DORIAN
By the time the night air hits us, I have about four seconds of restraint left.
Four seconds between the doors of the Whitmore and the side of the building where the light doesn’t reach, and I use every one of them walking her there—my hand on her back, her heels clicking fast to keep up, the green dress catching the streetlight—and then the four seconds are up, and I turn her and press her against the stone wall and kiss her like I’ve been drowning, and she’s the life preserver that will keep my head above water.
Her back hits the wall, and she makes a sound against my mouth, surprise and something else, something warmer.
My hands find her waist, and I pull her into me.
I kiss her the way I wanted to kiss her inside, without an audience or the excuse of a show.
Just my mouth on hers because I can’t stand another second of not having it there.
She tastes like champagne, and she’s shaking, but her hands come up to my chest and grip my jacket, and she holds on.
When we break apart, we’re both breathing hard. Her lips are swollen, and her eyes are wide and bright in the half-dark, and she’s looking up at me with an expression I’m going to carry for the rest of my life.
“Nobody’s watching now,” she says. Her voice is unsteady. “You don’t have to—we don’t have to keep up the—”
“Forget pretending.” It comes out rough, raw, stripped of every layer I usually wrap my words in. “I need you, Quinn. I need to be inside you.”
She goes still against the wall. Her fingers tighten on my jacket. I watch the words land on her, and I watch what they do—the way her lips part, the way her breath catches, the way her eyes darken—and then she says, quiet, barely a whisper, “I’ve never done this before.”
For a second, the city goes silent. Just her breathing and mine, and the muffled noise of the party on the other side of the wall.
“I’m a virgin,” she says, like she needs to make sure I understand. Like I might take it back.
I look at her. This girl pressed against a wall, giving me the one piece of information that should make me stop. That should send me back to the car alone, because a man like me does not deserve to be anyone’s first, least of all hers.
“Not for much longer,” I tell her, and her whole body responds—a shudder, a caught breath, her fingers pulling me closer instead of pushing me away.
I kiss her again, slower this time. Deliberate. Then I take her hand and walk her to the car.
Sal doesn’t ask questions. He sees us, reads the situation with the professional instinct of a man who’s survived decades in this family by knowing when to disappear, and drives. The divider goes up without me pressing the button. I make a note to give him a raise.
In the back seat, I don’t touch her.
I want to. She’s sitting close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off her skin, and every cell in my body is telling me to pull her into my lap and finish what I started against that wall.
But if I start in this car, I won’t be able to stop, and she deserves more than the back seat.
She deserves a bed and time, and someone who’s paying attention to every detail.
She reaches over and laces her fingers through mine. Her hand is trembling.
“Are you afraid?” I ask.
“Terrified,” she says, and then, before I can respond, “Don’t you dare take that as a reason to stop.”
Something in my chest unlocks. A door I sealed shut years ago when Sofia died, and I decided to bury the part of me that reached for another person, because reaching for another person only ever brings complications.
Yet this girl managed to make me forget why I ever made that decision, and she has no idea what a feat that is.
“I’m not going to stop,” I tell her. “But I need you to tell me if something doesn’t feel right. At any point. I don’t care if we’re in the middle of it. You tell me, and I stop. Understood?”
“Understood,” she whispers like she’s trying to convince both of us she’s braver than she feels.
The gate opens. The driveway unfolds. The house is dark except for the lights I leave on for Lillie, and I remember, with a jolt, that my daughter is sleeping upstairs, and Ms. Beaumont is in the guest cottage, and there are guards at the perimeter, and none of that changes what’s about to happen.
My bedroom is at the far end of the hall. I’ve never brought anyone here. This room is mine alone and has been since I took ownership of this family. Sofia had her own room, her own life that ran parallel to mine and only intersected now and then. The sheets have only ever known me.
Until tonight.
I close the door behind us, and the sound it makes is final, and Quinn stands in the middle of my room.
The moonlight from the window catches the fabric and her hair and her face, and I have wanted a lot of things in my life—power, safety, control, my daughter’s happiness—and none of it has felt like this. None of it has made my hands shake.
I cross to her. I take her face in my hands, the way I’ve imagined for months—my thumbs on her cheekbones, my fingers in her hair—and I kiss her slowly, carefully, the way I should have kissed her the first time, before the wall and the urgency took over.
She melts into it. Her hands come up to my wrists, holding on.
“Turn around,” I murmur against her mouth.
She does. I find the zipper at the back of the green dress, and I pull it down, slowly, one vertebrae at a time. The fabric parts, and underneath it is skin I’ve been imagining since the first morning she walked into my house.
The dress falls. She catches it at her hips, an instinct, a hesitation, and I put my mouth against the back of her neck and say, “Let it go.”
She lets it go.
I’ve been with one woman in my life. Sofia was beautiful and practiced, and everything between us was choreographed—performed, like the marriage itself. I knew what to do; she knew what to do, and we did it. It was fine, and I never once felt like the ground was moving under me.
