Chapter 23
ALEC
The suite door closes and the world goes quiet.
Not gradually. All at once. Ten thousand strangers and six hours of street music replaced by the hum of the air conditioning and the distant sound of the sea through the veranda doors.
Ella’s still moving to a rhythm that isn’t playing anymore, her hips swaying as she drops her bag on the console table, and I watch the festival leave her body in stages.
The bounce slows. The sway softens. She turns to face me in the dim entryway, and what’s left on her face isn’t the wide-open grin from the street.
It’s quieter than that. Warmer. A little sad around the edges.
Tomorrow we fly home. Different flights, different cities, two thousand miles of geography that didn’t exist while we were dancing. My brain, which the festival mercifully kept offline until now, has already done the math. It’s all ending too soon.
Ella steps toward me. There’s glitter on her collarbones, fine gold dust from costumed dancers who swept past us on the parade route. Her skin is flushed from the sun and the heat earlier today. Her lips taste like rum punch, which I can still taste when I lean down and kiss her.
The kiss starts warm, easy. Her mouth is soft and sweet. Her hand settles on my chest. My arm goes around her waist because that’s where it prefers to live now.
Then the kiss changes. Deepens. My hand slides from her waist to the curve of her lower back and I pull her closer.
The press of her body against mine sends heat flooding through me so fast it nearly takes my breath.
She makes a small sound against my mouth, barely audible.
Her fingers curl into the front of my shirt.
I’ve been hard for most of the evening. Since the dancing, since her body moved against mine in the crowd and the friction of her hips ground against me through our clothes. That arousal never left. It just waited, and now it surges back with interest.
Her hand slides from my chest to the side of my neck. Her thumb traces my jaw. When she pulls back just far enough to look at me, her blue eyes are dark and clear in the low light, and the expression in them strips the last of my control.
I bring my hand to the strap of her sundress. Just my fingertips, resting on the thin material where it crosses her shoulder.
She doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. Her eyes stay on mine and I can feel her pulse under my other hand where it rests against the side of her throat.
I slide the strap off her shoulder. The cotton falls against her upper arm and I follow the path it just traveled with my mouth. The warm skin of her shoulder. The tendon that tightens when she tilts her head. My lips find the hollow at the base of her throat and I feel her shiver.
I stay there, her pulse against my lips, the salt on her skin. Every detail I take in now is one I get to keep when tomorrow puts too much distance between us, and the greed in that thought surprises me. I want to map her with my mouth until there’s nowhere left I haven’t tasted.
I slide the other strap down and the dress loses its hold. It catches briefly at her hips, then surrenders to gravity. Cotton pools at her feet and she’s standing in front of me in a pale blue bra and matching panties, the turquoise scarf I gave her still tied loosely around her neck.
A week ago, I was eating steamed fish alone and running from my own cardiologist. Now I’m undressing the woman who turned my entire operating system inside out, and I can’t think of any part of my life before her that I’d want back.
I reach behind her. Her bra clasp gives under my fingers and the fabric goes slack.
I pull it forward off her arms and let it drop.
Her bare breasts are full and warm, her nipples already tight from the air conditioning or from the way I’m looking at her or both.
The sight of her bare skin still hits me the way it did that first night, but it carries a different significance now.
I know the sounds she makes when I put my mouth on her.
I know how her fingers like to clutch at my hair.
Knowing her—all of her, intimately—makes the wanting now even sharper.
Harder to hold. I cup one breast in my hand, feeling the weight of it against my palm, and I lower my head and take her nipple into my mouth.
Her gasp is sharp and immediate. Her hand goes into my hair, fingers threading through and gripping.
I circle her nipple with my tongue, then draw on it until her back arches and a moan slips out of her.
I switch to the other breast, giving it the same deliberate attention.
The same slow, measured worship while my hand traces the curve of her rib cage and my dick throbs against the front of my shorts.
My body wants to go faster. Every nerve is screaming for it.
But fast leads to finished, and finished leads to tomorrow, and I am not letting tomorrow into this room yet.
