6. Cillian
CILLIAN
I wake before she does, and for a second I don’t recognize the feeling.
I’m usually out of bed before the sun has a chance to find the windows, already dressed, already wearing the version of myself the rest of the world gets. Today, I stay put.
Ciara is asleep against my chest, her hair tangled over my arm, her hand resting where my heartbeat refuses to settle. She doesn’t know she’s holding on to me. Maybe that’s why I can’t make myself move. She found this spot sometime in the night, and I don’t want her to give it up.
I lie there, watching her. I don’t want to break whatever this is.
She shifts in her sleep and I feel it before I see it. The faint damp warmth spreading against my skin where her breast presses into my side. She’s full again already. Of course she is. Her body doesn’t run on anyone’s schedule but its own, and my body has learned to read it better than she has.
I should let her sleep. She needs the rest after last night.
But the thought of her waking up aching and uncomfortable, trying to manage it alone again the way she used to, sits wrong in my chest.
Instead, I lean in and brush my mouth over her shoulder, lingering just long enough to feel her begin to wake beneath the kiss.
“Morning, my Irish Cream,” I murmur.
She answers with a sleepy little hum and burrows deeper into the pillow, her voice rough and soft with sleep.
“Too early.”
Even half-asleep she still sounds like mine. A small smile pulls at my mouth as I watch her, soft and warm and completely unaware of how beautiful she looks like this.
“Never too early for this.”
I trail my mouth down her throat and across her collarbone, then lower, pressing open kisses to the soft underside of both breasts before I ever take a nipple.
She shifts under me, already restless, already giving in.
When I finally close my lips around her and pull, she gasps fully awake, back arching, fingers sliding straight into my hair.
“Cillian—”
“Shh.” I don’t stop. I draw slow and deep.
The first warm rush of her milk hits my tongue and I groan against her skin because I can’t help it.
My free hand slides between her thighs instead of going to the other breast, finding her already wet, already open for me.
I work her there while I drink, and her body answers like it has been waiting for exactly this.
“You’re insatiable,” she breathes.
She’s not pulling away. She doesn’t anymore.
“Only for you, baby. You make it so much harder when you’re this breathtaking and so full for me.”
I switch sides, unhurried, licking a slow trail of milk down the curve of her ribs before I kiss my way back up and find her mouth. I share the taste with her and she moans into the kiss like it’s the best thing she’s ever had.
Weeks ago she would turn away or cover herself the second my eyes lingered too long on her chest. Now she doesn’t hide at all.
She leans into it, unhurried. She reaches for me like she needs this as badly as I do, and there’s something in that shift that undoes me every single time.
My stepsister, hiding pads in a locked suitcase the day she arrived.
My Ciara now, spilling into my mouth with her spine bowed off the mattress and not a trace of shame left in her.
“Let me,” she says suddenly, breathless, pulling back just far enough to look at me.
“Let you what?”
She doesn’t answer with words. She sits up, then shifts onto her knees between my legs, the sheet falling away from her body.
In the soft morning light she looks unreal, flushed, full, nipples already dark and damp.
She cups one heavy breast and brings it straight to my mouth, guiding me.
I open for her without hesitation. She milks herself onto my tongue, unhurried and sure, while her other hand slides down and wraps around my cock.
The second her fingers close around me I groan against her skin, the sound scraping out of me.
“Fuck, Ciara.”
She doesn’t look away. She holds my gaze while she feeds herself into my mouth, cheeks flushed, lips parted, nothing hidden anymore. Just pure want staring straight back at me while she strokes me with growing confidence. Every pull of her hand makes my hips twitch. I’m so hard it almost hurts.
“You feel that?” I manage, voice strained. “That’s what you do to me. Every single time.”
She keeps working me, tighter now, while she continues offering her breast. The dual sensation is devastating. Warm milk flooding my tongue, her soft hand sliding over my cock, the sight of her on her knees feeding me. I can barely think.
