Chapter 42
David
The door to Nora’s house crashes open under our combined weight, and we stumble inside like we’ve been holding back a storm all night.
She’s already yanking at my jacket, her fingers frantic on the buttons, while I kick the door shut behind us with enough force to rattle the frame.
No Archie to greet us, no Michaela bounding down the hall—Marta’s got them overnight at my place, and we’re not due back until morning.
The house is ours, empty and echoing, and that knowledge hits like a shot of adrenaline.
I grab her waist and spin her against the nearest wall, the impact knocking a picture frame askew. Her laugh turns into a gasp as I crush my mouth to hers, tasting the remnants of champagne and the salt of her skin.
“David,” she breathes, moans. And the sound goes straight to my cock.
Her hands shove my jacket off my shoulders, then dive under my shirt, nails scraping up my back hard enough to leave marks I’ll feel tomorrow.
“Fuck, Nora.” I shove her coat off her shoulders and hike her dress up her thighs, the fabric bunching in my fists, and she wraps one leg around my hip, grinding against me with a need that’s been building since we left the club.
No words, no pauses—we’re both too far gone for that.
I lift her fully, her back sliding up the wall, and she locks both legs around my waist as I thrust against her, the friction through our clothes a tease that’s already driving me insane.
She reaches down between us, fumbling with my fly, and I set her down just long enough to tug her panties down her legs and shove my jeans down my hips. I slide my fingers between her legs, finding her soaked, pulsing.
“You’re dripping,” I growl, circling her clit until she bucks and moans, loud and unrestrained, the sound bouncing off the hallway walls.
“Inside me. Now.”
Her command is ragged, and I don’t make her wait. I lift her again, positioning myself, and thrust in deep, burying myself to the hilt in one rough stroke.
“David. Fuck!” She cries out, head thrown back, and I start moving, pounding into her with a rhythm that’s pure instinct, the wall thumping behind us.
Her nails dig into my shoulders, urging me harder, faster, and I give it to her, sweat already beading on my skin as she clenches around me so tight and hot I nearly lose the thread of my own name.
“Jesus Christ.” My forehead drops to hers for one wrecked second before I pull back and drive into her again. She takes it with a broken, hungry sound, heels digging into my ass like she can force me deeper by sheer will.
The hallway is dim except for the spill of streetlight through the front window, enough to turn her skin gold where her breasts escape her dress. Her lipstick is half gone. Her hair is wild. And I have the insane thought that if I die right now, at least I die having had this.
Her.
“Nora,” I grind out. “You feel—fuck.”
“I know,” she pants, and even now there’s a thread of humor under it, wrecked but unmistakably her. “Less talking. More—oh God—”
I give her more, fuck her hard.
She buries her face in my neck and bites my shoulder through my shirt.
“Fuck.” The pain-spark of it nearly detonates me on the spot.
I shove off the wall just enough to look at her. “You bite me again like that and I’m not getting you to the bedroom.”
“Then don’t,” she says, eyes glassy and wicked. “This wall seems perfectly adequate.”
I laugh—one rough, disbelieving exhale—and then she clenches around me on purpose.
My laugh dies violently.
“Christ.” I slam back into her and she cries out, head knocking lightly against the wall, one hand flying up to grip my hair. I catch her wrist and pin it over her head, my fingers wrapped around it, holding her there while I drive into her harder.
“Look at me,” I say, and she does.
That’s a mistake. For me, specifically.
Her pupils are huge. Her lips are swollen. Her chest is heaving above the wrecked neckline of that green dress, and she looks so thoroughly undone every civilized impulse I have leaves the building.
“There you are,” I mutter, more to myself than to her. “My God. I love you so fucking much.”
She makes a soft sound at that, something open and vulnerable that doesn’t belong in filthy hallway sex and somehow makes the whole thing hotter. Her leg tightens around my waist. “Don’t you dare go sweet on me now.”
I thrust up hard enough to cut off her next breath. “I fucking love you.”
Her eyes flash.
“I love you,” she whispers. “More than I’ve ever loved anyone in my life.”
Then she writhes against me with a deliberate roll of her hips that drags a curse straight out of my spine.
I lose whatever was left of restraint.
I release her wrist only to grab both of her thighs and hitch her higher, adjusting the angle until the next thrust hits deep enough to make her whole body jolt. She cries out, loud and shameless, and the sound tears through the quiet house like a match.
“That,” I say, breathless and half feral, “that’s what you wanted?”
“Yes.” Her fingers dig into my hair. “Again.”
I give her again. And again. Hard enough to make the frame on the wall rattle.
Hard enough that my own lungs start to burn.
Her dress is bunched at her hips, my jeans are halfway down my thighs, and there’s absolutely nothing elegant about either of us now.
Just friction, sweat, and the brutal, perfect slide of her body taking me like she was made to.
