there in the front seat while the city moved past outside, oblivious.
She’d be tight. She’d cling to me as I fucked her, her nails digging into my shoulders, her mouth open against my neck. “Sebastian,” she’d moan. “Please. Don’t stop.”
I wouldn’t stop. I’d fuck her until she came apart around me, until she was shaking and crying my name, until-
“Noelle-”
Her name tears out of me as I come, hard enough that my vision whites out at the edges. My whole body shudders, release pulsing through me in waves that seem to go on forever.
The groan gets stifled against my arm. The walls are thin. She’s fifteen feet away.
When breathing becomes possible again, my forehead presses against the cool tile while water runs over my back.
This is a problem.
This is a very, very serious problem.
The shower runs longer than it should, time spent trying to compose myself. Trying to become Sebastian Sterling again, the cold and the distance back in place.
When I finally step out, towel wrapped around my waist, she’s standing in the connecting doorway.
“Your door swung open,” she says, and her face is the color of a ripe tomato. Her eyes dart down to my chest, then lower, then snap back up to my face like she’s been burned.
That answers my question, then. She saw.
“The latch is broken.”
“I noticed.”
“Did you enjoy the show?”
The words come out rough, challenging. Part of me wants her to run. Part of me wants her to stay. Most of me just wants to stop feeling like I’m coming apart at the seams every time she’s in the same room.
She doesn’t run.
She’s wearing a t-shirt and sleep shorts, her hair wet from her own shower, her face scrubbed clean of makeup. Exhausted and beautiful and like the worst decision I’ve ever wanted to make.
“You should go back to your room,” I say.
“Probably.”
She doesn’t move.
“Noelle.”
“I know.” She leans against the doorframe, the position pulling her t-shirt tight across her breasts. “I know this is complicated. I know the timing is terrible. I know you probably have seventeen logical reasons why this is a bad idea.”
“I have at least twenty.”
“But?”
The word hangs between us.
“But I haven’t stopped thinking about you since-” One step toward her, then a hard stop, cutting off the sentence before too much spills out. “Every time you walk into a room, I forget what I was doing. When you argued with that contractor today, I wanted to-”
“Wanted to what?”
“Things I shouldn’t want.”
She pushes off from the doorframe. Closes the distance between us. Her hand comes up to rest on my chest, right over my heart, and she must feel how fast it’s beating.
“What if I want them too?”
“Then we’re both idiots.”
My eyes close. A deep breath. Hating myself for what comes next.
“Goodnight, Noelle.”
The words cost everything.
“Goodnight,” she whispers.
Then she smiles, this soft, secret thing, and rises on her toes to press a kiss to my mouth. Brief. Fleeting. Just enough to make me groan against her lips.
She pulls back before I can grab her, already retreating through the connecting door with a low chuckle.
“Sleep well, Sebastian.”
The door closes behind her.
I stand there, dripping onto the cheap carpet, wondering if I’m losing my mind.
Thirty seconds pass.
Sixty.
Twenty logical reasons why this is a terrible idea run through my head.
None of them matter.
The connecting door swings open under my hand, and she’s sitting on the edge of her bed, still smiling, like she was waiting for exactly this. Her eyes go wide when she sees me.
“What-”
Three steps cross the room. My hands cup her face. The question gets kissed right off her lips.
She responds immediately, her mouth opening under mine, her fingers clutching at my shoulders. The kiss turns desperate, consuming, all the tension of the past three days catching fire at once.
“I can’t-” she gasps between kisses. “I can’t think when you-”
“Then don’t think.”
I push her back onto the bed and follow her down, dragging the towel off myself because waiting is no longer something my body knows how to do. Her hand finds my cock and strokes once, and the sound that comes out of me isn’t human.
“Fuck, Noelle-”
“I’ve been thinking about this.” Her voice is wrecked, her hand still working me. “Since the car. Since before the car. I can’t stop.”
“I know.” I tear her t-shirt up over her head. No bra. Just bare skin and the prettiest tits I have ever had my hands on, and I get my mouth on one and bite until she cries out and her spine comes off the mattress.
“Sebastian, please-”
I shove her sleep shorts down her legs, her underwear with them, and the second I get a hand between her thighs she is drenched, slick and hot and already clenching around nothing.
“Look how wet you are.” I drag two fingers through it and push them into her and feel her grip them. “You have been soaked this whole time. Sitting fifteen feet away with your hand probably down your own shorts.”
“Yes,” she gasps, shameless, riding my hand. “Just like you in that shower.”
That is the end of whatever patience I had left.
I do not go slow. I do not draw it out. I notch against her and push in hard, all of me at once, and she takes it with a broken cry that goes straight to the base of my spine.
“Christ.” I have to stop, jaw locked, buried to the root. She is gripping me so tight it is almost too much. “You feel that. That is what you have done to me for three days.”
“Move,” she begs. “Please, please move.”
I give her exactly what she is begging for.
Hard, fast, no rhythm to speak of, just the need to get deeper, the headboard cracking against the wall on every thrust. She hooks a leg around me and rakes her nails down my back hard enough to break skin and I want the marks, I want proof tomorrow that this was real.
“Harder,” she demands. “Sebastian, fuck me harder-”
I get a hand under her and tilt her hips up and pound into her, the new angle dragging a scream out of her that the thin walls do nothing to hide.
“Let them hear you,” I growl against her throat. “I want the whole place to know whose name you are screaming.”
“Yours-” Her whole body starts to shake. “Oh God, I am-”
“Do it. Come on my cock. Right now.”
She breaks apart around me, clenching so hard I lose the last of my control. I drive in deep and let go with a groan torn out of my chest, holding her shaking body against mine while it goes on and on.
We collapse together, both of us slick with sweat, tangled in the cheap sheets.
I don’t let go of her.
I can’t.
Later, after we’ve caught our breath, after I’ve cleaned us both up, after we’ve rearranged ourselves into something resembling human beings, she traces patterns on my chest with her fingertips.
“What happens now?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not very reassuring.”
“I’m not very reassuring.” I pull her closer, tucking her head under my chin. “But I’m not going anywhere.”
“Even when this gets complicated?”
“It’s already complicated.” A kiss presses into her hair. “I don’t care.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Then: “I wasn’t expecting this.”
“Neither was I.”
“I came here to destroy your family.”
“Technically, you came here to destroy my brother. I’m helping with that part.”
She laughs, soft and surprised. “That’s true. We’re partners in destruction.”
“Among other things, apparently.”
We don’t sleep.
Not really.
We talk about everything except the thing we’re actually doing. We talk about our families, her distant mother, my overbearing one. Her absent father, my reckless one. All the ways we were shaped by people who didn’t know how to love us properly.
And when we’re not talking, we’re learning each other.
The spot behind her ear that makes her shiver. The way she gasps when I bite her hip. How she sounds when she comes, desperate and broken and beautiful.
By the time the sun comes up, I know her body better than I know my own.
And I know, with terrifying certainty, that I’m in far deeper than I ever intended to be.