Chapter 4 #2
She hit me. Her fist against my chest, frustrated, wanting to be angry and unable to hold onto it. I caught her hand. Held it against my shirt, her knuckles under my palm, and I felt her whole body shaking.
"I hate you," she said with barely any conviction.
"I know."
"I hate that you came here and made everything different. I hate that I can't handle this alone and I hate that you knew that before I did."
"I know."
She kissed me. Hard, angry, her free hand grabbing the back of my neck and pulling me down to her mouth, and the anger turned into something else the second our lips met.
Heat, desperate and consuming, the kind that came from fear converted into need, from almost losing something and deciding to hold onto it with everything you had.
I picked her up. Her legs locked around my waist, and I carried her through the back door, through the kitchen, up the stairs.
Her mouth on mine the whole way, her fingers in my hair, her body pressed against me with an urgency that was making coherent thought impossible.
I got us through the apartment door, kicked it shut, and had her on the bed in seconds.
“Wait…downstairs. Customers will be waiting,” She said.
“Locked up, there are no customers,” I said as I kissed her neck and across her jaw. “And even if there were, they’d have to wait, we’re busy.”
She pulled my shirt over my head in response.
I pulled hers off and she was bare underneath, nothing between my hands and her skin, and the sight of her laid out on those sheets with her hair dark against the pillow and her chest rising fast, her body flushed and open made my blood run so hot I could hear it.
I put my mouth on her. Her throat, her collarbone, the swell of her breasts.
I took my time because the first time had been urgent, desperate, the crack in the wall, and this time I wanted every inch of her.
I wanted to learn the topography of this woman's body the way I learned everything, thoroughly, obsessively, until I could navigate her with my eyes closed.
Her breasts filled my hands, heavy, warm, and I lowered my mouth to one nipple, sucked, and felt her arch underneath me, grab the sheets.
I gave it attention until she was squirming, then moved to the other, my hand on the breast I'd left, my thumb rolling the wet, swollen peak.
The sounds she was making were doing things to me that I couldn't think past. Every whimper, every catch of breath, every time she said my name in that broken voice.
I kissed down her stomach. The soft curve of it, the give of her flesh under my mouth, the way she tensed when I reached her hip and then relaxed when I pressed my lips there and didn't rush.
Her skin was warm, salt, alive, and I wanted all of it.
I dragged her jeans down her legs, her underwear with them.
Settled between her thighs and looked up at her.
She was watching me. Her eyes dark, her lips parted, her chest heaving. She looked like a woman who knew exactly what was about to happen and wanted it so badly she was vibrating with it.
I held her gaze and put my mouth on her.
She cried out. Her hand flew to my head, fingers gripping my hair, her hips lifting off the bed.
She was wet, swollen, and the first long, slow stroke of my tongue through her folds made my own body clench with want.
I spread her wider with my hands, her thighs soft and warm against my palms, and I took my time.
I licked into her, slow, thorough, tasting every slick, perfect inch of her.
I found her clit and circled it with the flat of my tongue and her whole body jerked.
"God," she gasped. "Rook, please."
I gave her more. Faster, harder, my tongue working her clit while I slid two fingers inside her and felt her clench around them instantly.
She was so wet my fingers were drenched, and the sound of them moving inside her was obscene and perfect.
I curled them, found the spot that made her thighs shake, and worked it while I sucked her clit into my mouth.
She came screaming. Raw and uncontained, her back bowing off the mattress, her thighs clamping against my head, her body pulsing around my fingers in waves. I didn't stop. I kept my mouth on her, gentler now, riding her through it, feeling every aftershock under my tongue.
Before she'd finished shaking, I was stripping off my jeans.
She reached for me, and got her hand around my cock, and the grip of her fingers made my vision go dark at the edges.
She stroked me, firm, sure, her thumb sliding through the wet at the tip, and I let her for ten seconds before I grabbed her wrist because I was going to come in her hand if she kept going and that wasn't how this was ending.
