Chapter 18
DARCY
Unlike the other night, this time I hold on to my keys.
It's about all I can manage with Finn kissing me against my own front door, one hand in my hair and the other flat against the small of my back.
The porch light glows over our heads like a spotlight, but I don't care.
I can't. I am done—completely done—pretending I want anything more than this man and his incredible mouth on mine.
"Inside," I gasp against his lips.
His answer is a low, impatient growl.
I pivot around and fumble to get the key into the lock.
Miraculously, I get the door open on the second try.
Finn takes hold of me before we're even inside, and we go through the opened door attached at the lips, his jacket still draped around my shoulders, his hands moving against my back and in my loose hair.
I have exactly enough civic pride to kick the door shut behind us so we don't give the town anything more to talk about than we already have. My keys land in the entryway bowl by pure muscle memory. The lamp on my little hall table stays off. The streetlight through the front window is plenty.
He walks me backward as if he knows my place like its his own, still kissing me as if he no longer needs air to breathe. Not that I can complain. His hunger for me is the hottest thing I've ever known, and it ignites my need for him into a fire I can hardly contain.
His thigh slides between mine and I grind down on it without an iota of shame. He's hard against my hip, his erection thick and unmistakable through his jeans, and knowing it's for me sends heat rolling straight down through my belly. I pull his shirttail free. He drags his mouth down my throat.
"All week," he says against my hammering pulse. "I've wanted you like this all week. Longer."
I smile against his mouth. "Then stop wasting time."
I push his jacket off my shoulders and start on his shirt buttons, and he lets me, watching my face while I work, which is unfair, because his eyes in the half dark are enough to make my fingers clumsy.
I get the shirt open and shove it off him, pausing to appreciate what I finally can see.
I've felt this chest through fabric twice now. Bare is different.
Bare is a wall of warm muscle and that raised scar along his ribs that makes me wince in empathy even as it turns me on like it has no right to. I put my mouth on his collarbone, tasting his smooth skin, which carries a trace of clean salt for the way he's burning up for me.
The sound he makes goes straight between my legs.
"Damn, Darcy." His hands find the tie of my wrap dress. "I've been thinking about untying this knot since seven o'clock."
"It's one pull," I tell him, practically panting now.
It is not one pull. I knotted it twice because it was windy on the bay, and I didn't want to risk any wardrobe malfunctions.
But now, Finn Bardot, who I have no doubt can rig a climbing anchor blindfolded on a cliff ledge, evidently cannot beat a double knot in jersey fabric.
He tugs, and tugs again, cursing under his breath.
I can't help the laugh that bubbles up inside me. I look down at where he's struggling, his long fingers confounded by the knot. His hands are shaking.
His hands are shaking because of me. Because of how much he wants me.
"I can do that for you."
"Don't even think about it," he mutters. "I've got this."
"You sure?" I'm grinning like an idiot. "Do you want a flashlight? Scissors? Should we phone a Boy Scout? I have the local troop leader in my contacts."
He gets it on the third try and the dress falls open, and whatever I was going to say next dies, because he reaches up to grab the back of my neck and kisses me senseless again.
Then he draws back, going still as he looks at me.
Both hands at my waist, all that motion in him stopped, and he gazes at me standing in my open dress and underwear.
"Even better than I imagined," he says, rough. "And I imagined plenty."
Then his hands slide inside the dress, palms hot on my bare waist, and his mouth comes down on mine again, and we stop being careful.
The dress goes to the floor somewhere by the bookshelf.
My bra follows it, and his mouth is on my breast before the air finishes touching me, his tongue rolling over my nipple, and the pull of it lands low in my belly and I hear myself moan—actually moan.
It's a starving sound, as raw as my body is right now.
Finn swallows it up with a kiss I can feel in every fiber of my desire-soaked body.
We don't make it to the bedroom. I'm not even sure we try to get that far.
Locked together, we hit the couch. He lays me back against the cushions, and here is a fact I will only ever admit right now: it has been fourteen months since anyone touched me, and even before the drought, it was never like this.
I'd started to believe I'd remembered it wrong, how good hands could feel.
But nothing I've known before has prepared me for the way Finn makes me feel.
He kneels on the floor, hooks his fingers in my underwear, and drags my panties down my legs, unhurried, watching me the whole way, and then he kisses the inside of my knee and works up my thigh and I stop breathing in any organized fashion.
"Finn."
"I know," he says, against my inner thigh, as if he can sense how much I crave him inside me. "First I need to taste you."
Then his mouth is on me. He kisses my pussy the way he kissed my mouth at the bottom of my stairs, patient and sure and paying attention, his tongue finding my clit and settling into a rhythm that empties my head out completely.
My hips rise for his mouth. He wraps an arm over them and holds me still and does not stop, and then his fingers join his tongue—first one, and then two sliding into me easily, filling me, but not yet satisfying me. I want more. I need more.
I'm wet and aching, bucking against his mouth, and the sound I make would end my teaching career if the windows were open.
He doesn't stop. The heat builds low and spreads down my thighs and up my spine.
I've got one hand fisted in his hair and the other gripping the couch cushion like it might try to run away somewhere, and when I break, I break loud.
His name, let loose in a hoarse shout I can feel vibrating through me.
My whole body pulls tight. White stars burst behind my eyes, my thighs shaking against his shoulders, and he works me through every last wave of it until I'm boneless and spent.
I resurface in pieces. He's kissing my hip bone. He looks extremely pleased with himself, and even I have to admit that he's damn well earned it.
"Come here," I say, when I have words.
He stands and strips the rest of the way.
Belt, jeans, everything. And I get my first full look at Finn Bardot naked in my living room.
Broad shoulders, muscles roping his chest and torso, that scar I want to lick.
My eyes roam lower, over his lean hips and down to his cock, which juts out hard and heavy.
