Chapter 20 Boone
CHAPTER TWENTY
Boone
I lie to myself all damn night.
Tell myself I’m not thinking about the way Delaney looked when she walked out the door earlier.
Tell myself I’m not imagining things I shouldn’t imagine.
Tell myself I’m not listening for her footsteps on the porch, wondering what time she’ll come home, or replaying the way Silas damn near choked on his own tongue when she passed him.
Or the silence that fell over Caleb as if he’d been punched in the sternum.
Tell myself it means nothing that I noticed all of that.
That she means nothing.
I tell myself I’m fine…. focused, responsible. A parent. A boss. A man who knows better, who is not built for this kind of wanting anymore, not since Marissa.
The thought hits. A fist to the ribs. Old scar tissue tearing open.
Marissa in the doorway, saying she “couldn’t breathe here,” packing her bags while Sadie cried, walking out without looking back.
The sound of the front door closing that morning… I still hear it.
Some nights, it wakes me.
I swore I’d never let myself lose control in that way again.
Never want someone so much they could break me just by leaving.
Never need anyone in a way that made me weak.
I built rules, boundaries, routines… walls thick enough to muffle the worst of the memories.
And then Delaney Rivers showed up in my kitchen with her soft voice and warm eyes and the kind of laughter that sinks into the bones of a house and makes it feel lived in again.
That scares the hell out of me, because wanting her feels like standing on the edge of a cliff and leaning forward, because she’s younger, because she works for me, because Sadie adores her, and because she deserves someone whole, and I don’t know if I am anymore.
Because losing control over a woman once left my daughter with a wound she still can’t name.
And now this feeling… this heat, this hunger…
I don’t want it.
I don’t trust it.
I scrub a hand over my face, trying to shake it off, trying to be the version of me I know how to be—steady, responsible, contained.
But every time I close my eyes, I see Delaney’s mouth curve in that shy little smile.
I roll onto my back, stare at the ceiling, waiting for answers.
It doesn’t give any.
I close my eyes.
Tell myself I’m going to sleep.
That tomorrow I’ll be rational.
Controlled.
The man I’m supposed to be…
“Boone.”
Her voice.
I turn toward the sound, breath already catching, and she steps out of the shadows. Hair loose, falling around her shoulders. Lips parted. A glint in her eyes that doesn’t match the shy smiles she gives Sadie or the polite ones she gives strangers.
This Delaney is made of hunger.
She walks toward me slowly. Hips swaying, chin lifted. Danger curling at the corner of her mouth.
I should be the one in control here.
My dream.
My subconscious.
My damn rules.
But she stops in front of me, tips my chin up with one finger, and says in a low, devastating whisper…
“Get on your knees.”
My stomach drops.
Heat slams into my spine.
I don’t move at first, not because I’m resisting, but because the shock is so sharp it rattles through my ribs.
She watches me, amused. Patient. Almost predatory.
“Boone,” she murmurs, leaning down until her breath skims my jaw, “don’t make me ask again.”
My knees hit the floor, and I can feel her smile without even seeing it.
Her hand slides into my hair and pulls my head back until I meet her eyes.
“Good,” she says softly. “You listen.”
My chest twists, low and feral.
Her fingers tighten in my hair. Just enough pressure to make my pulse stutter.
“I’ve seen the way you look at me,” she whispers. “All that restraint. All that control. You think you’re hiding it.”
I swallow hard.
She shakes her head once, tugging my hair just enough that a groan rumbles out of me.
“You’re not,” she says. “I see all of it. You want to devour me. Don’t you?”
My breath leaves my lungs in a single harsh exhale.
“Yes.”
She rewards the honesty by dragging her nails down my scalp, hard enough to make my eyes close, soft enough to make it torture.
“Boone, now I need you to take off my panties.”
My hands are clumsy at first, too big and rough for the silk and the skin beneath.
I feel the tremble in her thighs, see the glittering challenge in her eyes, and my own hands steady, every instinct bowing to the command in her voice.
I hook my fingers under the delicate edge, breath catching when I brush the softest part of her, and she lets out a humming, dangerous sound that echoes in my blood.
The panties, black, thin, almost laughably insubstantial, slide down her legs, and she does not move to help. Just stands there, looking down at me. She could have me executed for the way I’m staring up at her.
