Chapter 21 Maya
MAYA
His heartbeat is steady against my back, slow and strong. His arms are around me, one across my ribs, the other resting heavy on my hip, and the water moves gently with each breath he takes. Steam curls around us, carrying the last of the sunset into the darkening sky.
I don't move.
I am not ready to break this. Whatever this is. This warm, weightless, dissolved feeling of being held by someone. Boneless, undone, trembling slightly in the places where sensation is still receding like a tide going out.
His mouth is against the side of my neck. Not kissing. Just there. Breathing me in like he's in no hurry to exhale.
I shift against him, some small adjustment I don't entirely control, and the movement settles me more firmly against his lap. Against him. He's still hard. And that makes something low in my belly clench again.
I shift again. Less accidentally this time.
His hand tightens on my hip. "Maya." His voice is rough, low, right against my ear. "If you keep doing that, I'm going to come in this hot tub. And I have plans that don't include that."
I should stop. I should be sensible. I should be careful.
Instead I roll my hips against him, slow and deliberate, and say, "What kind of plans?"
And that does it. His arms lock around me and he stands.
Straight up out of the water with me in his arms like I weigh nothing. Water sheets off both of us. The cold air hits my skin, immediate, sharp, and I gasp and press closer to him, to the heat of his chest and the impossible warmth of his body against mine.
"What are you doing?"
"Ravishing you." Then he bites the side of my neck, a quick scrape of teeth that sends a bolt of heat straight through me, and starts walking.
I loop my arms around his neck and hold on.
He shoulders open a door at the end and carries me into his room .
Stone fireplace wall, rough-cut granite stacked floor to ceiling, unpolished, the kind of stonework that looks like it was built by hand over weeks.
Exposed timber beams across the ceiling, dark with age, heavy and honest. Wide plank floors in warm honey tones, partially covered by a thick rug the color of sand.
The bed is large, low, dressed in earth tones, heavy linen and a woven throw in deep brown.
A worn leather chair sits near the fireplace. Books stacked on the nightstand.
There's an order to this room that contradicts every assumption I've made about Jace. The wild card, the restless one, the man who is always in motion. This room is still. Considered. Everything in it has been chosen rather than accumulated, and nothing is here for show.
He sets me down on the wide plank floor, gently, steadying me because my legs haven't fully recovered from what happened in the hot tub.
"Stay here," he says. "One second."
He disappears into the ensuite and comes back with a towel. Large and soft,that he wraps around my shoulders, pulling it close, and then he starts to dry me.
Slowly.
My shoulders, my arms, the back of my neck where the wet hair has dripped. He pats the towel along my collarbone, down my sternum, careful around my breasts.
I watch his face while he does it. The concentration there. The slight furrow between his brows. This is where the teasing stops. This is the real Jace underneath it.
He kneels. Dries my legs, my calves, lifts each foot and runs the towel between my toes, and the tenderness of it is so unexpected and so complete that my eyes sting and I have to look at the ceiling to keep from falling apart.
"Hey." He's looking up at me from the floor, towel in his hands, head tilted. "You okay?"
I nod. I don't trust my voice.
He stands. Takes my hand and leads me to the bed. Sits me down on the edge, the linen cool and smooth under my bare thighs. He leans in and kisses me, soft and brief.
He crosses to the fireplace. Crouches in front of it, and I watch him stack kindling over crumpled paper with quick and practiced efficiency.
The muscles in his back shift under his skin as he works, still damp from the hot tub, and the low light catches the planes of his shoulders, the lean definition of his arms.
He strikes a match. Holds it to the paper. Waits, patient, until the kindling catches and the first real flame licks upward, casting warm light across the stone wall.
He stays crouched for a moment, feeding the fire a larger piece of wood, adjusting the airflow, and I watch him and what I feel is not just arousal.
It's admiration. Safety. The specific, grounding sensation of watching a man do something competently and without pretense, something practical and real, while I sit naked on his bed in a room that smells like wood smoke and pine.
He turns and catches me watching. The firelight plays across his face, his jaw, the sharp line of his cheekbone, and the half-smile that arrives is slower than his usual grin. More honest.
"Keep looking at me like that," he says, low, "and I'm not going to give you the rest you need."
He's still in his boxers, and they are wet and clinging, and there is nothing subtle about the shape of him beneath the fabric. He's long and thick and straining against the cotton, and the sight of it sends a pulse of heat through me that starts between my legs and radiates outward.
I hold his gaze. "Then come here."
He doesn't move immediately. He looks at me, the firelight behind him, and something passes across his face that I can't name. Not hesitation. Recognition, maybe. Like he's seeing something he didn't expect to find.
Then he walks to the bed.
I reach for the waistband of his boxers as he gets close. He stops in front of me, standing, close enough that I can feel the heat coming off his skin. I pull the wet fabric down and he helps, stepping out of them, and he is there, inches from me, hard and flushed and wanting.
"My turn," I say with a confidence I’m far from feeling.
"Maya." He touches my cheek. Tucks a strand of damp hair behind my ear. "You don't have to."
"I know I don't have to." I look up at him. "I want to."
"Then lie back," his voice has changed register, becoming rougher at the edges. "On your back. Let your head come to the edge."
I lie back on the cool linen. Shift until my head reaches the side of the bed, tilting slightly over the edge. The ceiling above me is all dark timber beams and dancing firelight, and from this angle Jace is upside down and towering and the vulnerability of the position sends a thrill through me.
He cradles the back of my head in one hand. Runs his thumb across my lower lip with the other.
