17. Georgina #2
I kiss him before either of us can make it more complicated.
This time there is nothing tentative in the way he answers.
His arm closes around me, and I take a step back with him until my shoulders meet the wall.
The cold stone surprises a breath out of me; he draws me forward again, away from it, without breaking the kiss.
I remember this man so clearly that it hurts.
The way he comes back for another kiss before the first has quite ended. The hand that finds the back of my head, careful of my braid even now. I want to be furious that he can still make me forget where I am, and then a sound from the stable reminds me exactly where we are.
I pull away, listening. Farther down the aisle, the groom speaks to the bay, followed by the scrape of a bucket.
Max follows my glance. “We can stop.”
“I didn’t ask you to stop.”
For the first time, a little of the strain in his face becomes something almost like a smile. It disappears when I take his hand.
The old tack room is a few doors down, used now for spare rugs and the estate’s accumulated things nobody quite wants to throw away.
I know there is a bolt on the inside. I know there is a broad wooden bench under the window, and I am irritated with myself for knowing any of this while pretending I haven’t already decided.
I take my coat from the hook. Max retrieves his helmet, and we walk down the aisle with a space between us that feels absurd after the last few minutes. At the room, I open the door and turn toward him.
He waits for me to draw him inside.
The rain is louder against the little window. He puts his helmet on a shelf while I lay my coat on a clear peg, then I slide the bolt across. The small metal click seems to fill the room.
When I turn, he hasn’t moved toward me.
“Don’t look at me as though I’m about to break.”
His expression tightens. “I’m trying not to assume.”
I know the difference. I know he is giving me something I asked for, and my impatience with it isn’t entirely fair. But I have no patience left for standing across rooms from my husband and wondering who is allowed to cross first.
I go to him.
My hands find his face, and his eyes close for a moment before I kiss him. That small surrender undoes something in me. I can be angry with him and still know what it means to have missed a touch so badly that receiving it hurts.
He catches me close, turning with me until his back meets the door. The kiss loses its careful rhythm. I press into him, my hands unsteady against his jaw, and when he draws back for breath, I follow.
“Elle.”
“Don’t ask me about tomorrow.”
He opens his eyes. “I wasn’t going to.”
I search his face, wanting to believe him without having to decide what believing him means. He doesn’t give me a promise. He waits, breathing as unevenly as I am, his hand warm against the back of my neck.
I have spent weeks wanting him and treating that want as something I must outlast.
Today, watching him turn toward me at the rail, I remembered how much I liked him, too. That frightens me more than the kissing. I can account for missing his touch. I don’t know what to do with the pleasure of making him laugh.
Just for now, I tell myself.
Just this once, without deciding what comes after.
I take his hand and lead him away from the door.
He lets me. Two steps. Three. Then his grip tightens and he turns me, sudden and sure, until my shoulders meet the plaster beside the window.
Rain streaks the glass behind my head. His mouth finds mine again, harder now, open, the careful husband gone and the man who knows my body left in his place.
“Tell me again,” he says against my lips, voice low. “Say it while you still mean it.”
“This doesn’t change anything.” My breath breaks on the words. “I’m still furious with you.”
“Good.” His thigh slots between mine, pinning me to the wall. “Stay furious. Just don’t pretend you don’t want this.”
My hands are already under the damp hem of his shirt, dragging over the cold skin of his back, and when he rolls his hips into me I make a sound I would be ashamed of anywhere else.
He answers with another slow grind, deliberate, and I feel how hard he is through both layers of wet fabric.
“Christ, Elle.” He kisses the corner of my mouth, then my jaw, then the place beneath my ear that always undoes me. “You taste like rain. You feel like you’ve been waiting for me to stop being careful.”
“Then stop.”
He does.
His hands go under my sweater, palms hot against my waist, then higher, shoving the fabric up until cool air hits my skin.
He finds the clasp of my bra and opens it with one practiced tug.
When his mouth closes over my breast, I tip my head back against the wall and grip his hair hard enough to hurt.
“That’s it,” he murmurs against my skin. “Take what you need. Look at you. My wife, soaked through, biting her lip like she’s still pretending this is nothing.”
“It isn’t nothing.” I hate how wrecked I sound. “It just isn’t forgiveness.”
