Chapter Thirty #3
Her hips roll up to meet mine, restless, urgent, chasing the angle, chasing me, her entire lower body moving with a single-minded purpose that has nothing to do with patience anymore.
One of her hands leaves my shoulder and grabs the back of my neck instead, fingers digging into the tousled hair at my nape and pulling, yanking my mouth down to hers, and the kiss she gives me is open, desperate, and barely a kiss at all, more breath than pressure, more need than intention.
I put my lips to her ear. “Let go.” The words land and something in her breaks open.
Her spine arches off the bench, a full-body bow, her head thrown back, her throat exposed, and a sound tearing out of her that bounces off every wall in the room, the kind of sound she has no armor left to manage.
Her body locks around mine, a sudden vicious clench that squeezes the breath straight out of my lungs, and then pulses, deep, rhythmic, relentless, each one gripping me harder than the last, dragging from the base of me to the tip in long rolling waves of pressure that blur the edges of my vision and make my knees give out from under me.
My palm slams flat to the bench behind her, the only reason either of us stays upright.
She is still going, still shuddering, her hips jerking forward in small, helpless movements she has no control over anymore.
Every one of them drives the sensation deeper into me, until my jaw is locked so hard my back teeth ache, and my free hand has her hip in a grip that is going to leave a mark by morning.
Her arms wrap around my neck, dragging me into her as her face buries in my throat, and she lets out one last broken sound against my skin, muffled, wrecked, and completely hers, like she’s fallen clean over the edge and has no intention of coming back. Her body pulses around mine one more time.
Long, deep, and thorough.
And something in me snaps.
My hands find her hips and drag her forward to the very edge of the bench, flush against me, no space left between us, nothing held back, and the sound she makes at the sudden pressure is another small devastation I file away without meaning to.
“Millie.” Her name in my throat, rough and scraped raw.
She tightens her arms around my neck in answer, and the sensation of it, the tight heat of her still clenching around me in slow fading pulses, each one gripping and releasing and gripping again, pulls a sound out of me I don’t have any control over.
I drop my forehead to her shoulder.
My hips drive forward once, hard, and she gasps into my neck.
Again.
Her nails drag down my back.
The pressure inside me has been building since she walked through that front door with her folder of paperwork, her barely contained joy, and her voice going fast and bright with everything she could see that wasn’t there yet.
It has been pulling tighter with every word out of her mouth and every room we walked through and every second of her hands on me in the close, warm dark of this pantry, and now it has nowhere left to go.
“God, you feel…” The sentence doesn’t finish. There are no words adequate to the end of it.
She turns her face into my jaw. “I know,” she breathes. “I know.”
I thrust into her one last time, deep, deliberate, absolute, and the world reduces itself.
Everything narrows.
The dusty warmth of the room, the bench solid under my hands, Millie’s arms around my neck, her breath against my skin, and the slick, relentless grip of her body around mine, holding me there, pulling, a sensation so acute it registers somewhere behind my eyes as light.
My jaw locks.
My spine pulls taut.
Every muscle in my body draws in at once like a fist closing. For one suspended, dizzying second, everything is absolutely still, absolutely unbearable. I hang there at the edge of it with Millie’s name in my chest and her heartbeat against mine.
Then it breaks.
It hits low in my spine and rolls outward in steady waves, stripping away thought, intention, anything that isn’t her, right here, breathing against my throat.
My hands grip her hard enough that she makes a soft noise.
I bury my face in her hair and groan her name into it, nothing left of the control I walked in here with.
“Millie.”
She holds me through it, both arms locked around my shoulders, her lips pressed to the side of my neck, and she doesn’t say anything. She stays exactly where she is while the waves move through me and slow, and finally, gradually, release their grip.
My breathing is ragged. My legs have opinions I am choosing to ignore. Her hair is against my face, and she smells like herself, and something that is already starting to smell like this place, like sawdust and old timber, and my chest is so full I don’t entirely trust myself to speak.
So, I don’t.
I press my mouth into her hair.
I keep both arms around her.
And I stand here in her bakery, in the room that doesn’t exist yet, holding the woman who is my whole life, and I am breathless.
