FORTY-THREE #3
The sound he makes is almost pain, but it’s one of the sexiest things that have graced my ears.
Then his fingers slide into my hair. He’s exceptionally careful at first. Way too careful, so I look up at him.
He understands immediately, his grip tightening.
He’s not forcing, just holding. Anchoring.
My scalp prickles with his touch and my body lights up like how I remember fireworks would color the sky every Fourth of July.
I take him into my mouth again and, this time, when his fingers curl harder, I moan around him.
“Fuck,” he grits out, the word scraping directly down my spine.
I keep going until his control starts to fray for real, sucking and swallowing around him.
I keep going until his breathing turns rough and choppy.
Until his hand in my hair starts shaking with how desperately he wants to move me and how fiercely he refuses.
When I pull away, Fletcher’s eyes open. He looks absolutely ruined.
Good.
I stand and his hand falls from my hair immediately. His voice is nothing more than a graveled rasp when he says my name, almost like a prayer on his lips. “Dakota.”
“My turn to give orders,” I tell him, and his jaw tightens.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Oh, fuck. Well, that shouldn’t work on me.
That absolutely fucking works on me.
Heat drops hard and fast between my thighs, my scent bursting from me when arousal licks every sensitive spot on my body. I point to the workbench against the far wall and command, “Sit.”
Fletcher obeys without a drop of hesitation. Without a single argument. He simply crosses to the bench and sits, big body barely fitting and hands braced on either side of him. Waiting. Watching.
I walk to him slowly, stripping as I go. My shirt disappears first, leaving me bare from the waist up after my ruined bra was discarded after the incident in the hallway. My pants follow quickly after, and then my underwear joins the strewn clothes somewhere behind me.
The night air brushes over every inch of my exposed skin. My throat is marked, my thighs are bruised, my knee hasn’t stopped screaming at me since I hurt it, my arm still throbs dully after the pharmacy incident, and my body is not clean or healed or simple.
And still, despite it all, Fletcher looks at me like none of that makes me less. As if none of it makes me more available either.
Just mine.
I climb onto his lap facing him and I catch his hands hovering. I catch them before he decides to drop them back to the bench, placing them roughly on my thighs. “Right here.”
His fingers spread over my skin, warm and rough and grounding. I reach between us, gripping him in my hand with a firm hold that makes him groan again, and rub the head of him through the slick heat of me.
Fletcher’s breath turns ragged and he only manages to rasp, “Protection.”
I freeze, but not because I forgot. It’s simply because he remembered when I was too deep inside the haze of arousal to even think clearly.
He reaches into his back pocket with one hand, his movements far rougher than before, and pulls out a packet.
“Prepared?” I ask, voice uneven and my raised eyebrow a little shaky.
“Hopeful,” he corrects. “Wasn’t assumin’.”
Damn him and his pretty accent that makes him sound charming and polite. Damn him for making my throat burn during this thing.
I help him roll it on the moment he tears the foil packet, then line him up again. His eyes stay on mine the entire time, a storm rolling through those wild eyes.
“Darlin’,” he says, voice rough and low. “You control this.”
“I know.”
“Then say it.”
My breath catches because he is not ordering me. He’s only asking me to hear myself.
“I control this,” I say.
His hands tighten on my thighs. “Yeah, you do.”
And then I sink down onto him, taking him inch by maddening inch slowly. So slow that it steals the air from my lungs and sends my heart into a galloping race I won’t mind if it loses.
Fletcher is thick, stretching me with every inch I claim, and I watch with arousal and fascination as his control ingrains itself into every line of his face.
His jaw clenches enough that I hear his teeth grind.
His arms tense enough that his veins pop with the strain of holding himself back.
And his hands still stay exactly where I put them.
When I take him fully, sinking down on him until he bottoms out inside me and his knot rubs against the most sensitive part of my body, we both stop.
The yard fades away to nothing, vanishing like it was never there to begin with.
There’s just his body under mine, the rough bench under my battered knees, the night air caressing my back, and the sheer solid heat of him inside me.
His forehead drops to my shoulder with a throaty rumble that seems to come from the depths of his chest. Not my throat, not the bites, but my shoulder.
“I’ve got you,” he says.
I tense automatically, like instinct still tells me those aren’t words that should be strung together around me. He feels it immediately and his hands loosen.