“I know.” He lifts his head. His eyes are dark, focused entirely on my face. “I don’t need your forgiveness to fuck you properly. I only need you to tell me if I should stop.”
“Don’t you dare.”
He kisses me filthy then: tongue, teeth, the kind of kiss that used to start arguments about whether we had time before dinner. His hands drop to my riding breeches.
The button, the zip, the shove of damp fabric down my thighs. I kick free of one boot, then the other, clumsy and impatient, and he laughs once against my throat, low and rough.
“Beautiful,” he says, almost reverent, as he looks down at me stripped to my socks and the sweater bunched under my arms. “Fucking beautiful. And still looking at me like you might walk out.”
“I might.”
“Then I’d better make it worth staying.”
He drops to his knees.
I wasn’t ready for that. For Max on the tack room floor, rain roaring at the glass, his hands spreading my thighs, his mouth hot and shameless between them.
He doesn’t tease. He knows exactly where I am too sensitive, exactly how hard to press with his tongue, and when my knees buckle he holds me up against the wall like I weigh nothing.
“Max…”
I catch myself and try again. “Max.”
“Say my name like that again.” He looks up, mouth wet, utterly unrepentant. “Dio, you get so wet for me. Still. Even angry.”
I shove at his shoulder, not to push him away, to pull him closer by the hair. He groans into me and works two fingers inside, curling them the way I taught him years ago, and the sound I make would carry down the aisle if the rain weren’t so loud.
He doesn’t stop until I’m shaking, until I’m biting my own wrist to keep quiet, until the orgasm hits hard enough that I have to lock my legs around his shoulders or fall.
He talks me through it in a wrecked murmur and only then does he stand, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand like a man who has decided the careful chapter is over.
“Turn around.”
I do. My palms find the plaster. He kicks my feet wider, and I hear his own belt, the wet slide of his trousers, the tear of a condom wrapper he must have had the sense to carry. Even now. Even like this.
“This changes nothing,” I say again, voice thin, because I need him to hear it before he is inside me.
“I know, amore.” His chest meets my back. One hand braces beside my head; the other guides himself between my thighs. “I’m still the bastard you’re angry with. And you’re still going to take every inch of me.”
He pushes in slow at first, too slow, and I shove back onto him with a broken sound that makes him swear in Italian against my neck. Then he seats himself fully, deep, and holds there while we both breathe.
“Cazzo. You feel…” He stops, forehead to my temple. “Perfect. So tight. So fucking mine for as long as you’ll let me have you.”
“Then move.”
He moves.
Hard. Measured at first, then less so, one hand fisted in my braid to tip my head back so he can kiss the side of my mouth while he fucks me into the wall.
Each thrust jars a soft, helpless noise out of me.
The bench scrapes. Something falls off a shelf.
I don’t care. I push back to meet him, greedy and furious, and he praises every filthy second of it.
“Listen to you.” His breath is ragged. “Listen to how you take me. Beautiful. So fucking good. Still so angry and still so wet. Christ, Elle.”
“Shut up and harder.”
He laughs, dark and delighted, and gives me harder.
The angle changes when he hooks an arm under my thigh and lifts, opening me wider against the wall, and the next thrust hits so deep I see white.
I come again with his name in my mouth and my nails scoring the plaster, and he follows soon after, buried to the hilt, groaning into my hair like the sound has been waiting months to get out.
We stay like that for a long moment, him still inside me, my cheek against the cold wall, rain softening on the glass.
He pulls out carefully. Turns me. Cups my face with both hands and kisses me once, gentler now, almost questioning.
“Still angry,” I whisper against his mouth.
“Still here,” he answers.
I nod. That is all I can give him. He helps me find my breeches, my boots, the damp tangle of my sweater. He spreads a clean folded rug over the bench so I can sit while my hands stop shaking. Neither of us speaks about tomorrow.
By the time I reach for my coat, the rain has softened against the window.
Max stands beside the bench, fastening the cuff of his still-damp shirt.
He has spread a clean folded rug over the wood, and I keep looking at the place where we were sitting instead of at him.
There was a little while when I stopped trying to work out what I could afford to feel.
Now I am doing it again, with my fingers tangled in a button that won’t go through its hole.
“Here.” He starts to reach toward it, then pauses. “May I?”