Chapter 21 #2
I kiss the inside of one thigh, then the other, slow enough to make her hips move. She tries to hold still. She is terrible at it. I bite gently, leaving a mark high enough that no one else will see it unless she chooses to show them. The thought makes my hand curl around her leg.
I keep going, slower now, kissing my way up the inside of her thigh while she stares down at me with her entire body trembling from restraint. At the crease of her hip, I hook one finger in the side of her panties and stop.
This time, I make myself breathe.
This time, I make myself look at her.
“Still okay?”
Her lips part.
For half a second, I think she’ll make a joke. Something brisk and cutting, something about consent forms or legal exposure or how I’m taking longer than a municipal permit review. I’m almost grateful for it. Humor would put one thin wall back between us.
She doesn’t.
Her gaze holds mine.
All the cleverness leaves her face, and what remains is so honest I feel it like a hand closing around my ribs.
“Yes,” she whispers.
One word.
I slide my finger under the fabric and understand, with a calm that scares me more than hunger ever could, that this is the moment I stop pretending I can give her only part of me.
I pull them down, kissing her knees as I do it, because I need one second where my mouth is somewhere safe. Somewhere, I can still pretend I am in control.
Then her hand slips into my hair.
Not to pull me away.
To keep me there.
The air in the room changes. It goes warmer, thinner, too full of skin and breath and the low hum of the city behind the glass.
Her pussy is beautiful. Wet. Dark pink. Open for me.
My jaw locks.
Need hits me so hard it almost makes me angry.
Not at her. Never at her. At myself, maybe, because I know what it costs when wanting becomes honest. I have built an entire life around keeping my needs polished, contained, banked behind glass.
I solve problems. I pay invoices. I move people out of harm’s way before they know danger has entered the room.
I don't get on my knees for a woman and feel something in me break open.
Except here I am.
I don’t hesitate.
I lick her from the bottom to her clit, and she makes this small, strangled sound, almost a sob, as if pleasure has caught her off guard and she resents me for being right about her body.
Fuck.
I do it again, slower, flattening my tongue, making it wet and deep, learning the exact pressure that makes her legs tense around my shoulders. Her hand tightens in my hair. Her hips lift once, then stop, like she has ordered herself to behave and her body has filed an objection.
That is so Livia, it nearly ruins me.
“Creed,” she breathes.
My name doesn't sound like my name when she says it like that. It sounds like a warning. A plea. A document signed in a language neither of us should understand this quickly.
I use my thumbs to spread her open and look at her.
A mistake.
A necessary one.
She goes still beneath my gaze. Not from shame.
From being seen. There is a difference, and the difference makes my chest ache in a place I don’t like anyone touching.
Her thighs tremble against my forearms. Her fingers flex in my hair, then ease, then tighten again.
She is fighting the urge to cover herself.
Fighting harder not to ask if I like what I see.
I answer before she can turn vulnerability into sarcasm.
“You’re perfect.” I wrap my arms under her thighs and pull her to the edge of the bed.
She gasps, a soft broken intake, and I bury my face in her.
The first taste of her nearly ends my restraint.
She is hot and slick against my tongue, and my body reacts with a violence I keep locked beneath posture and cuff links.
I suck her clit softly at first, then harder when her thighs jerk, then soft again when she makes a wounded little sound.
I test. Adjust. Listen. Learn her by every breath she fails to hide.
This is where I understand the real danger.
Not that I want her.
I already knew that.
The danger is that I want to be good for her. Not impressive. Not useful. Not the man with the answer, the car, the check, the private doctor, the key card, the solution.
Good—for her.
I slide one finger inside her.
She arches.
The sound she makes turns my name into something ruined.
I add a second finger, curl them up, and she comes apart by inches at first. A breath. A shake. Her hand over her mouth again, as if she can keep the need in if she contains the sound.
I pull away just enough to say, “No.”
Her eyes snap to mine.
I don't smile. I can’t.
“Let me hear you, baby,” I beg.
Then I move my fingers again. Her head falls back. Her hips lift. Her thighs close around me like she means to keep me there forever, and I decide, with alarming calm, that I would let her.
I suck her clit harder.
She breaks.
The cry that comes out of her is ragged and intimate and too honest for this room.
Her body clamps down around my fingers. Her back bows off the bed.