“No,” he corrects, voice rough. “You’ve got you. I’m just here. Just here, darlin’.”
Something in me shatters open then, but not in a bad way. It’s more like letting the air in and a much-needed breeze passing by when I need it most.
I start to move then. At first, I go slow, my hands braced on his shoulders while I adjust to his girth and length. His hands remain on my thighs.
My pace.
My choice.
My body taking what it wants without asking fear to approve first.
And Fletcher lets me. He doesn’t do anything but give me the control I’ve been craving. That I’ve been needing. But then I grow greedy. I want more.
“Grip me,” I tell him.
His fingers dig into my thighs.
“More.”
He gives me more and the pressure sends sparks shooting up my spine. I roll my hips harder, and his breath punches out against my skin.
“Like that?” he pants, his thighs tensing under me when I grind against him and release a little sound that blows his pupils wide.
“Yeah,” I breathe, right before I ride him harder.
The bench creaks precariously under us. His body meets mine, not taking over, just answering every call I make. Every thrust up is made of restraint until I press down harder. Every grip waits for my nod. Every rough sound he makes feels dragged out of him by nothing but my choice.
It’s fucking crazy. It’s wild. And it’s so goddamn intoxicating, but not because he’s gentle. It’s because he’s strong enough to be rough but has the beautiful discipline not to steal something I’m not willing to hand over. Not yet.
My nails bite into his shoulders, leaving little marks in his flesh that only make the heat in my lower stomach build and my walls tighten around him with every gyration of my hips.
He looks up at me. There’s sweat beaded at his temples and his pupils have almost taken over the entirety of his blue irises. His scent is everywhere now, cedar and leather wrapped around my body like a protective hug, rich and steady and so Fletcher it makes my chest ache.
“I want you over me,” I say suddenly, the words falling off my tongue before I can reconsider them.
His whole body locks tight enough that I know it hurts. “Dakota.”
“I said what I want.”
His eyes search mine. “The bench is narrow.”
“Then don’t let me fall,” I whisper.
A beat. That’s all that passes before he stands suddenly, still inside me, still hard, and still hot under my hands.
I gasp loudly, arms flying around his neck as he lifts me like I weigh nothing more than a feather.
He turns us, lays me back on the workbench, and braces one hand beside my head and one at my hip.
My legs have a mind of their own as they lock around his waist.
The wood is hard under my back, cold and perfect and different and so fucking real that I’d cry if his body wasn’t making mine feel so good. Fletcher looks down at me, big and broad and breathing hard, like a shield over me. Not a cage.
“Door?” he asks.
It takes my lust-addled brain a second to understand what he’s saying.
My door.
My way out.
I touch his chest. “If I push, you stop.”
“Immediately.”
“If I say off, you move.”
“Yes.”
“And if I tell you harder?” I ask breathlessly, my walls clamping around him as if my body wants the answer too.
His eyes darken impossibly before he roughly answers, “Then I give you harder.”
My body clenches around him again and his breath stutters.
“Harder,” I say.
And Fletcher fucking gives it to me.
His first thrust drives the air out of my lungs, and that’s fine.
I don’t need air anyway. The second makes my back slide against the rough bench, the scrapes of splinters surely marking me in a way that will show tomorrow.
The third makes me cry out so loud that his hand moves to my mouth, then stops in mid-air. Asking without words.
I grab his wrist and press his palm over my mouth myself and his eyes flare.
There.
Mine.
Chosen.
He covers my mouth while he fucks me hard and fast, not to silence me, but because I put him there.
Because his other hand is locked on my hip so tight that I won’t be surprised if he leaves bruises, holding me steady as he drives into me with controlled, brutal strokes that make the whole bench rattle loudly.
I moan into his palm just as his knot starts to swell.
I feel it at the base of him, pressing thicker every time he thrusts deep, rubbing against my sensitive body in a way that sends me chasing a release I can already feel teasing my lower spine.
My body stretches around the bulge of him, heat coiling tight and low.
Fletcher’s head dips and his teeth brush the unmarked space at my throat, drawing out a haggard moan straight from my goddamn soul.
But then he pulls back. Hard. So hard I feel the loss. His hand drops from my mouth suddenly, just as he rasps, “No.”