Chapter Eighteen #3
My hand slips under the edge of her underwear.
No barrier now. Just her—slick, swollen, clenching against nothing when my fingers slide through her folds.
She's so wet it makes my head spin, and when I push two fingers inside her she makes a sound against my throat that I will hear for the rest of my life.
I work her with my hand while the water moves around us.
Her hips rock against my fingers. Her thighs tighten around my waist. My thumb finds her clit and presses, circles, presses again.
She's trembling now, forehead dropped against my shoulder, breath coming in sharp bursts I can feel against my collarbone.
My name comes out of her broken.
Like she doesn't want to be saying it and can't stop.
I curl my fingers inside her and she jerks hard, one hand fisting in my hair, the other gripping my shoulder like she needs something to anchor her to the world.
She comes with a shudder that rolls through her entire body. Her walls clamp tight around my fingers and she buries her face in my neck, gasping, nails digging into my skin hard enough to leave marks I'll feel tomorrow.
I hold her through it.
Don't pull my hand away until the last aftershock fades and her breathing starts to come back down.
Then I say, roughly, "Inside."
She blinks at me. Dazed and flushed. Pupils blown so wide her eyes look black.
I don't wait for a verbal answer.
I haul us out of the pool, her legs wrapping around my waist while I half carry, half drag her across the terrace.
Water streams off both of us. My footing slips once on the wet tile and I catch us against the doorframe, her back hitting the wood, and for one second we just stay there—both breathing too hard, her legs locked around me, the night air cooling the water on our skin while everything between us burns.
Then I keep moving.
Down the hall. Into the bedroom.
The door shuts behind us and the sound is too loud in the quiet villa. I set her down and we're pulling at each other immediately—her hands shoving at my swim trunks, mine fighting with her bra clasp, both of us too frantic to be coordinated about any of it.
Her bra hits the floor first. Then my trunks. Then her underwear, dragged down her thighs and kicked aside.
And then there's nothing.
Just us.
Bare—Wet… Standing in the middle of the honeymoon suite with the moonlight cutting through the terrace doors and three days of pretending we could survive this without touching each other finally, mercifully, over.
I look at her.
I can't help it.
Wet hair slicked back. Skin flushed from the orgasm still glowing in her cheeks. Her breasts full, nipples peaked. The soft curve of her stomach. There’s still water running in thin lines down her body that I’d like to trail with my tongue.
She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and for six months in my office, I tried not to see it. Not to see the beautiful woman working for me that I refused to let get my coffee order right.
I close the distance between us. One hand at the back of her neck, the other flat against the small of her back, pulling her flush against me so there's no space left between her skin and mine.
The feeling of her bare against me—chest to chest, stomach to stomach, her heat pressed against my length empties my head completely.
I walk her backward until her legs hit the bed. I lay her down gently and then pull her up the bed until her head hits the pillow, her body soft under mine, devastating awareness that I am about to be inside my wife for the first time and nothing in my life has prepared me for how much I want this.
My mouth moves down her throat–her collarbone. The soft swell of her breast. When I close my lips around her nipple she arches off the mattress so hard her hips grind against mine and a sound escapes me that has no business coming from a man who's supposed to be in control of anything.
I keep going lower.
Her stomach. The dip of her navel. The inside of her hip where the skin is thin and sensitive enough to make her breath catch when I press my mouth there.
When I settle between her thighs and put my mouth on her properly, she goes perfectly still.
One heartbeat.
Two.
Then her fingers slide into my hair and her hips lift toward me and whatever sound she makes is swallowed by the pillow she turns her face into.
I take my time.
Not to tease. Not to prove anything.
Because I want to know her here. The way she tastes. The way she moves. The sounds she makes when there's no fight left to hide behind and it's just her body and my mouth and the slow, relentless build of something neither of us can take back.
She's close again fast—still sensitive from the pool—and when she comes this time it's quieter but deeper, her whole body curling toward me, thighs pressing against my ears, my name barely a whisper on her lips.
I press one last kiss to the inside of her thigh and crawl back up.
She catches my face in both hands and kisses me—slow, thorough, tasting herself on my mouth and not caring. Her hand wraps around me and I drop my forehead against hers because the sensation of her fingers on me after all of this is almost too much.
The condom is in the nightstand. I reach for it, tear the packet with wet fingers and a complete absence of grace, and roll it on while she watches me with those dark, heavy-lidded eyes.
Then I settle between her thighs.
Brace one hand beside her head.
Look at her.
She looks back.
What passes between us isn’t banter or anger or performance. Something stripped clean of everything except what we’re about to do and what it means.
