Chapter 15 #2
I watched, dazed and gasping, as he fumbled for his wallet with shaking hands, retrieving a condom and rolling it on with clumsy, desperate efficiency. The sight of him preparing himself for me, his jaw clenched with concentration and need, was almost my undoing.
Then he positioned himself between my legs, his hands gripping my hips, and I could feel the blunt head of him pressing against my entrance.
He entered me in one deep, decisive thrust that drove the air from my lungs in a sharp cry.
My back pressed against the windowpane. The sensation of being filled by him was everything.
He was perfectly big, stretching me in the most delicious way, and for a moment we both just breathed, adjusting to the perfection of it.
“God,” he growled, his face a mask of intense concentration. “You’re so tight. So right.”
He began to move, and the rhythm he set was frantic, almost desperate. This was not the man who methodically repaired fishing rods and hung siding. This was someone else entirely. Someone raw, untamed, driven by weeks of suppressed need.
I wrapped my legs around his lean waist, pulling him deeper, meeting him thrust for powerful thrust. The friction was exquisite, building a fire inside me that threatened to consume us both. I raked my nails down the hard muscles of his back, feeling the skin ripple, earning a sharp hiss from him.
“Yes,” I cried out, as my back slammed against the window again and again. “God, yes. Harder, Austin. I need more.”
He slammed into me again, deeper this time, harder, and I screamed his name. The sound seemed to drive him wild, and suddenly he was moving with a wild fury, his hips snapping against mine.
“Is this what you want?” he rasped, his voice almost unrecognizable.
“Yes!” I cried, my nails digging into his shoulders. “Don’t stop.”
The coil inside me wound tighter and tighter, past the point of bearing. I was so close, balanced on the knife’s edge of release. Austin must have sensed it because suddenly his hand was between us, his thumb finding that sensitive bundle of nerves and pressing hard.
The wild glare in his eyes, combined with the relentless pressure of his thumb, shattered me.
A cry was ripped from my throat, my body convulsing around him as wave after wave of pleasure crashed over me.
Through the haze of my climax, I felt him stiffen, his release tearing through him with a force that made him shake.
“Iris,” he groaned, my name a prayer on his lips as he climaxed inside me.
We stayed like that for a long time, entwined at the window, breathing hard.
Our bodies were slick with sweat and coated in a fine, gritty layer of plaster dust. The reality of what we had just done, and where we had just done it, began to slowly seep back in.
As did the uncomfortable press of the window against my spine.
Then worry washed over me, chilling my overheated skin. Was he going to bolt? Put his walls back up and pretend this was just a momentary, regrettable lapse in judgment? I braced myself for the inevitable withdrawal.
But he didn’t pull away.
Instead, he leaned down and kissed me again.
This time, it was different. His brush of lips was soft, slow, almost questioning, completely opposite to the furious passion of moments before.
He ran his mouth gently across my jaw, his scruff a pleasant, tingling abrasion, then down to the sensitive skin of my neck, to the hollow of my collarbone.
Every movement was tender. A reassurance.
This tenderness, this simple act of staying, was almost more shocking and more intimate than the frantic passion that had preceded it. Hope, fragile and beautiful, bloomed in my chest. Bolstered by his unexpected gentleness, I found my voice.
“Stay tonight,” I whispered in his ear. “With me.”
He pulled back enough to look at me, his eyes dark, still unreadable. But the frantic, panicked energy was gone, replaced by something deeper and more thoughtful. After a long moment that stretched into an eternity, he gave a single, steady nod.
After we gathered our clothes, I reached for his hand and led him from the dusty, chaotic demolition of the Magnolia Suite, down the hall to my bedroom—a temporary island of relative order amidst the glorious mess of Heron House.
We fell together onto my bed, and its clean sheets were a soft, welcoming haven.
He pulled me against him, his lips finding mine again in the semi-darkness of my bedroom.
His kiss was softer now, a question asked without words.
I answered by melting into him, my body boneless and sated.
We didn’t speak. There were no words for what had just happened in that dusty, deconstructed room.
No easy labels for the raw, messy, undeniable thing that had exploded between us.
All I knew was that the silence that had so often felt vast and lonely was now different. And as I drifted off to sleep, curled against the warm, solid reality of Austin Coleridge, Heron House didn’t feel quite so daunting anymore.