The pantry goes absolutely silent.
Both of us are trying to catch our breath.
Nothing else.
Then my knee connects with the shelving unit, and it rattles, as if it has been waiting all afternoon for the opportunity.
Millie makes a sound that starts somewhere between a gasp and a shriek and collapses entirely into laughter, the kind she can’t manage, the helpless kind, and I press my face into her hair and let out a rough sound that is somewhere between a laugh and a groan.
“That…” she says, when she can speak, “… was most definitely not OSHA-compliant.”
“This isn’t a workplace yet.”
“It is in my head, and you just got written up, sir.”
I cup her face in both hands and kiss her, unhurried and thorough. She sighs into it, holding my wrists, and the laughter drains out of both of us into something warmer.
Eventually, she slides down off the bench and puts herself back together with the kind of composure that suggests nothing just happened… even though we both know better.
I slide off the used condom and throw it into a cardboard box that already has some trash in it, then drag my shirt back on.
I settle my cut across my shoulders, and she closes the distance without asking, straightening the collar, smoothing the leather with careful hands, her gaze lowered in concentration, and the intimacy of it catches me somewhere I can’t quite name.
“I cannot believe we just—” she starts.
“I can.”
She looks at me. Her eyes are bright. “You’re very smug for someone who nearly knocked over an entire shelving unit.”
“The shelving is fine.”
Her hair is a disaster, but I don’t mention it. I reach over and tuck a loose strand behind her ear. She goes still, watching me do it, and I hold her chin for a second and look at her until the laughter settles out of her face and something softer comes in.
“I can’t wait to do this more often,” I say.
She blinks. “In a butler’s pantry?”
“In your bakery.”
She looks at me for another moment, something in her expression moving and re-settling. Then she glances back through the doorway into the main room, and her voice changes, gets cheerful, the way it does when she is saying something she actually means.
“It’s going to be warm in here,” she says. “And it’s going to smell incredible.”
I look around the bare room, at the dusty surfaces, the blank walls, and the afternoon light falling sideways through the front window. “It already does.”
She turns to look at me. “What are you talking about?”
“You’ve been in it for ten minutes. It already smells like you.”
She stares at me. “That is the most ridiculous compliment anyone has ever given me.”
“I mean it.”
Something in her face softens completely. “I know you do.”
Five Days Later
Sunday at the clubhouse feels easy, like it’s been hard won.
Not every Sunday has felt this way. There have been Sundays this year that were heavy with things unsaid and things unknown, with the weight of a problem that has not been resolved sitting somewhere beneath every conversation like a stone in a boot.
But this one is different.
I am sitting at a table near the back with my beer almost empty, watching the room the way I have always watched rooms, without needing to be in the middle of them to feel part of them.
Ghost and Sage are in their corner.
She’s been stealing that chair for two months now with the kind of confidence that says she decided it belonged to her a while ago and everybody else needs to catch up.
Nobody’s argued with her about it either—especially not Ghost. He’s sitting beside her now with his arms folded and a beer in one hand, staring straight ahead in that way that somehow makes it painfully obvious he’s aware of every single thing she’s doing anyway.
Sage leans over and says something low enough that only he’s supposed to hear it.
The corner of his mouth twitches before he catches himself.
It stops somewhere on the edge of a smile, restrained but real.
From across the room, Deek notices this. Of course he does. Deek notices everything worth remembering and files it away with practiced ease, like he’s been keeping a running archive of our romantic mistakes for years.
He tips his beer toward Ghost once, real subtle, like he’s congratulating himself for calling this whole thing weeks ago, then turns back to his conversation, wearing the most smug bastard expression I’ve seen all night.
From four feet away, Dad’s been watching Deek openly stalk Ghost and Sage for entertainment all night. He closes his eyes for a second, looking exactly like a man who loves his son to death and is permanently tired of his bullshit at the same time. Then he opens them again and takes another drink.
He doesn’t say a word. Which, honestly, seems to be a huge part of surviving life with Deek as your kid. Dad handles it with the kind of long-suffering patience I’ve always respected and am suddenly feeling very grateful for tonight.