Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
Gage
She'd been quiet since breakfast.
Not her kind of quiet—not the soft, loose quiet she settled into after a long night, when she'd curl into my side and talk about nothing until she fell back asleep. This was different. Wound up and turned inward, somewhere I couldn't follow.
I'd caught her at the kitchen window twice, coffee going cold in her hands. Watched her start three separate sentences and let them dissolve. She'd swept the same section of counter twice without noticing.
I noticed. That was the thing about Millie—she was easy to watch.
Not just because she was beautiful, though she was, unreasonably so, standing there in my kitchen in cutoffs and one of my old flannels with her hair loose.
But because she moved through a room like she was always slightly in conversation with it, touching things, rearranging, making herself at home in a way that had stopped surprising me and started feeling like something I'd been waiting for without knowing it.
Her parents were coming. Elena and Robert Calloway, driving up from San Antonio, due in twenty minutes.
Millie had cleaned things that weren't dirty and rearranged the throw pillows three times and made a pan of something that smelled incredible and then stood here at the window going somewhere else entirely.
Daniela was coming too. That part she'd mentioned like a footnote, like it wasn't going to send her best friend straight into the orbit of my cousin Sawyer, who I was choosing not to think about.
I checked my phone. Twenty minutes.
Millie was at the sink pretending to rinse a mug she'd already rinsed.
"Come here," I said.
She turned. Not quick enough for it to be nothing.
"I'm fine."
"I didn't say you weren't." I patted my knee. "Come here."
She hesitated—that little flicker of resistance she did when she knew I was going to get the truth out of her anyway.
Then she came and sat in my lap, and I wrapped an arm around her waist and felt some of the tension go out of her just from that.
She fit there. She always fit there, like she'd been sized for it.
I took her hand and held it.
"Talk."
"My parents are going to be here in—"
"Twenty minutes. I know." I kept my voice even. "Tell me what's wrong."
She pulled in a slow breath. Let it out. "I'm late."
I went still.
"I don't know yet," she said quickly. "I haven't taken anything. It's three days now, and I've been trying not to make it into something, but—"
"How long have you known?"
Her eyes cut to the window. "This morning I was sure. Earlier this week I just—I didn't want to say anything until—"
I stood, taking her with me, and set her on the edge of the kitchen table.
"Gage—"
"I know." I stepped between her knees. Took her face in both hands, tilted it up. Her eyes were too bright. I ran my thumb along her jaw. "Twenty minutes."
"That's not enough time to—"
"It's enough." I kissed her once, firm. "Stay there."
"My parents are going to walk in and find me on the kitchen table—"
"Not if we hurry." I stepped between her knees and worked her cutoffs open.
She lifted her hips without being asked—she always did, some cooperative instinct that wrecked me every time—and I dragged them down and dropped them on the floor.
My hands ran up the outside of her thighs. She was already shivering.
"Gage—"
"I know." I hooked my fingers in her underwear and pulled them down too. "We don't have time for me to do this the way I want to." I spread her knees wider and looked at her—bare on my kitchen table, flannel pooling open, cheeks flushed, watching me. "So you're going to have to be fast for me."
She made a sound that was mostly air.
I put my mouth on her.
One long, slow stroke of my tongue and she grabbed the edge of the table with both hands.
I held her thighs open and just—stayed there.
Learned her. The way she tasted, the way she jumped when I pressed flat against her clit, the specific catch in her breath that meant I was exactly where she needed me.
I knew all of it by now. I'd made a study of it.
"Oh god—" Her hips rolled toward my mouth.
I let her. Slid my hands under her thighs and tilted the angle and went back to work, slow and thorough, licking into her and then pulling back to circle her clit, over and over, reading the way her thighs tensed against my palms. She was soaked.
Had been wound up all morning with nowhere to put it and I could taste exactly how much.
I was so hard it hurt.
That was its own thing—separate from the want, which was always there with her.
This was something lower and more animal.
The idea of it. Three days late. My come inside her for weeks now, every night, twice some mornings, and the possibility that it had already worked, that she was already carrying it and didn't know yet.
My hand tightened on her thigh. I pressed my mouth harder against her and she cried out.
"Gage—"
I slid two fingers inside her and felt her clench immediately, her whole body pulling me deeper, and I groaned against her and felt her shiver at the vibration.
"Right there," she breathed. "Right—please—don't stop—"
I didn't stop. I worked her with my fingers and my mouth, curling into her, finding the spot that made her thighs shake, and she moved against me—small urgent rolls of her hips, chasing it, her hand fisting in my hair to hold me there. Like I was going anywhere.
"More—"
I gave her more. Sucked her clit and fucked her slow with my fingers and felt her start to tip toward it, the clench building around me.
"I'm going to—" She gasped. "Gage, I'm—"
I pulled back.
She made a desperate, wrecked sound.