She reaches between us, fumbling, and I know what she wants before she finds it. Her fingers brush my stomach, then my cock where I disappear inside her, then her clit, and when she touches herself her head falls back with a sound so wrecked it nearly stops my heart.
“Fuck, Nora.”
“Keep going,” she pants. “Don’t you dare stop.”
“As if I could.”
I catch her mouth and swallow the moan she lets out. The combination of it—her mouth, the drag of her body around me, the sight of her touching herself while I fuck her into the wall—hits me like a head-on collision.
She comes with a shattered cry, thighs locking around my hips, hand spasming between us as her whole body convulses.
The pulsing grip of her cunt around my cock is so violent and perfect I nearly go with her, but I grit my teeth and hold on by a thread, driving through it while she shakes in my arms.
“That’s it,” I rasp against her mouth. “That’s it, my love. Fuck, you’re so beautiful when you come for me.”
She’s barely coherent, eyes squeezed shut, mouth open on broken little gasps, and those gasps in the dark foyer of her house do something unholy to my sense of proportion. I should take her to bed. I should slow this down. I should be a man with a functioning frontal lobe.
Instead, I pull almost all the way out and slam back in.
Nora cries out so loud I glance toward the empty living room on pure instinct before remembering there’s no one here to hear us but the neighbors, and frankly if they object they can move.
“David—again, please, again—”
“Yeah?” I say, wrecked and breathless. “You think I’m done with you?”
“No.” Her laugh is jagged, half moan. “No, I know better.”
Smart woman.
I push off the wall and carry her down the hallway, still inside her, my steps unsteady and badly planned. She clings to me, kissing whatever part of me she can reach—jaw, mouth, throat—until I settle her onto the couch and pull out of her.
She whimpers at the loss, but she helps when I tug her dress over her head, tossing it aside, and I strip off my shirt, kicking away my pants, then helping her out of the corset and bra.
“Oh god, I can breathe again,” she gasps, slumping against the back of the couch with a lazy grin.
“You say that like the corset personally offended you.”
“It did,” she says, still breathless, one hand over her ribs. “It was structurally unsound and morally aggressive.”
I laugh and drop to my knees, spreading her thighs wide.
“David.”
“Hmmm?” I taste her, tongue delving in, lapping at her clit while she arches and fists my hair, her moans turning into desperate pleas.
Her whole body jerks.
“Oh fuck—”
I flatten my hands over her thighs and hold her open for me, licking slow and deep, then firmer when she writhes and tries to close around my head.
She tastes like sex and the particular sweetness that only exists when she’s already been wrecked and then asked for more.
I could stay here for hours. I probably would if she’d let me.
But Nora is not a patient woman when she’s like this.
“David, I swear to God,” she pants, yanking gently at my hair. “If you tease me to the brink and then stop, I’ll report you to the bar association.”
I drag my tongue over her clit and feel her thighs shake. “For what?”
“Professional misconduct. Abuse of power. Crimes against—ah, fuck—”
Her sentence breaks apart as I suck her clit into my mouth and hold her there, my tongue flicking until her breath stutters into sharp, helpless little sounds.
The couch creaks under her. One of her heels drops to the floor with a clatter.
I slide two fingers inside her again and curl them, and she gives me exactly the reaction I’m looking for—hips lifting, back arching, a broken moan.
“That’s it,” I murmur against her. “Come on.”
Her hand slaps over her mouth. I pull back just enough to catch her wrist.
“No,” I say.
She blinks down at me, hair in her face, chest heaving. “No?”
“I want to hear you.”
Something in her expression goes molten and I see the moment she decides to give it to me.
Her hand falls away.
“Bossy,” she breathes, but it’s ruined by the way her voice shakes.
“Only with you.”
“That seems statistically unlike—”
I thrust my fingers again and she cries out, the sound snapping off into a helpless moan that lights every nerve ending I have on fire.
“Better,” I say, and go back to her.
I eat her until she’s shaking. Until her thighs quiver under my hands and her smart mouth dissolves into broken, breathless fragments of my name.
I know this body now—the exact pressure that makes her writhe, the rhythm that has her chasing the edge, the way she tries to squirm away when it gets too intense even as she begs for more.
“David, I’m close.”
“I know.” I suck her clit again, harder this time, and she jolts. “Come for me.”
She does.
It hits her hard. Her whole body bows off the couch, one hand flying to the back cushion, the other fisting in my hair so tightly it burns.
She comes with a loud, wrecked cry that echoes through the room, and I hold her there through all of it, working her gently until the spasms turn sharp and oversensitive and she’s trying to push at my shoulder.
“Too much,” she gasps. “David—god, I can’t—”
I ease back, kissing the inside of her thigh, working my way up her body for a kiss that’s messy and deep.
“You can,” I murmur against her mouth, then flip her over, positioning her on all fours over the arm of the couch, and enter her from behind.
“Oh fuck. David!”