Chapter 18 Savannah #2
I'm sitting beside him in nothing but a t shirt, while he relaxes in boxers and no shirt. It’s fucking impossible to concentrate when he’s got all of that going on over there.
The adrenaline burned off hours ago and what's underneath is want, the specific, urgent, physical kind that shows up after fear.
It needs to move. It needs to touch and be touched.
It needs confirmation that the person beside you is warm and solid and alive.
I've been staring at his chest for the last ten minutes pretending to read a book I found on the nightstand, something in Italian that I can't read, and he's been watching me pretend with the specific patience of a man who knows exactly what I'm doing and is waiting for me to stop pretending and do it.
"You're staring," he says.
"I'm reading."
"You're reading an Italian book upside down."
I look at the book. It is, in fact, upside down. I set it on the nightstand.
"You should rest," I say.
"I should."
"Your arm is fucked."
"Very."
"Russo said no strenuous activity."
"Russo also said to eat more vegetables and I'm not doing that either."
I climb onto the bed. Carefully, because the bed shifts with weight and shifting means jostling and jostling means pain, and I position myself on his good side with my knees on the mattress and my hands on his chest.
"If you use your bad arm, I'm stopping."
"Try me."
"I'm serious, Emilio. You'll tear the stitches and I'll have to clean it again and I'm not doing that twice in one day."
"Then you better make sure I don't need to use it." His hand comes up and grips my hip, fingers pressing into the curve of my waist, pulling me closer. "Get on top of me, vixen."
I swing my leg over and settle on his hips. His cock is already hard, I can feel him through his boxers, and the contact sends a current through me that starts between my legs and ends behind my ribs. I put both hands flat on his chest and look down at him.
He looks up at me. His face is open in a way it rarely is, the grin gone, the performance gone, just him. The man underneath all the charm and the jokes and the bouncing energy. The man who held my head against his chest in the bar and shook because he was scared of losing the thing he just found.
I roll my hips. Slow, forward and back, grinding against him through the fabric, and the sound that comes out of him is low and rough and goes straight through me. His hand squeezes my hip.
"This is torture, just slide it home."
"Shut up. I'm in charge."
"Yes ma'am."
I reach down and pull my shirt over my head, and his eyes go dark when he sees me and his hips push up against me on reflex.
"Hands off," I say. "One hand. Good side only."
"That's cruel."
"That's medicine. Russo's orders."
"Russo can fuck himself."
I lean down and kiss him. His mouth opens under mine, and his tongue finds mine and the kiss turns deep and slow, the kind that isn't going anywhere fast because fast isn't what this is about.
This is about feeling him alive under me.
His heartbeat against my palms. His chest expanding with breath.
The warmth of his skin and the flex of his stomach when my hips grind forward and backward.
I kiss down his neck. His jaw, the stubble rough against my lips.
The hollow of his throat where his pulse hammers.
His collarbone, the one I bit last week and left a bruise that's still fading.
I work my way down his chest, pressing my mouth to his skin, tasting salt and soap and him, and every time I find a spot that makes his breathing change I stay there and work it until he swears.
"You're destroying me," he says. “I’m going to cum in my boxers like a fucking teen if you don’t stop this shit.”
"You got shot. This is your punishment."
"Getting blown up and then edged by a gorgeous woman is not punishment, it's a fetish I didn't know I had."
"Nobody's getting blown up, drama queen. You got grazed."
"Through and through is not a graze, it's a whole-ass bullet wound, and you're licking my chest while I have it, which makes you either the best girlfriend in the world or clinically insane."
"Both. Now shut up."
I pull his boxers down, and he lifts his hips to help, the movement makes him wince. I get them off and throw them somewhere and he's hard, fully hard, and the sight of him does the thing it always does to my brain, which is turn it off.
Crawling back up, his thumb traces the crease where my leg meets my hip, and the touch is light enough to make me shiver.
"Come closer," he says. "I need to touch you."
"One hand."
"One hand is all I need."
I lean back, hands braced on his thighs and his hand slides between my thighs.
His fingers find me wet, soaking, really, the fear and the adrenaline and the relief all converted into a want so intense I can feel my pulse between my legs.
He groans when he feels it and his fingers slide through me, parting me, finding my clit and pressing.
