Chapter 45
LAUREL
Beckett is halfway through telling me something I’m no longer listening to when I get up and move between his knees. His sentence dies on its own. “Should I be worried?”
I rest my hands on his shoulders. “Probably.”
His palms settle at my hips, easy and warm, but he leaves the rest to me. Always leaves the rest to me. God, I adore him. The thought arrives without panic, without some internal alarm demanding I interrogate it to death.
I thread my fingers into the hair at his nape, knocking the black frames a little crooked. “Do you remember all the things I promised I’d do to you in these? Studio B, fake stars, any of it ringing a bell?”
Beckett’s throat bobs with a swallow. “You wanted your name back before I kissed you.”
My chest tightens around a feeling so sweet it almost hurts. “You really do remember everything.”
“The important things.”
I smooth my thumb along the back of his neck, staring at this man who waited beneath plastic constellations and never once made patience feel like a debt I’d eventually have to repay.
Above us, the real sky stretches black and bright, scattered with stars I don’t have to pretend are anything else. “It’s Bellamy now.”
Beckett stops breathing.
I climb into his lap.
The sound that leaves him is half laugh, half prayer, and his hands finally close around my waist as my knees bracket his thighs. “Laurel.”
My forehead touches his, our noses brush, his glasses slightly crooked between us, and I can feel his restraint hanging on by one very expensive thread.
“You’ve asked me every step of the way,” I whisper. “You’ve given me so much fucking room I could’ve built another house in it.”
His laugh is shaky now. “I was trying not to crowd you.”
“I know.”
I cup his face. “So I’m making this one easy.” His eyes search mine, not doubting me, just giving me the last word the way he always does. I adore him for that too. “Kiss me, Beckett.”
He does.
The first touch of our lips opens some impossible new dimension in the space between one heartbeat and the next, as if the night has been holding another version of itself just out of reach and Beckett’s mouth is what finally lets me into it.
His hand slides to the side of my neck, careful of my throat, his thumb resting near my jaw as he kisses me warm and slow.
Wine, lemon, the last trace of peach he stole back from me.
I’ve imagined this too many times—in bed, every damn time I used my vibrator, in the shower, halfway through conversations where I had no business wondering what his mouth would feel like—and every version I invented falls laughably short.
The real thing spans somewhere imagination never did.
I take him in like I’ve been hungry for this man without knowing the hunger had a name, and every romantic instinct I’ve spent months trying to suffocate claws its way back at once.
The stars are real above us. His arms are around me. My name is mine again. His mouth is finally, finally on mine, and one bright, primitive thought burns through everything else.
Mine.
He is here of his own free will. He keeps choosing me. Mine in the terrifying, delicious way that only works because I am his by choice too.
I kiss him back with everything I’ve been holding onto, and whatever patience survived the first touch lasts maybe three seconds after that.
My fingers tighten in his hair, his mouth opens under mine, our tongues meet, and the kiss loses its manners in an instant, my whole body lights up. Beckett makes a rough sound deep in his throat when I shift closer on his lap, and I immediately decide I need to hear it again.
His hands slide from my waist to my hips, holding me with more certainty now, and the glasses bump my cheek. I pull back just far enough to straighten them. Beckett is breathing like he ran here from Belle Meade.
“The glasses stay on,” I tell him.
His eyes close for one doomed second. “Jesus Christ.”
“I gave you advance notice.”
“You also said slow.”
“I’m kissing you, not refinancing a stadium.”
His laugh disappears into my mouth when I kiss him again, and the restraint Beckett still has goes straight to hell.
One hand spreads over my ass and hauls me tight until my tits flatten to his chest and his dick presses right between my legs, exactly where I’ve been wanting it for an irresponsible amount of time.
A pulse shoots straight to my pussy, my eyes rolling back as a helpless little “Oh” spills out of me.
Beckett drops his forehead to mine, breath coming rough. “Don’t make that fucking sound unless you want me to bend you over this table and fuck you hard.”
Jesus. My hips roll over his cock on pure instinct, dragging a groan out of him as his grip clamps down on my ass.
