Chapter 8 #2
I reach down between us and close my hand around his cock.
He is thick, hard, the skin burning under my fingers, and when I stroke the full length of him his entire body shudders.
The noise he releases is raw and desperate, pulled from somewhere deep enough to rewrite everything I thought I knew about the limits of his self-control.
"Keating." My name comes out wrecked in his mouth. The surname he uses to maintain distance, delivered in a voice that has none left.
"Meagan," I correct, because whatever happens in this bed happens with my name in his mouth.
"Meagan." He lifts his head. His eyes are dark, pupils wide, and the focus in them is absolute. "If you keep doing that, I'm going to be done before I start."
"Then start."
His hand is shaking when he grips my hip and tilts my pelvis up. He lines himself up and pushes inside me in one long, unhurried stroke.
The stretch pulls a sound out of me that I did not plan. He fills me completely, the thickness pressing into every nerve ending, and for a beat neither of us breathes.
His hand goes to the headboard behind me, grip flexing on the wood hard enough that I hear the frame adjust. That sound, the physical evidence of what holding back is costing him, does more for me than anything he could say.
He pulls back and drives forward again, harder this time, seating himself so deep I feel the impact through my whole body.
My hands fly to his shoulders. The muscles under my palms are rigid, locked with the effort of pacing what his body wants to do at a speed I can take, and the iron in him is eroding with every thrust.
"Don't hold back on me, Meagan." The words land rough at the side of my throat, scraped down to gravel, and my breath catches because I said those words to him first, on a sidewalk weeks ago, and hearing them in his mouth while he's inside me rewires the memory at the source.
He finds a rhythm, adjusting when my breathing changes, when my back arches, when the specific tilt of my hips tells him what words would take too long to deliver.
Every stroke presses deep enough to blur my vision, and his grip holds the angle steady, keeping me exactly where the sensation is sharpest.
I don't let him run the pace alone. My hand goes to his jaw, and I turn his face toward mine so I can see his eyes when the mask fractures. I want to see it. I want to know what lives underneath the steel when the steel gives. Every version of Kincaid I’ve met so far has been a managed performance, and the man in my bed right now is running out of managed versions.
"Look at me," I say.
He looks.
What I see stops me mid-breath. The operative is gone.
The man underneath is hungry, desperate, holding onto the last edge of his restraint because the alternative is consuming.
I’ve watched Kincaid's face in corridors, in bars, in my kitchen. I’ve never seen it stripped to the wiring.
He isn’t in control of what he feels for me, and the knowledge hits me like a fist.
I pull him closer. My heels press into the backs of his thighs, and the angle change takes him deeper, impossibly deep, the base of him grinding on my clit with every forward stroke. The groan he releases vibrates through my entire body.
His pace breaks. The leash snaps and what comes through is faster, rougher, driven by the same hunger I saw in his face when he stopped pretending.
His hand slides from my waist to the back of my knee, pushing my leg higher, wider, and the new angle makes me cry out in a way that would embarrass me in any context that was not this one.
My fingers dig into his back. The muscles under my hands are taut, straining, his body slick with sweat where my palms press to his shoulder blades.
The wet slap of skin on skin fills the small bedroom, a rhythmic impact that keeps time with his breathing and mine.
The raw physicality of it strips away the last layer of distance between the investigation and the personal, between the alliance and whatever unnamed thing is forming between us.
The hand on the headboard moves to the space between us, thumb landing on my clit with the exact pressure that makes me buck into him.
The touch is so specifically him, so attuned to the signals my body is giving, that the orgasm builds with an inevitability I feel in my teeth.
His thumb circles, presses, holds the rhythm steady while his hips drive into me at a pace that has left calculation behind entirely, and the dual sensation tightens something low in my core until my whole body is trembling under his.
"Don't stop." The words leave me without clearance, direct and unguarded, and the sound of my own voice stripped of composure is unfamiliar enough to register as a confession.
He doesn't stop. His pace holds steady. His thumb holds pressure. When the orgasm hits it detonates from his thumb through the center of me, locking my inner muscles around him in pulses I feel through my whole body. There is no observation. No read. No room in my head for anything except his body inside mine, the white-hot wire of sensation pulled taut between us. I’m not thinking.
I’m not filing. I’m just here, held open, and the sound that comes out of my throat belongs to someone I’ve never met.
The grip of my body around his is what finally breaks him. His hips slam forward, burying himself to the hilt, and the shudder that follows mine starts in his shoulders and runs the full length of him as he comes inside me with a force that registers in my bones.
The hand between us comes up and cups the back of my head the way it cupped my neck on the kitchen floor. The tenderness of the gesture after the intensity of everything preceding it does specific and irreversible damage to the walls I built around my ability to feel things for dangerous men.
For a span of minutes we stay pressed together, breathing, sweat cooling between us.
His weight settles heavier because the self-possession that was distributing it has temporarily shut down, and the heaviness is grounding rather than confining.
My fingers trace idle paths across his shoulder blade.