Chapter Ten — Adrian #2
I lie her back against the dark silk. My mouth finds her collarbone, the hollow of her throat, the curve of her sternum.
She smells like the show. Hairspray, adrenaline, and underneath it, just her.
My mouth moves lower to her ribs. The soft skin below her navel.
Her fingers find my hair, and she isn't quiet about it.
I don't want her quiet.
I pull her underwear down and off and put my mouth on her.
She arches off the bed the moment my mouth finds her.
I keep her hips pinned. I take my time. My tongue learns the place that makes her gasp, the pressure that tightens her grip in my hair, the angle that makes her hips jolt against my hands.
I'm hard against the sheets and I don't care. I have her exactly where I want her.
When I work two fingers inside her I feel how ready she is. Tight and hot, gripping my fingers, and the sound she makes nearly undoes me.
She says my name the way she does when she's out of arguments.
"Look at me," I say against her.
She does. Eyes blown. Hair loose across the silk. Her chest heaving.
I keep my eyes on her face and work her until she shatters. Her thighs locking around my shoulders, my name tearing out of her, her whole body clenching and shaking with it.
I give her approximately thirty seconds.
"Adrian." Breathless. Warning.
I move up her body, my mouth dragging over her stomach, her ribs, the underside of her breast. Her hands go immediately to my shoulders. Not pulling me in. Gripping. Like she needs something to hold onto. I brace over her. Her eyes find mine.
Neither of us says anything.
I push into her slowly.
Her mouth falls open. Her head goes back. Just the sharp intake of breath as her body stretches around me, hot, tight, clenching. Her legs lock around my hips. Her nails drag down my back as she pulls me closer. Each point of contact a line of heat against my skin.
I press my forehead to hers. Feel her tighten around me. Feel her breath, warm against my jaw, when I'm burri all the way inside her.
"Don't stop," she says.
I have no intention of stopping.
I build the pace with purpose. Long, deep strokes that have her toes curling against my calves. Each time I feel her getting close, feel it in the way she tightens around me, in the catch of her breath, I pull back. Slow down. She makes a sound of pure frustration and her grip turns punishing.
"You're doing that on purpose," she says through her teeth.
"Yes."
"I hate you."
"No," I say. "You don't."
I drive into her hard enough that she stops talking.
The sound she makes tears through me. I stop pacing anything. Bury my face in her neck and drive deeper. She cries out. Her voice breaking on my name and I feel her tighten around me, clenching and pulsing, her whole body shaking with it.
She says my name one final time. Not a question. Not a demand. Just my name. The way you say the name of something you've stopped pretending you don't need.
She shatters and then I do.
We lie there afterward, her chest against mine, both of us breathing like we've survived something. The city goes on outside the glass. I stare at the ceiling.
Her hand presses flat against my sternum. We stay.
She lets me pull her up toward the pillows.
Which is significant. Sienna Rossi does not let things happen to her.
She drives events or she exits them. The fact that she goes still against my side with her head on my shoulder and her eyes closed is a form of trust she almost certainly won't acknowledge in the morning.
I'm not going to mention it.
The sheets are a dark silk charcoal. Chosen for the penthouse by a designer I hired and never thought about again. The color makes her look pale and luminous and entirely too real against the abstraction of the room. I lie down beside her. She curls toward me without opening her eyes.
My hand moves over her shoulder. Her arm. The curve of her waist. I keep the touch light. Not seductive. The way you touch something you're trying to confirm is actually there.
She's warm. Her breathing is slowing. Within a few minutes, it's evened out entirely.
I lie there with the ceiling above me and her weight on my chest and the lights running on past midnight through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
The merger is in week four. Vane has been quiet for six days.
Six days is not the same as finished.
Her hand is loose at my sternum. I lie there in the dark and think about what I'm holding. Not the deal. Her. The way she tipped her head back against me in the corridor, all that adrenaline finally landing. The way she kissed me first.
Vane asked about her by name. Sterling told me three weeks ago and I put it away as a threat to manage. Lying here now with her weight against my side, I understand what kind of threat it actually is.
If he gets to her before I get to him, if he uses what he has before I can bury it, he finds out about everything at once. Vane's interference. My company's role in it. Her name attached to a bankruptcy fraud narrative before I can stop it.
She'd leave.
I lie there and listen to her breathe and understand it the way I never understand anything, without calculating it first. That's the thing I can't let happen.
Not the deal. Her.
She shifts slightly. Her hand presses flatter against my chest.
I don't move.
I close my eyes.
I do not sleep for a long time.
She's still there when I open my eyes.
I note this before anything else. Before the light. Before the hour. Before the list of things requiring my attention.
She's still there.
I lie still and let that be enough.
For now.