13. She Had a Whole Speech Prepared, With Three Austen References #2
"Well." She pushed off the door, backing toward the living room, hands clasped behind her back, chin tilted up. "Every room needs to know you live here now."
I caught her at the waist, pulled her in, and she came without resistance, hands finding the front of my shirt.
"Here's how this works," I said. "I'm in charge."
Her eyes darkened immediately. "Are you."
"Every room." I held her gaze. "My rules. You say parachute and we stop."
"Parachute," she repeated. "I know."
"Good girl." I felt her breath catch. "Then take off the shirt. Leave everything else."
She reached for the hem, pulled it over her head, let it drop, and removed the rest of her clothing slowly.
She stood in front of me in nothing at all, barefoot on our living room floor, not flinching under my gaze.
A woman who had discovered, over months of careful study, that being looked at like this was something she wanted.
"Kneel," I said.
A beat. She'd never done this from cold, without having already been taken apart first. I watched her consider it. Not whether she wanted to, but whether her legs would hold the dignity of it. Then she sank down, slowly, onto her knees on the hardwood, and looked up at me.
The sight of it did something to me I didn't have a word for. Vera Montgomery, on her knees, in our living room, looking up at me with those clear blue eyes and all the composure in the world.
"You're beautiful," I said. Not a line. Just the only true thing.
"I know," she said, which made me laugh.
I sank my hand into her hair, not pulling, just holding. "Stay there," I said. "Don't move."
I undressed in front of her, unhurried, and watched her watch me, watched her hands settle obediently on her thighs even as her breathing changed, even as the effort of not reaching for me showed in every line of her.
When I finally pulled her gently up by the hair, she exhaled like something released.
I kissed her once, deep and slow. Then I walked her backward to the couch.
"Hands on the back of it," I said. "Don't let go."
She gripped the back of the couch, and I moved behind her, one hand at the flat of her stomach, the other tracing down her spine, feeling every small shiver, and I took my time.
I didn't touch her where she needed it. I touched her everywhere else—her throat, her ribs, the undersides of her wrists still locked on the couch back, the sensitive place below her ear—until she was breathing in fragments and her knuckles had gone white.
"Petra—"
"Mm?"
"Please."
"Please, what?"
"Please touch me."
I brought my hand between her thighs, and she cried out at the first contact, hips pressing back against me.
I found her clit and worked it with the pressure I knew by now like a fingerprint, and kept my other hand at her throat, not squeezing, just resting.
I felt her pulse hammering against my palm.
"Hold on," I said. "Don't let go of the couch."
She held. She was shaking, her grip white-knuckled, and she held, and when I slid two fingers inside her and curled them, she made a sound that I was going to be thinking about for weeks.
"Don't stop—"
"I've got you." I pressed my mouth to the back of her neck. "Come for me. Right here, in our living room."
She came with her hands on the back of our couch, my fingers inside her and my hand at her throat, her whole body clenching and shuddering, my name cracked open in her mouth.
I held her through it. Felt the last tremors ease.
"One," I said, against her shoulder.
She laughed, unsteady and spent. "One," she agreed.
I gave her sixty seconds. Then I said, "Kitchen."
"I can't walk," she informed me.
"Yes, you can."
She could. Barely. I walked behind her with my hand at the small of her back, steering, and felt her collect herself with every step until we reached the kitchen doorway and she turned to look at me with that expression I'd learned meant she was nervous and excited in equal measure and intended to pretend it was entirely the former.
"Up," I said, and lifted her onto the counter before she'd finished the thought, her thighs falling open around my hips automatically. The same counter where she'd made us breakfast this morning. Where she'd make us breakfast tomorrow.
I reached up to the cabinet above the refrigerator and found the dish towel she kept folded over the handle.
She watched me take it down.
"Petra," she said.
"Do you trust me?"
"Yes."
"Then give me your hands."
She held them out. I wrapped the dish towel loosely around her wrists, nothing she couldn't slip free from in two seconds, both of us knowing it, both of us knowing that wasn't the point, and set them on the counter edge beside her hips.
"Keep them there," I said.
She looked down at her loosely bound wrists. "Okay," she said quietly.
I took my time.
I kissed down her throat, her collarbone, her chest, her stomach, all of it, with the particular patience of someone who had nowhere else in the world to be.
She was trembling before I'd gotten below her ribs, her breath coming in short pulls, her wrists staying where I'd put them even though she could have moved them at any moment.
That was the part I loved. That she chose to hold still. That the whole dynamic lived in that choice, freely made, renewed with every second she didn't move.
When I finally dropped to my knees on our kitchen floor and put my mouth on her, she made a sound that probably carried to the landing.
Her hands went rigid on the counter's edge.
Her thighs pressed against my head. I pinned her hips and worked her slowly, learning her again in this new context, our kitchen, our home, her wrists loosely bound with our dish towel and her taste on my tongue.
"Petra—please—I'm so close—"
I pulled back.
"What— no—"
"Ask me."
"I—please, Petra, please let me come, please—"
"Please, what?"