I push into her.
One slow stroke that buries me completely.
Every thought leaves.
She's tight around me and hot and so wet I can feel it even through the condom. Her mouth falls open. Her nails dig into my shoulders. Her hips tilt up to take me deeper and I have to hold perfectly still for a moment because if I move too soon this will be over embarrassingly fast.
I breathe.
She breathes.
Then she shifts beneath me—a small, deliberate roll of her hips—and I'm done waiting.
I pull back and thrust into her again. Harder.
She cries out. Not quietly. Not the controlled sounds from the pool. A full, unfiltered sound that fills the room and goes straight to the base of my spine.
After that, nothing stays careful.
I fuck her like I've been starving for it—because I have.
Every stroke drives deeper, harder, my hand gripping her thigh, hitching it higher around my hip so I can feel the full length of myself disappearing into her.
The sound of it fills the room. Wet skin.
The creak of the bed frame. Her breath breaking every time I bottom out.
Her hands move from my shoulders to my back to the sheets, fisting the fabric, pulling it off the corner of the mattress. Her back arches. Her head tips back against the pillow and I drag my mouth down the exposed line of her throat, feeling her pulse hammer against my lips.
This is not the controlled, precise man I've spent thirty-four years building.
This is something underneath that. Something that has wanted her since before I had a name for it.
I reach between us and press my thumb against her clit. She jerks so hard beneath me that I nearly lose my rhythm. But I keep the pressure steady—firm circles in time with my thrusts—and watch her unravel.
It doesn't take long.
She goes rigid. Back arched completely off the bed. Walls clenching around me so tight the sensation whites out my vision for a full second. My name comes out of her fractured—syllables that don't fit back together—and her whole body shakes with the force of it.
I last maybe five more strokes.
Then I'm gone too.
It hits like a load-bearing wall giving out. My hips press flush against hers and everything locks—my arms, my jaw, my spine—the orgasm rolling through me in waves so sharp they almost hurt. I bury my face in her neck and let it take me apart completely.
For a long time after, I can't do anything but breathe.
The weight of me must be crushing her but she doesn't push me away. Her fingers drift slowly up my spine, through the wet hair at the back of my neck. Gentle in a way that makes my chest ache worse than the fight did.
Eventually I roll to my back and she comes with me, half sprawled over my chest, one leg tangled with mine, both of us still damp at the edges from the pool and the run upstairs.
I look across the room at the canvas propped near the dresser.
The one she brought home days ago. The same one now hanging in Amaury's gallery where strangers stop to stare at the loneliness in it.
"It's good," I say.
She lifts her head. "The painting?"
"Yes."
Her mouth curves faintly. "That sounded dangerously close to a compliment."
"It is."
She studies me for a second. "You didn't look thrilled when you saw it."
"No."
"Because it's bad?"
"Because it's accurate."
The smile fades.
I keep my eyes on the ceiling because that's easier than looking at her when I say the next part.
"I didn't like seeing myself through your eyes."
For a second, all she does is breathe against my chest.
Then she says, quietly, "I stopped painting after the accident."
I turn my head.
She's watching the sheet gathered in her hand, smoothing the fabric without really feeling it.
"It felt like wanting it again meant betraying her," she says. "My mom loved painting. It was hers before it was mine. After she died, every time I thought about starting again, it felt selfish. Like stepping back into the thing that made me most like her meant leaving her behind."
I say nothing.
Not because I don't care.
Because this is the kind of truth you don't interrupt.
She lets out a shaky breath. "I know that sounds irrational."
"It doesn't."
That gets her to look at me.
Something in her face softens.
After a moment, she asks, "Why swimming?"
I look back up at the ceiling.
"It was the first place my head ever got quiet," I say. "Everything else always meant something to someone. School. Tutors. Milestones. Dinners. Swimming didn't. It was just water and the next lap." I pause. "It still works better than anything else when my mind won't shut off."
Her fingers find mine on the sheet between us and thread through them.
I look down at our joined hands.
"I like you better when you're not trying to outrun yourself," she says softly.
I bring our hands to my mouth and press a kiss to her knuckles before letting them fall again.
She settles closer after that, resting her head back against my shoulder like there was never another place to be.
Outside, the sea keeps moving toward the shore in the dark.
Inside, the room is quiet in a new way.
No longer empty with two people inside of it.
She painted me without meaning to.
She followed me home to make me talk.
She kissed me like she was just as done with restraint as I was.
And now she's curled against my side like she trusts me with more than I deserve.
This is the problem with finally getting what you want.
You don't feel calmer after.
You feel more terrified.
Because now there's something real to lose.