Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Annie
The first thing I taste is his disbelief, all sharp with salt and the dark, unspoken parts of himself that he refuses to let out—except, apparently, for this.
For me.
His mouth is hard and insistent, but not unskilled. With Silas it’s always intentional, like he’s thought through every angle of contact, every inch of pressure that will make me want to come apart beneath his hands.
I don’t just kiss him back. I take as much as he’ll give me, my hands fisted in the hem of his shirt, pulling him closer, needing to press every nerve in my body to the heat of his skin.
He lets me, for one shuddering breath.
Then he takes over.
One hand stays at my jaw, angling my face until he can deepen the kiss; the other slides down, anchoring at the base of my skull, fingers threading through the disaster of my hair with dangerous, proprietary precision, pulling just enough to tip my head back.
Gentle, then not, his grip tightening when my mouth opens for him.
The sound I make is embarrassing. It’s pure, unguarded want, ricocheting off the walls of this office where we have both spent weeks pretending there’s any such thing as professional distance.
He knows it, too.
I feel the way his body goes rigid, every muscle gone taut with the effort of holding himself in check.
He could break me if he wanted to, and that’s the energy around us. Of need so intense it cuts through every defense I have ever thought to build.
I break the kiss, panting, dizzy enough that it takes a second to process the fact that he’s moved me, no, lifted me onto the desk.
I don’t remember my feet leaving the ground but his arms are braced around my hips, forearms caging me in over this mess of invoices and pens and cinderblock space.
My knees are angled wide around his ribs, skirt askew, skin pressed to the cool surface of the desk and the hungry, electric heat of his hands.
I expect him to say something, to issue a command or a warning, or maybe even just a single, unanswerable question the way he sometimes does right before he takes a problem apart molecule by molecule.
Instead, he just looks at me. Seeing what I look like ruined and wanting him, the flush beneath my jaw, the way my pulse stutters so hard it probably shakes the entire desk.
I try to drag in a breath. Fail. “Someone could—”
He cuts me off by kissing me again, mouth hard enough to bruise. One hand is already shoving files and laptop to the side with a sweep that’s neither careful nor apologetic.
Everything scatters until there’s nothing between us and the desk is bare except for my lower back and the frantic, metallic taste of his name burning the back of my tongue.
“Let them,” he says, barely more than a rumble against my neck. “Let them see you like this.”
Heat explodes between my legs. There’s nothing careful about the way he bites down just beneath my ear, enough for me to flinch and then melt, his hand already up my thigh and sweeping the skirt with it.
I can’t stop the moan, don’t try, and in return he gives back this impossible, ferocious satisfaction, like he’s wanted to devour me all along and is only now admitting he’s hungry.
My breath comes in uneven shivers. I feel the anger in his grip, at all the questions he can’t solve, all the ways I have no control, all the times I’ve refused to let him be as selfish as he wants.
Now he’s doing it anyway and I’m the only thing on the agenda.
He doesn’t even bother with a slow build. His fingers are rough as he pushes the skirt higher, grazes bare skin, finds the edge of my underwear and snaps the elastic hard enough to make me gasp.
I want to yank his head down to mine but he’s already ahead of me, mouth on my throat, sucking a line down to my collarbone. His stubble scrapes and the sting is perfect and animal and I can’t think of a single reason to stop him.
He works a hand inside, the heel of his palm exactly where I need it. I clutch at his back, nails leaving red lines I hope he finds tomorrow.
He finds the spot in me that’s already gone slick for him and groans against my ear, the noise so raw it’s almost a plea.
I’m surrendering to a controlled burn, the fire line drawn precisely by his hands and mouth and the sound he makes when my body rocks against him, desperate, demanding.
My thighs flex around his hips. He yanks my underwear down with such savagery that the fabric snaps, the sound impossibly loud in the little office.
There’s a split second where I want to laugh at the sheer melodrama of it, but it gets lost in an involuntary sob when his fingers are inside me, not tentative at all, just pushing in and holding firm.
He moves his thumb, slow at first, then harder, a rhythm that makes my head roll back and my fingernails score his skin through the shirt.
He’s watching all of it; he wants to see. The thought makes my cheeks burn, makes me soak his hand, makes nothing in the world matter except what he’s doing when I’m coming apart for him, bare and trembling in his hands.
My head snaps forward and my lips are on his throat, tasting salt and oxygen.
