FIFTEEN
He crossed the room in three strides and ripped her off her feet before his name fully left her lips.
“Reid!” she gasped, hands flying to his shoulders as he turned for the bed in one smooth glide. He lay her on the mattress and followed her down, sinking his weight over her, unable to hold back this storm between them anymore.
It was lightning strikes and booms of thunder. It was molten lava spewing from a volcano. It was tides crashing against shores.
He found her mouth and took control.
With a moan, she latched on to his shoulders tighter, fingers digging in.
In the war room, he’d wanted this—her mouth, the little sounds she made as he swept his tongue across hers. He wanted her to say she loved him back, dammit.
Now he didn’t need the words. He knew it by the look in her eyes when he walked in that door and the press of her fingertips into his muscle.
Cupping her face in one palm, he deepened the kiss, pouring out everything he couldn’t find the words to say.
She arched into him, sliding her hands down his back and curling them into his shirt.
He groaned against her mouth, delivering kiss after smoldering kiss because stopping wasn’t a possibility his body was willing to consider.
“Ryss.” Her name burst out roughly between kisses, barely a syllable. “God, Ryss.”
She answered him with her hands, lips and tongue. She pulled him down harder and he let himself believe, just for tonight, that whatever came after didn’t matter yet.
Only this.
They tore off each other’s clothes and his mind blanked to anything but her sweet noises of pleasure as he nibbled the column of her throat and spattered kisses over the tops of her breasts.
When he took one straining nipple between his lips, he watched her eyelids droop and her mouth part on a gasp.
He teased the tip into a hard bud, alternating swipes of his tongue with grazes of his teeth. By the time he pulled free and moved to take her other nipple, she was bucking against him for more.
“Reid! God, Reid,” she echoed his earlier words.
He slipped his hand down the curve of her side and landed on her hip. In one swift move, he eased down her body and clasped her thighs.
“Open for me. Let me have you.”
She cried out and let her thighs fall apart. He parted them even more and buried his tongue in her pussy. Liquid heat bathed his tongue. His cock throbbed hard against the mattress, protesting the control he wouldn’t relinquish yet.
He wanted to give her the goddamn world, but all he had was this moment in time. She could leave in five minutes or five hours or five days. No one knew, but this minute—right now—could be theirs.
Swirling his tongue through her soaking folds, he licked a path to her clit. When he applied pressure, her thighs tightened and she rocked her hips. As he slid one finger inside her drenched heat, she let out a roughened groan that he felt to the pit of his soul.
He added a second finger and pressed them inside her nice and slow while lapping at her bundle of nerves until she writhed. Her throat arched. Her head was thrown back. Freckles stood out against her pink cheeks.
With a slow withdrawal, he watched her come apart for him even as he felt her beginning to pulse under his tongue.
“Faster!”
A guttural noise tore from his throat and he lost himself in pleasing her with hard, fast thrusts of his fingers and the perfect pressure of his lips on her clit that would drive her to an end she’d never forget.
Her hips bucked upward and hovered in the air. Her fingers dug into his scalp as her release struck. He moaned against her pussy, driving her higher and higher as he pushed her further.
Before she’d totally come down, he hovered over her. Their lips met in a hungry kiss that spiraled on for endless minutes.
He wanted inside her the way he wanted air. His cock was a steely rod jerking against his abs. But if this was their final time together, he was going to make it last.
Just when he thought he couldn’t hold back anymore, she stole all control from him by curling her fingers around his cock.
“Ryss.” He groaned against her throat, the edges of his vision going white from the tormenting feel of her hand on him.
She gave him a slow stroke and then gently pushed on his chest. “Lie on your back.”
Her soft tone undid him, and even if he wasn’t about to gain the highest pleasure, he would do anything she asked.
He rolled onto his back, and she crushed her body over his, warm curves stealing what was left of his mind.
Their mouths collided. He tangled his fingers with hers, but in seconds she was gone, pressing kisses over his chest and abs, lingering over the fresh scar for so long that his eyes stung with emotion.
Then she brushed her lips over his hip and he stopped breathing.
She wrapped her fingers around his hard length, her eyes flashing as she took him in her hot mouth.
* * * * *
He tasted like salt and man. Pure Reid. All hers—at least for now.
She couldn’t resist closing her eyes as she sucked him into her mouth. Every inch pulsed on her tongue, the mushroomed tip pressing into the back of her throat. She swallowed around him and gained the growl she knew to expect after doing this so many times before.
