Chapter Eighteen #3
Pride swells in my chest knowing I’m the only one who’s made her act like this. “As much as I’d like to stay right where we are, we need to move. Work around the farm starts soon.”
She straightens so quickly that she almost topples off my lap, and I brace my legs and arms around her to hold her in place.
“Steady now.”
She tucks a stray lock of her hair behind her ear and looks down between us. When her eyes widen at my lap, I grin up at her.
“Oh, my,” she breathes.
“Don’t be embarrassed. You did so well.”
Her eyes glint with mischief, and I glance at her mouth and notice a freckle shaped almost like a heart near the top left of her lower lip.
I want to kiss those lips, make them swollen and wet, but I’ll have to wait until next time.
It hasn’t gone unnoticed that I still haven’t kissed her, but if I do, I won’t be able to stop, and I can’t risk anyone catching us here.
She rubs her chin, and a slow smile tugs at her lips. “I…”
“What is it?”
“I liked that you called me a good girl.”
I squeeze around her middle in silent approval. “I’m glad.”
“I think you call me that sometimes in my dreams.”
“Sounds like your subconscious is trying to tell you something.”
I move closer and place a last kiss above the gold locket around her chest while pulling the straps up to cover her breasts. I try not to dwell on the rosy glow now covering her usually pale skin, but it’s fucking impossible to ignore the evidence of my beard all over her chest.
Marking her. I did that.
It’s the biggest turn-on and highest privilege that she let me do that to her. It makes me wonder what else she’d let me do if we weren’t short of time.
I pull her in for a hug and put my lips close to her cheek. I shouldn’t delay leaving, but I can’t seem to help myself when I’m around her.
“I need to get going,” she whispers.
I nod. “Are you okay, Mae?”
She slides off my lap and tugs at her tracksuit. I zero in on the wetness coating her crotch but force my gaze up to level her with a stare. I let her consider my question in her own time, needing to hear her words before we go our separate ways.
She squares her shoulders. “Yes. I’m feeling much better, actually.”
I grin and finally get up. The heavy air around us smells like sex, and she rubs her still-heated cheeks. I scrub a hand through my beard, searching for something, anything, to say. Then it clicks.
“What were you doing when I first came in?”
Her brows lift. “I don’t think I was doing anything.”
I nod towards the spot where I found her. “I watched you for about a minute. Your eyes were closed,” I explain, “but your mouth was moving. Were you talking to yourself?”
Her chin dips. “Oh. That.”
I rest my hands on her shoulders and bend my knees, lowering myself to her level. “You can trust me.”
She keeps her eyes averted, but her lips pull up in a crooked smile. “I know. I was counting.”
“Counting?”
She hesitates, wetting her lips. “Sometimes, I get anxiety attacks. When I feel an attack coming, I start counting to myself. It helps me calm down again.” She lifts her shoulders in a light shrug like it’s nothing, like she hasn’t just handed me something fragile.
No, not fragile: precious.
She opens her mouth again, but then closes it.
Something in my chest tightens, but I can’t put my finger on it. I don’t press, though. I know that some things aren’t mine to take yet.
“All right. We should probably talk about what just happened, but…”
“Not right now,” she agrees. “But please don’t make a fuss. I’m not going to change my mind about us. I needed a release from someone other than my own hand, and I got it. Thank you.”
My hands ache to grab her and kiss her, but I suppress the urge and push them into my back pockets.
“It was my pleasure. Truly.”
She glances down at my crotch, and her lips stretch in a wide smile. “Well, I can see that. Okay, I’m going now. Bye.”
She backs away from me, her eyes lingering on mine for a couple of steps. I raise my eyebrows at her, waiting for the question she seems to want to ask me, but instead, she turns around and sets off in a light jog, and before I know it, she’s left me alone.
I watch blindly, flashes of what we just did raging through me until I finally come unstuck from my spot.
The last thing I need is for one of my employees to see me with sex hair and a big, sticky glob spattered on my jeans.
I turn around, and without thinking too hard about what I just did, I head back into the main house.
But the taste of her skin stays in my mouth for the entire morning, and even though I shouldn’t, I keep trying to come up with an excuse to see her again.
I wasn’t lying when I told her I’m aching to taste her pussy, but now that I’ve gotten a glimpse into her fantasies about me, I’m yearning for more from her.
It’s not a matter of if it’ll happen anymore. It’s a matter of when.
Because there’s no way I’ve had my fill of Maeve yet.
It’s just sex, and now that she’s reassured me that her feelings about me haven’t changed, I’m determined to get her alone again. Sooner rather than later.
But later that night, when the house has settled and Katie has gone to bed, it’s not sex that’s on my mind. I stand at the kitchen sink longer than I need to, staring at nothing.
I was counting.
The words come back to me, soft and careful, as if she’d measured them before sharing them with me.
I dry my hands and put the mug away. Maeve had shared her anxiety with me as if it was ordinary, manageable, even, but it’s not really that that’s stuck with me like glue all day.
It’s that I’d found her in the middle of chasing an attack away, and the fact that the sound of my voice helped, even in a small way, is what shakes me.
She trusts me far more than I trust myself, and now that we’ve headed into deeper waters, all I can do is hope to pull myself out before we sink to the bottom.