“I want this too,” she whispers. “I want to feel you.”
She strokes me until I’m aching, until my breathing has gone ragged. Then she leans forward, presses her full, still-leaking breasts together around me, and looks up.
“I want you right here,” she says, voice soft but certain. “Between them. Rub against me. I want to feel every bit of you.”
I slide between them and the wet heat nearly undoes me on the first thrust. Milk slicks the way, warm and perfect, and every stroke rubs against the soft heavy weight of her. I grip her shoulders and move, watching her face, watching the way her nipples glisten and leak with every push.
I sit up just enough to reach her. I take one nipple back into my mouth and drink while I keep thrusting between her breasts.
The combination is almost too much, the tight slick slide of her and the rich taste of her milk at the same time.
She moans and presses tighter around me, offering more, and I come hard with a broken groan, spilling across her soft skin while I keep suckling, taking everything she still has to give.
My release paints her chest in thick, warm streaks, mixing with the milk still leaking from her nipples.
The two of us are a mess, her milk and my come sliding together down the soft curves of her breasts, glossy and wet in the morning light.
I keep my mouth on her a moment longer, tasting the faint sweetness of her mixed with the salt of my own skin, then lift my head and look at the beautiful wreck we’ve made of each other.
She is flushed, breathing hard, marked by both of us, and the sight hits me harder than the orgasm itself.
I cup her face with one clean hand and kiss her slow and deep, uncaring of how messy we are.
When it’s over I clean her carefully with the edge of the sheet, no rush, no distance. Then I pull her up into my chest and hold her there, both of us breathing hard, morning light gone pale gold through the curtains.
“Good morning,” I say, voice still rough.
She laughs, the sound loose and easy in a way I don’t think I have heard from her before.
“That’s one way to wake someone up.”
“I have others.” I kiss her temple. “But that one’s my favorite.”
She settles against me for a while, quiet, tracing lazy patterns on my chest with one finger. Then she reaches over to the nightstand and pulls her journal out of the drawer, the same one she was clutching to her chest the first night I found her in the window seat.
“You actually write in that thing?”
“Sometimes.” She flips it open to a blank page and starts writing, unhurried, tongue caught between her teeth in concentration.
“What are you putting down?”
She doesn’t look up right away. When she does, her face is softer, more open than I’ve seen it.
“You,” she says simply. “Us. How I thought I’d hate being here this summer. How I planned to just get through it and leave. But somehow this place… you… made me feel comfortable. Free. Like myself again for the first time in a long time.”
For a moment, I can’t find a single word. I can’t.
No one has ever written about me like that. Seeing me not in what I could do for them. Recognizing me outside of my name. Not my family. Just me.
My whole life has been people deciding where I belong, what comes next, who I’m supposed to become.
Then she walked into my life and, without either of us planning it, she chose me.
Not because she had to. Not because anyone told her to.
Just because being with me makes her happy.
And I want her just as much. Maybe more.
I reach for her before I can stop myself, brushing my thumb across her cheek.
“You have no idea what that means to me,”
For a second the room feels completely still. Just the two of us, her skin warm under my hand, the quiet stretching soft and unbroken.
The knock comes hard and sudden.
Ciara goes rigid against me a second before I do. My body locks up on its own, jaw tight, shoulders set, pushing every soft part of me back under the surface. By the time I sit up, the man who was just with her is already gone.
“Cillian.” My father’s assistant’s voice comes through the door, careful and low. “Sorry to disturb you. Your father needs you downstairs. Now.”
I look at her. She’s still flushed, still soft from everything we just did, but I can already see the fear starting in her eyes.
“I have to go,” I say quietly.
She nods. She understands. That small flash of fear is still there, though, and it hits harder than it should.
I lean down and kiss her once, quick and firm, before I stand and open the door. The day’s weight settles back onto my shoulders like a coat I never really took off.
The assistant’s face tells me everything before he says another word.
Whatever’s waiting for me downstairs isn’t going to be good.