Chapter 8 #2
She holds the look a beat too long, and I see the calculation happen behind her eyes, the crime-beat instinct running the math on what the man in front of her is worth.
I stand. I cross the kitchen, not fast, the pace of a man who sees the calculation and isn't interested in rushing it.
Her arms are folded. Her chin lifts. She doesn't step back.
I stop close enough that her folded arms press against my chest, close enough that the warmth of her reaches me through the layers, that I can see the tension in her jaw and the way her lips part when she breathes.
"You want to know if I'm lying," I say. "You've wanted to know since the night you put your hand on my chest and felt me breathe.
The journals are evidence. The clause is evidence.
But the thing you're actually after is the part of me the paperwork can't reach, and the paperwork is the only language I've ever had, and you're standing in this kitchen daring me to find another one. "
"I'm not daring you to do anything."
"You just told me you should have thrown me out. You're still six inches away. You haven't moved."
Her mouth opens on a response, and I close the distance and take it.
The kiss is hard, tasting of the anger she's been holding and the coffee she drank while she held it. Her fists are still pressed against my chest, but she doesn't pull away. My hand slides to the back of her neck, fingers threading into her hair, tilting her head where I want it.
She makes a sound against my mouth, low and involuntary and furious. Her hands unfold and grip my shirt and pull, not pushing me away but pulling me in.
"I should hate you for this," she says against my mouth.
"You should."
"I don't. I should, and I don't, and that is the worst thing you've done to me."
I walk her backward until her shoulders hit the kitchen wall. Her fingers work the buttons of my shirt with the efficient attention she brings to everything, and the shirt falls open and her palms land flat against my chest.
"Every time you touch me, I'm looking for the lie," she says. Her hands slide down my stomach, and the muscles contract under her fingers. "I'm cataloging your reactions. I'm building a file."
"I know."
"It doesn't bother you?"
"More than it should."
Her hands stop. The stillness belongs to a woman who just heard something she wasn't expecting.
"Why?"
I pull her sweater over her head. She lifts her arms and lets me. I unclasp her bra and let it fall.
My thumb drags across one nipple, slow and deliberate, and the peak tightens under the pressure. I cup her breast, feeling the weight of it in my palm, the softness against the calluses.
When my mouth replaces my thumb, closing around the peak with slow, firm suction, her spine arches off the wall and her fingers curl into my hair and grip.
I pull with my lips, then circle with my tongue, the flat of it dragging across the hardened peak in strokes that match the rhythm I'll set later when I'm inside her. She doesn't know that yet. I do.
I switch to the other breast. My thumb keeps working the first, wet from my mouth, rolling the peak between my fingers while my tongue traces the same slow circles on the second.
The sound she makes is low and continuous, a vibration I can feel in her ribcage under my hand.
Her hips shift against the wall, restless, searching for pressure I'm not giving her yet.
"Because a woman who watches my face while I'm inside her is going to see everything I've spent my life keeping out of sight," I say against her skin. "The composure holds in Ward's office. It holds in a courtroom. It does not hold with you."
Her jeans and panties come off with my hands and her cooperation, my fingers hooking the waistband and stripping denim and cotton down her legs.
She's completely naked, standing against her mother's kitchen wall. The sight of her stops my hands on my own belt.
The lamplight catches the sheen between her thighs.
She's wet, visibly, and the want that goes through me is blunt and immediate and strips every professional instinct I own down to the animal underneath.
My mouth goes dry. My cock is straining against the wool, and I can feel my own pulse in it, heavy and demanding, and every rational process I've built in thirty-four years of learning to control rooms is being outbid by the need to put my mouth on her and taste what I'm doing to her.
I leave my belt. I drop to one knee on the kitchen floor, my hands on her hips pressing her back against the wall, and the sound she makes when she understands what I'm doing is half protest and half surrender.
I lift one of her thighs over my shoulder, opening her, and press my mouth between her legs.
The first long stroke of my tongue parts her from entrance to clit, and the taste of her hits me straight at the base of my spine.
Salt and heat and the slick evidence of a want she can't argue away any more than I can. Her whole body jolts.
