Chapter 14 #2
He reached for the bedside drawer without taking his eyes off her. The crinkle of foil turned heat into wildfire. She took the packet from his fingers, tore it, and rolled the condom down over him with hands that shook for reasons that weren’t nerves.
“Good girl,” he said, and the approval stroked places his hands hadn’t touched. “Hands above your head.”
She obeyed. He caught her wrists in one palm and pinned them to the headboard, not hard, not gentle—just sure—then pressed into her in one long, purposeful stroke.
Her breath broke. So did his. He went still when he was buried to the hilt, forehead to hers, chest heaving, hand still holding her wrists. She wrapped her legs around his waist and tightened until his control flared in his eyes.
“Move,” she begged.
He did. Long, deep, nothing spared. The headboard tapped the wall, the mattress answered, the city threw light across his back and her chest. He watched her while he took her, watched every change in her face, every shiver and catch, adjusted with ruthless precision until she couldn’t breathe without breathing him.
“Harder,” she said against his mouth. “I can take it.”
He gave it. He rolled his hips and drove into her until the room forgot its own name.
When she climbed, he lifted one of her legs higher along his arm and angled deeper, dragged his mouth down her throat and tasted the hammer of her pulse.
He let her wrists go to get a hand between them and stroked her where she was slick and swollen, and she came apart around him with a cry that sounded like surrender and victory at once.
He flipped her when she was still shaking, drew her up onto her knees, and fitted himself behind her.
One hand pressed at the back of her neck—not to hold her down, to anchor her—while the other slipped under to find her again.
He pulled her back onto him and fucked her deep, the slap of skin a drumbeat, the rhythm single-minded and merciless.
She met him, learned him, matched him, and when she shattered this time it was with her teeth in the sheet and his name fierce and unpretty in her throat.
He followed, voice breaking on a curse, thrusts jerking and then burying, pulsing inside her until he had nothing left to give but the heft of his body and the rasping sweep of his breath against her shoulder.
He stayed there, pressed along her spine, hand spread over her ribs like he was reminding himself she was real.
For a long minute they didn’t move. The room hummed with silence, with city, with the faint tick of cooling muscles and the softer, stranger tick of something she didn’t name.
When he finally eased free, he did it with a care that contrasted indecently with the way he’d taken her.
He vanished for a moment, returned with a damp cloth, and touched her with a tenderness that made her eyes sting. She blinked hard and blamed the sweat.
He tossed the cloth aside, stretched out, and pulled her over him so her cheek landed above his heart. It beat like a fist against her ear—hard, steady, human. She listened until her breath matched it.
She should’ve gotten up. She should’ve put the dress back on and drawn fresh lines. Instead, she let herself go heavy on him while his palm traced idle paths up and down her spine as if he couldn’t stop touching her if he tried.
“What are you thinking,” he asked at last, voice softer than she’d heard it.
“That you taste like trouble,” she said into his skin. “And I’ve never wanted trouble this much.”
His chuckle was more exhale than laugh. “You’ll survive it.”
“Maybe I don’t want to.”
His hand paused at the hollow of her back, pressed warm. “You will.” A beat. “Stay.”
It wasn’t a command. He had plenty of those already.
It was an ask. That was worse. She tipped her head enough to look at him.
The lines around his mouth had eased. The avarice in his eyes had shifted to something like satisfaction, like possession, like a man who’d won and still wanted more because winning wasn’t the point.
She wanted to say yes. She wanted to see what he’d look like in the morning, mouth soft with sleep, hair wrecked by her hands. She wanted coffee in his kitchen with nothing on but one of his shirts and her heels. She wanted too much.
“Five minutes,” she compromised, because five minutes could hold a lifetime if you let them.
He accepted that, palm returning to its leisurely path along her spine.
Five minutes slid into more. They dozed.
Woke. Kissed slow and filthy. She rolled him and rode him with her hair falling around her face and his hands on her hips guiding and giving up control in alternating breaths.
He sat up and sucked her nipple into his mouth while she worked on him, gasping, grinding, coming again with a choked sound he swallowed.
He flipped her with a laugh that wasn’t a laugh and took her sideways, her leg thrown over his hip, while she tried not to scream.
The city watched and blessed them with light.
When the edge finally dulled, they lay tangled and silent, her cheek to his chest again, his fingers tangled in her hair. She could’ve fallen asleep there without thinking, without caution, without the voice that had kept her alive insisting she move.
The voice returned like a tide.
She eased away on a breath. Fear wasn’t the problem.
He hadn’t hurt her. What scared her was the opposite.
How easily she could stay, how quickly she could lose herself in him until morning blurred into forever.
Survival had taught her not to hand anyone that much power.
She needed the distance, needed the reminder she could still walk away.
He made a sound that might’ve been protest if he’d had more energy to bother with words and then let her go, eyes half-lidded, mouth curved like he knew she’d come back even if she didn’t know it yet.
She went in search of her dress and smoothed it on.
The reflection in the windows threw back a woman with flushed lips and bite marks blooming at her shoulder, hair wild, eyes too bright.
She pressed her fingers to the tender mark at her throat and felt the thud beneath—hers or his, she couldn’t tell.
She went back to the bedroom. He’d turned onto his side, forearm under his head, watching her with that steady, unblinking attention that had first undressed her at the Alabaster Club. The room smelled like sex and skin and a satisfaction so complete it made her knees go weak all over again.
He swung his legs off the bed. She tried to wave him back, but he was already standing, already tugging on trousers with a look that promised no argument would stop him. “I don’t let you walk out of here alone,” he said, voice iron. “Not even when your place is only one floor down.”
She wanted to protest, wanted to keep the small shield of distance, but something in her softened at his insistence.
He slipped into his shirt half-buttoned, caught her hand, and walked her to the door.
The penthouse deadbolt clicked behind them, and he paced her the short way down the hall and into the waiting elevator.
The mirrored walls reflected them both, tousled and raw, a pair bound by something neither of them had asked for.
At her floor he escorted her out, stopping at her apartment door, palm braced beside her head. He kissed her again there in the quiet hallway—slow, claiming, a reminder that whatever she thought she was running from, he would follow. Only when she unlocked the door did he let her slip inside.
She leaned against the wood after it closed, pulse sprinting, body still humming. Endless minutes passed. Through the silence she could sense him returning to his penthouse above her, a weight in the ceiling, a promise in the air. She pressed her hand to her mouth and tasted him all over again.
She’d wanted trouble. She’d taken it. She’d loved every second.
And she already knew one night would never be close to enough.
God, she was so screwed!