Chapter 18 #2
"Callum. If you don't finish what you started, I will make you regret it."
"You'll try," I chuckle.
The challenge sits between us the way every challenge has sat between us: loaded, electric, a dare neither of us will back down from.
She answers by fisting my hair and pulling.
I answer by sealing my mouth over her clit and sucking hard while my fingers curl deep, stroking the swollen ridge inside her with a relentless precision that leaves her nowhere to hide.
Her spine arches. Her thighs clamp against my jaw. The sounds she is making have abandoned language for something more honest, short fractured pulls of breath that I feel against my scalp through the grip of her hand.
She comes with my name in her mouth and her hips grinding against my face and her inner walls clenching tight around my fingers in rhythmic pulses I can feel against my knuckles. I hold her through it, my mouth easing, gentling, drawing the last tremors from her body until she lies there breathing.
I press a kiss to the inside of her thigh and rise over her.
She reaches between us, her hand wrapping around my cock, and the contact strips the last of whatever control I was carrying.
She is still trembling from the orgasm, her grip firm and proprietary.
Her thumb slides through the slick bead at the tip, spreading it down the shaft in a stroke that makes my jaw lock and my hips push forward into her fist.
"There he is," she murmurs, watching my face the way she always watches my face. "The man who loses his composure."
"You're the only person who's seen it."
"That's why I keep doing this."
She guides me to her entrance. The blunt head of me presses against slick heat, and I push inside slowly, inch by inch.
The wet tight grip of her body opening around me is so complete that my arms shake with the effort of holding still once I am fully seated.
She is swollen from the orgasm, tighter than usual, the inner walls still fluttering with aftershocks that I can feel along the full length of me.
Her legs wrap around my hips. Her hands find my lower back, pulling me deeper.
"Stay," she says.
The word lands. I bury my face against her throat and start to move, long unhurried strokes that draw the full length of me out until she is empty and aching and then return, pressing deep, the head of me dragging against her front wall on every pass.
I set the pace because the pace is always mine to set, even when I am giving her the gentlest version of myself.
Every slow withdrawal and return is a decision I am making, and the decision is that this woman will feel every inch of me at the speed I choose.
Her nails rake down my back, scoring fresh lines over the healed scratches, and the sting makes my rhythm falter for a beat before I recover. She notices the falter. She catalogs it. I can see the cataloguing happen in real time behind her eyes, the reporter noting a new vulnerability.
She watches my face. She always watches my face.
The difference is that the surface she has been reading for is not in place, and what she finds underneath it is the thing I have spent my career keeping hidden: the consuming need to be inside this woman and the knowledge that the need has made me something I cannot unmake.
Her hand cups my jaw. Her thumb traces my lower lip.
"There you are," she says, and the callback to the first time she said it in this bed lands like a deposition I did not see coming.
"I'm here."
"I know. That's what's terrifying."
I drive deeper, my pace building, my hand sliding between us to find her clit, circling the swollen bud with my thumb in counterpoint to my thrusts. Her back arches, her hips rolling to meet me, and the wet sound of our bodies together fills the quiet bedroom.
She comes again with her teeth against my shoulder, biting down hard enough to draw a groan from my chest, and the sting of it and the clenching grip of her body trigger my own release, a hard deep pulse that I ride out buried to the hilt with my forehead pressed to hers and her name in my throat.
The stillness afterward is enormous. I stay inside her. She lets me.
Her fingers trace the line of my jaw, the vein at my temple, the sweat-damp hair at my nape. The touches are idle, proprietary, a woman conducting inventory on something she has decided to keep.
"That was different," she says.
"Yes."
"The first time you had me against the wall, you were proving something. The second time, you were memorizing me." Her voice is low, the reporter processing data even now. "This time you weren't doing either."
"No."
"So what were you doing?"
"Staying."
She presses her lips to my forehead. I let her.
There will be mornings when I pin her wrists and set a pace that makes her curse my name, and there will be mornings like this one, where the crack in the surface stays open long enough for her to see what is underneath, and both versions are the same man. She knows that. She chose that.
The morning stretches. We shower. We dress without speaking, moving through the house with the ease of two people who have learned each other's rhythms. The domesticity of it is foreign to everything I have known in the glass house on the ridge, and it is entirely mine.
The cold on the porch when I step outside hits the skin she had her mouth on an hour ago, and the contrast between that warmth and this air is the distance between the man I am in her bed and the man I am about to be in the town below.
I drive into town for groceries. The excuse is bread and eggs.
The reason is that I need to see Wicked Falls in daylight, without the commission microphones, without the professional armor that has governed every interaction I have had in this valley since I was old enough to understand what the Aldrich name could buy.
The grocer is Frank. He has stocked the shelves of this store for decades, greeted me by name every time I walked in, and offered the deference that comes standard with the family.
Today he looks up from the register, and the expression on his face is not deference.
It is an assessment. The nod he gives me is different.
It is the nod you give a man, not a name.
I take the groceries to the counter. "Morning, Frank."