Move With Me #3
"Too late." I looked up the length of her petite body, past the freckles and the flush, at her face: mouth open, chest heaving, hands white-knuckled on the headboard, watching me with eyes that had gone nearly black. "Here are the rules."
"Rules," she repeated, like she was trying to keep up.
"You don't come until I tell you to." I kept my gaze on hers, letting it land. "Your orgasm belongs to me tonight. I decide when."
The sound she made was helplessly desperate and the hottest thing I'd ever heard in my life.
"Are we clear?" I asked.
"Yes," she breathed. "God, yes, we're very clear—"
I lowered my head and put my mouth on her.
She cried out so suddenly the sound rang off the walls.
She tasted sweet and musky and went straight to my head like a shot of expensive whiskey, except better, because whiskey had never made me want to spend the rest of my life exactly here, doing exactly this, and consider it a life excellently spent.
I groaned against her and felt her hips surge up, felt her hands finally tear free of the headboard and find my hair.
I let her have that. She needed something to hold.
I learned her the way I needed to learn her. What made her breath fracture. What made her moan. What made those gorgeous thighs clamp against my head until I pinned them open with both forearms and felt her nearly lose her mind at being held there.
"There," she gasped when I found her clit with my tongue, "oh god, right there, please—Petra, please—"
I stayed exactly there.
When I slid two fingers inside her, she arched completely off the bed, a full bow of her spine, and said something that was probably my name and possibly every word of the Rilke tattoo, hard to confirm, her pronunciation had deteriorated considerably.
"Don't stop," she begged, voice cracking. "I'm so close, I'm so—"
I lifted my head.
She made a noise of pure outrage.
"Hold it," I said.
She stared at me, my fingers still inside her, not moving. "I—what?"
"Hold it for me." I watched her face cycle through approximately five emotions in two seconds. "You don't come until I say so. You remember."
"Petra," she said, in the tone of someone making a very reasonable legal argument, "I am physically right there—"
"I know." I pressed a kiss to the inside of her thigh, without moving my fingers. Felt her clench around them, fighting it. "You're doing incredibly. Keep going."
"This is a very specific form of—oh god—" She exhaled through her teeth as I curled my fingers slightly, not enough, never enough, and her whole body shook with the effort of holding back. "This is cruel."
"This is mine." I looked up at her. "And you like it."
A sound left her throat that I was going to think about for the rest of the year. Her hands twisted in my hair. Her thighs were trembling against my forearms.
"Petra," she begged. "Please. I'm begging you. Please—"
"Now," I said, and put my mouth back on her.
She came so hard and so suddenly that she nearly pulled my hair out by the roots, her whole body lifting off the bed, my name on her lips in a broken, breathless cry that echoed off the walls.
I worked her through every second of it, riding every wave, easing her down as slowly as I'd built her up, feeling the uncontrollable pulse of her orgasm on my tongue.
When I raised my head, she was staring at the ceiling with the expression of someone who had briefly left their body and was not entirely certain they'd returned.
"Vera."
Nothing.
"Still in there?"
A long pause. "I'm reconsidering the entire trajectory of my adult life." She turned her head to look at me. Hair everywhere, lipstick a distant memory, flushed from her hairline to her collarbones. Completely, radically undone. "Come here."
I crawled up her body, and she pulled me into a long, slow kiss—and tasted herself on my tongue and made a sound that felt like a lit match against my insides. Her hands skimmed down my ribs, my stomach, the waistband of my jeans.
"Your turn," she said against my mouth.
"Vera—"
She flipped me.
I landed on my back, blinking, which—I was a decorated war veteran and a trained crisis responder, and she was a tiny librarian who wore vintage dresses, and she had just flipped me.
She swung a leg over my hips before I'd fully processed it, already working my belt with the concentrated readiness of someone who'd made a plan and was not taking questions.
"I've been thinking about this," she said, "since noon."
"Noon specifically?"
"Eight-fifteen this morning. But the specific thought of you like this entered at noon." She got my jeans open. "I'm a thorough planner."
I sat up and caught her face in my hands.
She looked at me, startled.
"You don't have to do anything you're not—"
"Petra Alves." She covered my hands with hers, steady and sure. "I am about to take you apart." Clear. No equivocation anywhere. "I need you to let me. Can you do that?"
I looked at her.
"Yes," I said.