My mouth waters at the sight of him. I did that.
A week ago, I would've sworn Finn and I were lifelong enemies, and now here he is standing naked in my living room, this beautiful ridiculous man, hard because of me.
I sit up and wrap my hand around his shaft.
His whole body jerks. He's hot in my palm, stiff and silky smooth, and I stroke him slow, root to tip, watching his face while I do it, because turnaround is only fair. His eyes close. His jaw works. On the third stroke he makes a sound like I've hurt him and catches my wrist.
"Darcy." Ragged. "I want to last longer than a teenager tonight, so if you don't stop that..."
"That good?" I can't help it.
"You have no idea." He exhales hard, a man talking himself down off a ledge he usually jumps from. "I need my jacket. Left pocket."
The jacket is on the floor behind him, and I am not letting him get farther away than arm's reach, so he leans and grabs it and comes up with a condom, and I raise an eyebrow.
"You came prepared."
He smirks. "I've been an optimist since Thursday night."
He rolls it on and comes down over me, and the couch registers its first complaint.
He is six foot two, and my couch was purchased ages ago, on sale, for one schoolteacher and a reading blanket.
His knee slides off the edge. His foot hits the armrest. He swears into my neck and I'm laughing, actually laughing, with a naked man between my thighs.
Definitely not a situation I could've pictured myself in anytime in the past year and a half.
Then he pushes inside me and my laugh breaks in half and becomes something else entirely.
Finn goes slow, thrusting deep. The stretch of him steals my voice. He watches my face and holds still, buried as far as he can go inside me, letting me adjust, his arms shaking with the effort of not moving.
"Okay?" he manages.
"Mm-hm. More than okay."
"Yeah," he says, his voice strained. "So fucking good. But if you need me to stop at any point—"
"Don't you dare fucking stop."
He chuckles. "I like this bossy side of you." He pulls back and pushes deep again, slow, watching me take him. "God, Darcy. You fit me so tight. You feel like wet, hot silk around my cock."
He moves, and it's good. It's so good. Deep and slow, and then less slow.
His hips find a rhythm my body answers before I decide anything, and I get my hands on his back and feel the muscle working under my palms. And then his knee slips off the cushion again, and we skid, and the stack of half-graded essays I left on the coffee table go to the floor.
He's laughing, breathless. "Your couch deserves a difficulty rating. I think it hates me."
"It's a loyalty test." I push at his shoulder. "Sit up."
He sits back against the cushions and I climb over him, knees on either side of his hips, and sink down onto his cock, and both of us make a sound at the same time.
Oh, God. Yes. This is the angle we needed.
His hands find my hips. Mine find his shoulders.
I start to move and watch what it does to him.
Because it does do things. Finn Bardot, showman, headline act, comes apart underneath me one piece at a time.
His head tips back against the cushion. His jaw goes tight.
His hands grip my hips harder than he likely means to, guiding me, A sound comes out of him, low and wrecked, and hearing it makes me ride him faster.
"Darcy." My name cracks in the middle. "God. You have no idea what you're doing to me."
"I can guess," I reply, smiling saucily. I lean down and kiss his mouth, and for a minute the pace gentles all on its own, deep and unrushed, his hands sliding up my back to hold me against him, chest to chest, and it stops being urgent and becomes something I don't have an adequate word for.
And somewhere in there, moving on him in the quiet darkness of my apartment, with his hands on my hips and his cock buried to the hilt inside me, his heart slamming under my palm, he opens his eyes and looks at me.
Really looks. Nobody has ever looked at me like this, like I'm the answer to a question he's been carrying around since high school, and I realize something I've been trying to deny for a long time.
I know the way you know you've left the stove on—instantly, bodily, and ultimately too late.
I could easily fall in love with him.
I don't say it. I kiss him instead, and he groans into my mouth and gets a hand between us, his thumb finding my clit, and everything narrows to that. His thumb. His cock deep inside me. The couch creaking like a scandalized aunt. Heat winds tight and low, then tighter still.
I hear myself saying his name and then I'm not saying anything.
I'm coming, hard, clenching around him in waves, and it pulls him right over the edge after me.
He drives up into me once, twice, and comes with his face buried against my throat and my name breaking apart in his mouth, shuddering, holding me down onto him like letting go isn't a thing he does anymore.
Then quiet. His heartbeat going like a sprinter's under my ear. My leg is asleep and I have no plans to move.
"So," he says, finally, into my hair. His voice is destroyed. "The couch survived."
"Barely. It's seen things now."
His laugh rumbles under my cheek, and he wraps both arms around me and pulls me tighter against his chest, damp skin to damp skin, and presses a kiss to the top of my head, unhurried, like we have all the time in the world.
"Next time, I'll try to take you to bed like a gentleman," he says into my hair. "If you want a next time, that is."
"I want it."
"Good. So do I." He strokes my shoulder. "I just need a minute or two to regroup. Unless you've had enough of me for one night?"
"Not even close," I say.
I stay there and listen to his heart slow down. Feeling his fingers trace lazy lines up my spine, a quiet sort of terror arrives, the way it does, right behind the joy. When I finally find my voice, it’s a whisper at most, wrapped around a word I never allow myself to say. "Stay, Finn."
He lifts my chin enough for him to kiss me. "I'm not going anywhere."
I want that to be true so much it hurts. Because I know what this was for me. I don't know what it was for him. He has an empire and an eventual exit plan waiting for him. I have an apartment lease and a homeroom, and my heart is doing the one thing I swore it wouldn't.
It’s falling.
His fingers keep moving on my spine. The essays lie scattered on the floor next to the couch. And my last coherent thought, before I stop thinking at all, is that my stupid idea to get revenge on the man I was supposed to hate has backfired in the worst possible way.