Chapter 9
Evelyn
The penthouse was masculine and sleek—steel, charcoal, glass—but it blurred around me the moment he carried me across the threshold.
I barely saw it. I felt him. His mouth. His hands.
His need pressed hot against my thigh as he set me down on a bed draped in dark silk sheets that sighed beneath my back.
He looked down at me like he had earned this moment, like every inch of me belonged to his gaze before his touch even claimed it.
And then he stripped me. Slowly. Purposefully.
Like he had all the time in the world and every right to see what I tried so hard to keep hidden—softness, vulnerability, desire that terrified me more than any danger in my life ever had.
His fingers traced the straps of my bra, sliding it down my shoulders and tossing it away.
His lips followed. A kiss at my collarbone.
A breath between my breasts. A whisper lower…
lower…By the time his mouth found my thighs, my pulse was a frantic drum.
He slid down my panties so slowly I could barely breathe.
When his tongue touched my center, I broke—full-body, uncontrollable, a shuddering collapse into silk and pleasure.
He didn’t stop. Didn’t soften. Didn’t let me drift back down. His mouth worked me relentlessly—skilled, hungry, worshipful—driving me through one orgasm and then another, until I pushed weakly at his shoulders, breathless and laughing at my own ruin.
“Fuck, Alexander,” I gasped, chest heaving, hair sticking to my cheeks, “you want to be the death of me tonight?”
His soft chuckle stirred something traitorous in my chest, something warm, foolish, emotional. I shoved it down.
This was a one-night stand. A spectacular, ruinous, unforgettable one-night stand.
Nothing more. But then he kissed me again slowly, claiming—and lined himself against me.
And when he finally pushed into me, it was with a low, guttural groan…
the kind of sound a starving man makes when he finally tastes what he’s been denied.
My breath caught. My legs wrapped around him without thinking.
He filled me—deep, overwhelming, perfect.
We moved together in a rhythm neither of us had to find.
Desperate, clinging, chasing. Then slow—torturously slow—as if he wanted to memorize every shiver that crossed my skin.
Then desperate again when the restraint shattered between us. His mouth found my throat.
My nails raked his back. Our breaths tangled in the dark.
When the release hit again, I wasn’t sure whose voice broke first—his or mine.
We collapsed onto the sheets, sweat-slicked, breathless, limbs tangled without care or caution.
And in the quiet darkness of his penthouse, my pulse still racing, my body humming from where he had marked it inside and out—I realized something terrifying.
For the night, I was his. And part of me already feared that one night wouldn’t be enough.