In a slow glide, she pulled back, sucking on his length in soft pulls that had him twisting her hair in his fist. He loved watching her take him in her mouth, and she gave him what he needed now, holding his stare as she drove him to new heights.
She needed to make him feel the things he made her feel. When they left this room, and she left this base, she needed him to know where her heart lay even if she couldn’t whisper the words.
The cooler air brushed against her spine, sending shivers of sensation through her. With her gaze fixed on Reid’s handsome face, she took him all the way to the root and felt a shudder ripple through his muscular body.
Dark pleasure took hold of her every move as she lived in the moment. When his cock surged in her mouth, she felt a tingle of anticipation low in her own belly.
Before she could push him over the edge, he grasped her by the arms and dragged her up his body. In a flurry, she straddled him and took him inside her in one hard, downward shove.
They shared a groan, and he flattened his hand on her spine. They began to move, bodies sealed. Mouths fused. Hearts beating as one.
Dammit, she wouldn’t survive losing him a second time, but she needed this.
He churned his hips against hers, cock stroking deep, deeper, deeper still. Her inner walls clenched and released on his thick length. And for one moment, what could have been shot through her mind.
If she wasn’t on birth control, she could have his baby. A pain that it couldn’t happen now stabbed so deep that it brought tears to her eyes.
He tasted it on her tongue and stilled under her. He brushed his fingertips over her chin, lifting her face to his. “Baby. What is it?”
“I…just wish. That’s all.”
His lips hardened and his stare burned into hers. “So do I. So do I.”
He flipped her. Throwing her thigh around his back, he drove inside her with a new brand of passion she’d never felt from him before.
His steely body flexed and bowed as he drove his cock into her neediest point. She hooked her hand around his nape and pulled him down again, kissing him with everything she had to give.
Four more deep thrusts…then five…and her body took over. Before she could draw a breath, she was floating away in a sea of pulsations.
In the back of her mind, she noted how Reid’s movements became disjointed right before hot cum showered her inner walls. She clutched at him, and he cradled her face in his palm.
Their gazes locked as they rode out the storm together and then took shelter in each other’s arms.
She came back to herself slowly, aware that her heart was still hammering and love words perched on her lips.
The things she couldn’t bring herself to say—I love you, I need you, I never want this to end—she hoped she’d shown him with her body.
He moved off her and drew her against his side, tracing sweeping patterns over her side that made her nipples tighten all over again.
She let her head rest on his chest, listening to the slow, steady rhythm of his heartbeat starting to slow, and for a long moment neither of them said anything at all. It didn’t feel like silence, though. It felt full.
His fingers kept moving, unhurried, tracing the curve of her waist, up over her ribs, back down again, as though he was memorizing her by touch the same way he’d once told her he used to memorize every freckle on her body.
Maybe that was exactly what he was doing. Maybe he needed this as badly as she did—proof, solid and warm under his hands—that this wasn’t a dream world and he’d wake with an empty bed and a deep ache in his chest.
“You still do that,” she murmured, tracing a lazy finger across his muscled pec.
“Do what?”
“Touch me like you’re checking if I’m real.”
His hand stilled for a brief second before resuming its slow path. “Old habit.”
She felt the truth of his love in the careful, deliberate way he held her, as if letting go even for a moment might undo the things neither of them could afford to lose again.
She pressed a kiss to his chest, right over his heart, and felt it stutter under her lips.
“Ryss,” he said, low, almost a warning.
“I know.” She did know. She knew exactly what neither of them was saying, knew the color of the words painted between them.
I love you.
Stay.
Don’t leave.
And she knew, too, why neither of them would let those words out tonight. Saying them meant making them real. Making them real meant facing the fact that reality had an expiration date stamped on it when the warehouse was found.
So she just curled closer, let her palm rest on his chest and matched her breathing to his until the two rhythms synced.
He pressed a kiss to the crown of her head, lingering there as he tightened his hold on her.
“Stay with me a while,” he said quietly against her hair.
Not stay forever. Not the impossible thing.
Just stay for this hour. Maybe all night, in this small stolen pocket of time.
“I’m not going anywhere.” For now, it had to be enough.
Outside this room, a case waited. A warehouse location, a deadline, a name still unidentified on a whiteboard covered in her own handwriting.
The clock was ticking down fast toward an ending neither of them had found the courage to accept yet.
In here, for now, there was just his heartbeat under her ear, his hand tracing slow shapes against her skin.
And the fragile peace of pretending the future couldn’t reach them until morning.