4. Jenna
Jenna
Dominic’s body is a tall, hot wall in the dark, and as soon as the door latches we’re braced against it, crashing together like we’re both trying to prove a point. It’s not a kiss. It’s an argument with our mouths. He tastes like whiskey and the aftermath of a decade’s worth of unfinished business.
“Pemberton,” he says, low, against my mouth.
“Don’t talk.”
His hands settle at my waist, then slide down and around, pulling me so tight I can actually feel the edge of his self-control vibrating under my hands.
Every inch of him is against me, and I want more.
I want to demolish the last twelve hours and the years before that.
I want to pillage my own rules, rip “professionalism” off the wall, and see what’s left when I finally let him have what he’s been circling since day one.
“I’m going to talk. You’re too fucking hot, and I need to tell you.”
“Please don’t.”
He laughs, the sound low and warm, and bends to bite gently at the hinge of my jaw.
My knees threaten mutiny. I fist his shirt and drag him back to my mouth, kissing him harder, like I can shut him up with tongue and teeth.
He lets me—for a second—then pulls back just enough to speak against my lips.
“Still want this to be meaningless, or are you willing to admit you’re obsessed with me?”
“Still want you to shut up,” I counter, yanking at his shirt until a button pops. “This is sex, Cruz. Not a feelings meeting.”
He grins, unbothered, hands flattening at the small of my back as he walks me backward into the room like he owns the floor plan. “You keep saying that like you think I’ll start listening.”
I try to spin us, to get him against the wall instead, but he moves with me and then past me, reversing us so fast my spine hits plaster and his mouth is on mine again before I can complain.
One of his hands catches both my wrists and pins them above my head.
The other slides down my side, slow, deliberate.
“God, you feel good,” he says, voice rough.
I make a noise that definitely isn’t dignified, and shift my hips so his fingers slide lower, tracing the edge of my skirt. “You’re taking too long,” I hiss.
“Patience, Pemberton.”
Normally, being pinned like this would make me want to bite. Or at minimum, stage an escape so dramatic it would be legend by morning. Tonight I don’t want to escape. I only want to burn.
“Just fuck me, Dominic.”
“Jesus.” He lets go of my wrists only to catch my jaw, thumb rough over my cheek. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted this.”
“Ten years?” I gasp, and he grins.
“Nine and a half. But those last three, Jen. Fuck, those have been rough.”
When he brings his lips to mine again, I take the opening and catch his jaw in my palm, then rake my nails up into his hair. He groans against my mouth, and if there’s ever been a greater rush of power than making Dominic Cruz groan, I haven’t found it. I smile into the kiss, drunk on it.
“Don’t.” His hand catches my wrist.
I pull back maybe two inches. “What.”
He looks at me, eyes dark and steady.
“You’re not the one running this.”
The pulse in my throat does something humiliating.
“I run everything,” I say.
“I’m aware.”
“Dominic.”
“I’m aware, Pemberton.” His thumb strokes once, slowly, over the inside of my wrist where he’s holding it. “I have watched you run every room you’ve been in since we met. I love watching you run rooms. You can have all the rooms you want. You don’t get to run this one. I’ve waited too damn long.”
“Oh,” I say, with the dignity of a woman who has just discovered she has no skeletal structure.
“Come here.”
“I’m here.”
“Come here.”
He tugs my wrist. Rough. Without breaking eye contact.
I let him pull me forward and down, and he turns us in one smooth motion that I am too distracted to clock the mechanics of, and when I land it’s on my back, on the bed, with him on his elbows over me and his thigh hooked between mine. He shifts and drags a hand up my side.
“You did that on purpose.”
He grins. “I do everything on purpose.”
He kisses me before I can manage a comeback, slower this time, deliberately slower, like he’s making a point about pace. His hand finds the zip at the side of my dress, but he doesn’t pull it. He traces the line with his thumb, eyes locked on mine.
Waiting.
“Take it off,” I demand.
Something fierce moves across his face.
Then he pulls the zip.
The dress comes apart at my side in one long whisper.
The moment hits.
It’s the moment I’ve been having for half my life, in every bedroom with a man wealthy enough or beautiful enough to be a risk.