I flipped her over. My hands on her hips, pulling her up onto her knees, and she made a sound that was pure anticipation, a breathless, desperate sound that made my cock throb.
I ran my hands up the backs of her thighs, over the curve of her ass, my thumbs dragging down the crease where her thighs met her body, and she pushed back against me, impatient, wanting.
I lined up against her, pushed in slowly, and the feeling of her from this angle, the tight, slick heat of her stretching around me, the way her back arched and her fists clenched in the sheets, almost ended me right there.
"Fuck," I breathed. "Lexie. You feel incredible."
She pushed back against me, taking me deeper, and the groan that ripped out of me was guttural, animal, a sound I'd never made in my life.
I gripped her hips and started moving, deep strokes that bottomed out inside her, that made her cry out every time my hips met the soft flesh of her ass.
The sound was loud in the small room, skin on skin, wet, raw, and underneath it her voice breaking on my name.
I leaned over her. One hand flat on the bed beside her shoulder, the other still on her hip, my chest against her back.
I pressed my mouth against her shoulder, her neck, the spot behind her ear, and whispered things I'd been holding back for months.
How long I'd wanted her. How many nights I'd sat at her counter and thought about exactly this.
How she'd wrecked every defense I had without even trying.
"Every night," I said against her skin, my hips driving into her.
"Every night I watched you behind that counter and I wanted you so badly I couldn't think straight.
The way you move, the way you laugh when you think nobody's listening, the way your body looks in the light from that goddamn neon sign.
You've been destroying me for five months and you didn't even know. "
She moaned, pushed back harder, and I stopped being careful.
I fucked her the way I'd been wanting to.
Hard, relentless, my grip on her hip the only thing keeping her steady, the bed slamming against the wall with a rhythm that matched my breathing.
She was meeting every thrust, her body arching, her voice wrecked, and when I reached around her hip and found her clit with my fingers she went off like a detonation.
She came so hard she collapsed forward, her arms giving out, her face in the pillow, her whole body shaking.
I felt it everywhere, the clench of her around me, the pulsing, the way her body gripped me and pulled me deeper, and I followed her over the edge with a force that whited out my vision.
I buried myself to the hilt and came with a sound I couldn't contain, my arm wrapped around her waist, my face against her spine, my hips grinding into her while the orgasm tore through me in waves that felt like they'd never stop.
We stayed there. Breathing. Her body limp beneath mine, my weight on my forearm, both of us slick with sweat, both of us trembling. I put my lips between her shoulder blades and felt her heartbeat hammering against my mouth.
I eased out of her gently. She rolled over, boneless, and looked up at me with glazed eyes, swollen lips, and an expression that was equal parts wrecked and wondering.
"Come here," she said.
I lay down beside her, and she curled into me, her head on my chest, her leg thrown over mine, her hand resting over my heart. The afternoon light was softer now, the room warm, and I held her, her breathing slowing against my ribs and thought about the two men in the alley and what was coming.
They'd be back. More of them, with intent.
The threat had been clear and I believed it.
This wasn't going to end with a conversation and it wasn't going to end with me sitting at her counter every single day.
The club was going to have to move, and when we moved, the Jackals were going to respond, and this quiet afternoon in this warm bed was borrowed time and we both knew it.
"I can hear you thinking," she said. Her voice was slightly sleepy, sated, the voice of a woman who had let every wall come down and wasn't ready to build them back up.
"Good thoughts."
"Liar."
I tightened my arm around her. Pressed my mouth to the top of her head. She smelled like sweat, like sex, like the woman I'd been falling for since the first night I walked through her door, and underneath the tactical assessment already running in my head there was something simpler and fiercer.
I'd held a line once and lost everything. I was holding one again, and this time the thing on the other side of it was lying in my arms with her heartbeat against my chest. I wasn't going to lose.
The room was still. The highway hummed below us. I held her close, and I started to plan.