The ground is moving now.
I turn Quinn to face me, and I look at her, and she lets me, even though her hands are trembling, and her breath is coming fast. She lets me look, and that trust does something to me that I don’t have the language for. It tears me apart.
I guide her to the bed. I lay her down. Her hair fans across my pillow, blonde against dark sheets, and she looks up at me while I shed my jacket, my tie, the shirt, and I watch her eyes move over me the way mine moved over her in the boutique. Fair is fair.
What comes next is slow. Slower than my body wants.
Every part of me is wound tight, months of wanting compressed into a single night, years of nothing before that.
There’s a hunger in me I didn’t know could get this sharp, and it’s pulling at me, demanding, but I hold it back because this is her first time, and I will not be the man who rushes it.
I learn her. That’s the only word for it.
I learn the sound she makes when I kiss her neck, and the different sound when I kiss lower, and the way her back arches when my hand finds the curve of her waist, and the way her fingers dig into my shoulders when I work my way down her body and spread her thighs wider so I can worship the swollen nub peeking out from between her plump lips.
She tenses when my breath hits her sensitive skin. “Relax,” I urge, and it comes out rough and raw. “Let me taste you. I need to feel you come on my tongue.”
“Oh, god…” Her eyes close, and her head falls back against the pillow like a wanton angel. “Dorian…”
I could live on the sound of her whispering my name.
I could live on the sweet, musky taste of her.
No other man has ever been here, has ever dipped his tongue into her pink folds and learned what makes her writhe.
No other man has licked her from asshole to clit and back down again, memorizing every gasp, every twitch, every pulse that sends fresh nectar to coat my tongue and drive me wild with need.
I look up at her across the length of her body.
Luscious tits rising and falling with every ragged breath.
Head turning from side to side on the pillow while she claws at the sheets.
Her hips start to move, and I go with it, letting her ride my face and take what she needs from me while my cock drips with my own need.
Her first time. This has to be good for her.
Her hips shoot up off the mattress, and a sound comes out of her that makes my cock twitch and drip. “Oh, god!” she moans before shattering, drowning me in her juices while her pussy flutters, and her thighs squeeze my head before falling to either side.
“Oh, wow,” she whimpers, trembling and breathing hard. Her flushed face glows, and she smiles up at me once I’ve crawled up the length of her, settling between her legs.
“You’re sure?” I ask in a voice I barely recognize. It’s taking every ounce of my self-control not to impale her here and now.
She nods, arms winding around my neck. “I’m sure.”
But she tenses once I press my swollen head against her quivering hole. I stop. Completely. My forehead against hers, my arms shaking with the effort of holding still.
“Look at me,” I tell her. She opens her eyes—so wide, so trusting, so blue.
“Stay with me,” I urge.
She nods, and I move, and the sound she makes is not only pain, though it has to be in there.
She’s indescribably tight, so tight it has to hurt even with the wetness dripping from her pussy.
It’s the sound of something changing, a threshold being crossed, and I hold her through it, steady, as still as I can manage.
Then her body eases, and her grip on me shifts from holding on to pulling closer, and the permission in that shift undoes me.
After that, I stop being careful.
Not reckless. Not rough. But I stop holding back the thing that’s been building since the morning she walked into my house.
Every morning, every stolen glance, every time she said Mr. Moretti, and I wanted to hear her say my name exactly the way she’s saying it now—all of it pours out of me, and she takes it, she meets it, and her body rises to mine like she was made to be here.
I have been powerful my whole life. I have controlled rooms, controlled men, controlled outcomes. Nothing has ever made me feel as powerful as this girl saying my name in the dark.
When she comes apart, I feel it everywhere—her whole body tightening around me, her nails in my back, the sound she makes pressed against my neck—and it pulls me after her, and I let it. For a few seconds there is nothing in the world except her and me, and the dark and the way we sound together.
Afterward, I don’t let go.
I pull her against my chest, and she fits there, the way I knew she would; her head under my chin, her hand flat over my heart, her breathing slowly evening out. The sheets are tangled. The moonlight has moved from the window to the floor, and the house is silent except for the two of us.
“Dorian,” she says softly, half-asleep.
“Mm.”
“That was…” I feel her smile against my skin. She doesn’t finish the sentence. She doesn’t have to.
Her breathing changes. Deepens. Slows. I feel the exact moment she falls asleep. The weight of her going heavy, her hand loosening against my chest. I lie there, holding her, staring at the ceiling.
There are guards on the perimeter. There’s a rival family that knows where I sleep. There’s a little girl down the hall who’s going to wake up in the morning and find Quinn in this house, and I will have to explain something I don’t yet have words for.
There are a hundred reasons this was a mistake.
I pull her closer anyway, and I close my eyes, and for the first time in years, I fall asleep holding someone, and the last thought I have before I go under is not about the life I’ve built to keep people out.
It’s about the way she said my name.