Chapter 6
GREER
His mouth finds my neck. My back finds the wall.
The hallway is narrow and dim and the wallpaper is peeling and the house still smells faintly of lavender no matter how many windows I open, and none of it matters because his hands are sliding up my ribcage and his teeth graze the tendon where my neck meets my shoulder and the sound I make is low and involuntary and nothing like the sound a woman makes when she's thinking clearly.
We don't make it upstairs. The living room is closer, my mother's living room, with the fireplace and the bookshelves and the two armchairs, and I pull him toward the couch with both hands fisted in his shirt, and he follows.
The back of my knees hits the seat cushion of the sofa and I sit, pulling him down over me, and his weight settles against me like an answer to a question I didn't know I was asking.
His hands are deliberate. My sweater over my head.
His fingers at the clasp of my bra, efficient and certain, like a man who approaches everything with competence and has decided to apply that competence here.
The bra falls away and the cool air tightens my skin, and he stops.
Looks. His gaze moves over my bare chest with the focused, unhurried attention of a man memorizing something he intends to revisit, and the weight of being looked at like that, by this man, in this dim room, makes my nipples harden before he touches them.
When his mouth finds my breast, the heat of it after the cold air is a shock that bows my spine off the cushion.
He takes my nipple between his lips and sucks, slow, firm, unhurried, his tongue circling the peak while his hand cups the other breast, his thumb dragging across the nipple in lazy strokes that match the rhythm of his mouth.
The sound I make is embarrassing and I don't care.
He switches sides, and the cool air on my wet skin where his mouth just was makes me whimper, and the whimper makes him press his hips against mine, and through his trousers I can feel exactly how hard he is, the rigid length of him against my inner thigh, and the knowledge of what that hardness means, what it wants, what it's going to do, turns the heat between my legs into a slick, aching pulse.
"You're shaking," he murmurs against my sternum.
"I'm cold."
"You're lying."
"I'm very good at it. Must be the company."
He laughs, a real sound, low and surprised, like a man who has forgotten what his own laughter sounds like, and the vibration of it against my skin does something devastating to the last of my restraint.
My fingers find his belt. His hand catches my wrist, pins it above my head against the arm of the sofa, and the look he gives me is controlled and hot and absolutely wrecking.
"Slow down," he says.
"Make me."
His mouth covers mine. The kiss is different from the hallway, deeper, more deliberate, the kind of kiss that takes inventory.
His free hand traces down my body, over my breast, pinching the nipple just hard enough to make me gasp into his mouth, across the flat of my stomach, along the waistband of my jeans.
His fingers are unhurried. Each touch is precise, intentional, mapped.
He undoes the button of my jeans like he has all the time in the world, and the patience of it is its own form of torment, because my hips are lifting toward his hand and he's not giving me what my body is demanding.
"Callum."
"Mm." His mouth is at my ear, his breath warm, and his fingers slide my clothing and find me. The slick, swollen heat of me, already soaked, and the groan he makes against my ear when he feels how wet I am is guttural and possessive and makes my inner walls clench around nothing.
"You were saying?" he murmurs, and his fingers begin to move.
Two of them, sliding through the wet folds, parting me, circling my clit with slow, deliberate pressure before dipping lower and pressing inside.
The stretch of his fingers, the curl of them against the front wall, the heel of his palm grinding against my clit with every stroke, is so precisely calibrated it borders on cruel.
I was saying his name. I was saying it like a demand, and now I'm saying it like a plea, because his fingers are stroking me with the same methodical precision he brings to everything, and the pleasure builds in slow, tight spirals, and he's watching my face with an attention that would be clinical if not for the way his jaw is set, the way his breathing has gone ragged, the way the hand pinning my wrist has tightened until I can feel his pulse in his fingertips.
He brings me to the edge and holds me there. Deliberately. He pulls his hand back when my thighs clamp around it, returns when the tension ebbs, reading my body with the fluency of a man who pays attention to details for a living and has decided to pay attention to this one with everything he has.
"You're doing this on purpose," I gasp.
"Obviously."