“Fuck.” My name follows on a wrecked whisper. “Laurel—fuck.”
“What?” I slide my hand between us and palm his hard cock through his jeans. “You like that?”
His head tips back, a broken breath tearing out of him as his thighs flex beneath mine.
Well. That’s mine too.
That sound. That reaction. The fact that Beckett Vale can negotiate with banks for sport and hold an entire boardroom hostage with nothing but his voice, yet my hand around his cock makes coherent language abandon him altogether.
I lean into his ear, my lips brushing the shell when I murmur, “I’ve been wondering what you’d feel like in my hand since the second I saw you sitting in Studio B wearing these fucking glasses.”
“Goddamn.”
I grin against his jaw, stroking him so slowly his cock jerks under my hand, and the reaction nearly curls my toes.
Heat gathers low in my stomach, my thighs tightening around him as another rush of arousal soaks my thong, the wet fabric clinging to my pussy.
God, I’m wound so tight I could come apart from friction and bad intentions alone.
“That good?”
He turns his face and kisses me so deep the question disappears. One hand bunches the back of my shirt in his fist, the other still firm on my ass, and I’m this close to finding out exactly how much abuse this patio chair was engineered to survive.
I kiss him until my mouth aches, until the cold air stops registering, until every careful distinction we made between wanting and doing starts looking flimsy as hell.
Beckett drags his mouth along my jaw, stops short of my throat and stays there; even half out of his fucking mind, he remembers Jenna’s restrictions.
I press my forehead to his. “You’re thinking about my vocal cords right now, aren’t you?”
His chest works under my palms. “I’m trying not to become the asshole who injures his woman twenty-four hours after her divorce becomes final.”
A laugh catches in my throat. “Terrible branding.”
“Catastrophic.”
A moan slips out of me when his palm drags over the clasp of my bra, down the length of my spine and settles hard on my hip, my whole body still wound tight around him.
“I want you so bad,” I murmur into his mouth.
Every muscle under my hands tightens. “How bad?”
I kiss the corner of his mouth, then press my lips to the pulse beating in his neck.
“I want your hands on my tits. I want them between my legs, inside me, all over my naked fucking body. I want to find out if this ridiculous self-control of yours survives a locked bedroom door, and I really want to hear what you sound like when you finally stop trying to be civilized.”
His restraint takes a visible beating. Beckett’s jaw locks, the grip on my hip tightening as his pupils swallow most of the gray. “You’re trying to kill me.”
“Maybe.” I kiss him once more, slow enough to make both of us suffer. He’s addictive in the worst way; I could drown in him, stay right here until wanting blurs into doing, and every filthy impulse in me is already bargaining for another five minutes.
Beckett stops the second I do. His hands ease on my ass, though I’m still in his lap and neither of us is breathing anywhere close to normal. That ease matters now as much as it has every other time.
I smooth my palm over his chest. “Not tonight.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not changing my mind about wanting you. In case the hand on your dick created any ambiguity.”
A strangled laugh rumbles in his chest. “The communication was fairly clear.”
I rest my forehead against his. “I don’t want our first time to happen because we kissed and neither of us knew when to stop.
I want to decide I’m sleeping with you before we’re halfway there, Beckett, not when I’m already so turned on I’d agree to several terrible ideas.
” My fingers stay curled into the back of his shirt.
“I want to come to you knowing exactly what I’m asking for, not get carried away and figure out what it meant afterward. ”
His hands settle at my waist, and the urgency in him banks without complaint. “What do you want it to be?”
I meet his eyes under the stars. “Ours.”
Beckett cups my cheek. “Then it’ll be ours.”
He kisses my forehead, the same place he kissed me under those fake stars, and warmth spreads slowly through my chest, so sudden and tender my eyes sting. That night, he gave me affection without asking me to turn it into anything more. Tonight, under the real sky, I finally get to kiss him back.
And when I stopped, he stopped with me.
I tuck myself against his chest, my legs still tangled with his, and we stay there until our breathing evens out and the city settles deeper into night.