Chapter 19
Anna
"I need to be inside you. Right now, Anna."
I pulled him down to me. "Then take me."
He positioned himself between my thighs, his weight settling over me, his arms braced on either side of my head, his gray eyes locked on mine.
Close. The closest we’d ever been. Skin on skin, nothing between us.
His expression was open, hungry, tender all at once in a way I didn’t think a face could hold.
"I don’t feel repulsed." His voice was rough, almost wondering. "I’m touching you everywhere. Not even a trace. Not even a whisper." He pressed his forehead to mine. "You’ve broken every rule my brain has ever made."
He pushed forward. Slow, careful, inch by inch, and the feeling of him entering me was so overwhelming that my back arched off the bed and my nails dug into his shoulders.
The stretch. The fullness. The heat of him filling me completely.
The sound that came out of me wasn't a word.
It was something deeper than language, pulled from a place I didn't know I had.
He was big, and the fullness bordered on too much before my body adjusted, opened for him, and then he became exactly right. He groaned my name into my neck, low and broken, and I felt the vibration of it against my throat.
He didn’t move. Held himself still inside me, his arms trembling, his forehead pressed against mine, his breathing ragged. Letting me adjust. Letting himself adjust. Every muscle in his body coiled tight with restraint.
"You feel…" He couldn’t finish the sentence. His body went rigid beneath the effort of holding himself still, his breathing rough and uneven. His eyes were squeezed shut.
I wrapped my legs around his waist and pulled him deeper. "Move."
He did. Slow at first. Long, deep strokes that pulled all the way out before pushing back in, filling me to the hilt each time. Every thrust hit a place inside me that made the world flash white behind my eyelids. I gasped, gripped his shoulders, dug my nails in harder.
"There." I could barely speak. "Right there. Don’t stop."
"I couldn’t stop if I tried." His voice was gone. Just gravel and breath and accent. He found a rhythm, deep and steady and devastating, rolling his hips in a way that ground against the exact spot that made my toes curl.
I moaned his name. He did more of whatever caused it, adjusting the angle, going deeper when I pulled him closer.
He was learning me in real time, his obsessive attention locked on my body, reading every sound I made and every shift in my breathing and turning each one into something he could use to unravel me further.
"Harder," I whispered against his ear.
He gave me harder. His hand gripped my hip, angled me up, and the new depth tore a sound out of me I didn't recognize. He caught it with his mouth, kissing me deep while he moved, his tongue stroking mine in the same rhythm as his hips.
"You’re so tight." His mouth crashed against mine, swallowing his own words. "You feel incredible. I can’t…"
I bit his lower lip. Tugged. The sound he made was primal. His hips snapped forward, harder than before, and I arched off the bed and wrapped myself around him and we were past careful, past controlled, past everything but the raw desperate need to be as close as two bodies could get.
He hitched my leg higher around his waist. Deeper. Fuller. I cried out and his eyes found mine and stayed there. He watched my face while he moved, every reaction, every gasp, and when my eyes fluttered shut he'd slow down until I opened them again.
"Look at me." Low. Commanding. The voice he used in boardrooms except aimed at my body instead of a contract. "I want to see you."
I held his gaze. His gray eyes were almost black, pupils blown wide, and the intensity of being seen like this, completely bare, while he was taking me apart stroke by stroke, was the most exposed I'd ever felt.
More naked than naked. He was seeing everything.
The pleasure on my face, the tears forming in the corners of my eyes because nobody had ever looked at me like this while being this close.
Like I was the answer to a question he'd been asking his whole life.
His hand slid between us. Found the place that was swollen and aching. The moment his fingers made contact I saw stars. He stroked me in time with his thrusts, precise circles that tightened something inside me like a coil being wound past its limit.
"Come for me." He whispered against my mouth. His forehead pressed to mine. "I want to feel you. I want to watch you."
The orgasm hit like a wave crashing. My whole body clenched around him and I cried his name with my eyes on his because he’d asked me to look at him and I did, I let him see all of it, the pleasure ripping through me in pulses that made my legs shake and my vision blur, and his face while he watched me come apart was the most intimate thing I’d ever witnessed.