The smile that broke across her face was triumphant and warm all at once. "Good." She kissed me, then said against my mouth: "Put your hands above your head."
My arms moved before I'd consciously decided on it.
She looked at my hands against the headboard and made a small, pleased sound that did unspeakable things to my composure.
"Don't move them," she said, "unless I say so."
I hadn't expected that. I also wasn't going to lie and say I didn't feel it in every nerve ending I possessed. "Noted."
She pulled my jeans and underwear off in one motion and sat back to look at me, and the thorough attention she gave me was the same she gave the tattoos, the compass, everything she'd decided to know properly.
"Gorgeous," she said quietly. Her hands settled warmly on my thighs. "Tell me what you like."
"You're not touching me anywhere useful."
"I'm working up to it." Her thumbs traced my inner thighs, slow circles, not close to where I needed them. "Tell me what you like."
"Pressure," I managed, which cost me something I wasn't willing to admit outloud. "And you, specifically, to please—"
Her hand made contact, and my hips came off the bed completely without my permission, which was embarrassing, and I had approximately zero negative feelings about it.
"Here?" she asked, with the feigned innocence of someone who knew exactly what she was doing.
"Yes. Exactly—yes."
She learned fast. Cheerfully, methodically, infuriatingly fast. She worked me with the same focused application she brought to finding exactly the right book for exactly the right patron, learning every sound I made and exactly how to make me make it again, and within minutes I had abandoned all pretense of composure and was holding onto the headboard because I needed something solid to grip.
"You're watching me," I said, because she was. That cataloging librarian gaze, direct on my face while her fingers moved.
"I'm studying you." She lowered her mouth to my clit with ruinous lightness. "I'm going to very carefully cat—"
"If you say catalog—" Her fingers pressed exactly right, and I lost the rest of the sentence completely. "That. That was the rest of the sentence."
"Noted," she said serenely, and did it again.
She slid two fingers inside me and found a rhythm that—
I wasn't going to last.
I was not going to last.
My hands were still on the headboard. I was gripping it hard enough to leave marks. I could feel every muscle in my body pulling toward the edge, and she was watching my face the whole time, patient and focused and entirely too pleased with herself.
"Vera."
She looked up. Eyes dark. Lips swollen. Chin tilted up. "Mm?"
"Faster."
Her face lit up, delicate features transforming.
"Say please," she said.
I stared at her.
She waited, the picture of composure, her fingers slowing.
This woman. This absolute— "Please."
The smile that curved her mouth was the most infuriatingly sexy thing I had ever seen in my life.
She gave me what I asked for.
"Let go," she said softly, eyes on mine. "I've got you."
The orgasm hit like a flashover—total, all-consuming, zero warning—and I heard myself groan her name with absolutely no restraint whatsoever, and the world went white at the edges, and she worked me through every last second of it until I was wrung out and trembling and had temporarily lost track of the year and possibly my own name.
When I opened my eyes, she was looking down at me with an expression of pure, unashamed triumph.
"You look incredibly smug," I observed.
"I feel incredibly smug." She curled against my side. "Earned?"
"Earned." I pulled her in. My whole body was still humming. "Vera."
"Mm."
"Where did you even—"
"Fast learner. Independent research." She pressed her mouth to my shoulder. "I had a very specific research question."
"What was it?"
A pause. "How to completely take apart a helitack forewoman in under twenty minutes."
I laughed—really laughed, open and undefended—and she lifted her head to look at me, smiling at the sound of it the way she'd smiled at it in the diner. Like it was something she wanted to keep.
Her fingers found the phoenix on my ribs, following the wings. "Tell me about this one."
"Later."
"You'll always say later."
"Later always comes. I promise, I'll tell you another time."
"Fine." She tucked back against me. The room was going silver-blue with the last of the evening. "Petra?"
"Mm."
"This was my first time," she said, quietly. "Having sex like this. The power play stuff."
I went still.
She propped herself up to read my face. "But I've always wanted to try it, I swear." She touched my jaw, very light. "I just never… I didn't know anyone I trust enough to—" She gestured briefly at the general situation. "To do this with."
"Vera." I brought her hand to my mouth and pressed a kiss to her palm. "You should have told me. I would have—"
"What? Slowed down?" The eyebrow went up. "I didn't want slow. I wanted exactly what you gave me." She kissed the corner of my mouth. "And I want it again, actually."
I stared at her. "Already?"