Chapter 16 Cole #2
I grip her hips and flip her onto her stomach. She gasps, hands fisting the sheets, and I haul her backward off the bed until her feet hit the floor.
I bend her over the vanity across from the bed. Her palms slap against the surface, bracing herself, and the mirror throws her reflection back at both of us. Hair messy, lips swollen, mascara smudged, skin flushed all the way down her chest.
Seven years of watching her through screens, and nothing, nothing, compares to this.
She starts to turn her face away.
I grip her chin and turn it back toward the glass.
She wrenches against my hold, eyes squeezing shut.
I loosen my grip immediately. "What do you need?"
"It's not you." Her voice is tight, strained. "It's—I can't look at myself. Not like this."
Adrian taught her that too. Taught her that her own reflection was something to avoid.
"You can." I hold her gaze in the mirror, my chest pressed against her back. "When's the last time you wanted something that wasn't for Chesca? For the family? Just for you?"
Her mouth opens. Closes.
Nothing comes out.
"That's what I thought." I grip her hip with one hand, my cock pressing against her entrance. She doesn't freeze. A week ago, this position would have stopped everything. Tonight, she arches into it. "Be selfish, Angelina."
I thrust into her in one hard stroke.
Her mouth falls open on a cry, hands scrambling against the vanity. A small ceramic dish skitters toward the edge. The tight heat of her gripping me makes my focus blur.
"Take this for yourself." I pull back and slam in again, my fingers digging into her hips. The vanity rattles against the wall. "No one else. Just you."
"God—" Her voice breaks. "Cole—"
I set a brutal pace, fucking into her hard enough that her whole body rocks forward with each stroke. A bottle of perfume wobbles, tips, spills across the surface, jasmine flooding the room, thick and expensive.
"My Chanel—" she gasps, but she does not stop moving or even slow down. "That was—ah—two hundred dollars—"
"I'll buy you ten." I thrust harder, and whatever protest she was forming dissolves into a moan. "A hundred. I don't care."
She laughs, actually laughs, breathless and wild, and then the laugh cuts off into a cry as I hit something deep inside her.
There. That spot. Remember it.
"Right there." Her voice is ragged, barely recognizable. "Cole, I'm so close, don't stop—"
"Tell me you want this." Pressure builds at the base of my spine, my balls drawing tight, but I hold back. Not yet. Not until she says it. "Say it."
"I want it." The words come out half-sobbed. "I want you. I want to come so hard I can't think. I want—" Her voice cracks on something raw. "I want to stop being numb."
The words hit me like a fist.
Eight years. Eight years of feeling nothing, surviving instead of living, and she's asking ME to make her feel.
Her jaw sets in the mirror, decision made. I watch the last thread of her restraint snap.
She stops bracing against my thrusts and starts pushing BACK.
Meeting me stroke for stroke, her ass pressing into my hips, chasing her own pleasure with a greed I've never seen from her.
The change in angle makes us both groan.
I sink deeper, hit harder, and she takes every inch like she's been starving for it.
"That's it." I'm barely holding on. My thighs burn, sweat sliding down my back. "Fuck. Just like that, firefly—"
"Harder." She's watching herself now. Actually watching her own face twist with pleasure. "I can take it. Give me more."
I reach around and find her clit, circling with two fingers while I fuck her. Her whole body shudders, her pussy clamping down so hard my vision whites out at the edges.
"Come for me." I thrust deeper, fingers working her in tight circles. "Take that too. I want to feel you come on my cock."
She screams when she comes.
Not a moan or a whimper, but a full-throated scream that echoes off the walls as her orgasm tears through her.
Her pussy pulses around me in waves, milking my cock, and I watch her face in the mirror.
The way it crumples, her mouth falling open, the way she looks completely undone and utterly alive.
"Kuso—" The Japanese rips out of me. I am right there, right on the edge, every muscle locked tight. "Angelina, I'm going to—"
"Inside me." She is still shaking, still clenching around me. "I want to feel you come inside me."
Mine.
The word sears through me, absolute. She has no idea what she's asking for. No idea that for the past two days, I've made sure those little pink pills won't do a goddamn thing.
And she is asking me to come inside her.
I bury myself to the hilt and let go.
The orgasm slams through me hard enough to blank my mind. I feel my cock pulsing as I spill into her, filling her, claiming her from the inside in a way she doesn't even know. A sound tears from my throat, something between a groan and a growl.
