Chapter 24 - Catherine #4
I hear him behind me. The rustle of his shirt coming off. The slide of his slacks. Then his hands on my hips—bare, warm, the grip that spans my waist.
His mouth. Between my legs. From behind. His tongue flat against me, licking from clit to entrance and back, his hands spreading me open. The angle makes everything more intense—the exposure, the depth of his tongue, the way I can’t see him but can feel everything.
I press my face into the pillow. His tongue pushes inside me. His thumb on my clit. The dual sensation makes my hips push back against his mouth and he growls against me and the vibration sends a shockwave up my spine.
He pulls back. Kisses my hip. My lower back. The curve of my ass. The particular worship of a man who is taking his time because he can and because making me wait is part of the game.
“Kaiden.” My voice is muffled by the pillow. “Please.”
“Please what?”
“Please fuck me. I need—I need you inside me. Now. Please.”
He positions himself behind me. The head of him pressing against me—teasing, not entering, the particular cruelty of a man who knows exactly what he’s doing. I push back. He holds my hips still.
“Say it again.”
“Please.”
“Say who you belong to.”
“You. I belong to you, Kaiden. Now fucking—”
He drives in. One thrust. All the way. My hands fist in the sheets and the sound that comes out of me is not quiet and I don’t care because the feeling of him filling me from this angle—deep, impossibly deep—overrides every other consideration including discretion.
He doesn’t start slow. The pace is hard from the first stroke—his hips slamming against me, his hands gripping my hips, pulling me back onto him with every thrust. The sound of skin against skin fills the room.
The headboard hits the wall in a rhythm that matches his pace and I bury my face in the pillow and bite down.
“No.” He reaches forward. Grabs my hair. Pulls my head up from the pillow. “I want to hear you. Every sound. Every moan. You claimed me in front of that whole party. Now let this whole house hear you claim me up here.”
The angle changes—my back arching, his hand in my hair, the new position hitting deeper. I moan. Loud. His name and profanity tangled together in a sound that is not dignified and not controlled.
“That’s it,” he says. His voice is rough. Wrecked. The dark voice. “That’s my girl. My jealous, possessive, beautiful fucking girl. You think any other woman in that room compares to this? To the way you feel? To the way you say my name?”
He drives in harder. The hand not in my hair finds my clit. Circles. The combination of the depth and the pressure and his voice is building something in me that’s going to be catastrophic when it breaks.
“No one,” he continues. Each word punctuated by a thrust. “Touches me. But you. No one’s name. Comes out of my mouth. The way yours does. You are it, Cat. You are the only. Fucking. Thing.”
The orgasm hits like a wall. Not building—slamming.
My body locks so hard my vision goes white.
My arms give out. I drop to my elbows. His hand in my hair tightens.
His hips don’t stop—driving through my orgasm, extending it, the overstimulation tipping from pleasure into something that borders on too much and is exactly right.
He pulls out. Flips me over. I’m on my back, legs spread, chest heaving, the aftershocks still rolling through me. He kneels between my legs. Looks down at me with an expression that is feral and tender simultaneously—the paradox of Kaiden Monaghan in a single look.
“One more,” he says. “Give me one more, baby.”
“I can’t—”
“You can.” He enters me again—slower this time, sliding in inch by inch, his eyes on mine. The position shift changes everything—his face above me, his body covering mine, the intimacy of eye contact while he’s inside me. His hand comes to my throat. I nod. He squeezes.
He moves. Slow and deep. The pace a contrast to what came before—deliberate, savoring, every stroke designed to hit the deepest point of me. His thumb on my clit—light circles, patient, rebuilding what the last orgasm dismantled.
“Look at me,” he says. “Stay with me.”
I look. His face is above me. Moonlight catching his jaw. His eyes nearly black. The tattoos on his arms framing my body. The Celtic knot necklace pooled in the hollow of my throat beneath his hand.
“I love you,” he says. The words landing with each thrust. Slow.
Deliberate. “Not just when you’re dressed in gold telling other women to back off.
Not just when you’re underneath me making sounds that ruin me.
Always. Every version. The ice princess.
The girl in the hospital. The one who cries in the bathroom.
The one who reads Haynes manuals. All of it. ”
The orgasm builds differently this time. Slower. Deeper. From a place that’s not just physical—the particular intensity of being seen while being touched, of hearing “I love you” while his body is inside mine and his hand is on my throat and his eyes are holding mine.
When it breaks, it breaks quietly. A full-body shudder.
His name on my lips—not screamed, whispered.
The kind of orgasm that makes your eyes sting.
He follows immediately—his body going rigid, his face buried in my neck, a groan that vibrates through my collarbones and settles in my chest like a second heartbeat.
We lie there. Tangled. Breathing. The party below us has gotten louder—the countdown approaching, the energy building toward midnight. Up here, it’s just the sound of two people who have used their bodies to say everything language can’t hold.
He pulls out. Rolls beside me. I curl into him. The position. My face against his chest. The Claddagh ring pressing between our bodies. From downstairs: the countdown begins. Muffled through the floor. Voices in unison.
Ten. Nine. Eight.
Kaiden tilts my chin up. Looks at me. The feral version is gone. What’s left is the boy—the real one, the one under every performance, the one who held my hand in a hospital and whispered “I love you” while I was too sedated to hear.
Seven. Six. Five.
“Happy New Year, Kitty Cat.”
Four. Three. Two.
“Happy New Year, Kaid.”
One.
He kisses me at midnight. In our bed. In our room. In a house full of people celebrating below us while we celebrate in the only way that matters—skin to skin, heartbeat to heartbeat, two people who survived the worst year of their lives and are stepping into a new one together.
The cheering rises through the floor. Champagne corks. Music. The particular joy of a room full of people believing that the next year will be better than the last. I press my face into Kaiden’s chest. Feel his heartbeat. Slow. Steady. The rhythm I fall asleep to every night.
My life has never been a fairytale. The monsters were real. The scars are permanent. The girl who walked into Edgewood Prep in September is not the girl lying in this bed in January—she’s been broken and rebuilt so many times the original blueprints are unrecognizable.
But the boy whose heartbeat is under my ear chose her anyway. Chose every version. And the family downstairs—the one built from crisis and proximity and the particular alchemy of people who decided to love each other on purpose—is more real than any family she was born into.
The Claddagh ring catches the moonlight. Heart facing inward. This heart is taken.
I close my eyes. The new year begins. And for the first time in my life, I’m not afraid of what’s coming. Because whatever it is, I’m not facing it alone.