“Look at you,” she whispers, tilting my chin again. “So obedient. So easy. I bet you like being told what to do.”
She bites the inside of her cheek, not even trying to hide her smile.
My knees hurt on the tile, nerves misfiring in my hands, but I stay exactly where she put me, waiting for some permission I don’t remember needing until it’s not given.
She lifts her foot, inviting me to help, to strip her the rest of the way. My mouth goes dry. I loop a finger under the black silk and drag it over her foot. Her toenails are painted the color of spoiled cherries. They twitch, just slightly, when my knuckle grazes her sole.
I swallow. The panties are a trophy in my fist, and she’s watching, eyes never blinking, blowing all the air out of my lungs with every breath.
“Now, Boone,” she groans as she leans back against the wall, her foot pressed behind her and her thighs open wide. “I think you know what I need you to do next.”
Every atom in me strains forward, an animal on the scent, but I snap my jaw shut on the urge to speak, to beg, to do anything but exactly what she’s told me.
I shift closer, knees scraping rough tile, mouth near the bare skin of her thigh. She’s warm, warmer than I expect, radiating heat and the sharp, chemical hum of her perfume, and a saltiness under that.
I look up, just to make sure, and she nods, nearly invisible, her hand slipping into my hair, not to guide but to anchor. She wants to see if I’ll do it myself, and I do, tongue first.
The taste is electric: sweat, lotion, her. I run the tip along the inside of her thigh, letting the anticipation agitate us both. She laughs, breath stuttering, because she knows what I’m doing and she loves it. I think of that laugh as a dare, so I go higher.
My mouth is on her, and then inside her, and I hear the clatter of her head against the wall as she inhales so violently it could be her drowning.
Her thighs tense up, almost crush my ears, but I work my hands up and splay them against her hips, holding her so she can’t jerk away or buckle or slide down.
I never want to be anywhere else but in this exact spot, tasting her, every flick and curl of my tongue designed to unmake her composure cell by cell.
Her noises get meaner, less human, until she’s cursing at me. Not in anger but in raw, lunging desperation.
“Fuck, Boone,” she says, and my name is pure combustion.
My eyes are wet with the prickle of sweat, effort, and the sting of her hand twisting tight in.
“Now, give me your cock already. You’re hard, right? Show me.”
She’s already reaching, palming the bulge in my jeans, and it’s almost embarrassing how much I flinch at the contact. My skin tingles where her thumb presses, right along the seam. She knows the exact weak spot. She grins fiercely, fingers digging in, and I am lost, utterly, hilariously powerless.
I fumble out of the last of my clothes, maybe not as smooth as I imagine, but she’s so hungry she’s pulling at me before I have the chance to get self-conscious.
She tugs me up, stands me in front of her, and I almost expect her to say something—more instructions, a cutting nickname, some dagger-sharp joke—but instead she just stares down at what I’ve got her, and then she makes a sound, a low, shocked exhale.
It fills me up, makes me stupidly proud.
I’ve managed to prove a theorem she didn’t think I could solve.
She stands and pushes me back onto the edge of the kitchen table. The old Formica top bites into my bare ass, cold and hard and grounding as hell. She climbs up with me, one knee pressed beside my hip, the other curling between my legs.
She’s taller than I expect, or maybe it’s the heels, but she knows exactly how to slot herself against me, winding her arm around the back of my neck as she angles my face up to hers.
“You’re going to let me ride you, right?”
The question is a dare, but she’s not waiting for my answer. She’s maneuvering herself until she’s got me in her hand, hot and pulsing, and the rest of me kind of blanks out.
Her hand is surprisingly gentle, a velvet vice, and she guides me to where she wants me. I feel it, the impossible slick tension as she slides down, sinking onto me slowly, the first inch a kind of punishment. She’s stretching out the moment just to make me beg for the next fraction of her.
Every centimeter is an agony, a benediction. I manage to hiss out her name, half question, half surrender, but she just clamps a hand over my mouth and keeps going.
Her hips are unhurried at first, fucking herself down on me in lazy, open circles. The friction isn’t enough, and at the same time, it’s almost too much, the way she’s milking it, squeezing every last possibility out of the contact.
My hands are frantic, everywhere at once. Her ass, her waist, one palm braced behind me on the table to keep from flying backwards every time she slams down.