I sink my teeth in.
He hisses and rocks his hips against the desk, pinning me between his body and the surface so I can’t move, can’t think, can only feel the intense pressure of his palm and the way his fingers fuck me deeper with every pulse.
I want to beg. The urge is there, in the back of my throat, scraping to get out, but I bite it down, swallowing instead the groan he gives when I shudder around him, thighs clutching, body arching off the desk.
The hand in my hair tightens to the point of pain, and I would be lying if I didn’t admit how much I love that, the freedom of it, the certainty that I can trust him not to let go.
The edge of my knee smashes a mug to the floor, hot tea or maybe someone’s stale coffee splattering everywhere.
I don’t even blink.
Silas doesn’t either, unless you count the thin, feral twist of his lip as he pumps his fingers harder and the wet, dirty sound of it fills up the space between us.
It happens sooner than I expect. His hand flexes, then goes rigid, a tremor lighting up his arm as if my pleasure is a current traveling through him.
He breathes my name, just once, nothing like the weapon he usually makes of it. I jerk against his hand, every muscle in my abdomen pulling tight and tighter until it finally breaks.
I come with a wave of heat so hard it makes my teeth ache and my vision whites out, fractal and bright and endless.
For a long moment, the only thing tethering me to this office is the unrelenting fact of Silas’s body pressed into mine, his hand still, anchoring me at the precise point of impact, refusing to let me drift away.
When I come back to myself, I’m still trembling, my skirt hiked indecently high, legs splayed, and one shoe half off, balanced precariously on the edge of the desk.
I expect at least the echo of shame, maybe guilt, or the urge to laugh, but it doesn’t come. Instead, a flush of pride, wild and sudden, that I could do this to him and to myself.
He stands over me, hands braced on either side of my hips, breathing like he’s run an entire city block. There’s color in his cheeks I’ve never seen before; his mouth is wet and a little red, kiss-swollen, his pupils so wide he looks like a man hallucinating.
It’s almost tender, which is the most terrifying part of all.
My throat works, but sound doesn’t organize itself. He watches me, hungry and expectant, as if the moment hangs on my next word or movement. Instead, I open my thighs wider, an invitation and a challenge both.
His palm cups the inside of my knee, rough thumb smoothing circles, then sliding up in one long, brutal caress, until the ruined hem of my underwear dangles from my ankle like a flag of surrender.
I swallow, hard, the taste of ink or metal in my mouth.
“You…” I start, but he shakes his head, and the look is enough to shut me up.
He finds the zipper on the side of my skirt and tugs it down so slow I can hear every tooth give, the sound so obscene it makes my skin prickle.
Then he’s on his knees, and I’m not sure whether to be embarrassed or to arch my back farther so he can get at me.
I arch.
The skirt gets peeled off with a single, brutal jerk, and when his mouth presses to the inside of my thigh, the friction burns through every last nerve ending.
He smiles, right into me, and if I had breath enough to curse him I would. Instead I just shudder, waiting for the next contact, the next impossible demand.
He doesn’t give it to me, not right away. He drags it out, making me squirm, making me say please in every way the body can.
He laps at the pulse point in my thigh like he’s tasting the aftershocks, then follows the line of my leg, kissing every bruise and freckle until I’m burning.
When his mouth finally hits the center of me I forget my own name, which is fine, because he makes a point of saying it so I don’t have to.
The next few minutes blur into a kind of fever dream: the rough edge of the desk biting hot against my spine, his tongue so overwhelming I want to claw the paint off the cinderblock, and the impossible, heavy presence of his hands keeping me open, pinned, nothing but touch.
Every time I think I’m about to break, he backs off, pulling the pleasure into a wire taut enough to sing, and every time I whimper, humiliated and frantic, he rewards me by crushing his mouth back onto me, lapping my desperation like he’s starving.
I brace one hand behind me, scrabbling for purchase, the other in his hair, and I don’t recognize the voice that gasps out his name—a broken, crystalline thing coming from somewhere in my chest.
Each time he groans against me, the vibration is a shock, radiating from the slick of his tongue straight down the fuse of my spine like I’m an electric grid and he’s the only storm for miles.
There’s a rush of static behind my eyes, a vertigo that has me clutching the back of his neck until I don’t know if I’m pulling him away or forcing him closer, and either would be a delicious kind of violence.