Chapter 18 Avah
AVAH
The stairs creak under our feet as I lead Jeremy up to my apartment, and I’m suddenly acutely aware of the overwhelming smallness of the life I’m building from scratch.
My hand tightens around his, and I pause in front of the door, heart fluttering in my throat. “This is not what you’re used to.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it’s true.” I jiggle the key in the lock that sticks like it moonlights as a security system. “We’re going from your five-star villa to a space where I wake up every morning to the hot water heater deciding whether to call it quits.”
Jeremy’s thumb traces a slow circle on the inside of my wrist, which sends my pulse into overdrive. “I don’t care about your hot water heater.”
“You haven’t tried to take a shower here yet.”
I push open the door and flip on the light. The apartment is exactly as I left it: small, clean, and almost aggressively basic.
“Home sweet home.” My tone holds the edge that means I’m trying to hide behind bravado. “The good news is the commute takes roughly five seconds.”
From the doorway, Jeremy’s gaze slowly travels across the space.
He takes in the bare walls and the milk crate Winnie considers a rustic end table.
Molly brought me the plant on the windowsill that I’m bound to kill.
I watch his face for the inevitable judgment when he realizes exactly how far I’ve fallen from the polished woman with the designer bags and French-tipped manicures.
That woman feels like a stranger, and I don’t really miss her.
“Avah.” His voice is low.
“Look, I know it’s not—”
“I can’t see anything but you.”
The words pour over me like honey. I open my mouth to deflect with a cutting observation about how he’d better get his eyes checked, but he’s already closing the distance between us. As the door clicks shut behind him, the apartment suddenly feels intimate in a way that makes my knees weak.
“You’re ridiculous.” My hip hits the kitchen counter even though I don’t remember moving.
“Probably.” His hands anchor me in place. “I’ve been called worse, by you specifically.”
“I have an elaborate vocabulary.”
“I noticed.” His mouth brushes my jaw, and I feel the words more than hear them. “It’s one of my favorite things about you.”
The laugh that escapes sounds breathless to my own ears as Jeremy’s lips trace a path from my jaw to the hollow behind my ear. My fingers curl into the fabric of his shirt, searching for something solid to hold on to while the rest of me threatens to melt into a puddle on the scuffed floor.
“I should offer you a drink.” The words come out unsteady. “Like you’re a proper guest. I have tap water and this morning’s coffee.”
“Avah.” He pulls back just enough to meet my eyes, and the mix of desire and patience I see there makes my breath catch. “Tell me to stop, and I’ll stop.”
I should. Every self-protective instinct I’ve spent years honing is screaming that I’m too raw and too vulnerable and too freshly out of the wreckage of my last relationship to be letting anyone this close.
We aren’t in paradise anymore. Skylark is my real life, and Jeremy could buy this building and the block it sits on and probably half the town if he wanted.
That kind of power should send me running in the other direction.
Instead, I reach up and trace the line of his jaw, his stubble scratchy against my fingertips.
“I don’t want you to stop.”
He drags his mouth along my skin like he’s been waiting to do this since that morning I left the island. And I arch into the contact like I’m starving for it.
Maybe I am.
He reaches around to unzip my dress, then pushes it off my shoulders and down my body. I’m wearing a plain black bra and cotton panties underneath. Nothing fancy—I wasn’t planning on anyone else seeing it—but Jeremy’s gaze darkens like I’m a lingerie model.
“Christ, Avah.”
“I know you’ve seen bras before. Hell, my bikini top covered less.”
His thumb traces the edge just above the curve of my breast, a touch so light it borders on cruel. “But this is real life. Mine, and more importantly, yours.”
The distinction knocks something loose in my chest, because he’s right. If Bora Bora was a fantasy fever dream, this is real, and I’m choosing it regardless.
His mouth finds my collarbone as his hands work the clasp of my bra.
The fabric falls away, and his lips trail lower, mapping the territory of my skin with the focus of an ancient cartographer.
I thread my fingers through his hair to ground myself as a sound escapes my throat that I refuse to call a whimper.
His hands slide down and hook into my underwear. “These too?”
“Yes.”
He tugs them over my hips, cotton pooling at my feet.
And suddenly, I’m standing in this basic-bitch apartment completely naked while a billionaire goes to his knees in front of me on the scuffed linoleum floor.
It feels more inevitable than absurd, like we’ve been moving toward this since the moment he picked me up from that lounge chair in paradise.
With a low growl, Jeremy squeezes my ass cheeks, his thumbs tracing the jut of my hipbones. He looks up with an expression I can’t quite read. “I need to taste you, Avah. Now.”
My mouth goes dry. “Maybe we should move to the—”
“Now.”
“Now is good.” The words tumble out with an embarrassing lack of dignity. “Now is—”
He presses a tender kiss to my inner thigh, and I stop talking as all of my brain cells spontaneously combust.
His breath skims over my skin, hot and deliberate. I’m grateful for the counter at my back keeping me upright. He drags his lips to the crease where my thigh meets my hip, then works his way toward my center with a patience that makes me want to scream.
“Jeremy.”
“Mmm?”
“If you’re trying to torture me—”
I lose the rest of the sentence as his tongue finds me with an intensity that makes my soul leave my body for a second.