The moment where the dress comes off and I have to be a body, and the body is six feet one and pear-shaped and full-thighed and big-armed and the man is going to either pretend he doesn’t see what he sees or—worse—be kind about it.
I make a small motion with my hand. Not consciously. Just the muscle memory of every other time. My hand starts to go, on its own, toward the lamp on the bedside table.
He catches it.
“No,” he says, against my mouth. Quiet. Absolute.
“It’s—”
“No.”
“The light—”
“Stays on, Pemberton.”
I don’t have anything to say to that.
He lifts up onto his elbow above me. His hand goes back to my side, where the zip is, and he peels the dress open the rest of the way with the kind of unhurried attention I have given to fewer than a dozen objects in my life.
He sits up enough to slide it down my body.
I lift, automatically. He gets it past my hips and my thighs and off, and he tosses it somewhere behind him in the same way he did with his jacket, and then he sits back on his heels at the foot of the bed and looks at me.
I’m in black underwear that doesn’t match.
The bra is boring. The panties are nice—lace-edged, cotton everywhere else. Against the white sheets, my size is impossible to edit small. I watch his face for the adjustment.
Dominic only looks hungrier.
Fuck.
He doesn’t move to undress me more. He drags his eyes over every inch, then flicks his gaze up like he’s checking to see if I’m still here. I am. For perhaps the first time in my life, I’m not thinking about what I look like to him. I’m thinking about him, and how he’s looking at me.
Holy fuck.
He keeps his eyes locked on mine as he pushes his own shirt up, drawing it over his head in a motion that only comes from never needing to try. The undershirt comes too, leaving his skin bare, the lines of his body gym-cut and tattooed.
I stare at the intricate black ink that spreads across both pecs in wings and steel bars then travels down his left arm in a tangle of shapes and swirls.
His body is an entire piece of artwork I barely knew existed because it was mostly hiding under his suit.
I mean, I’ve seen his forearm and occasionally a little ink when he unbuttoned his shirt at the end of a long day. But this is way more than I expected.
He waits, lets me look at him the same way he looked at me. And when my eyes return to his, he moves over me again.
“You have tattoos.”
“I have one massive tattoo,” he confirms, voice gravel. “You’ve seen me with my sleeves rolled up.”
“Yes, but how did I not know it covered half your chest and one whole arm?” I don’t know why, but I’m unsettled by this fact. Like it’s proof that I don’t know Dominic the way I thought I did. That maybe I . . . was wrong somehow.
“Jenna,” he says, his voice taking on a slightly commanding note that snaps my eyes to his. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Don’t make a thing of this. It’s just a tattoo.”
“There are a lot of muscles too.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t have those.”
“Sweetheart, I don’t expect you to.”
I nod and he stills. Then he leans down, hands braced on the bed on either side of me, and he puts his mouth, deliberately, against the soft inside of my upper arm. The part I don’t look at in mirrors. The part I have spent twenty years dressing around.
His mouth opens against the skin. He kisses me there. Slowly. Like it’s a place he’s been thinking about kissing for a long time.
“You know, this is the first time I’ve seen you without a shirt on too,” he says into my arm. “I like you naked, and I fucking love that you’re soft.”
I close my eyes.
His mouth moves to my collarbone. To the hollow at the base of my throat. To the curve of my breast above the cup of my bra. He undoes the bra with one hand, behind my back, with a competence I refuse to find time to interrogate, and then it’s gone, on the floor, and his mouth is on me without it.
I make another sound I’ve never made.
“Fuck, Jen. Look at you.”
“Stop talking.”
“I’m never going to stop telling you what you do to me,” he says, his mouth at the underside of my breast now, his hand splayed across my ribs.
“Dominic—”
“You can yell at me about it tomorrow.”
He slides down my body.
Down past my breasts, past my ribs, past the dip of my waist and onto the curve of my hip and the soft swell of my belly.
He kisses all of it, openly and without commentary, like it’s a place he has chosen on purpose.
His hands are at my hips. His mouth moving lower.
He gets to the line of my underwear and stops.
Then he looks up the length of my body at me, and raises his eyebrows.
I can’t speak.
I nod.
He hooks his fingers in the elastic and slides them down.
I’m bare under his gaze. Bare under his hands.
