Chapter 13 #2
She's wet, slick and hot against my fingers, and the knowledge that the argument got her here, that the fighting and the mutual respect underneath it turned her on, lands in my gut like a fist.
My thumb finds the spot I've learned through weeks of focused repetition, the place that makes her grip whatever's closest and forget how to form sentences, and I work it with a slow, circling pressure that I know will build her toward the edge without pushing her over.
Her breathing changes. Her hips roll against my hand, and the rhythm she sets is the rhythm of a woman who knows what she wants and is done pretending otherwise.
I slide two fingers inside her and curl them forward, pressing against the front wall with the deliberate accuracy of a man who has mapped this territory until the map is in his muscle memory, and the sound she makes is low and broken and mine.
I keep the pressure on her clit with my thumb while my fingers work inside her, and the dual contact pulls her hips off the bed, drives her body into a rolling grind against my hand.
The orgasm is building in the tightening of her thighs around my wrist and the hitch in her breathing that tells me she's close.
I slow down.
"Boone." Her voice is a warning, sharp and breathless and absolutely lethal. "Do not stop."
"I'm not stopping. I'm pacing."
"I will kill you."
"After." I speed up again, harder this time, the pad of my thumb pressing firm circles while my fingers curl and press, and the orgasm takes her in a wave that arches her back and clamps her thighs around my hand.
My name tears out of her mouth in a sound that has nothing polished or controlled left in it.
Her body pulses against my fingers, and I hold the contact through every aftershock, easing the pressure as she comes down, because I've learned exactly how long Ireland needs to be held through a finish before the sensitivity tips from pleasure into too much.
She drops her forehead against my shoulder, breathing hard, and her hand slides down my stomach and finds my cock through my jeans with a grip that tells me the orgasm did not satisfy her.
It focused her.
"Off," she says, pulling at my belt.
My jeans come off. My shirt follows.
Ireland's hands on my bare skin have the confident familiarity of a woman who has spent weeks learning this body.
Her thumb presses the shrapnel scar from Mosul without asking about it, traces the ridge across my ribs and follows it to the sensitive strip of skin along my oblique where the touch makes my stomach contract and my cock twitch, because she found that shortcut in the second week and has been exploiting it ever since.
Her mouth follows the path her fingers traced, down my ribs, across my abdomen, and the intent in her descent is unmistakable.
She settles between my legs, her hair falling around her bare shoulders, her eyes locked on mine with the focused determination of a woman whose orgasm did not satisfy her but sharpened her into something more dangerous.
Her hand wraps around my cock, firm and knowing, and her thumb drags across the head in the slow pass that she has learned takes me from wanting to desperate in the space of one stroke.
She lowers her mouth and takes me in, and the slick drag of her tongue along the underside of my shaft drops through my spine and bottoms out in my hips.
She's learned what undoes me. The slow suction at the tip, the long stroke down with her hand following her mouth so the contact is unbroken from root to tip and back again.
Her other hand presses flat against my stomach, pinning me to the mattress, and the restraint in that palm is deliberate.
She's controlling the pace. She's controlling me.
I'm letting her. I want her to. The SEAL who runs tactical operations is flat on his back letting a redheaded physical therapist take him apart with her mouth, and it is the most complete surrender I have ever made in a life that has included surrendering nothing.
My fingers tighten in her hair. The groan that comes out of me is rough and involuntary and belongs in the notebook in handwriting so small no one else could read it.
Her cheeks hollow around me, and the suction intensifies, and if she doesn't stop soon the ending will be in her mouth instead of inside her, and I want to be inside her when this ends because tomorrow I might not get to be.
"Come here." My voice sounds like gravel and demand, the command voice stripped of everything tactical and loaded with everything else.
She releases me with a deliberate slowness that is designed to punish, and the look she gives me as she lifts her head is the look of a woman who knows exactly what she just did and is proud of it.
"You look wrecked, Aldridge."
"You look like you're not finished."
"I'm not even close to finished."
I pull her up the length of my body and roll her beneath me, settling between her thighs with the weight and intent of a man who is done being taken apart and ready to do the taking. Her legs wrap around my hips, and the heat of her against my cock, slick and swollen, makes my jaw clench.
Her hand reaches between us, wraps around my cock with the firm, knowing grip that makes my breath leave in a rush, and guides me to her entrance.
I lower myself over her, bracing on my forearms, and the full contact of skin against skin from hip to shoulder pulls a sound from her that is all need and no composure.
I push inside her in one slow stroke, and the tight, wet grip of her body, still pulsing from the orgasm, pulls a groan from somewhere I can't reach on purpose.
The rhythm starts slow. Not the urgency of the kitchen.
Not the discovery of the first time. Not the claiming fierceness of the night she rode me with her hands on the headboard.
Tonight every stroke is deliberate, weighted with the knowledge that tomorrow I send this woman into a room that might be rigged to hurt people, and every inch of contact is my body's way of memorizing what it can't afford to lose.
Her nails rake down my back. Her hips rise to meet mine.
The pace builds because her body demands it, her legs tightening around my hips, her breathing going sharp and fast. My mouth finds her throat, her jaw, the place behind her ear where the response is always immediate, and the sound she makes against my skin is half frustration and half desperate pleasure.
"Harder," she breathes. "I won't break."
"I know you won't."
I give her harder, my hips driving forward with a force that makes her cry out and her hand fly to the iron headboard above her, bracing for the impact.
My thumb slides between us, finds her clit, swollen and slick, and the contact alongside the depth of each stroke makes her body start to tighten around me.
I stop moving.
I am fully inside her, my hips pressed against hers, every point of contact locked in place. My thumb stills on her clit. My mouth stills on her throat.
The absolute cessation of movement after the building rhythm is a kind of control I learned in a different context, the ability to go from motion to stillness in a fraction of a second.
The application of it here, with Ireland's body clenched around my cock and her breathing ragged and her nails scoring my back, is the most deliberately cruel thing I have ever done to a person I love.
The stillness holds for three heartbeats.
"Boone." Her voice is wrecked. "Move."
"Tell me something first."