"Please—" Her hand yanked at my hair. "Please, don't—"
"Please what." I pressed my thumb where my mouth had been. Light. Nowhere near enough. She was shaking. "Use your words."
"Inside me." She was already reaching for me. "Please, I need—Gage—please—"
I stood, got my jeans open, lined myself up against her. The head of my cock nudged her entrance and I felt how wet she was and had to close my eyes for a second.
"Look at me," I said.
She looked. Chest heaving, hair loose, eyes too bright and too dark at the same time.
"You're already mine. Whatever that test says."
"I know—"
"Say it."
"I'm already yours." Her hips tilted toward me. "Gage, please—"
I pushed inside.
She arched back against the table, one hand braced on the wood, and I drove forward and buried myself to the hilt and held.
Felt her clench around me—still sensitive from my mouth, from the edge I'd pulled her back from—and had to breathe through it.
She was so wet. So hot. Her whole body gripping me like it was trying to keep me there.
"Fuck." Her legs locked around my hips.
"Yeah." I pulled back slow, watching her face, then drove in hard.
Her breath punched out. I did it again. Found the angle—I knew exactly where it was by now, had mapped it, catalogued it, came back to it every time because of the specific sound she made when I hit it just right. That sound. "Feel that?"
"God—yes—there—"
"I know." I worked it. Slow, deep strokes, grinding in at the end of each one, keeping myself buried against that spot. "Feel how deep I am inside you?"
"Yes—"
"That's where it's going to take." My hand spread flat across her lower belly, pressing in—feeling myself through her, the fullness of it, the obscene perfect pressure—and she clenched so hard around my cock I had to stop moving and just breathe. "Christ, Millie. Feel how tight you are around me?"
She made a sound that wasn't a word.
"Already might have done it." I started moving again, slow and deliberate, palm still firm on her stomach.
"Might've put a baby in you a week ago. Two weeks.
" I pressed in deeper and she gasped. "Been fucking you every night thinking about it.
Thinking about how you'd look. How you'd feel.
" I rolled my hips and she grabbed the table edge.
"Thinking about this—exactly this—your belly full and round and mine. "
"Gage—"
"Don't stop me." I fucked her harder, steady and mean, palm flat on her stomach. "Want you to feel this. Want you to feel where I am when you come." Her thighs were shaking. "Come on. Give it to me."
She came apart—all that coiled tension from the whole morning cracking open at once, her pussy clenching in waves around me, her back arching off the table, my name breaking into pieces in her throat. I kept moving through every second of it. Watched her face. Watched her take it.
Then I gripped her hips, pulled out, flipped her.
"Gage—"
I bent her over the table's edge, kicked her feet wider, and drove back inside.
She cried out into the wood.
"Again." I set a harder pace this time. No easing into it.
Just deep, driving strokes, my hips meeting the backs of her thighs on every thrust, her body jolting forward against the table.
I reached around and found her clit with two fingers and she sobbed.
"Your pussy's going to take every drop I give it.
" I worked her in tight circles. "Going to breed you so full you'll feel me all through dinner.
Every time your mama asks you to pass the bread basket you're going to feel me dripping out of you. "
"Oh god—"
"Already might be pregnant." I fucked into her harder, fingers merciless on her clit.
"Might've knocked you up two weeks ago and you've been walking around not knowing.
Walking around full of my come." She clenched around me and I groaned.
"That what's been making you quiet all morning? Thinking about it?"
"Yes—" Broken. Desperate. "Yes, I've been—Gage, please—"
"Please what." I stilled my fingers. She made a devastated sound. "Tell me what you want. Say it out loud."
"Fill me up." She pressed back against me. "Please—I want you to fill me up, I want to feel it, I want—please breed me, Gage—"
I gave her everything.
Hard and deep and relentless, two fingers back on her clit, my chest against her back, my mouth at her neck, and she gave me two more before I got there—the second one hitting while I was still working her through the first, her whole body seizing around me, milking me, and I came with my hand splayed hard across her lower stomach and my cock buried as deep as it would go and the thought detonating behind my eyes: already. Already. Already.
Neither of us moved.
The kitchen was very quiet.
Then her phone buzzed on the counter.
I reached over her and checked it.
Mamá
Pulling off 281. See you soon!!!
"Millie."
"Mm." She hadn't lifted her face from the table.
"Three minutes."
A long pause. "I can't feel my legs."
"You've got two of them. I checked." I pulled out, found her underwear on the floor, crouched and held them while she stepped in. Handed back her cutoffs. Tugged the flannel closed across her chest and did the bottom two buttons myself.
"I look—"
"Beautiful." I kissed her temple. "Go open a window."
She went, still buttoning, moving a little carefully. I looked at the table for a moment.
I was going to think about this every minute of dinner…every second until I could be inside her again.
I straightened my jeans and went to meet them at the door.