19. Charlotte
— ? —
Charlotte
I stood across the ballroom from him with Vivienne’s confession still ringing in my ears and watched the last six months rearrange themselves into a shape I didn’t recognize.
“I heard everything she said,” I told him when he reached me. “Every word of it.”
“I wanted to tell you myself.” His voice was low, urgent. “I wanted to explain before you found out like this. I wanted to bring you the whole picture instead of letting you stumble into it at a goddamn auction.”
“Take me upstairs right now.”
He stopped mid-breath. His eyes searched my face for something he could trust, and I watched him find it.
“Charlotte…”
“I’ve spent days talking myself out of wanting you,” I said.
“I’ve spent months building walls and making excuses and protecting myself from something that was going to happen whether I let it or not.
I’m done being careful. Take me upstairs before I remember all the reasons I’m supposed to keep my distance. ”
“You’re sure this is what you want? After everything you just heard?”
“What I just heard is that you didn’t abandon me at that church. That the silence was never yours.” I stepped closer, close enough to smell the cedar and smoke of his cologne. “I’m sure. I’ve never been more sure of anything. Now stop asking me questions and take me to your room.”
We left the auction together and I felt every eye in the room follow us to the door.
I didn’t care about any of them.
The elevator doors closed and he stood on the opposite side of the small space, his hands at his sides.
I crossed the distance between us in two steps and pressed my body against his, my hands fisting in his jacket, my mouth finding his. He tasted like whiskey and when his hands came up to grip my waist I felt the restraint in them, the careful control he was barely holding onto.
“This is real.” His hands slid up my back, fingers splaying between my shoulder blades. “I’m real. I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.”
“Prove it.”
The elevator opened with a soft chime and we moved down the hallway without breaking apart, his hands at my waist, my fingers working at his tie. He walked me backward, his mouth never leaving mine, and I felt the door against my spine before I heard the click of the keycard.
We spilled into his room with the door slamming behind us, and he pulled back just far enough to look at me.
“I want to take my time with you tonight,” he said.
“We’ve wasted enough time.”
“That’s not what I mean.” He reached up and traced his thumb along my collarbone, following the line of it to the hollow of my throat.
I shivered and watched his eyes darken at my response. “I’ve been rushing everything since I got to Newport. Trying to catch up to what we lost. Trying to prove myself in stolen moments. Tonight I want to go slow. I want to learn every inch of you like I should have learned you years ago.”
“Then stop talking about what you want to do,” I said, “and start doing it.”
He reached for the zipper at the back of my dress.
The sound of it sliding down was obscenely loud in the quiet room, tooth by tooth, his knuckles brushing my spine with a deliberation that made my breath catch.
He eased the dress off my shoulders, his palms skating down my arms, taking the silk with them. I felt it pool at my feet and stepped out of it, standing before him in nothing but black lace that suddenly felt like tissue paper.
His gaze moved down my body with a weight I could feel, lingering on my breasts, my waist, the flare of my hips. When his eyes came back to mine they were almost black.
“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
He stepped closer, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off him through his shirt. “Looking at you right now, I can barely breathe.”
“Then stop looking,” I said, reaching for his buttons, “and start touching.”
I worked his shirt open with fingers that trembled despite my best efforts, revealing him inch by inch. The hard planes of his chest. The ridges of his stomach. A trail of dark hair disappearing into his waistband.
I spread my palms flat against his skin and felt his muscles contract under my touch, felt the growl that rumbled through his chest.
“Lie back on the bed,” he said.
I moved to the bed and lay back against the pillows, watching him watch me. He didn’t follow immediately. He stood at the foot of the bed and looked at me, and then he knelt on the mattress and reached for my ankle.
“I’m going to worship every inch of you,” he said, pressing his lips to the inside of my ankle. The scrape of his stubble sent sparks up my leg. “I’m going to kiss you everywhere. Taste you everywhere.”
“Promises, promises.”
“That’s not a promise.” He kissed up my calf, his mouth warm, his hands sliding along my skin. “That’s a fact.”
He reached my knee and kissed the sensitive spot behind it, and I felt the sensation shoot straight between my thighs, sharp and sudden. I gasped and his hands tightened on my leg.
“You’re already trembling,” he said against my skin. “I’ve barely started and you’re already shaking.”
“It’s been so long.” My voice came out breathless, wrecked. “It’s been so long since anyone touched me like this.”
He laughed against my thigh and the vibration made me clench. Then his mouth moved higher and the laughter died.
He kissed up my inner thigh with agonizing slowness, his lips brushing skin that had never felt this sensitive, this alive.
By the time he reached the edge of my underwear I was breathing in shallow gasps, my hands fisted in the sheets.
“Please,” I said. “I need your mouth on me.”
His breath was hot against the lace. “I want to hear you say it.”
“You know what I want.”
He pressed a kiss to the crease where my thigh met my hip, so close to where I needed him and nowhere near close enough. “I want the words, Charlotte. I want to hear them in your voice.”
“I want you to eat me out.” The words came out raw. “I want your tongue on my pussy. I want you to make me come with your mouth. I want to feel you tasting me until I can’t remember my own name.”
He groaned like I’d wounded him. Then he hooked his fingers into my underwear and dragged it down my legs, tossing it somewhere behind him.
The first touch of his tongue made me cry out.
He licked through my folds, tasting me, learning me. I was so wet I could hear it, could hear the obscene sounds of his mouth on me, and instead of shame I felt a surge of power. I had made him kneel for me. I had made him beg for the privilege of tasting me.
“You’re dripping,” he said against me. “Absolutely soaked. Is this all for me?”
“All for you.” I reached down and tangled my fingers in his hair.
He circled my clit with his tongue, and I watched him through half-lidded eyes. The way his shoulders flexed as he held my thighs apart.