My head thumps back against an upper cabinet as white-hot heat floods my system.
I keep one hand fisted in his thick hair while my other palm presses flat against the laminate countertop.
He lifts my right leg, hooking my knee over his shoulder to open me completely to his gaze and his mouth.
The shift in angle sends a fresh jolt of electricity straight to my core, and I do my best to swallow a scream.
Unlike my pitiful excuse of an ex, who was barely willing to devote five minutes to my pleasure before he got what he wanted, Jeremy is methodical, interpreting every moan and shudder like he’s spent years memorizing how to take me to the edge and hold me there.
“Jeremy, please…” The words come out as a broken rasp. “I’m going to—”
He lets out a low hum against my skin that I feel all the way to my marrow. “I’ve got you,” he rasps against my thigh. “Give me everything, Avah.”
He increases the pressure, his tongue tracing tight circles until I’m nothing but raw nerve.
The orgasm rips through me with a violence that steals the air from my lungs.
My entire body clenches, toes curling against the floor as he holds me through the waves of aftershocks.
I should probably be embarrassed by the needy sounds I can’t manage to hold back, but Jeremy’s hands only tighten on my hips, as if watching me come apart is his favorite thing ever.
When I finally manage to open my eyes, he’s still on his knees. His mouth is wet, his dark hair a mess, and his expression is so patently smug I want to throat punch him and kiss him at the same time.
“Bedroom,” I choke out, my voice a total wreck.
“Maybe we should…” He repeats my earlier words, grin widening.
“Now.”
He rises to his feet with a self-satisfied laugh and hauls me up in one smooth motion.
I wrap my legs around his waist, my arms locked around his neck as he navigates the five steps to the cramped bedroom.
The mattress groans under our combined weight as he pulls back the quilt and drops me onto the center of the bed.
I’m already clawing at his shirt with hands that won’t stop trembling. “Off.”
He stands and strips bare with a speed that makes my pulse spike. Then he’s hovering over me, skin flushed and eyes wild. This man is used to private jets and five-star everything, yet here he is in my shabby apartment like there’s no place on earth he’d rather be.
“I bought new bedding,” I tell him as I yank the top sheet down past my hips. A flush that has nothing to do with a mind-blowing orgasm creeps up my neck. “The ones that came with the place were fine, but I...I wanted something here to belong only to me.”
Jeremy’s expression softens, tenderness breaking through the raw lust in his eyes. He runs a palm across the soft cotton, his gaze locked on me in a way that silently acknowledges the effort I made to make this place mine.
“The sheets aren’t the only thing here that are yours,” he says gruffly. Before I can truly process that statement, his mouth grazes the sensitive dip of my collarbone. “But you should also know that I’m going to wreck them.”
A laugh bubbles up in my chest. “They’re from Target, Jeremy. Not a huge thread-count investment.”
“They’re perfect.” He shifts my legs wider with his knees. The head of his thick cock nudges against my entrance, and the sheer, blunt pressure of it makes my brain go quiet. “You’re perfect.”
He doesn’t wait for a comeback. Not that I could form one with him pushing inside me in a single thrust that fills me so completely I have to arch my back to take all of him.
The bed creaks in protest, which only serves to ground me in the reality of the moment.
This isn’t a fever dream. The weight of him, the friction of our bodies, and the way he’s watching my face to make sure I’m with him for every inch—it’s all so real.
“Okay?” he asks, his jaw tight with the effort of holding back.
My fingers dig into his shoulders as my eyes drift shut. “More.” It’s a word I can’t keep myself from associating with this man.
He starts to move, and I match his rhythm instantly, my hips rising to meet every deep stroke. Our night together on the island was about escaping the world, but this feels like we’re building a new one. At least that’s what my heart keeps saying, blatantly ignoring my pleas to shut up.
“Look at me, Avah.”
I force my eyes open. Above me, Jeremy Winslow looks like a man losing a fight he never expected to be in. I reach up, my thumb wiping a bead of sweat near his hairline, and he leans into my touch like it’s the only thing keeping him tethered to the now.
My climax builds slowly this time, a rolling breaker rather than a sudden strike. As my internal muscles coil around him, his pace turns urgent, his movements losing their purposeful cadence as he buries his face in the crook of my neck.
“I’m close.” My voice cracks. “I’m—”
“I’ve got you, sweetheart,” he repeats on a low growl.
He reaches between us, his thumb finding my already sensitive clit, and the added friction sends me over the cliff.
I shout his name into the quiet apartment while my body convulses in a rhythmic release that seems to go on forever.
He follows a second later, and the desperate sound that tears from his throat as he collapses against me fills me with an emotion I’m nowhere near ready to name.
We lie there afterward, tangled together on my new sheets that are—true to his word—definitely wrecked. His arm is a solid weight across my waist, and my leg is still hooked over his, neither of us quite ready to let the physical connection go.
I stare up at the ceiling, stained with water marks from a long-ago leak.
On my first night in this apartment, those ugly brown stains felt like a reminder of everything I had lost when I left my old life behind.
But with Jeremy’s heartbeat thudding steadily against my side, I don’t feel like I’m failing at life.
It feels like the future is just getting started.