"I hate you."
"You don't." His thumb circles, presses, and his fingers curl hard against the spot inside me that makes my vision fracture, and the orgasm crests through me like a wave breaking, my back arching off the sofa, his name in my mouth, his hand between my thighs, his eyes on mine the entire time, watching me fall apart with the focused, consuming attention of a man who is filing away every detail.
Every sound. Every reaction. Learning me the way he learns anything: thoroughly, precisely, with the intent to use what he's learned.
The aftermath is quick and graceless. My hands tearing at his belt, his trousers.
His shirt goes over his head and I get my first real look at him, the lean, hard lines of his torso, the definition across his stomach, the trail of dark hair below his navel.
He's built the way I should have expected: controlled, maintained, nothing wasted.
I press my mouth to his chest, taste salt and rain and the warm skin underneath, and feel his breath hitch when my teeth find the ridge of muscle above his hip.
He kicks his trousers off and I reach for him, wrap my fingers around the hard, hot length of him. He's thick and heavy in my hand, the skin like velvet over iron, and when I stroke him from base to tip, my thumb sliding through the slick bead of moisture at the head, his whole body jerks.
The sound he makes is guttural, pulled from somewhere deep, and his hips push forward into my grip with a need that strips away every layer of composure he's ever worn.
"Greer." My name in his mouth sounds like a warning and a prayer at the same time.
His hand closes over mine, tightening my grip, showing me the pressure he wants, the pace, and for a moment I have the power, I have this man who controls everything at the mercy of my hand, and the headiness of it is almost better than the orgasm he just gave me.
"I want you inside me," I tell him, and my voice doesn't sound like mine.
He doesn't need to be told twice. He pulls my hand away, pins both my wrists above my head with one hand, and lowers himself over me.
His free hand hooks under my thigh, lifts my leg against his hip, and the angle opens me to him in a way that makes me gasp before he's even inside me.
The head of him presses against my entrance, hot and blunt, and the anticipation of it, the hovering, is its own exquisite torture.
"Look at me," he says.
I look. His eyes are almost black in the dim light, focused and fierce, and when he pushes inside me, slow, one long continuous slide, the stretch of him fills me so completely that the breath leaves my body in a shudder.
The sensation is overwhelming, the thickness of him pushing against my inner walls, the fullness so deep it borders on too much.
He holds there, buried, his jaw locked, the muscles in his arms taut from the effort of not moving, and the fullness of him is almost overpowering, the pressure and the heat and the intimacy of being pinned beneath a man who is watching my face like it's the only thing in the world.
"God," I whisper, and my voice is wrecked, and I don't recognize it.
"Tell me what you feel," he says, low, against my mouth.
"Full. I feel full of you. I feel you everywhere."
Something shifts in his expression. The control cracks, just a fraction, and he pulls back, almost all the way out, the drag of him against my sensitive walls making me moan, and then drives forward, and the sound that comes out of both of us is raw and simultaneous and the sofa groans beneath us.
He sets a rhythm that is relentless and deliberate, deep strokes that hit a spot inside me that makes my vision white out at the edges.
Each thrust pushes the air from my lungs in a sharp exhale, and I can hear myself making sounds I've never made, broken, desperate sounds that would embarrass me if I could think about anything beyond the feel of him moving inside me.
My wrists strain against his grip. My hips rise to meet each thrust, and the wet sound of our bodies is obscene in the quiet house, and I love it, the mess of it, the gracelessness, the slick slide of skin on skin.
His mouth finds the curve of my neck and his teeth close on the skin there, not gently, and the sharp edge of pain braids with the pleasure until I can't separate them.
"Harder," I tell him, and he gives me harder, driving into me with a force that scoots us both up the sofa, and the bookshelves rattle, and my mother's journals shift on their shelf, and there is something profane and perfect about being fucked on June Holden's sofa by an Aldrich while the rain comes down and the dead clock keeps its silence in the hall.
"You have no idea what you look like right now," he says against my throat, and his voice is shredded, barely recognizable. "What you feel like. How tight you are."