Awe. Hunger. Tenderness. All of it at once.
He felt it. Groaned. His rhythm stuttered, his grip on my thigh tightened. Two more strokes, deep, desperate. He came with my name on his lips, his eyes still locked on mine, and I watched him lose control the way I’d lost it, his face open and wrecked and beautiful, and neither of us looked away.
He collapsed beside me and pulled me against him, both of us trembling, breathing like we'd run a marathon. His face pressed into my neck, arm heavy around my waist, skin hot and damp where it met mine.
I ran my fingers down his spine. He shivered and pressed closer.
Neither of us spoke for a long time. The rain tapped the windows. His breathing slowed against my skin. His hand traced lazy patterns on my stomach, his fingertips light, exploring without agenda.
"It feels wonderful." He repeated it into the quiet, his lips against my shoulder. The wonder in his voice was unmistakable. "The way I can feel you everywhere. On my skin. Inside me. Stay," he whispered.
"I’m not going anywhere."
I'd never felt this safe with anyone. The thought scared me more than anything Tobias ever did, because he was the one who taught me that safety was a lie, something offered with one hand and taken back with the other.
But Jace's arms were around me and his heart was beating steadily under my palm, and I wanted to believe this time was different so badly that the wanting itself was terrifying.
I closed my eyes and let the warmth take me under.
Three days in that cabin and I discovered the following about Jace Hunter: the man was insatiable.
Not just physically, though in that department, he was a revelation. A man who’d spent his entire life avoiding touch and given permission to touch, made up for lost time with interest compounding daily.
He was curious, attentive, and treated my body like a project he intended to master. Nothing missed. Nothing rushed. I was starting to understand why his assistants kept quitting. If he brought this level of intensity to everything, the man was genuinely exhausting.
But the insatiable part wasn’t only about the bedroom.
He was insatiable with closeness. He read on the couch and pulled my feet into his lap without asking, just reached over and lifted them like that was where they belonged. He cooked breakfast and stood behind me while I poured coffee and rested his chin on my shoulder.
He’d find me in a room and stand close enough that our arms touched. When I showered, he’d knock and hand me a towel through the crack in the door, his fingers lingering on my wrist before he walked away.
Jace Hunter was also insatiable with words. Not a lot of them. But the ones he chose landed differently now.
"Your hair is in my coffee." He said it while I was leaning over his shoulder to read his screen, and he didn't move away. Just looked at the strand floating in his cup and then at me, and the fact that he didn't fish it out with a napkin felt like a declaration.
"You left a sock in the hallway." He was holding it between two fingers with the expression of a man caught between affection and sanitization. Affection won. Barely.
"Come here." From across the room, for no reason. Every time, my stomach flipped like I was sixteen and not a grown woman who should be immune to a man in a sweater saying two words.
On the second afternoon, I was on the couch when I noticed his laptop open on the desk. The screen showed something that looked like a game environment, a massive open-world landscape with mountains and forests and ruins that stretched to a digital horizon. I walked over and leaned in.
"Is this Ethereal Vanguard?"
He looked up from the code he was reviewing on a separate screen. "The current build. I’ve been working on the narrative modifications."
"This is the one getting adapted into movies, right? The Meridian deal?"
"If the deal survives. The narrative team keeps revising the romance arc and it's still not right.
" He pushed back from the desk, and when he looked at the screen his whole demeanor loosened.
The set of his jaw softened. His shoulders dropped a fraction.
On the monitor behind him I could see a rendering of a world built in impossible color, mountains and light and architecture that looked like someone had poured years of their life into every pixel.
This was what lived underneath the CEO. "The game means something to people. Gamers built lives inside that world. The movie adaptation has to honor that or it shouldn't exist."
"What’s wrong with the romance arc?"
"It’s too clean." He frowned at the screen. "The developers think it’s perfect. The focus groups say it’s compelling.
But it doesn’t feel real. The healing journey is too smooth.
Nobody recovers from trauma in a straight line.
There should be setbacks. Regression. Moments where the character thinks they’re better and then something triggers them and they’re right back at the start. "
He handed me a controller. "Play it. Tell me what you think."