12. Noelle
— ? —
Noelle
The board retreat is at the Sterling lake property.
“Shit,” he mutters, scrubbing a hand over his face.
“What?”
“The retreat. It’s today.”
“The board retreat?” I sit up, clutching the sheet to my chest like modesty matters after everything we did last night. “The one at the lake?”
“The one at the lake.” He’s already out of bed, reaching for his phone, scrolling through messages. “We’re close. Maybe two hours away. The rest of the board is driving up from the city, they won’t arrive until late afternoon.”
“So we’ll be there first.”
“By several hours.”
We look at each other. The implications sit between us, unspoken and heavy.
“This is fine,” I say.
“This is a disaster.”
But we go anyway, because there’s no other choice. Because not showing up would raise more questions than showing up together, and because Sebastian Sterling doesn’t miss board retreats, not even when he’s just spent the night fucking his brother’s wife in a motor lodge off the highway.
The lake house is beautiful. Sprawling. The kind of rustic luxury that costs more than most people’s mortgages, exposed beams and floor-to-ceiling windows and a dock that stretches out over water so still it looks like glass.
We’re the first to arrive, just like Sebastian predicted.
The quiet between us is unbearable.
Every time he walks past me, electricity crackles across my skin. Every time his eyes meet mine, my whole body tightens with the memory of last night, his hands, his mouth, the way he groaned my name when he came.
I want him so badly it’s making me stupid.
“Stop looking at me like that,” he says, setting his bag down in the main room.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re imagining me naked.”
“I’m not imagining. I’m remembering.”
His jaw tightens. “My family will be here in a few hours.”
“I know.”
“We need to be professional.”
“I know.”
“Noelle.”
“Sebastian.”
We stare at each other across the room, the tension pulled tight between us. His hands are clenched at his sides. My whole body is humming.
Then the sky opens up.
The rain comes without warning, a wall of water slamming flat into the windows. Thunder cracks so loud the whole house shakes. Lightning turns the afternoon dark as night.
Within an hour, the roads are flooded.
Sebastian’s phone buzzes with cancellation after cancellation. Board members stuck in traffic. Flights delayed. The highway closed due to flooding.
By sunset, it’s clear: no one else is coming. The roads are washed out. Cell service is spotty at best. And the power keeps flickering like the storm is playing with us.
“So,” I say, watching the rain lash the windows. “This is convenient.”
“It’s not convenient. It’s a disaster.”
“For who?”
He looks at me. I look back.
The power goes out.
The darkness is absolute for a long moment before the emergency lights flicker on, dim, barely enough to see by. The temperature in the room drops immediately without the heating system running.
“The main suite has a fireplace,” Sebastian says, his voice flat. “Working. Wood-burning. It’s the only room that will stay warm.”
“One bed?”
“One bed.”
Of course. Of course there’s one bed. Because the universe has apparently decided I don’t get to catch a single break, and is committed to hitting every trope on the list.
“I’ll take the floor,” he says.
“Don’t be stupid. It’s forty degrees.”
“I’ll manage.”
“Sebastian.”
“What?”
“Get in the bed.”
The main suite is smaller than I expected, intimate, with a king-sized bed draped in thick blankets and a stone fireplace already crackling with flames Sebastian coaxed to life. The storm screams outside the windows, rain hammering against glass, wind howling through the trees.
We lie in the dark, not touching, a careful distance between us that feels both necessary and absurd. The fire throws dancing shadows across the ceiling. The silence stretches.
“This feels like a bad romance novel,” I say.
“It feels like a liability.”
“Is that all it is to you? A liability?”
He turns his head. In the firelight, his face is all shadows and angles, beautiful and sharp and impossible to read.
“You know it’s not.”
“Then stop treating it like one.”
He reaches for me in the firelight, and I catch his wrist before his hand lands.
“No,” I say. “Lie back.”
His eyebrows go up. Sebastian Sterling is not a man used to being told what to do.
But after a second something in his face gives, and he eases back against the pillows, and the sight of him laid out under me, all that hard quiet power waiting on what I’ll do next, makes my thighs clench tight around nothing.
I’ve spent five years being arranged. Tonight I get to do the arranging.
I straddle his hips and take my time. I drag my fingers down the center of his chest, over the cut of muscle there, down the trail of dark hair to the waistband of his briefs and the thick line of him straining under it. He’s already hard. He’s been hard since the bed.
“You’re going to kill me,” he says, low.
“Probably.” I free him and wrap my hand around his cock and stroke once, slow, base to tip, and the groan it pulls out of him is worth every careful year. “Hold still.”
“Noelle-”
“I said hold still.”
I rise up on my knees and notch him against me and sink down slow, taking him an inch at a time, watching his jaw clench and the muscle in his throat jump and his hands fist in the sheets because I told him not to touch.
He’s thick enough that the stretch burns at first, the good kind, the kind that whites out everything else in my head.
When I’ve taken all of him I stop. I sit there full and trembling and watch him come apart under me.
“Fuck,” he grits out. “You feel - God, you’re soaking me.”
“I know.” I roll my hips once, testing, and we both shudder. “I can feel how bad you want to move.”
“Then move. Please.”
It’s the please that does it. This controlled, untouchable man, begging.
I ride him slow. Deep, grinding rolls that drag him against the spot inside me that makes me clench around him, my hands flat on his chest for balance, his heartbeat slamming under my palm.
The fire throws orange light across both of us.
The storm screams at the windows. None of it is real.
Only this is real, the slick heat where we’re joined, the wet sound of it, the way his eyes never leave my face.
“Let me touch you,” he says. “Please. Let me-”
“Hands.”
He gives me his hands and I press them to my breasts and he groans like I’ve gutted him, thumbs rolling my nipples while I work myself on his cock.
“That’s it,” I breathe. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it. From the second you saw me in that dress.”
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
“I wanted you.” His hips buck up into me, losing the rhythm I set, chasing it. “I wanted to ruin you. I wanted you ruined for anyone who isn’t me.”
The filth of it lights me up. I ride him harder, faster, the burn building low and bright, and his hands drop to my hips and grip hard enough to leave marks.
“I’m close,” I tell him.
“I don’t have anything,” he says, ragged. “I didn’t bring-”
“It’s fine.” I say it more evenly than I feel. “I can’t get pregnant. Five years of trying with him and nothing ever took. And I’m clean.”
“I’m clean too.” His eyes hold mine, dark and serious even now. “You’re sure. Bare. You’re sure.”
“I want to feel you.” I lean down so my mouth is at his ear. “There’s nothing to be careful about with me. There never has been. So come inside me and let me feel it after.”
That breaks him.
He plants his feet and fucks up into me from below, hard and fast and filthy, one hand sliding between us to press his thumb to my clit, and I come around him with my face buried in his neck and his name caught somewhere in my throat.
He follows three thrusts later, slamming deep and holding there, and I feel every pulse of him spilling hot inside me, exactly like I asked for.
We don’t move for a long time. I stay sprawled on his chest, still joined, his cock softening inside me, his heart slamming hard under my cheek.
“I keep waiting for you to change your mind,” I say into his skin.
His arms close around my back. “About what.”
“Me. This. All of it.”
“I’m not going to change my mind.” His hand strokes slow up my spine. “I knew you existed for five years. I just didn’t let myself look.”
“Why not?”
“Because you were his. And I don’t take what isn’t mine.” A beat. “I’m taking you anyway.”
The fire pops. The wind howls. And for the first time in longer than I can remember, wrapped around a man who’s still inside me and still holding on, I feel safe.