“Right there,” I breathed. “God, right there.”
He sucked my clit into his mouth and I saw stars. My hips bucked against his face and he pressed one arm across my stomach, pinning me down, keeping me still while he worked me with his tongue. The pressure was relentless, perfect, exactly where I needed it.
“I can feel you getting close,” he said. “Your thighs are shaking. You’re clenching around nothing.”
“Then give me something to clench around.”
He slid two fingers inside me and I moaned so loud I was sure someone in the hallway heard. He curled them against that spot deep inside me, the one I could never quite reach myself, and stroked it in rhythm with his tongue on my clit.
“You’re so tight,” he groaned. “I could do this for hours. I could stay down here forever just listening to the sounds you make.”
“I won’t last hours.” My voice had gone high and thin. “I’m going to come. I can’t hold it back.”
“Then don’t.” He looked up at me with his lips slick and his eyes burning. “Come on my tongue. Let me taste it.”
He sucked hard on my clit while his fingers drove into me, and I shattered.
The orgasm didn’t build so much as ambush me. One second I was grinding against his mouth, and the next my entire body seized like a current had been run through it.
I arched off the bed with a sound I didn’t recognize as my own voice, my thighs clamping around his head as he refused to stop, refused to let me come down. The pleasure was so sharp it bordered on pain, and I was sobbing his name, tugging at his hair, begging for something I couldn’t even name.
He gave me another slow, deliberate lick and I shattered all over again, smaller aftershocks rippling through me until I was trembling and destroyed and absolutely certain I would never recover.
I felt him groan against me like my pleasure was his, until I was boneless and gasping.
He kissed his way up my body while I tried to remember how to breathe. My stomach. My ribs. The undersides of my breasts.
“That was one,” he said against my throat.
“One?”
“I told you I’d make you lose count.” He sucked on my pulse point and I felt another wave of heat pool low in my belly. “We’re just getting started.”
“I need you inside me.” I reached for his belt with hands that still shook. “I need to feel all of you.”
“Not yet.” He caught my wrists and pinned them above my head, his body pressing me into the mattress. “I’m not done with you yet.”
He kissed me and I tasted myself on his tongue, salt and musk and something that was just me. It should have been strange. Instead it was the hottest thing anyone had ever done.
“What else do you want to do to me?” I asked against his mouth.
“I want to feel you come on my cock.” He rolled his hips and I felt him hard against my thigh, thick and insistent. “I want to feel you squeeze me while you fall apart. I want to be so deep inside you that you feel me for days afterward.”
“Then stop teasing and take what’s yours.”
Something snapped behind his eyes.
He released my wrists and reared back, shoving his pants down his hips with a desperation that made me smile. When he was finally naked above me I let myself look, really look. The broad shoulders. The narrow hips. The cock that jutted toward me, thick and flushed and leaking at the tip.
I wrapped my hand around him and stroked, feeling him pulse against my palm.
“Charlotte.” My name came out like a prayer. “I need to be inside you. I’ve been dreaming about this for months.”
“Then stop dreaming,” I said, guiding him to my entrance, “and make it real.”
There was no patience left in either of us. He drove into me in one hard thrust and I cried out, back arching off the bed as he filled me completely without warning.
The stretch burned in the best way, pleasure and pain tangled together until I couldn’t tell them apart. My legs wrapped around his waist and I pulled him deeper, greedy for more, for everything, for all of him at once.
He groaned against my throat and started to move, and I matched his rhythm with desperate rolls of my hips because waiting was over and I needed this like I needed oxygen.
“You feel incredible,” he said when he was fully seated, his forehead pressed to mine. “Tight and hot and perfect. Like you were made for me.”
“Move.” I wrapped my legs tighter and pulled him deeper. “I need to feel you move.”
He pulled back slowly and thrust forward, and the sound I made wasn’t human.
He set a rhythm that was deep, each stroke hitting places inside me that made my vision blur.
This wasn’t like before. This wasn’t desperate or angry or trying to prove something.
This was two people who had lost each other finally finding their way back.
“Harder,” I gasped.
He drove into me deeper, his hips snapping against mine, the sound of skin on skin filling the room.
“You feel so good,” he groaned. “I forgot how good this was. I made myself forget because remembering was torture.”
He reached between us and found my clit, rubbing in tight circles while he thrust, and the sensation pushed me to the edge faster than I expected. I could feel the second orgasm building, different from the first, deeper, like it was coming from somewhere inside my chest.
“I’m close,” I said. “You’re going to make me come again.”
“Come with me.” His thrusts grew erratic, desperate. “I want to feel you when I let go.”
When I finally broke, it wasn’t an explosion but a slow, rolling unraveling that started in my core and spread outward.
I clenched around him, each pulse dragging a ragged moan from my throat, and I watched his jaw go tight as he fought to hold on.
The pleasure lasted so long I forgot where I ended and he began.
I felt him follow me over the edge, his cock pulsing as he spilled inside me, my name tearing from his throat like he’d been holding it back for months.
We lay tangled together afterward, breathing hard, his body still connected to mine. Neither of us moved to separate. I didn’t want to lose the feeling of him inside me, the weight of him on top of me, the reality of what we’d just done.
Eventually he rolled to the side and pulled me against his chest, his arm wrapping around my waist.
“I love you,” he said into my hair, quiet, like it cost him something. “I never stopped loving you. Not for one single day.”
I heard the words and felt them settle into my chest, right next to the fear that had been living there since the day I’d walked away from him.
But I couldn’t say it back.
The last time I was this sure of something, the sky fell in. Saying the words felt like handing him a weapon. Like giving him the thing he could use to break me all over again.
So I pressed my lips to his chest and said nothing, and let the silence sit between us where the words should have been.
He didn’t push. He just held me tighter.