The dress is bunched up around her ribs, a rumpled green flag of conquest, and I can see the marks I left on her thighs from earlier already starting to bloom.
There are scratches too, streaked just below her hips.
They stand out, welts against the pale, the kind of battle scars that will outlast the evening, and maybe that’s the point.
Her hair falls in brown curtains around her face, framing that narrow, competent smile she only wears when she’s in the middle of something precise.
I want to see all of her at once, but she stays just out of reach, holding me down under her hand, grinding down until I can’t even remember how to breathe.
My heels knock against the crossbars of the table, desperate for leverage or escape, but she’s got me, all of me, pinned by the gravity of her own momentum.
She leans forward, drape of hair tickling my lips, her other hand raking down my chest. I can smell the sweat on her, sharp and salt and sage, and it comes to me that I’d do this forever if she asked.
I’d live right here, buried deep inside her pussy, let her ride me into the ground, if it meant I never lost this heat, this rush.
Her moan is low and strange, dragged through her teeth, chewing on the edge of her own hunger. She pops her hand off my mouth at the same moment she slams down, and the noise I make is obscene and involuntary, echoing off the empty kitchen.
I almost break, right there. She feels it, either the way I flex inside her or the way my whole body threatens to convulse, and clamps down hard, knees pressing in, thighs trembling.
“Not yet,” she growls, the command unsteady but absolute. “You don’t come until I say so.”
It shouldn’t be hot, the way she strips me down to nothing and then rebuilds me to her own pattern, but right now it’s all I ever want. I’m being rewired from the ground up. She’s teaching my skin how to feel things in ways a human body’s not designed for.
My hands slide up the slick planes of her back, nails grazing along the edges of her shoulder blades, and when I pull her down to me, teeth colliding with the side of her neck, she whimpers—a sound so raw and undressed I want to peel the skin off my chest and press her inside.
I want to say her name again, to get her attention or at least remind her of the person she’s breaking apart, but I can’t find air long enough to form the syllables.
My head goes blurry at the edges, little pulses firing behind my eyes every time she grinds down hard enough to send electricity shooting out of my toes.
There’s something gluttonous in the way she moves, insisting on every aftershock, every ripple, draining all the voltage out of us before she lets me get close to coming.
I can feel her starting to clench up around me, sharp little spasms, daring me to ignore her order, to lose it and pay the penalty.
If I had any control left, I’d try harder to impress her, prove that I can hold out, but the only thing keeping me from going over is pure terror, a sweaty, bone-deep fear of what she’ll do if I come before she wants me to.
She shifts, changes the angle, rides up on her knees, and the slick heat between us is obscene, the slap of her flesh, the drip of sweat off my own skin as I strain up to catch her with my mouth, anywhere, everywhere.
I sink my teeth into her shoulder just to anchor myself, just to keep from detonating right there on the kitchen table. She doesn’t even flinch. She just laughs, a low, delighted cackle, proud of what she’s doing to me.
I feel the build in her first, the sudden wild tremble that goes through her thighs, the way her nails claw at my wrist instead of the table. She drags her bottom lip between her teeth and closes her eyes, and I know she’s seconds away.
I want to tell her how good she looks, how the flush creeps up her chest, but there's no language for it, just this howling in my skull, this static that drowns out everything but the slap and shudder.
“Now,” she grates, the signal cracked and brutal, but it’s all I need.
I come so violently it arches my spine off the table, stars behind my eyelids, that ancient tidal wave tearing through and shattering me so thoroughly she has to hold me down until I’m done. She rides it out, both of us gone animal, spasming around me, trying desperately to hang on…
I wake up gasping, sheets twisted around my legs, chest heaving, skin burning.
My body is a live wire. Every nerve lit up. Every part of me straining for a touch that never happened.
My name is a strangled sound in the dark.
“Delaney…”
Damn.
Shame crashes in next. Hard, fast, choking.
What the hell is wrong with me?
I sit up, dragging a hand over my face. My pulse is still thundering. My body still aching. My mind still filled with the image of her standing over me, telling me to kneel.
I can’t do this. I can’t want her, not like this, not when she works for me, not when Sadie loves her, not when I’ve spent years rebuilding my life brick by brick.
I have no business dreaming about her.
Never again, I warn myself.