"Fuck," I breathe. "Right there."
He works me with his fingers. Slow circles on my clit, then two fingers pushing inside me, curling, finding the spot that makes my thighs clench around his hand.
I'm bracing myself on his thighs and my head is dropped back and my hair is falling around us and the sounds I'm making are loud and I don't care who hears them through these walls.
"You're so wet," he says. "All that just from being scared for me?"
"All that from being pissed at you. Anger makes me horny."
"I'll remember that."
"You better." I reach forward and wrap my hand around his cock. He's hot and thick in my grip and the sound he makes when I squeeze is guttural and desperate and I stroke him twice, three times, spreading the precum down his length.
"I need you inside me," I say. "Now."
"Then take it, vixen. It's yours."
I lift my hips and guide him to my pussy and sink down.
The stretch is the same as every time and different from every time, because every time I take him inside me it rewires something in my nervous system.
Tonight the rewiring is more intense because he's alive and I almost lost him and the combination of relief and desire is so strong I can't tell where one ends and the other begins.
I take him all the way. Every inch. Until I'm sitting on his hips with him buried as deep as he can go.
We're both breathing hard and his hand is gripping my thigh and the bandage on his arm is white against his skin and the stitches are holding and he's looking up at me with an expression I've never seen on his face before.
Not just want. Not just need. Gratitude and love. The emotions of a man who got shot and came home and the woman he loves is on top of him and alive and real and here.
I start to move, slow at first, rising and falling, feeling every inch of him drag against me.
His hand moves from my thigh to my hip, guiding me, not controlling, just touching.
His eyes don't leave my face. He watches me ride him with the focused intensity of a man who is memorizing this moment, memorizing it, keeping it somewhere the world can't reach.
The pace builds. I brace my hands on his chest and ride him harder, his hips start meeting mine from below, thrusting up to meet me, and the depth changes and the angle hits the place inside me that makes everything go white at the edges.
I lean back, change the angle, take him deeper, and the sound that comes out of both of us is animalistic.
"Harder," I moan.
His hand grips my hip and pulls me down as he drives up and the impact rattles through my whole body. I brace against his chest, and he does it again, and again, and the rhythm we build together is urgent and desperate and the headboard hits the wall, and I don't care.
The world could end right this second and I’d welcome it with open arms so long as I died with his perfect cock fucking up my pussy.
His hand moves between my legs, thumb finding my clit while he fucks me from below, and the dual pressure builds fast, faster than I'm ready for, the orgasm coming together in my core from every direction at once.
"I'm going to come," I tell him because he deserves the warning and also because saying it out loud makes it hit harder.
"Fuck yes, vixen, come for me, give it all to me."
I come like I’ve never come before. The orgasm tears through me in waves that start between my legs and spread outward until my arms give out and I collapse forward onto his chest. He drives up into me twice more, three more, his good hand locked around my waist, and he follows me with a groan that I feel in his chest and in my bones, buried deep, pulsing, his face pressed into my neck.
We stay there. Breathing like we’ve just run a fucking marathon.
His arm around me, the good one, holding me against him with a grip that says he's not letting go anytime soon.
His heart is hammering under my ear, fast and hard and alive.
The sound is the best sound in this building and I will never get tired of listening to it.
"Hey, asshole," I say against his neck.
"Yes, vixen."
"Don't ever get shot again."
"I'll try."
"Don't try. Do."
"I can't promise that."
"Then promise me you'll always come home, even if you’re coming home with a hole or two."
His arm tightens and his lips press against my hair. "I promise. Every fucking time, even if I have to crawl over shards of glass, I’m coming back to you. No matter what... I come home to you."
I close my eyes. His heartbeat under my ear. The bandage on his arm, white and clean, the stitches holding. His body is so perfectly warm and alive beneath mine.
This man is going to drive me insane for the rest of my life. He's going to make jokes when he should be serious and get shot when he should be safe and grin when he should be scared and love me louder than any person has loved me.
And I'm going to let him. Because the alternative is going back to the life I had before him, and that life has nothing in it that comes close to the feeling of this man's heartbeat under my ear after he came home alive.
Gigi would say I picked a dangerous one, a gorgeous one, and an insane one all in one package.
Gigi would also say those ones are the only ones worth keeping.