Chapter 9 Angelina
nine
Angelina
Iclose the distance between us and kiss him.
Not soft. Not tentative. I grab the front of his shirt and pull him up from the chair, and his hands finally leave the desk to catch my waist, and I'm kissing him like I'm drowning and he's air.
He lets me lead. Lets me take. His mouth opens under mine and I taste coffee and want and something darker I don't have a name for, something that's been waiting twelve years for this exact moment.
You're kissing your stalker. The man who watched you through cameras. The man who left you.
I kiss him harder.
When I pull back, we're both breathing hard and his hands are on my hips, light, not gripping, ready to release if I flinch. Ready to let me go if I change my mind.
I don't flinch. I don't change my mind.
"Not here," I say, and my voice comes out rougher than I expect, scraped raw by need I've been suppressing for days. "Chesca's room shares a wall with this one."
He understands immediately. The guest room at the far end of the hall, far enough that an eight-year-old won't hear anything she shouldn't.
I turn and walk toward the door without taking his hand, without looking back. The surveillance room disappears behind me with all those monitors showing empty rooms, my life reduced to pixels, and I keep walking because if I stop, if I think, I'll remember every reason this is insane.
I'm leading my stalker to his bedroom. I should have called the police earlier. But I'm wet and aching and if he doesn't touch me in the next sixty seconds I might actually lose my mind.
Nonna Rosa would be horrified. Or maybe she'd laugh. "Tesoro, the heart wants what it wants. The body wants it faster."
The guest room door opens under my palm and I walk through, leaving it open behind me.
An invitation. A choice. His choice now.
His footsteps follow. I hear them even though he moves quietly, feel the slight shift in air pressure as he enters the room behind me. I knew they would. I knew he'd follow.
The door clicks shut and he walks by me.
I don't give him time to think, either. My palms hit his chest and I shove hard, sending him backward onto the mattress with a grunt of surprise, and I'm already climbing over him with my knees bracketing his hips before he can recover.
I'm in control. I need to be in control.
I kiss him again, hard and taking. My fingers find the hem of his shirt and drag it up, and he helps by sitting up enough to pull it over his head, and then my hands are on his bare shoulders, his chest, the ridges of muscle I've been pretending not to notice for five days.
His hands find my waist. Slide up my sides. My shirt disappears somewhere—when did that happen?— and his fingers move down again, settling on my hips with his thumbs pressing into the hollows above my hipbones, curving around to my lower back—
The angle. The way he grips.
The way Adrian used to grab me before—
My whole body goes rigid and my lungs seize. Everything locks.
I'm off him before I consciously decide to move, bare feet hitting the floor as I stumble backward, standing there in nothing but my jeans with my arms crossing over my bare chest.
Eight years. Three therapists. Homework assignments I did in the dark, crying, trying to make my body remember what wanting felt like instead of what fear felt like.
And here you are. Broken. Still broken.
Cole is on his feet immediately with his hands raised and palms out. He doesn't come toward me. He sidesteps, putting distance between us, moving toward the door like he's giving me the whole room to breathe in.
"Nothing else needs to happen."
His voice is steady and calm with no frustration, no disappointment, no hint of you started this or what's wrong with you now. "I'll be in the monitoring room if you need anything."
He's hard. I can see it straining against his pants, obvious and undeniable, and he's still leaving. He's walking away from what I offered because I flinched, because my body betrayed me, because I'm too damaged to—
His hand reaches for the doorknob.
"Wait."
The word tears out of me, wrecked and raw, and I barely recognize my own voice.
Cole stops with his hand on the doorknob, knuckles white against the brass. He doesn't turn around, doesn't move, just waits there giving me space to take it back, to change my mind, to remember all the reasons this is a terrible idea.
I should let him go, lock myself in my room and pretend the last ten minutes didn't happen. I could call my therapist in the morning and schedule an emergency session. I can do anything except what I'm about to do.
"Come back."
Now he turns. His eyes find mine, dark and searching. But he doesn't move toward me. Doesn't close the distance. Just stands there, shirtless and hard and waiting for me to decide.
He's making me choose. Again. Always making me choose, always putting the power in my hands even when my hands are shaking.