"Open for me."
I open my mouth and he slides inside and the weight of him on my tongue, the salt-clean taste of his skin, the way his breath hitches when I close my lips around him, makes me moan around him and the vibration makes him groan.
"Fuck." The word comes out torn. "Your mouth, Maya."
He starts to move. Shallow at first, careful, letting me adjust to the feel of him.
His hand stays cradled behind my head, supporting, not forcing.
I breathe through my nose and relax my throat and take him deeper, and when I do, when the head of him nudges the back of my throat and I swallow around it, his whole body shudders.
"Look at me."
I look up at him, eyes watering, mouth full of him, and whatever he sees in my face makes his hand tighten in my hair and his jaw clench and a sound come out of him that I want to hear again for the rest of my life.
He rocks into my mouth with more purpose now, deeper strokes that test the limits of what I can take and then ease back before I have to ask.
His free hand trails down my body, over my collarbone, between my breasts, down my stomach, and when his fingers reach between my legs and find how wet I am, already, still, again, he swears under his breath.
I moan around his cock and his hips jerk and his fingers slide inside me, two, curling, finding the spot that makes my back arch off the bed.
He fucks my mouth and fingers me at the same time and the dual sensation is overwhelming, the fullness of him in my throat and the pressure building between my legs, and I'm climbing, I'm close, I'm right there.
He pulls out of my mouth. Withdraws his fingers.
I gasp, the sudden absence a shock. "No. Don't stop. I was..."
"I know." He's breathing hard. His cock is slick from my mouth, flushed dark, twitching. His eyes are wild. "The next time you come, I'm inside you."
The words hit me like a physical thing. I feel them in my belly, my thighs, the place where his fingers just were.
He lifts my head gently, repositions me on the bed, and then he's next to me, lying on his side, pulling me to face him.
We're on our sides, mirrored, and his hand slides down my thigh and lifts my leg over his hip.
The position opens me to him and I feel the head of him right there, hot and blunt and pressing.
He pauses.
We're inches apart. I can see every detail of his face in the firelight. The pale blue of his eyes, darker now. The slight part of his lips. The auburn curls drying against his forehead.
He pushes inside me.
Slow. So slow. I feel every inch of him, the stretch, the fullness, the way my body opens and adjusts and then takes him completely, and we both exhale at the same time, a shared sound, and the intimacy of that, of breathing together while he fills me, makes something crack open in my chest that I didn't know was still sealed.
He doesn't move right away. He stays there, buried, forehead against mine, and breathes.
"You feel," he starts, and his voice breaks slightly. He clears his throat. "You feel incredible."
I touch his face. My fingers against his jaw, the rough stubble there. He turns his head and kisses my palm, eyes closed, and the gesture is so tender and so un-Jace that my breath catches.
He starts to move. Slow, deep rocks that are less about rhythm and more about feeling, like he's trying to memorize the way I fit around him. My leg tightens over his hip, pulling him deeper, and he groans against my forehead.
We're looking at each other. Not chasing the next sensation. Just looking, with him moving inside me in slow, unhurried strokes that build heat the way the fire in the hearth builds heat, gradual and then inevitable.
"Jace." His name comes out like a discovery.
"I'm here." He brushes his lips against mine. "I'm right here."
His hand finds my hip, grips, and the rhythm shifts, deeper, more insistent, but he never breaks eye contact and I don't either.
The pleasure is building low and dense, not the sharp, urgent peak from the hot tub but something slower and wider, something that involves my entire body and the place where his forehead rests against mine and the sound of his breathing getting ragged and the way his fingers tremble against my hip.
"Come for me," he says, and his voice is wrecked. "I want to feel it. I want to feel you."
I shatter.
It rolls through me in a wave, not sharp but deep, a full-body release that starts where he is inside me and radiates outward through my belly, my spine, my fingers, my scalp.
I clench around him and he groans, long and low, and his hips lose their rhythm and I feel him let go, feel him pulse inside me, feel his whole body tense and then give way against mine.
He buries his face in my neck and the sound he makes is surrender given a voice.
We stay like that. Tangled, breathing, still connected.
The fire crackles. The room is warm now, amber and shadow, the stone wall catching the light.
His hand moves slowly up my back, down again, tracing patterns.
My fingers are in his hair, the damp curls at the base of his skull, and I feel his pulse against my collarbone, fast and slowing.
"You're something, Maya Reeves," he murmurs against my neck. "You know that?"
I don't answer. I press closer. He pulls me in, arms around me like the towel earlier, encompassing, and I feel his breathing even out and his muscles go slack one by one, the specific sequence of a body releasing the last of its tension.
The sheets are warm beneath us. The fire is settling into a low steady burn, the kind that will hold for hours. His body around mine is heavy and relaxed, and I can feel him drifting, that slow slide toward sleep.
I'm drifting too. My eyes are closed. My hand is over his heart and I can feel it, steady now, slow.
His breathing deepens. His arm tightens around me, a sleep-reflex, pulling me in.
And then, so quiet I almost miss it, mumbled against my hair in a voice already half lost to sleep:
"Don't go breakin' us, sweetheart."
My eyes open.
He doesn't say anything else. His breathing is deep and even, his body heavy with sleep, and I don't think he knows he said it. I don't think it was meant for me to hear. It slipped out from whatever unguarded place Jace keeps behind the teasing.
And I don't move. And I don't sleep. And I don't breathe too deeply, because this moment is so fragile and so enormous that I'm afraid if I shift even slightly it will dissolve.