Her hand finds the back of my head, fingers fisting in my hair hard enough to sting. I find her clit and work it with slow, firm pressure, my lips closing around the swollen bud, pulling with a rhythm designed to take her apart at the speed I set.
Two fingers slide inside her. She's tight and hot and wet enough that they push in without resistance, the slick heat gripping them as I curl against the front wall and find the spot that makes her head tip back against the plaster.
"You look like a man on his knees for the first time." Her voice is wrecked, but the observation is sharp and pointed, Greer watching and filing even now. "I don't think anyone's ever seen this version of you."
She's correct. I answer by curling my fingers harder and sealing my mouth over her clit with a suction that makes her spine arch off the wall and her hand fist tighter in my hair.
When I feel her getting close, the muscles tightening, I pull back. My mouth leaves her. My fingers slow to a shallow, teasing stroke.
"Don't you dare," she breathes.
"You wanted to build a file." I press a kiss to the inside of her thigh. "I'm contributing to the record."
"I will kill you."
"Later."
My mouth returns, and this time I don't ease off. My tongue circles her clit with firm, steady pressure, my fingers curving deep, stroking the spot in a rhythm that matches my tongue. Her hips grind against my face. Her breath comes in short, fractured pulls.
She comes against my mouth with both hands in my hair and a sound that breaks open behind her ribs. Her inner walls clench hard around my fingers in rhythmic pulses, her thigh shaking against my shoulder.
I work her through it, slower, gentler, until her grip loosens and her breathing starts to come back.
I stand. She looks at me, flushed from her cheeks to her chest, her back against the wall, her eyes glazed and dark.
Mine. The word arrives uninvited and absolute. She's standing against her mother's wall with my mouth still wet from her and the fury still in her eyes underneath the haze.
Mine. The woman who just read my worst weapon and is still within reach.
My clothes come off. She watches me strip with the same forensic attention she brings to evidence, cataloging.
Her gaze tracks down my chest, the definition across my stomach, the line of dark hair below my navel, and when I push the trousers and shorts down together and step free, her eyes drop to my cock and stay there.
I'm hard enough that it aches, the length of me thick and straining, and the look she gives me is not shy and not clinical. It's the look of a woman taking inventory of what's about to be inside her and deciding she wants every inch of it.
Her hand wraps around my cock the moment I'm close enough, her fingers closing with a pressure that makes my jaw lock and my vision narrow to the point of contact.
She strokes me once, base to tip, her thumb dragging through the moisture at the head, and the sound that comes out of me is low and honest and belongs to the man underneath the fixer, the one who wants this woman with a greed that would horrify the version of me who walks through courtrooms.
"You're shaking," she says.
"I'm aware."
I grip her hips and lift. Her legs wrap around me, her back braced against the wall. I hold her weight with one hand under her thigh, the other gripping her hip, and the position puts us face to face. Close enough that her breath is on my mouth. Close enough that she'll see everything.
She's so wet that the head of my cock slides through her folds without resistance.
I hold there, the blunt pressure against her entrance, letting her feel me right there.
Every nerve in my body is pulling forward and I hold still because the waiting is how I hold the last thread of control, the last distance between the man who manages everything and the man who is about to come apart inside the woman who sees through all of it.
Her lips part. Her hips tilt toward me in an involuntary pull, and I wait one more second, and then I push inside her in one slow, continuous stroke.
The heat of her grips me, tight, the swollen aftermath of the first orgasm making her clench around me with every inch.
The feel of it shuts down every remaining circuit that doesn't involve this.
Her body around mine. The wet, consuming grip of her.
My eyes close for a half-second before I force them open because I told her to watch me and I owe her the same.
She takes all of me. When I'm seated to the hilt she lets out a breath that shudders through her whole body, and the clench of her around me is so consuming that my hands shake where they hold her.
I set the pace. Slow and deep, using the wall for leverage, each thrust a full withdrawal that lets her feel every inch of me dragging against her before I push back to the hilt. The friction is consuming, the tight, wet grip of her body resisting and yielding in the same stroke.
"Look at me," I tell her.