Chapter 19
Maeve
Choosing
Iclimb into his lap, and I come alive instead.
My knees bracket his hips on the edge of the bed, and my hands find his face, and I kiss him the way I have wanted to for seventeen days and would not let myself.
His good hand spreads at the small of my back and drags me flush against him, and I feel the whole hard ridge of him through two thin layers of cotton, already straining, already insistent against the seam of me.
My body answers before my mind does. I am wet before he has touched me anywhere that should make me wet.
"The arm," I manage.
"Forget the arm."
"Lex."
"Maeve. Forget the arm."
I forget the arm.
His good hand finds the hem of my sweater and drags it up one-handed, and I lift my arms, and it is gone.
Cold air. Then his mouth. He pulls my breast into the heat of it, his tongue dragging across the nipple until it draws up tight and aching, and he scrapes his teeth there once, and the pull of it goes straight down through my belly to the place already clenching on nothing.
I grind down against him. The friction is not enough, and it is everything. I do it again.
I shove his shirt up over the hard plane of his stomach, the muscle jumping under my palms, and he lets go of me just long enough to drag it off, and then I have him bare to the waist in the dark — the broad chest, the dark hair, the old scars, the forearms inked black to the wrist, the white bandage the only soft thing on him.
He is enormous like this. I put my mouth to his sternum, where his heart is slamming, and I feel him shudder under it.
I rise off his thighs just enough to strip the rest away, and as the last of it goes, I feel the whole day go with it — the woman in the federal hallway, the woman on the floor of the SUV with his body over hers.
I leave her on the floor of the safe house.
The woman who sinks back down is the one who has decided what she is doing with the next fifty-something days of her life.
I drag his sweatpants down off his hips and he springs free, heavy against his own stomach, and for a second I just look at him.
He is big everywhere, and he is big here.
Thick and long and flushed dark at the crown, the broad head already wet with precum; a bead of it catching the only light in the room.
The length of his jumps once against his abdomen, like even that is straining toward me.
I have not let myself look at him like this, slow and greedy, with just enough lamplight to see exactly what I am about to take.
Then I wrap my hand around him.
He fills my palm and overfills it, thick and hot and impossibly hard, the skin like silk stretched over iron, and I feel him pulse once against my grip.
I stroke him root to tip, slow, and drag my thumb through the slick gathering at the crown, and the sound he makes is low and wrecked, and I feel it land somewhere behind my own navel.
A thick vein runs down the underside of him.
I trace it back down with my thumb. His hips jerk up off the bed before he can stop them, chasing my hand, his good hand fisting in the sheet — this controlled, silent man who gives nothing away, undone by my fist around his cock.
The sight of it pulls a fresh rush of heat between my legs.
I am dripping for him, and he has not even been inside me yet.
I rise up on my knees over him. I notch the broad head of him against me and drag it through the slick, swollen center of me, once, twice, pressing the flat of him to my clit until my thighs shake.
Then I sink down.
The stretch of it. The stretch. He is too much for the first inch and then my body gives and takes him, and I lower myself onto him slow, thick inch by thick inch, feeling every ridge and vein of him drag against my walls as they open around him, the burn going molten the deeper he goes, until I am seated to the root and the head of him is pressed somewhere high and deep that catches my breath and keeps it.
Neither of us moves.
He is so far inside me I can feel my own pulse around him. The room is black and silent, and all I hear is the wet of our slapping skin, the ragged catch of his breathing, and the blood slamming in my ears.
Then I roll my hips.
The drag of him pulling almost out and the slow, thick push of him sliding back in light up every nerve I have.
I ride him slowly. I lift until just the head of him holds me open and sink back to the root, again, again, and on every downstroke the base of him grinds my clit and the head of him drags that high, deep place, and I come apart in increments, my walls fluttering around him, the slick of me coating us both, the sound of it filling the dark.
His good hand spans my hip — guiding, lifting, bringing me down a little harder than slow — and I let him. I brace my hands on his chest, and I take him and give him back, and we find the rhythm of two people who have decided.
I lean toward his ear.
"I would do this again. Every time. Knowing what's coming."
His hand stops. His whole body goes still beneath me, inside me. He is looking at me, and the gold is not the gold of a man receiving a compliment. It is the gold of a man receiving a vow.
Then his good arm bands around my back and pulls me flush to his chest, and the angle changes, and now he is driving up into me from below, deep and slow and relentless, hitting that place on every stroke while the base of him works my clit, and the coil in me winds tighter and tighter and tighter.
"Maeve."
"I know."
"Come here."
I am already gone. It breaks over me in waves, my body clamping down around the thick of him in hard rolling pulses, the orgasm wringing me out from the inside, and I feel him swell thicker, and then he goes over with me, holding me down to the root, spilling hot and deep while he says my name into my hair like it is the last word he has.
I say his.
It comes out broken. The world reduces. The safe house, the brownstone, the city, the man out there who wants me dead, all of it reduces to the place where he is still throbbing inside me, and his heart is going under my cheek, and I have chosen him.
In three sentences. Only one of which I have said out loud.
"Lex."