My mouth moves lower. Down the soft skin between her breasts.
Her ribs. The plane of her stomach, where the muscles flutter under my lips.
I sink to my knees in front of her on the cool tile floor and her fingers tighten in my hair.
I press my mouth to the skin just above the waistband of her panties.
Her skin is impossibly soft, like velvet under my lips.
She moans when I slip my hand between her thighs where her pussy is already hot and wet, desire soaking through to scorch my fingers.
The knowledge that she’s this ready for me sends a pulse of raw need through my body that makes my hands unsteady.
I peel the panties down. Over her hips. Down her thighs, where my mouth follows, pressing against the soft skin of her inner thigh, tasting the warmth there. Not lingering. Not making this something else. Just my lips on her newly bare skin, brief and reverent, before I rise back to my feet.
And then she’s naked. I’m still in my clothes. The turquoise scarf with its painted sea turtle is the only thing she has on. I leave it tied around her neck, wanting her bare except for my gift.
She reaches for the hem of my shirt but I catch her hands.
Bring them to my mouth. I kiss her knuckles.
Then I strip my own shirt over my head and shove my shorts and boxers down, and her gaze drops and her eyes go heavy at what she sees.
My cock is straining, thick and hard, and the way she looks at me makes my blood pound even more intensely than before.
I guide her backward through the bedroom doorway.
Her calves hit the edge of the mattress and she sits, then lies back, and the image that greets me is one I’m not going to recover from.
Ella on the white sheets. Bare skin. Dark hair spread across the pillow.
The silky tails of the scarf pooled between her breasts, silk against skin, ocean-colored fabric on the woman who dragged me into the water and showed me how to float beside her and simply… be.
I settle over her. Face to face. My weight braced on my forearms, her body cradled under mine, and when I look down at her she’s looking at me too. No laughter. No deflection. Just Ella with her guard demolished and her blue eyes wide open.
Her legs wrap around me. Her heels press into the backs of my thighs, pulling me closer, and the wet heat of her against the underside of my cock nearly whites out my vision.
I reach between us and position myself at her entrance.
Her hand slides up my arm and grips my shoulder.
I push into her. Slowly. Inch by inch, feeling her body open around me, hot and tight and slick, and the sensation of being inside her is something I will never get used to no matter how many times we do this.
Every time feels like the first time my body got the answer to a question it didn’t know it was asking.
“God, Ella.” My voice is low and thick. “You feel incredible. Every time, baby. You fucking wreck me.”
Her hips lift to meet mine. Her nails dig into my shoulder.
The small, breathless sound she makes when I’m fully inside her is the best sound I’ve ever heard, and I hold still for a moment just to feel it.
The squeeze of her around me. The heat of her breath against my neck. Her heartbeat rapid against my chest.
I start to move. Long, unhurried strokes.
Each one deep and deliberate, my body pressing into hers with a focus that has nothing to do with technique and everything to do with the fact that I’m trying to say something with every inch of contact.
Her eyes stay on mine. Mine stay on hers.
There is nowhere to hide in this position, and I don’t want to hide.
I want her to see exactly what she does to me.
Her hand comes up to my face. Her thumb traces my cheekbone and the tenderness of that gesture, her touching my face while I’m inside her, unravels something behind my ribs that I didn’t know was still knotted.
“Stay with me,” she whispers. Not a command. A request. Like she can feel the clock too.
“I’m right here.” I press deeper. Hold. Her breath shudders and her eyes go liquid. “I’m not going anywhere.”
The rhythm builds with a gathering weight behind each stroke that I couldn’t stop if I tried. My hand slides into her hair, cradling the back of her head. Her leg pulls me tighter. The angle shifts and the next thrust draws a moan out of her that I feel in my spine.
“Right there,” she breathes. “Don’t stop.”
Fuck, I couldn’t stop if my damn life depended on it.
I hold the angle and give her exactly what she’s asking for, slow and deep and relentless, and I watch her face change with each stroke.
The flush spreading down her neck. Her lips parting.
Her eyes fighting to stay on mine as the pleasure builds.