Chapter 6
I crossed the kitchen and lifted her off Reid’s lap.
She made a small sound at the loss of him, legs wrapping around my waist out of instinct more than plan. I got an arm under her ass and one around her back and she hid her face in my neck, wet hair, my shirt, the heat of her still shaking.
“Good night,” I said.
Bennett stared. Reid dragged a hand through his hair and looked at her like I was taking something he hadn’t finished holding.
“Cole. Come on.”
“She’s going to bed.” I was already walking. Tile, then the warped board at the doorway, then the hall. “You got what I said you could have.”
They followed as far as the foot of the stairs. Of course they did. Bennett groaned, ugly and honest. Reid muttered something I didn’t bother parsing.
I started up. The second floor did what it always did: one long complaint in the wood, a pop at the landing, the furnace answering through the wall like a body turning over. Tessa’s arms tightened around my neck. I kissed her hair and didn’t slow down.
“She’s mine,” I said without looking back. “I let you borrow her. That’s all that was. Don’t stand there like you forgot.”
Another groan. Bennett this time. The kind that knew it wouldn’t change the door I was about to close.
My room was across from hers. It always had been. I shouldered the door open, carried her through the dark, and kicked it shut with my heel. The latch caught. The hallway went quiet except for the house doing its usual lying, footsteps that weren’t footsteps, pipes, old air.
I set her on my bed.
She looked up at me in the leftover light from the window, wrecked and clean and already marked all over again under the shirt, and I stood there long enough to let the stairs creak once more with my brothers giving up and going wherever they were going to go and hate me from.
Then I reached back and turned the lock.
I didn’t leave her on the bed.
I picked her up again and took her into the attached bath—small, old enamel, a shower that never got quite hot enough on the first try. I set her on her feet on the mat, pulled my shirt off her, and reached past her to start the water.
“In.”
Tessa stepped under it when it turned from cold to usable.
I stripped and followed, crowding her into the spray, and I washed them off her like I had a point to make.
Between her thighs first, thorough, two fingers and the soap, watching Bennett and Reid swirl down the drain in pale ribbons.
Her ass. Her chest, where I’d painted her.
Her mouth, my thumb on her lower lip until she opened and I rinsed that too.
“There,” I said. “That’s enough of them.”
She leaned her forehead on my shoulder while I did it.
Didn’t argue. The house knocked once in the wall behind the tile-pipes, always pipes-and she flinched like it was still the second-floor joke.
I kissed her temple and kept cleaning her until there was nothing left on her skin but water and my hands.
When I shut the soap off I didn’t shut the water off.
I lifted her by the thighs and put her back to the tile. Cold ceramic at her spine, heat at her front, her legs around my waist. I kissed her slow. Lined up slower. Pushed into her cunt in one long sink that made her gasp into my mouth, tight again, clean, just mine.
“Stay with me.”
I fucked her like that. Deep. Unhurried. Every stroke all the way in and a grind at the bottom that dragged against her. No slapping. No audience. Water running over both of us, her heels at my back, my mouth on her jaw and her throat and the place on her shoulder I’d already used once tonight.
“This is different,” I told her. “You feel that? No one else in you. No one watching. Just me taking what’s mine in my own bathroom.”
Tessa nodded, eyes closed, fingers in my wet hair. I kept the pace cruel only in how long I could hold it—slow pulls, deep pushes, the wet sound of it lost under the shower. She clenched when I hit the right angle and I stayed there, fucking that spot until her breath went ragged against my cheek.
“Come on my cock. Then I’m coming in you. Only me this time.”
She did. A quieter orgasm than the ones in the living room, the kitchen, shaking apart between me and the tile, my name a whisper like the locked door might still not be enough.
I held her through it and then I let myself follow, buried to the hilt, filling her in long pulses while the water beat on my back and the old house settled around us.
I didn’t put her down right away.
I stayed inside her and kissed her under the spray until the water started to run cool.