My forehead drops to her shoulder. Both of us gasping, sweat-slick skin pressed together.
For a long moment, neither of us moves.
Then she shifts, and I slip out of her with a groan. I glance down and watch my cum drip down her inner thighs, white against flushed skin.
She turns in my arms, back against the vanity, and looks up at me. Her mascara is completely ruined. Her hair is a disaster. The room reeks of sex and spilled perfume, and the afternoon sun catches the gold flecks in her eyes.
"I really liked that Chanel." She is fighting a smile, and losing.
"I meant it. A hundred bottles."
"Ridiculous." Her smile breaks through, crooked and devastating.
"Mmm." She reaches up, traces a scratch on my shoulder that she must have put there. "Take me to bed? The vanity's getting uncomfortable."
I scoop her up before she finishes the sentence.
She yelps, arms wrapping around my neck, laughing as I carry her past the perfume still pooling across the vanity surface.
I lower her onto the tangled sheets. She pulls me down with her, arranging us until her head rests on my chest and her leg hooks over mine.
"Stay," she whispers against my skin. "Just for a little while."
I press a kiss to her hair.
"I'm not going anywhere."
Her breathing evens out after a few minutes, not quite sleep, but close. Relaxed in my arms in a way I've never witnessed through any surveillance feed. The tension she carries like armor has finally drained out of her.
This. This is what I've been watching for. Waiting for. Working toward.
I let myself have this, the weight of her against me, the smell of jasmine and sex, the quiet rhythm of her breathing.
A buzz from the floor. From my pants, somewhere in the tangle of clothes next to the bed.
I ease out from under her with careful movements, trying not to wake her, and fish the phone from my pocket.
Xander: Ice cream consumed. Uncle Sal successfully charmed. Chesca's asking when she can come home. ETA 20 min if you need more time. Otherwise heading back now. Five minutes.
Twenty minutes. Or now.
I glance back at Angelina, curled on her side, one hand tucked under her cheek. The scratches she left on my shoulders throb with a satisfying ache.
We need to clean up. Air out this room. Make it look like nothing happened before an eight-year-old comes home and asks why Mamma's bedroom smells funny.
Me: Give us 20.
Xander: Copy. Grabbing a second round of ice cream. Kid's got good taste—went for the salted caramel.
"Firefly." I stroke her hair. "Wake up."
"Mmm." She burrows closer, face pressing into the pillow. "Five more minutes."
"Chesca's on her way home. Twenty minutes."
Her eyes snap open. "What?"
"Xander's bringing her back from Sal's."
"Oh God." She sits up, sheet pooling at her waist, hair a complete disaster. Her eyes sweep the room—the tangled sheets, the spilled perfume, the clothes scattered across the floor like evidence—and her face flushes. "Oh God, this room smells like—"
"Sex," I supply helpfully.
"I was going to say poor life choices, but yes." She's already moving, swinging her legs off the bed. "I need to shower. You need to shower. We need to open every window in this room and possibly burn some sage."
"I don't think sage is going to cover Chanel No. 5 mixed with—"
"Do NOT finish that sentence." But she's smiling, even as she grabs clothes from the dresser at random. "Go. Your bathroom. Now. And for God's sake, do something about that hickey before my daughter asks uncomfortable questions."
I catch her arm before she can disappear into the bathroom. Pull her back against my chest.
"Angelina."
She looks up at me, and for a moment the frantic energy drains away. Just us, in the afternoon light, in the room that smells like everything we just did.
"I meant what I said." I brush my thumb across her cheekbone. "I'm not going anywhere."
Her expression softens. Something vulnerable flickers through her eyes before she controls it.
"I know." She rises on her toes, presses a quick kiss to my jaw. "Now GO. Eighteen minutes."
I go.
The shower runs cold because I don't have time for anything else. I scrub efficiently, noting the marks she left. Scratches on my shoulders, a bite mark on my collarbone, the hickey on my neck that's going to be impossible to hide.
Worth it.
By the time I'm dressed and downstairs, Angelina has already thrown open every window on the second hallway and in her room. The cross-breeze carries the jasmine smell out and fresh air in. She's changed into jeans and a soft sweater, hair still damp, face scrubbed clean of ruined makeup.