Her hands hold my hair so tight it should hurt, and maybe it does, but pain has no place in me right now.
There is only her. The heat of her. The taste of her.
The stunning fact that Livia Crane is coming apart under my mouth because she trusts me enough not to stop it.
I keep going.
I can’t help it.
I want every second.
Every tremor. Every sound she tries to swallow and fails.
Every place where Livia stops being the woman who can dismantle a man with one eyebrow and a binder tab, and becomes this woman beneath my hands—open, furious with herself for needing, still trying to manage the collapse like it’s a meeting that ran over time.
I want to know what she looks like past competence.
Past control.
Past the bright, brutal ways she survives the day.
So I don’t stop.
I keep my mouth on her, my fingers buried inside her, and I listen to the changes in her breath.
That’s all I have now. Breath. Skin. Heat.
The quick, helpless sounds she hates herself for making.
The room is too warm, the sheets twisted under her hips, the air so thin it feels manufactured.
The city keeps shining beyond the glass, indifferent and expensive, while she breaks apart in front of me like she has finally run out of places to hide.
Her thighs clamp around my head.
“Creed,” she gasps, and it isn’t a warning anymore.
It is fear.
Not of me. Of this. Of how much she wants. Of what her body is saying before her pride can intercept it.
I know because I feel the same terror, only mine comes quieter. Mine moves under my skin with a suit on and a clean legal argument. Mine tells me to pull back, give her a second, let this stay containable.
I ignore it.
I curl my fingers again, firmer this time, and suck her clit with the exact pressure that made her lose the thread of her own sentence a minute ago. Her back lifts off the bed. One hand flies to my hair, the other grips the sheet so hard her knuckles pale.
“Fuck,” she whispers, then louder, broken, “fuck, Creed—”
The sound goes straight through me.
I look up because I need to see her when it happens.
Her face is flushed, eyes shut, mouth open as if she is caught between protest and prayer but too honest for either. Her body tightens around my fingers, then pulses. Once. Twice. Harder. Her hips jerk against my mouth, and then she comes with a force that takes the room with it.
She cries out.
Not pretty. Not controlled. Real.
Her pleasure spills over my hand, my mouth, the sheets beneath her, sudden and hot and so intimate that something in my chest goes very still.
She tries to close her legs, tries to turn away from the force of it, but I hold her where she is—not trapping her, never that—just keeping her from vanishing inside the shame I can already see gathering at the edges of her face.
“No,” I murmur against her.
She shakes her head, breath snapping out of her in little broken pieces. “I can’t—”
“Yes, you can.”
It is not an order.
It is permission.
Her body gives again.
The second wave hits her harder, pulling a ragged cry out of her as she arches beneath me.
I drink her because I can’t do anything else.
Because if I stop, I might say the true thing.
Because her pleasure on my tongue feels like evidence, and I am a man who has always trusted evidence more than faith.
This is what she wanted.
This is what she trusted me with.
This is what I will protect with every ugly, expensive, ruthless part of myself.
When she finally shoves at my shoulder, gasping, “Too much. Oh fuck, too much,” I stop at once.
I pull back, breathing hard, and rest my cheek against her thigh.
For a second, I don’t move. I can’t. My fingers are still inside her, and I keep them there one beat too long because some selfish part of me wants to feel the last tremor of what I gave her. Then I ease them out slowly, watching her face as she comes down from it.
Her hair is everywhere. Her lips are swollen. Her skin is damp and flushed across her chest and stomach. The sheet beneath her hips is wet. Her thighs are still shaking.
She looks revealed—awakened.
Livia opens her eyes.
For one second, she doesn't make a joke. She just looks at me, dazed and exposed and so fucking beautiful it turns want into something quieter. More dangerous.
I kiss the inside of her thigh.
She flinches, not away from me, but from tenderness.
That nearly destroys me.
“Don’t,” she whispers.
I lift my head. “Don’t what?”
Her mouth works once before she finds the words. “Look at me like that.”
“Like I’m in love with the most beautiful woman in the world?” I ask.
She gasps.
It’s one quick, stunned intake of air that changes the room.
“Creed.” Her voice sounds like a warning—or like fear.
“Because I do.” My voice lowers, and there is no elegance left in it. “I do love you.”
Her lips part.
Nothing comes out.
For one second, I think she might cry.
For one second, I think I might.
Neither of us does.