Chapter 27 #2
The kiss was slow and thorough—his hands in my hair, mine at his jaw, both of us taking our time because we were on a promontory in the morning light with nowhere to be and no audience and the harbor spread out below us and the live oaks overhead and all the time in the world.
He turned us and backed me gently against the largest oak—the bark smooth from decades of salt air, the trunk wide enough to lean against comfortably.
His mouth moved from mine to my jaw, my throat, the place just below my ear that he'd learned, at some point in the last week, was the fastest route to making me forget my own name.
"Grant," I said.
"Mm."
"I owe you something."
He lifted his head. Looked at me. The question in his eyes.
"You've been very generous," I said. "I haven't had the chance to—" I held his gaze. "Return the favor."
Something shifted in his expression, the warmth going dark.
"Louisa—”
"Sit down," I said.
He looked at the bench.
Then he sat.
I went to my knees in front of him on the path—the grass soft, the morning light filtering through the oaks, the harbor sound below—and looked up at him.
His face, from this angle, was something—jaw set, eyes dark, watching me with the complete, arrested attention of a man who'd stopped thinking about anything except this.
I worked his belt with unhurried hands. The buckle—the Pendleton silver, warm from his body—came loose with the soft clink I'd become used to. I set it on the bench beside him with the same care he always gave it.
He noticed. Something moved in his face.
I freed his cock—already hard, the heat of him against my palm when I wrapped my hand around the base—and heard the breath leave him.
I pressed my lips to the head of him, soft, a question. His answer was a low sound from the back of his throat that was barely language.
I took my time.
His hands found my hair—not directing, not pushing, just there, the weight of them resting on either side of my head, a benediction rather than a demand.
I worked him slowly at first, using my mouth and my hand in a rhythm I felt him respond to—the small, involuntary shifts of his hips, the way his fingers tightened slightly each time I hit a place that mattered.
"Christ, Louisa,” he said. Low. Rough. The voice he used when the control was slipping.
I looked up at him.
The expression on his face was—I wanted to keep it somewhere. The jaw loose, the eyes dark and completely present, no distance, no wall, no half-second delay between feeling and showing. Just Grant, undone, watching me with something that was gratitude and desire and vulnerability.
I took him deeper. His hips moved forward, involuntary—a small, helpless motion that he checked immediately. I responded by taking more myself, showing him it was all right, that this was mine to give and I was giving it freely.
His hands shifted in my hair. Still not pushing. But present.
Learning, I thought.
I worked him until his breathing broke. Until the careful control fractured into something more honest—his head dropping back against the oak trunk, a sound escaping him that he hadn't managed to contain, the involuntary sound of a man arriving somewhere he hadn't been in a long time.
"Louisa, babe—” Warning in his voice. Or offering.
I didn't stop.
He came with a long, low sound that belonged only to the two of us and the morning and the harbor below the bluff, his hands holding my head with a gentleness that felt enormous given everything else in his body.
I took everything he gave, swallowed, and rested my forehead against his thigh while he came back down.
His hand moved in my hair. Slow. Warm.
His breathing steadied, the last tremors of release fading into the warm Charleston morning.
His eyes opened and locked onto mine, dark with fresh hunger and a raw, possessive edge that made my pulse stutter.
The sun filtered through the live oaks in soft golden shafts, warming my face.
The harbor breeze swirled around us—thick, salt-laden, carrying the clean brine of the water below and the faint, sweet bloom of jasmine.
It lifted strands of my hair, cooled the sheen of sweat already forming at my neck, and tasted faintly metallic on my tongue when I licked my lips.
“Up here. Now,” Grant growled, voice still rough from his orgasm.
His hands slid under my arms, lifting me effortlessly from the grass. He pulled me onto his lap astride the bench, my knees sinking into the sun-warmed wood on either side of his hips, pants shoved down. The bench was solid beneath me, its grain smooth and heated by the morning sun.
The promontory felt dangerously alive. Spanish moss swayed overhead in the breeze, casting dancing shadows across Grant’s chest. Below us, the harbor water lapped lazily against the bluff—soft, rhythmic, indifferent.
