Chapter Three #3
He lifted me onto the counter, granite cool on my bare thighs, and stepped between my legs.
The height put us eye to eye. He held the look while he explored me, unhurried, palms running up my sides, over my ribs, fingers learning the curve of my waist, the dip of my spine.
He touched me as if he intended to memorize every inch, and the patience of it cracked something open.
“Beau.” His name in my mouth felt different than Rutledge. Closer. More dangerous.
“Tell me what you want.” Low, rough, his breath warm on my throat.
“Your mouth. Everywhere. Don’t skip anything.”
He didn’t. He kissed down my sternum, my stomach, dropped to his knees on the heart pine floor and pressed his lips to my inner thigh, and I stopped thinking in sentences.
His stubble dragged on skin still sensitive from the ocean.
He held my thighs open, thumbs pressing into the soft skin there, and when he finally reached my pussy I made a sound that probably carried across the creek.
He gave me the same focused attention he gave a dive check.
No rushing, no teasing for teasing’s sake.
Just his tongue flat and hot on my clit, reading my body the way he read a current, adjusting pressure and speed based on how I moved, how I sounded.
He slid two fingers inside me and curled them.
My vision whited out. I came with his name in my mouth and my thighs shaking and the counter edge biting into my palms.
He didn’t stop. He gentled but he didn’t stop, his tongue soft now, easing me down, and before I’d caught my breath his fingers were moving again, patient, building the next one underneath the aftershocks of the first.
“I can’t—” I could barely get the words out. “Again, already—”
“You can.” Absolute certainty. He closed over my clit again, and he was right. I came a second time on a broken cry that was half his name and half profanity, my hips rolling while he held me steady.
He stood. Wiped his lips with the back of his hand. Looked at me sitting wrecked on his kitchen counter with my hair falling out of its braid and my chest heaving. The expression on his face, dark, satisfied, barely leashed, was a dare. I wanted to take him apart.
“My turn.” I slid off the counter on unsteady legs, pushed him toward the table, and sank down.
He was gorgeous above me. Tan skin, scattered scars, the muscles in his stomach taut with wanting.
I pressed my lips to the V of muscle at his hip and heard him hiss through his teeth.
Kissed along the line of his obliques, feeling them contract under my lips.
Took my time, because he’d taken his, and turnabout was fair.
His cock was hard and thick in my grip, and I heard his breath catch when I took him in: a sharp inhale, then a groan from deep in his chest. I worked him with tongue and pressure and the edge of suction, learning what made his fists clench at his sides, what made his fingers find my hair, gentle, threading through the loose curls while I took him deeper.
“Fuck.” His voice cracked on it. “Marley. Your mouth—” He couldn’t finish.
I took him to the back of my throat and his hips jerked forward once before he caught himself, thighs rigid with the effort of staying still. I eased off, swirled my tongue over the head, tasted skin and heat, and took him deep again. His fingers curled tight in my hair. Not guiding. Holding on.
“You need to stop.” His voice was raw. “Keep doing that and I’m going to come and I’m not done with you.”
His jaw was clenched, his chest rising hard, and his eyes were ruined. Pupils blown wide, the gray barely a ring at the edges.
I stood. Kissed him. His hands clamped on my hips and he lifted me, my thighs wrapping around him, and I didn’t know where we were going until my back hit the bed.
The military-neat sheets rumpled under us instantly. Good. The man needed chaos in his life.
He settled between my legs, and I felt him—hot, hard, pressing but not entering. He paused. His forearms braced on either side of my head, his body a wall of heat above me, his lips hovering over mine.
“I’ve wanted this since you called me a bouncer,” he said.
“Maritime specialist.” I hooked my ankle behind his thigh and rocked my hips up.
He pushed inside me and the breath left me, stretching around him, the fullness of it hitting every oversensitive nerve.
He gave me a moment, held still, teeth set, the control visible in every line of him, his forehead pressed to mine so I could feel every breath he took.
The intimacy of that stillness undid me more than the sex had.
He was waiting for me. Watching my face. Making sure.
“Move,” I whispered.
He started to move. Slow at first. Deep. Each stroke purposeful, his hips rolling in a rhythm that found a spot inside me and my back arched off the mattress. He braced one hand beside my head, used the other to tilt my hip into him, and the new angle made us both swear.
“More,” I breathed.
He gave me more. His pace built, still controlled but harder now, and he bent to my breast, teeth grazing my nipple before his tongue soothed the sting. I wrapped my legs around him and shifted the angle and we both groaned.
“Right there.” I grabbed the back of his neck. “Don’t you dare stop.”
“Couldn’t if I wanted to.” His voice was hoarse, barely a whisper. He pressed his forehead to mine. “You feel—Christ, Marley. Watching you and wanting this and you’re better than anything I—”
He kissed me instead of finishing, hard and deep, and the taste of both of us sent a clench through my whole body.
He reached between us, his thumb finding my clit, circling in time with his thrusts.
His cock inside me, his thumb on me, his lips at my throat—it built into a wave I couldn’t outrun.
I came a third time on a cry that I buried in his shoulder, my nails scoring his back, my whole body tightening around him in pulses that went on and on.
He followed. His rhythm broke, his hips stuttering, and he buried himself deep and groaned my name into my neck, low, rough, shattered. I held him while he came apart in my arms. This man who controlled every room he walked into, who’d been a wall of composure since the day I met him.
“Oh my God.” I dropped my head back on the pillow.
“Yeah.” He was still inside me, his weight warm on top of me, his breath hot on my neck. He found my fingers, threaded his through mine, and held.
We lay there. The creek moved beneath the house with its tidal rhythm. Tree frogs started up outside, building their nightly chorus. The air through the open door carried salt marsh and the warmth of a Lowcountry evening that refused to cool down because it knew you didn’t want it to.
He rolled to his side and drew me with him, my back to his chest, his arm heavy around my waist. His lips pressed to the spot behind my ear.
“I’ll make coffee,” he said after a while. “You take yours black.”
“How do you know that?”
“Three days of watching you drink it on your boat.”
I turned in his arms to look at him. His face in the blue-dark was calm, open, the usual vigilance dialed down to a quiet I hadn’t seen before.
I could feel his heartbeat under my palm, still elevated, slowing by degrees.
The steady beat. The night air through the door.
The tide turning in the creek below, and the tree frogs singing their idiot hearts out in the spartina.
I didn’t want to leave.
That thought landed in my chest and sat there, immovable.
Not this boathouse. Not the jasmine or the heart pine or the tide beneath the floor.
Him. How he’d said you were right and meant all of it.
How he’d checked my gear before his own.
How he was holding me now, steady and unhurried, as though he had nowhere else to be and no one else to hold.
I’d spent years making sure I could leave anywhere. Reckoning was mobile for a reason. My whole life was designed around the exit.
Wanting to stay was the most terrifying thing I’d felt since the morning I realized my research partner had put his name on my work.
Beau’s breathing was slowing toward sleep, his arm warm and heavy across my ribs.
Outside, an engine rumbled on the Intracoastal.
Low, distant, wrong for this hour. My body went alert before my brain caught up—filed-down valve seats, photographed research, a center-console at the old fish house pier.
The world hadn’t stopped because we’d fallen into bed. The cartel was still out there. My regulator was still sabotaged. And I was lying in the arms of a man I’d known for three days, feeling safer than I had in years.
The engine faded south. The tree frogs resumed. Beau’s hand tightened once on my hip, reflexive, protective, even in half-sleep.
I stayed. And I was terrified.