She looks younger like this. Softer. The armor not quite back in place yet.
"The vanity's a lost cause," she says, not looking at me. "I had to throw out the bottle and mop up the perfume with about seven towels. That bottle was a gift from my mother, by the way. She's going to ask about it at Christmas."
"Tell her you wore it all."
"In one month?"
"You were feeling festive."
She laughs, that rough, surprised sound I'm learning to crave, and throws a hand towel at my head. I catch it without looking.
The front door opens.
"MAMMA! We're home!"
Chesca barrels through the front door, Xander trailing behind with the weary expression of a man who's spent three hours entertaining an eight-year-old on a sugar high.
"Tesoro!" Angelina crouches to catch her daughter, wrapping her in a hug. "How was Uncle Sal's?"
"He let me have TWO ice cream cones." Chesca's voice is muffled against her mother's shoulder. "And Mr. Xander taught me how to arm wrestle but he let me win."
"I did not let you win." Xander drops onto the couch with a groan. "You're freakishly strong for someone who weighs forty pounds."
"I'm FIFTY pounds," Chesca corrects with eight-year-old dignity. "And you're just weak."
"Wounded." Xander clutches his chest. "Fatally wounded by a child."
Chesca giggles, pulling back from Angelina to survey the room. Her eyes land on me, standing by the kitchen doorway.
"Hi, Mr. Cole."
"Hi, Hime."
"Why does it smell weird in here?"
Angelina's face does something complicated. I keep my expression neutral through sheer force of will.
"Mamma spilled some perfume," Angelina says smoothly. "Made a big mess. Very clumsy of me."
"Oh." Chesca accepts this with the easy trust of a child who hasn't yet learned to question convenient explanations. Then her brow furrows. "Mr. Cole, what happened to your neck?"
Fuck.
"Training accident," I say, without missing a beat. "Your mother's been teaching me self-defense."
Angelina makes a strangled sound that she turns into a cough.
Xander doesn't even try to hide his grin. "Is that what we're calling it now?"
"Mr. Xander." Chesca tugs on his sleeve. "Can we watch a movie? You promised."
"Did I promise? I don't remember promising."
"You PROMISED."
"Hmm. My memory's not what it used to be. Must be old age."
"You're not OLD. You're like... thirty."
"Thirty is ancient, munchkin. Practically prehistoric."
Their bickering fades as Xander lets Chesca drag him toward the living room, already negotiating which movie and whether popcorn counts as a second dinner.
Xander pauses at the threshold. Glances back at me, then down at my chest—specifically, at the shirt I'm wearing.
His eyebrow rises. The smirk spreads slow and deliberate.
The shirt. I almost forgot the shirt.
If I hadn't come downstairs early to grab it from where Angelina threw it, he'd have found it crumpled on the living room floor. Evidence. The kind that doesn't need explanation because it explains itself.
I hold his gaze. Don't react.
He mouths something that looks suspiciously like smooth and disappears into the living room after Chesca.
Too close.
Angelina moves to stand beside me in the kitchen doorway. Close enough that our shoulders almost touch.
"Training accident?" she murmurs.
"Best I could do on short notice."
"She's going to figure it out eventually."
"She's eight."
"She's MY eight-year-old. She notices everything." Angelina's mouth curves. "Including the fact that you're suddenly very interested in self-defense lessons."
"I'm a dedicated student."
"Mmm." She bumps her shoulder against mine. Casual. Almost domestic. "Thank you. For earlier. For... all of it."
I turn to look at her. The late afternoon light catches the gold in her eyes, and something in my chest cracks open a little further.
"I'm not going anywhere," I say again. Because it bears repeating. Because she needs to hear it as many times as it takes to believe it.
Her hand finds mine. Squeezes once.
"I know."
From the living room, Chesca's voice rises in triumph. "HA! You DO remember promising!"
"Fine, fine." Xander's dramatic sigh carries through the house. "But if we're watching Frozen again, I'm going to need popcorn."
"You just HAD ice cream!"
"Popcorn is a different food group, munchkin. Everyone knows that. And in case you haven't noticed, I eat a lot." Chesca's giggle floats through the house.
Angelina laughs. The sound settles into my bones like something I've been waiting seven years to hear.
This. This is what I've been watching for. Waiting for. Working toward.
And I'm not letting it go.