And I thought I heard distant voices drifting from nearby, close enough to remind us anyone could round the curve of live oaks and see everything.
The risk sent liquid heat flooding between my thighs.
“Anyone could walk by,” I whispered, even as my hands braced on his shoulders.
“Let them,” he said, the words dark and filthy against my mouth.
He yanked my panties aside with one hand, the other guiding his cock—still thick, still slick from my mouth—to my entrance.
I sank down in one slow slide. The stretch burned so perfectly I gasped, the salt air filling my lungs as he filled me completely.
Warm sunlight kissed my bare thighs and the exposed curve of my ass; the breeze teased higher, cooling the slick heat where we were joined and making my nipples tighten against the thin fabric of my top.
“Fuck, Louisa,” he groaned, head falling back against the oak trunk behind the bench, jaw tight. “So wet. So goddamn tight.”
I started to move—slow rolls of my hips at first, savoring the thick drag of him inside me, the way the sun-warmed bench and his body heat melted together beneath us.
The harbor breeze grew bolder, licking across my skin like a third lover, carrying the briny taste of the sea and the faint sweetness of moss.
Every thrust upward from him met my downward grind, the bench creaking softly under the rhythm, the slap of skin muffled only by the distant lap of waves.
His hands gripped my ass hard enough to bruise—possessive, claiming—guiding me faster. One slid up to pinch my nipple through my top; the other stayed at my clit, thumb circling with ruthless precision. “Ride me harder, babe. Let me hear you say my name.”
The thrill of exposure pushed me higher.
Distant footsteps crunched somewhere on the path—maybe a stable hand, maybe Hallie Mae—but the oaks hid us just enough to make it electric.
I rode him frantically now, the warm sun beating down on my back, sweat trickling between my breasts, the breeze cooling it instantly and sending shivers through me.
Every slide of his cock hit that perfect spot inside; every pass of his thumb on my clit wound the coil tighter.
“Grant—oh, God, I’m—”
“Come,” he ordered, voice gravel and command.
I broke. The orgasm crashed through me like the harbor tide—violent, endless—my walls clamping down around him as I cried out into the salt-heavy breeze.
The sun seemed brighter, the air thicker with brine and sex.
He followed with a guttural groan, hips snapping up one last time as he spilled deep inside me, hot pulses that I felt in my bones.
We clung together, chests heaving, the harbor breeze now cooling our sweat-slick skin while the warm sun still bathed us in golden light. The distant voices faded; the water kept lapping below.
We sat like that. The harbor below us. The oaks overhead. The morning doing its patient, salt-scented work around us.
"You know," he said, after a while. His voice was rough and content, the voice he had after. "We're absolutely going to get caught one of these days."
"I know," I said. "Izzy will think it's funny."
A short, genuine laugh. "Yeah," he said. “Maybe she will."
I leaned back enough to look at him. The jaw, the eyes. The man who'd been named for a general because his father could see the stubbornness coming.
"You okay?" I asked.
He held my gaze. "Yeah. Better than okay."
"Good," I said.
"There's—" he paused. The careful pause of a man choosing how to begin something large. "There's more I need to tell you. About last night. About what Wyatt—"
"When you're ready," I said.
He looked at me.
"I'm not going anywhere," I said. "Tell me when you're ready. There's no rush."
Something moved through his face. The gratitude again.
He kissed my temple. My cheek. The corner of my mouth.
"Okay," he said. "Soon."
"Soon," I agreed.
We sat on the bench above the harbor, the morning moving around us—the oaks and the Spanish moss and the salt air and the water doing its ancient, indifferent work below—and I thought about the warehouse on the Neck and the name I'd said twice last night with the same conviction.
Louisa Fentress Coastal Reserve.
My name. On the bottle. Real and coming and mine.
And this man. Also real. Also, incrementally, mine.
I was staying in Charleston.
Everything else—the brothers, the patent, the sourcing negotiation, the conversations Grant still needed to have and the things he hadn't told me yet—all of it was still there, patient and waiting, the way complicated things waited when you'd decided not to run from them.
But right now, on this bench, in this morning, I was just here.
That was enough.
That was everything.