Chapter 19
RENATA
The door closes behind us. The lock clicks. The ambient noise from the main floor drops to a low vibration through the walls, and the quiet wraps around us like a second room inside the first.
Andy sets me down on my feet, and the carpet is soft after the hardwood of the platform.
My legs hold. Barely. The robe is still hanging open and I still can't bring myself to fix it, because the woman who let a man carry her through a crowded club in a robe she didn't bother to close is not the same woman who tied her apron hours ago.
I turn to face him. His gaze drops the length of my body, from my flushed breasts to the wetness still gleaming on my inner thighs and climbs back up. The hunger in his expression is banked and patient and absolute.
"You look very proud of yourself," I tell him. "For a man whose hands haven't stopped shaking either."
His jaw tightens by a fraction. I caught the tell he didn't want me to see, and the fact that I'm reading him while I'm standing here flushed and trembling and soaked from a flogger he wielded tells him exactly what kind of woman he chose to put on that cross.
"On your knees," he says.
"You're very fond of that phrase."
"You're very fond of pretending you don't like hearing it."
The accuracy of that shuts my mouth faster than the command. The flogger stripped the brat down to the wire, but the wire is still live, still sparking, and I shed the robe and drop to the carpet with a look that says I'm choosing this, and we both know the difference.
His hand threads through my hair, tipping my head back. "Tell me why you're here."
"Because I want to know what happens when I stop performing."
"Then stop performing. Show me."
I reach for his belt. The leather slides through the buckle, and my fingers work the button and the zipper with the dexterity that Margot hired me for.
I push the leather pants down his hips. He is hard, thick, the head flushed dark, and the sight of him this close makes my mouth flood with saliva.
I wrap my hand around the base, feeling the heat of him, the ridge of the vein along the underside, the way his stomach muscles contract when I tighten my grip.
"You've been this hard since the cross," I say, looking up at him. "I could feel it against my back."
"Since before the cross." His voice is rough. "Since you walked out of the locker room in that corset."
"Your poker face needs work, Detective."
"My poker face is fine. You're just paying closer attention than you want to admit."
I lean forward and press my tongue flat against the underside, dragging from the base to the tip in a slow, wet stroke.
The taste of him is clean skin and salt and the faint musk that is purely Andy, the scent I've been breathing against his throat but stronger here, more concentrated. His grip tightens in my hair.
I take him into my mouth. My lips stretch around the head, my tongue circling the ridge, pressing into the sensitive notch beneath it. A low groan grinds out between his teeth, controlled and bitten off, the sound of a man holding his composure by his fingernails.
"Eyes on me," he says.
I look up at him with his cock in my mouth, and the eye contact while I'm kneeling and he's standing over me with his fist in my hair is the most honest act of submission I have ever given anyone. His jaw flexes. His eyes hold mine with an intensity that could strip paint.
I pull back and take him again, deeper, relaxing my jaw, letting him slide past the resistance at the back of my mouth.
My throat opens around him and the stretch aches in a way that makes my eyes water.
I swallow around his length, and the groan he gives me is rougher, less controlled, something he doesn't bother to suppress.
"Fuck." The word comes out guttural. "Your mouth, Renata."
His hips flex, a tiny, involuntary push that tells me the patience is costing him more than he'll admit.
I hollow my cheeks and suck on the withdrawal, letting my tongue drag heavy along the underside, tasting the salt leaking from the tip.
His hand fists harder, the grip stinging my scalp, sending a bright line of heat straight down my spine and between my legs where the denied orgasm is still simmering.
"Deeper." The command is quiet and rough. "Take all of me."
I take all of him. My nose presses against his stomach, his cock seated fully in my throat.
My jaw burns. My eyes stream. I hold, swallowing around his length, and what he gives up is guttural and private and mine, ripped out of a man who has spent months being patient and is watching me dismantle that patience from my knees.
I pull back, gasping, a string of saliva connecting my lips to his cock. I take him again without wiping my mouth, wet and messy and graceless, and the sounds filling the room are slick and rhythmic and explicit enough that anyone in the hallway would know what is happening behind this door.
His free hand cradles the side of my face.