Somehow, in my head, this was supposed to be fast and brutal. Rip the tension off like a Band-Aid and roll away from it in the morning, both of us restored to factory settings.
Instead, I’m pinned to the bed by the sheer force of how much he wants this and how much I want to watch him want it.
“Jesus, Jen,” he says, low and raw. “I cannot wait to get my mouth on you.”
He kisses the inside of my thigh, right at the place where my skin turns soft and liquid, and for the first time, I stop caring whether he’s going to notice everything I spent a lifetime trying to compress into less space.
His hands are steady at my legs, holding them open, and he looks at me like he’s about to do something sinful and philanthropic at the same time.
When he finally sweeps his tongue through my center, my hips come off the bed.
He groans, low and vulgar, like he’s been hungry for years and has no intention of pretending otherwise.
My hand flies to his hair, meaning to push him off or pull him closer, but I get nowhere because he is fucking diligent about this—tongue, lips, pressure, pace—like he’s been analyzing my patterns, taking notes, and this is his oral defense.
I could keep my composure, but what for?
I let my wrist buckle and find the bedsheets instead, clutching whatever I can hold while he does things to me I’m not prepared for.
He’s so good at it I start to suspect he’s been practicing, and then remember who I’m dealing with and realize sex is most likely how this man gets his cardio.
That thought should be insulting.
Instead, it’s wildly, helplessly arousing, which feels like a design flaw I’ll have to analyze later.
“Dominic—”
“Don’t you dare tell me to stop, Pemberton,” he growls. “I’ve been fucking starving for this cunt for years and I’m determined to get my fill.”
My head lifts off the mattress. “I wasn’t going to.”
“Good.” He glances up at me, eyes dark, mouth wet. “Now lie back and keep your thighs spread wide for me.”
I do as I’m told. The command is so foreign it’s a kind of shock to my system, but the compliment buried in it—it detonates any last holdout of resistance in my body.
I want to rake my nails through his scalp and haul him closer, but he has both hands locked over my thighs, keeping me exactly where he wants me.
His tongue dives back in, deliberate and tenacious, tracing slow circles around my clit before sucking it into his mouth with just enough pressure to make my vision blur.
I arch off the bed, a gasp tearing from my throat as he works me over, his stubble scraping against my inner thighs in a delicious burn that heightens every sensation.
The room spins, narrowing to the heat of his breath, the firm grip of his fingers as he licks and teases, plunging deeper until I’m trembling, my body a live wire sparking toward overload.
“God, Dominic,” I manage, my voice breaking on his name, but he doesn’t let up, just hums against me, the vibration sending shockwaves straight through my core.
It’s filthy and perfect, the way he devours me, adjusting his pace to draw out the torment.
The orgasm coils tight in my belly, building faster than I can control, and when he flicks his tongue just right, combined with the scrape of his teeth, it crashes over me—hard, unrelenting, my hips bucking against his face as waves of pleasure rip through me.
“Holy fuck! Dominic!” I cry out, loud enough that it echoes in the suite, my thighs clamping around his head despite his hold, but he rides it out, gentling his mouth only when I’m gasping, spent, my body limp and buzzing.
He lifts his head then, lips glistening, eyes locked on mine with a smug satisfaction that should annoy me but only makes me want to pull him up and kiss that look right off his face.
“I knew it’d be hot when you screamed my name like that. But, fuck, Jen.” He crawls back up my body, settling his weight over me, his erection pressing hard against my thigh through his pants. “I wasn’t prepared for just how hot.”
He grinds against me then captures my mouth in a kiss that tastes like me, like us, like the line we just obliterated.
I wrap my arms around his neck, pulling him closer, because now that I’ve come undone, I want to watch him do the same—want to strip him bare and see how far I can push until he’s the one begging.
But he breaks the kiss first, rolling to the side and propping himself on an elbow, his free hand tracing lazy patterns over my stomach.
“You doing OK?” It’s softer than I expect, a check-in amid the wreckage, and it catches me off guard.
I nod, still catching my breath, my skin humming from his touch. “More than OK. But you’re still dressed. That’s a problem.”
He chuckles, low and warm, sitting up to unbuckle his belt slow, like he’s savoring the anticipation. “Patience, Pemberton. We’ve got all night.”