17. Show Me #2
“And realized you were thinking about me. When you were with him.”
She doesn’t answer. Doesn’t need to.
Something dark and possessive hits me like a tidal wave.
I wrap my hands around her ass, lift her into my arms, and take her mouth with mine.
A claiming.
The kiss I’ve been building toward since I was twenty-one and realized that the girl on the phone wasn’t just a voice in the dark. That she was the person who saw me more clearly than anyone and chose to stay. To fight. For me.
“Four years, baby,” I growl against her lips. “You’ve been wearing my number for four years and you didn’t tell me?”
“You wouldn’t—” She gasps as I kiss down her neck. “You kept pushing me away.”
“Not anymore.” My hands slide up her sides, under her top, palms flat against the warm skin of her back. “You’re mine, Emma.”
I start down the hallway because the bedroom is down the hallway and I’m done with counters and doors and truck cabs and every insufficient surface I’ve imagined taking her on.
We make it four steps before she breaks the kiss. Just long enough to pull her sweater over her head.
I pause.
Lose the ability to form strategies because Emma’s legs are wrapped around my waist and she’s only in leggings and a black fucking bra looking at me like I’m the answer to a question she’s been asking her entire life.
“You stopped,” she observes.
“I’m memorizing. ”
“You’ve had years to memorize.”
“Not like this.” I brace her against the wall, trace the line of her collarbone with my index finger as goosebumps rise. “Not when I’m allowed to touch.”
Her breath catches. I store the sound away with all the others: the laugh, the moan against my palm on Christmas Eve, the cry I swallowed when she finished. A collection I plan to spend the rest of the night expanding.
“Bedroom,” she urges.
“Not yet.”
“Luke—”
“I told you on Christmas Eve.” I lower my mouth to her shoulder. Press my lips to the curve of it. Feel her shiver. “I want to take my time with you.” My mouth moves to her collarbone. Her neck. Lower where I feel her pulse stutter and race. “And I intend to keep that promise.”
She exhales sharply when my teeth graze the lace of her bra. Her hands grip my shoulders—steadying herself or holding on, I’m not sure. I’m not sure she knows either.
Finally, finally, I start walking again. Drop her onto my mattress like a queen arriving at her throne. She looks up at me with those dark eyes that have been dismantling my defenses since forever.
Then I kneel before her.
Not to pray, though what I’m feeling borders on religious. I kneel between her legs on the floor of my bedroom and take her face in my hands.
“I need you to know something,” I tell her, and my voice is doing that octave drop thing that I’ve never been able to control around her. “Before we do this. Before anything else happens tonight.”
“Okay.” Barely a whisper.
“Every scenario I imagined—and I’ve imagined a lot, Emma, an embarrassing amount—” She almost smiles. “None of them included knowing you’d had my number on your skin. That you chose me before I chose myself.”
Her eyes are shining.
“So I need you to understand that what happens next isn’t just…
” I press my forehead to hers. Breathe her in.
Seaside and cold air and something warmer underneath, something that’s just her .
“It’s not just sex. It’s not just the promise.
It’s me trying to deserve the fact that you never stopped believing in me. Even when I gave you every reason to. ”
A tear slips down her cheek. This warrior who claims she doesn’t cry.
I catch it with my thumb.
“Now,” I murmur against her mouth. “Lie back.”
She does.
“Good girl.”
I can’t see her face, but I swear I can hear her smile.
Good girl.
I pull the leggings down slow. Deliberately. Revealing the tattoo inch by inch—the Chinese characters first, then the Roman numerals, then the full sweep of her hip, her thigh, her legs that have powered her across ice for fifteen years and are now trembling under my hands.
I press my lips to the tattoo.
She gasps. Her hand finds my hair.
I trace the characters with my tongue. Slow. Tasting skin and the salt-sweet warmth of her body. Feeling her hips shift toward me, her fingers tighten in my hair, her breathing fracture into uneven pieces.
“Luke.”
“Shh.” I move from the tattoo to the inside of her hip bone. Then lower. Pressing kisses down the crease of her thigh, avoiding the place she wants me most because I meant what I said. I’m taking my time.
“You’re torturing me.” Her voice is wrecked. Beautiful.
“Oh, baby. I’m worshipping you.”
“Does worship involve me losing my mind because—”
I press my mouth to the lace covering her sweet-as-sin cunt and she stops talking. Moans instead.
“Tell me what you want.” I hook my fingers into the waistband. Wait. Because even now I need her to choose this. To say it out loud.
“You know what I want.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
Her eyes find mine from where she’s lying back, hair splayed across my comforter, chest rising and falling in quick, shallow breaths. She looks wrecked and wanting and so achingly perfect that the distance between what I deserve and what I have has never felt wider or less relevant.
“I want your mouth on me.” No hesitation. No flinch. Pure Emma. “I’ve wanted it for years and if you don’t—”
I pull the fabric down. Press my mouth against her, and she arches off the bed with a sound that fills the room and rewrites every fantasy I’ve ever had. Because none of them—not a single one, across thousands of hours of wanting—captured this .
The taste of her. The sound of her. The way her thighs bracket my head and her hand in my hair goes from guiding to gripping to desperate as I find what makes her unravel.
Give it to her relentlessly, ruthlessly, with every ounce of focus and precision I’ve applied to hockey and coaching and film study.
All of it repurposed for the singular goal of making Emma Cole come apart on my tongue.
“Oh my God—” Her back arches. “Right there—don’t stop.”
I don’t stop. I taste her like a man who just discovered ice cream, lapping as it falls over the cone.
Drag my tongue down to her ass while pushing two fingers inside her wet, beautiful slit.
Need every inch of her. Want to lick, to savor, to appreciate every part of Emma in ways I’ve dreamed about for years.
“Luke.”
“That’s right, baby,” I breathe against her. “That’s the name you use.”
Her thighs are shaking. Her hand in my hair has gone from pulling to simply holding on, like I’m the only fixed point in a world that’s tilting. The sounds she’s making have lost language, just breath and need and my name, repeated like an incantation.
“Look at me, Emma. Watch what I’m doing to you.”
She does. Lifts her head from the pillow, dark hair a mess, eyes almost black, and finds my gaze while I’m between her legs.
The eye contact hits us both. I see the intimacy of it land on her, the rawness, the fact that I’m watching her face while taking her apart.
Pleasure turns to something deeper. Something that looks a lot like trust.
“That’s it,” I murmur into her. “Just like that. Give me number one of the night, baby.”
She does.
Her entire body convulsing around my face, my fingers, my head. Her cum gushing down my throat as I drink like a man dying of thirst.
I don’t stop. Don’t move until her body squirms beneath my touch.
“Sensitive. Luke, I’m…”
Gently I shift, staring at the tattoo on her hip, pussy still dripping in front of me, chocolate eyes staring down at me with sated amusement.
I rest my forehead against her thigh, trying to catch my breath.
My chin is wet. She’s trembling.
I wipe at my face then lick my fingers dry.
Yeah, I’m never going to get tired of that taste.
“Luke.”
I meet her gaze again. Dazed and somehow still wanting more .
“That’s two,” I tell her.
“Two?”
“Two orgasms.” I kiss the tattoo again. “I’ve got four years to make up for, Em. We’re just getting started.”
She laughs, breathless. “You’re insane.”
“You tattooed my number on your body. I’m just responding appropriately.”
I press another kiss to the soft skin of her stomach as I work my way up her body, kissing every inch I’ve imagined.
By the time I reach her mouth, she’s boneless and flushed and looking at me with an expression I haven’t earned but am going to spend the rest of my life trying to.
Happy New Year, indeed.