His thumb traces my stretched lower lip where it wraps around his shaft, feeling himself inside my mouth, and the gesture is so possessive and so tender at the same time that my brain short-circuits.
He holds my face like it is precious while his cock fills my throat, and I have no framework for reconciling those two things.
"You're ruining me," he says, and the admission sounds like it was dragged out of him under duress. "You know that."
I pull back far enough to speak. My lips are swollen and wet. "Good. You've been ruining me for months. It's about time I returned the favor."
His thumb catches the saliva on my chin. "Get up here."
"Wasn't that supposed to be 'stop'?"
"That was supposed to be I need to be inside you before I lose what's left of my self-control.
" He draws me up by my hair, gentle enough not to hurt me, firm enough that I feel it.
My jaw aches in a way that will last for hours.
I pushed Andy Broussard to the edge of his patience with my mouth, and that is a victory I intend to savor for weeks.
His mouth finds mine, and he kisses me tasting himself on my tongue, the kiss deep and thorough, his hands framing my face as though the woman who just had him in her throat is someone worth kissing gently. My knees go soft at the whiplash between raw and reverent.
"You taste like me," he says against my lips.
"You say that like you don't enjoy it."
"I say it like I'm filing it away as evidence." His thumbs trace my cheekbones. "Everything about you tonight is evidence."
"Of what?"
"That you've been waiting for someone who wouldn't let you hide." He pulls back far enough to look at my face. "Am I wrong?"
"You are annoyingly, consistently, infuriatingly not wrong." My voice wobbles on the last word, the brat cracking at the seams, and I see him registering it the way he registers everything. "I hate that about you too."
"You have a long list of things you hate about me."
"It's getting longer by the minute."
Shedding what remains of his clothes, he walks me backward to the bed.
The backs of my knees hit the mattress and he lays me down, following me, his body covering mine.
The contact is full-body and electric, his bare chest on my breasts, his hips settling between my thighs, and the heat of his cock pressing against my center makes me arch into him with a desperation I stopped trying to hide around the fifth stroke of the flogger.
He braces on one forearm. His free hand travels down my body, over my breast, his thumb and forefinger closing on my nipple and rolling with a pressure that walks the edge between pain and pleasure.
His mouth follows his hand, his tongue replacing his fingers, his teeth grazing the hardened peak.
He sucks, and the pull travels in a direct line from my nipple to my clit, so sharp that my hips roll against him on reflex.
"You're squirming," he says against my breast.
"You're taking your time."
"Yes, I am." He bites down lightly, and the spike of sensation makes me gasp. "You have a problem with that?"
"I have a problem with your entire approach to time management. You are the slowest man I have ever met, and I include the elderly regulars at the bar in that assessment."
His hand slides between my legs, and my sentence dies. His fingers part me, sliding through slick, sensitive flesh with a patience that makes me want to scream, and the first brush across my clit sends my hips off the mattress.
"You were saying?"
"I was saying I hate you. I was in the middle of a very valid complaint."
"Finish it." His fingers circle my clit, slow, barely-there pressure on the aching bud, and the lightness of the touch after the intensity of the flogger is its own torment. "I'm listening."
"I can't finish it while you're doing that."
"Then I guess your complaint isn't that important."
Two fingers push inside me, and the stretch after hours of building arousal pulls a guttural, helpless sound out of my throat.
He curls them forward, finding the raised, textured spot behind my pubic bone with an accuracy born of paying attention to my body since the first time he touched me.
He presses and strokes, building pressure from the inside out while his thumb finds my clit and begins a slow, firm circle.
"That's what I wanted to hear," he says. "The real sound. The one you hide behind the attitude."
"I'm not hiding anything. I'm lying naked in a private room while you..." The sentence breaks apart because his fingers curl harder and the pressure builds into a spreading, tightening wave. "Andy."
"I know." His voice drops to the register that bypasses my defenses. "I can feel you getting close. You grip my fingers tighter every time I hit this spot." He hits it again, watching my face. "Right there."
"You do not need to narrate the physiological..." I lose the rest of the sentence to a sound that is not a word. "Oh God."