Chapter 14 #3
Then he moves, and I move with him, and the rhythm we find is ours, neither his pace nor mine but something we build together the way we built every defense this base has.
He sets a pace of long strokes that withdraw until only the head holds, then presses forward in a slow, deep grind that hits the front wall and sends heat blooming up through my abdomen.
My legs wrap around his waist and the angle changes, deeper, and the sound I make is somewhere between a gasp and a moan and I can feel him respond to it, his breathing going rough against my neck, his hips driving harder on the next stroke.
His hand cradles the back of my neck in a grip that is both anchor and possession, and his mouth finds the sensitive skin below my ear.
"Stay with me," he says low against my skin.
He's said it before, but the weight is different now, aimed past the bed, past the morning, past the end of the deployment.
The pace builds. His hips snap forward and the contact is deep enough to make my vision swim, each thrust hitting a place inside me that compounds the one before.
My hands find his back and my nails drag down the muscle along his spine, and the sound he makes against my throat, raw and wrecked and breaking open, is the best thing I've ever pulled from him.
His arms are braced on either side of my head and the muscles in his shoulders are rigid with effort, sweat tracking along his temple, and the sight of Griff Holland losing his composure above me, because of me, is more intoxicating than the physical act itself.
The climax builds like good code, layered and recursive, each pass compounding the one before.
My internal monologue, the running narration that has never in my entire life stopped talking, goes silent.
There is only sensation: the friction, the fullness, the pressure cresting behind my pelvic bone, his mouth on my throat and his hand on my neck and the rhythm between us that has stopped being rhythm and become something closer to urgency.
My thighs tighten around his waist. My breathing fragments into sounds that don't resemble language.
The edge is right there, close enough to taste, and my body is reaching for it with every muscle I have.
"Let go," he says against my mouth. "I've got you."
The climax hits like a system crash, total and without warning.
One stroke lands at the exact angle where his cock drags against the front wall and his thumb would be if his hand weren't cradling my neck, except the pressure is internal now, deep and relentless, and my body seizes around him.
My back arches off the mattress and my thighs lock against him and the orgasm rolls through me in hard, rhythmic pulses that I feel in my abdomen, my thighs, the soles of my feet.
The sound that tears from my throat is raw and loud and belongs to someone who has lost every filter she owns.
Griff doesn't stop. His hips drive forward through the clenching, each thrust shorter and harder, and I can feel him swelling inside me, the added thickness stretching me wider while my body is still contracting around him.
His breathing breaks apart against my neck, rough and uneven, and the controlled rhythm he's held all this time shatters into something urgent and graceless.
His hand tightens on my neck and his whole body goes rigid, every muscle locking at once, and he buries himself to the hilt and holds there.
The heat of him releasing inside me is immediate and visceral, a pulsing warmth that floods deep and triggers a second wave I wasn't braced for.
My body clamps down around him again, harder this time, milking the orgasm from both of us in overlapping contractions that blur the line between his release and mine.
His hips jerk forward in short, involuntary thrusts, pressing deeper with each pulse, and the groan he lets go against my throat is the most uncontrolled sound I've ever heard from a man who built his life around control.
The aftershocks roll through us in diminishing waves, my inner muscles fluttering around him while he softens inside me, the wet heat between us slick and abundant and evidence of everything we just did.
His arms give out and his full weight presses me into the mattress, and the heaviness of him is grounding in a way that keeps me from floating out of my own body.
His weight eases against me afterward, breathing evening out against my neck, and neither of us speaks for a long time because the silence holds more than words would.
At some point he shifts to his side and pulls me with him, and the room has gone dark enough that the pier lamps outside are painting slow-moving light across the ceiling.
His hand traces absent patterns on my hip, idle and warm, and the conversation finds us the way conversations do when the defenses are down and the quiet has gone on long enough to feel safe.
"Hartwell offered me an extended contract for ongoing cybersecurity consultation," I tell him. "The expanded investigation needs someone who knows the architecture, and the architecture lives in my head."
"Are you taking it?"
"I'm staying, and not because of you." I turn my head to look at him. "It's not despite you either. Tidewater needs what I do, and the work is important, and I've built something here that matters beyond the contract."
"The loft has a second bedroom we could convert into a proper office," he says, "so I can have my kitchen island back before your monitors permanently fuse to the granite. There's also terrible country music, and you're welcome to keep complaining about both for as long as you want."
"That is the least romantic offer I have ever received."
"You want romance, date someone who doesn't defuse bombs for a living."
"Point taken. The last man I dated was an investment banker. He alphabetized his spice rack and cried during commercials." I press my foot against his shin under the sheet. "You're an improvement."
His hand slides from my hip to my waist and pulls me flush against him. "Damn right I am."
We end up on the couch when the sheets get too warm and the room gets too still. The bay is flat and dark through the windows and the pier lamps dot the waterline in amber, and the loft is cool enough after the heat of the bedroom that the air feels good against bare skin.
My laptop is open on my knees, the monitoring framework running its passive sweep across the restored network, and my feet are in Griff's lap the way they've been on dozens of evenings that I told myself were temporary.
His hands rest on my ankles, his thumb making absent circles on the bone he's been touching every night as though confirming a measurement he already knows.
"This isn't temporary," I say, and the words come out steady and sure and without a trace of the accent I use as a blade or the sarcasm I use as a wall.
"No," he says. "It's not."
The code scrolls. His hand is warm on my ankle, and mine is steady on the keyboard.