Chapter 8 #2
Her hands worked my shirt open with fingers that weren’t entirely steady — I noticed, filed it away, found it devastating in ways I had no language for yet.
When her palms pressed flat against my bare chest I groaned at the contact, the heat of her hands searing against my skin.
She shoved the shirt from my shoulders and ran her palms down my stomach, feeling the muscles tense beneath her touch, and something about the focused way she explored me — like she was cataloging, like she was thorough even now — made my cock pulse hard against the fabric of my trousers.
She felt it. Looked up at me with dark eyes and a small, knowing curve to her mouth.
“Em—”
“Shh.” She reached between us and worked my belt open, her knuckles grazing the length of me through the fabric and making my jaw tighten with the effort of holding still.
When she finally freed me and wrapped her hand around me fully I made a sound that had nothing composed about it — low and rough and stripped of every layer of control I’d spent the evening maintaining.
She was warm and firm and she stroked me once, slowly, thumb dragging over the head, and my hips pushed forward involuntarily, seeking more.
“Stop overthinking,” she said.
“I never overthink.” I gripped her hips, pulling her flush against me, feeling the warmth of her even through the thin barrier of her underwear. “I calculate. There’s a difference.”
“Then calculate this.” She shifted her underwear aside with her own hand — the deliberateness of it, the fact that she was doing it herself, choosing this with full intention — and the first brush of her bare heat against my cock pulled a groan from deep in my chest.
She was wet. Slick and warm and ready, and when I pressed against her entrance she shuddered, her forehead dropping to mine.
“I want this,” she breathed, voice low and stripped of everything except truth. “I want you. Whatever comes after — I want this.”
I held her hips and let her control it — let her set the angle, the pace, the depth — and watched her face as she sank down onto me in one long, devastating slide.
The stretch of her taking me pulled a fractured sound from her throat, and I felt every inch of it — the tight, perfect heat of her surrounding me, the way her body adjusted and accepted and gripped.
“Okay?” I managed.
“More than.” Her voice was wrecked, her hands gripping my shoulders hard enough to bruise. “God, you feel — Sebastian—”
“I know.” I pressed my lips to her collarbone, her throat, the curve of her shoulder, anchoring us both. “I know.”
Then she began to move.
Slow at first — deep, rolling movements that had my hands gripping the leather seat and every muscle in my body fighting the urge to take over.
She set the pace with the same focused control she brought to everything, hips rolling in a rhythm that was deliberate and unhurried, learning the angle, learning what made my breathing stutter, returning to it with the infuriating precision of a woman who paid very close attention to evidence.
I could feel her — the slick heat of her sliding over me, the tight clench each time she seated herself fully, the small hitch in her breath when the angle hit right.
Her breasts pressed against my chest as she moved, her nipples dragging against my skin, and the sensation layered over everything else until my hands found her hips with a grip that was less patient than I intended.
“You’re doing that on purpose,” I said against her throat.
“Doing what?”
“Learning exactly what undoes me.”
Her laugh was breathless and triumphant and the most genuine sound I’d heard all evening. “Maybe I’m just thorough.”
“You’re catastrophic,” I said, and thrust up into her, hard, swallowing her gasp with my mouth.
The pace broke after that — less controlled, more urgent, both of us chasing something rather than leading toward it.
Her hips snapped down to meet mine, the wet sound of our bodies together filling the car, her nails scoring lines down my back that I knew I’d find again in the shower tomorrow and didn’t remotely mind.
I slid my hand between us and found her clit — felt her whole body jolt at the contact, felt her clench tight around me.
I circled slowly, deliberately, matching the rhythm of my hips, and watched her come apart piece by piece.
Her head fell back, the long column of her throat exposed, her breasts rising and falling with each ragged breath.
“That’s it,” I murmured, holding the pressure steady even as her rhythm faltered. “I’ve got you.”
“I don’t need—” The protest dissolved into a sharp, fractured moan as I changed the angle and increased the pace simultaneously. “Don’t stop — Sebastian, don’t—”
“I know you don’t need me to.” I pressed my lips to her temple, tasting her skin. “Let me anyway.”
The first orgasm hit her in a wave — a sudden fierce clenching around me that pulled my own control to its thinnest point, her cry muffled against my shoulder, her whole body shuddering with the force of it.
I held her through it, kept moving, kept my fingers working, felt her go pliant and oversensitive and then tighten again as I refused to let her come down completely.
“Sebastian—” My name in her voice, stripped of everything except need. “Sebastian, please—”
“I have you.” I drove deeper, felt her hips slam down to meet me, felt her take everything I gave her and demand more. “Right here. Come with me.”
The second time she fractured it was slower and deeper and she said my name like it meant something she hadn’t decided how to say yet — not composed, not managed, just honest — and I followed her over the edge with my forehead pressed to hers and her name in my mouth like something I’d been meaning to say since a balcony in November.
We stayed tangled together for a long time afterward, the city lights still sliding past the fogged windows, our breathing gradually finding its way back to something normal. Her head rested against my neck. My hand moved slowly up and down her spine, not thinking about it, just doing it.
“This changes things,” she said finally, her voice muffled against my collar.
“It changed things the moment we met.”
She lifted her head. I expected calculation in her expression — the professional assessment, the careful management of what had just happened.
Instead I found something rawer. Something that looked like the feeling I’d been carrying since a service corridor, finally reflected back at me without the armor over it.
“I’m still going to write the story,” she said.
“I know.”
“And I’m still going to follow every lead, even if it means uncovering something that destroys everything you’ve built.”
“I’d expect nothing less.” I tucked a strand of hair behind her ear — the gesture so familiar now it was muscle memory. “The truth matters. You taught me to remember that.”
She looked at me for a long moment. Something settled in her expression — not resolved, not simple, but real.
The car slowed, and I realized we’d reached her building. A modest brownstone in Logan Square, warm light in the windows of the floor above the entrance, nothing like my lakefront penthouse and completely, entirely hers.
“Tomorrow,” I said, as she reached for the door. “Nine AM. We start going through everything together.”
She hesitated. Then: “Nine AM.”
I watched her walk to the entrance. Watched the lights come on in the second-floor window. Stayed until I was certain she was safely inside before I tapped the partition.
“Take me home.”
The car pulled into traffic and I pressed my fingers briefly to my lips, still tasting her, and looked out at the city she’d spent her career trying to make honest.
She’d walked into my gala to expose me. She’d stood in my office and called my bluff.
She’d stepped back from something she wanted because her principles mattered more than the wanting, and then she’d spent two weeks watching me earn the right to be chosen again and made a decision with her whole self when she was ready.
I’d left a balcony without giving my name because I’d needed to think.
I’d thought. It had made everything worse and clarified everything that mattered.
Emilia Rivera wasn’t a complication anymore.
She was the only calculation that mattered.