My feet carry me across the carpet before I can overthink it. One step. Two. Three. Until I'm standing in front of him, close enough to feel the heat radiating off his bare skin.
I kiss him, softer this time. Real. My hands flatten against his chest and I feel his heart pounding beneath my palms, fast and hard, proof that he's not as controlled as he pretends to be.
He pulls back.
"Tell me what you want."
Like it's simple. Like I can just say the words out loud. Like I haven't spent eight years trying to forget that I ever wanted anything at all.
I try to kiss him again, rising onto my toes to chase his mouth, but his hands come up to frame my face with his thumbs pressing gently against my cheekbones, holding me still.
"Words, Angelina." His voice is rough but patient, strained but steady. "I need your words."
He's making me own this. Making me own wanting him. Making me say it out loud so I can't pretend later that it just happened, that I got swept away, that I wasn't a full participant in my own destruction.
Bastard. Beautiful, infuriating bastard.
Heat floods my cheeks. Eight years of therapy, of homework assignments, of vibrators prescribed like medicine. Touch your body, Angelina, learn what you like, reclaim your pleasure. And I threw them all away when they couldn't fix what Adrian broke.
"I want you to touch me."
"Where?"
This asshole. This stalking, possessive asshole. And I'm soaked.
"Everywhere." The word comes out strangled, desperate. "Just—everywhere."
His mouth finds my neck, open and hot, trailing down to my collarbone in a path that makes my knees threaten to buckle. His hands slide from my face to my shoulders, my arms, my waist, every movement deliberate and careful, every touch asking a question before it lands.
"Here?" His lips brush the curve of my breast, warm breath teasing my nipple.
"Yes."
His hands cup me gently, thumbs brushing over my nipples, and my back arches into him before I can stop it. When his mouth closes over one peak and his tongue flicks against the sensitive flesh, I gasp and my fingers dig into his shoulders hard enough to leave marks.
I hate him. I hate that he's the one who makes me feel this. I hate that my body was waiting for him all along, like the last eight years were just a holding pattern until he came back.
He lowers me onto the bed with more care than I would expect, settling me against the pillows like I'm something precious instead of something broken. Then he kneels between my thighs, and his fingers hook into the waistband of my shorts, pausing there with a question in his eyes.
"Can I taste you?"
My breath catches. His face lowers until it's inches from my pussy, waiting. Patient. Like he has all the time in the world.
"Yes."
His mouth descends, and I'm already close.
Eight years of nothing. Eight years of numbness and now this — his tongue dragging slow and deliberate across my pussy, circling my clit with maddening precision, reading my body like he's spent years studying exactly how to take me apart.
Maybe he has. Maybe those cameras showed him more than I thought.
His tongue flicks against my clit and every coherent thought dissolves.
My hips buck off the mattress but he pins me down with one forearm across my stomach, holding me in place while his mouth works me higher and higher toward something I haven't felt in so long I'd almost forgotten what it was like to want it.
The edge rushes toward me and I'm reaching for it, desperate and aching, so close I can taste it—
He pulls back.
"Cole—" The word tears out of me, half sob and half snarl. My thighs are shaking around his head. "Don't stop. Please don't—"
"Tell me what you want." His breath ghosts over my soaked pussy, hot and maddening, and I could murder him for making me say it again.
Bastard. Fucking bastard. Making me beg when I'm already—
"Inside me." I barely recognize my own voice, raw and wrecked and desperate. "Now. I need you inside me, please, I can't—"
He doesn't make me beg twice.
He moves up the bed and settles beside me, and then his hands find my hips and he's pulling me over him, lying back against the pillows, putting me on top.
Letting me control this. Letting me set the pace. Letting me take what I need instead of taking from me.
I straddle him with my knees pressing into the mattress on either side of his hips, aware of the hard length of him straining against his pants beneath me.
My hands work his belt open, then his zipper, and when I finally wrap my fingers around him, hot and thick and velvet-soft over steel, he makes a sound low in his throat that sends heat pooling between my thighs all over again.
I position him at my entrance and the soft head presses against me, stretching me as I sink down slowly, feeling every inch of him fill me.
It's almost too much after eight years of nothing, almost overwhelming, but I don't stop until he's buried completely inside me and my thighs are pressed against his hips.
Eight years. Eight years of nothing and now this. Now him.