Chapter 6 Wrecked and Wanting More
Gideon’s mouth didn’t stop.
Marlene’s thighs trembled against his shoulders as he worked her through the first wave—tongue flat and sure, his groan vibrating against her in a way that made her spine curl off the mattress.
Her fingers twisted in his hair. Her heels dug into his back.
The streetlamp outside kept throwing its orange light across them in slats, and somewhere in the part of her brain that was still capable of thought, she registered that she’d never felt this exposed in her life.
She didn’t care.
“Gideon—” His name splintered on her tongue. “I’m—I can’t—”
He lifted his mouth just far enough to speak. His lips were wet, his breath hot against her. “You can. You already did.” A kiss pressed to the inside of her thigh, softer now. “But I’m not done.”
Her head fell back. The ceiling swam above her, that familiar zigzag crack she’d traced so many nights alone. Tonight it blurred at the edges. Everything blurred except the man between her legs and the promise he’d just made.
His hands slid under her knees.
She felt the shift before she understood it—his palms cupping the backs of her thighs, lifting, guiding her legs up and over his shoulders.
The angle changed. Her hips tilted, and she felt herself open to him in a way that made her gasp.
Her calves rested against the scarred plane of his back.
Her heels crossed somewhere behind his neck.
Gideon looked up at her from between her thighs.
“Better,” he said. And it wasn’t a question.
Her breath caught. The word lodged somewhere in her chest—not fear, but the vertigo of being held this way, positioned this way, by a man who’d been a stranger two hours ago.
Her body was telling her things her mind was still catching up to.
The stretch in her hamstrings. The cool air on skin that had never been this bare.
The way his stubble scraped the soft flesh of her inner thigh every time he turned his head.
His mouth descended again.
This time there was nothing restrained about it. His tongue parted her with a precision that bordered on ruthless, finding the place that made her cry out, and then his lips closed around her and sucked.
Marlene’s back arched off the mattress.
The sound she made wasn’t a word. It wasn’t even a moan.
It was something that came from deeper—a place beneath language, beneath thought, beneath all the careful walls she’d built over years of keeping her head down and her mouth shut and her dreams locked in a box her father never bothered to open.
Her hands flew to the sheets, fisting the cotton so hard her knuckles went white.
Gideon hummed against her. The vibration rippled through her like a stone dropped in still water.
“You taste like—” He didn’t finish the sentence.
His tongue replaced the words, sliding a slow path from bottom to top, and her thighs clamped around his ears.
He didn’t seem to mind. His hands tightened on her legs, thumbs stroking the sensitive skin behind her knees, and he did it again.
Slower. Like he was savoring something expensive.
“Look at me,” he said.
She couldn’t. Her head was thrown back, her eyes squeezed shut, her whole body wound tight as a bowstring.
“Marlene.” His voice was rougher now. Commanding. “Look at me.”
She lifted her head. Forced her eyes open.
He was watching her over the plane of her own body—her breasts heaving, her stomach trembling, her legs draped over his shoulders like they belonged there.
His pupils had swallowed his irises. His jaw was slick.
He looked like a man who’d found exactly what he’d been searching for and still couldn’t quite believe it was real.
“Don’t close your eyes again,” he said. “I want you to see what you look like when you fall apart.”
Her breath hitched. “Gideon, I don’t know if I can—”
“You can.”
His mouth was on her before she could argue.
She watched. She made herself watch—watched his head dip, watched the way his lips moved, watched his tongue trace patterns she felt but couldn’t name.
The visual was almost more than she could process.
The wet sounds. The flex of his jaw. The way his eyes stayed locked on hers even as his mouth worked her with devastating patience.
It was too much and not enough, and the tension that had been building since the diner—since the first brush of his knuckles against her wrist—began to coil again at the base of her spine.
Her hips rolled against his mouth without permission.
He groaned. The sound vibrated through her clit and up into her stomach, and her elbows gave out.
She collapsed back onto the pillow, still holding his gaze, still obeying his command even as her vision blurred at the edges.
Her thighs began to shake. A fine tremor that started in her quads and spread outward until her whole body was quivering like a plucked string.
Gideon’s hands slid higher. His thumbs hooked into the creases where her thighs met her hips, pressing down hard enough to bruise—not painful, just anchoring. Holding her open. Holding her steady.
His tongue circled.
He found a rhythm now, steady and relentless—alternating between long flat strokes and tight circles that made her see colors that didn’t have names.
His mouth sealed around her, sucking in pulses that matched her heartbeat, and when his fingers joined—one sliding through wetness she could hear, could smell—she made a sound that might have been a sob.
“That’s it,” he murmured against her. His thumb replaced his tongue for a moment, pressing where she was most sensitive, while his mouth moved to the inside of her thigh. “Let me feel it.”
Her hand flew to his head. Not guiding, just holding. Her fingers tangled in his hair, and she could feel the muscles of his jaw working beneath her palm, could feel the vibration of every sound he made. He sucked a mark into her thigh and she cried out.
“Please.” The word tore out of her. “Gideon, please, I’m so close—”
His mouth returned to her center.
One finger pressed inside. Slow. Careful. Her body clenched around him, and he made a sound of approval that she felt more than heard. A second finger joined the first, curling upward, finding a spot that made her vision white out.
“There,” she gasped. “There, right there, don’t stop—”
He didn’t stop.
His fingers thrust in time with his tongue, a rhythm that built and built until she couldn’t tell where one sensation ended and the next began.
Her thighs clamped around his head. Her heels dug into his back hard enough to leave marks.
The tension in her spine wound tighter and tighter, a spring compressed to its limit, and she knew—she knew—that when it released she was going to shatter into pieces too small to put back together.
Gideon’s eyes met hers.
His mouth sealed around her clit.
He sucked.
And Marlene broke.
The orgasm ripped through her like a riptide—no warning, no gentle build, just a sudden violent crest that dragged her under.
Her back bowed off the mattress. Her mouth opened on a scream that had no sound.
Her fingers fisted in his hair so tight she must have hurt him, but he didn’t pull away.
He stayed with her through every pulse and shudder, his mouth gentling but never stopping, his fingers still moving inside her as wave after wave crashed through her body.
She heard herself say his name. Once. Twice. A litany she couldn’t control.
Her thighs shook. Her stomach quivered. The streetlamp outside flickered and steadied, and the orange light seemed to pulse in time with the aftershocks still rippling through her.
She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t do anything but lie there, wrecked and open and trembling, as Gideon finally—finally—lifted his mouth from her.
He pressed a kiss to her hipbone. Then the soft skin just below her navel. Then the valley between her breasts.
His body came up over hers, his weight settling against her in a way that should have been suffocating but wasn’t. His chest was slick with sweat. His scars gleamed in the low light. His mouth was wet when he pressed it to her jaw.
“There you are,” he said.
She couldn’t speak. Her throat was raw, her body still twitching with aftershocks.
She reached for him with trembling hands, pulling his face to hers, and kissed him.
Tasted herself on his lips. Something about that—the intimacy, the salt, the sheer audacity of it—made her laugh against his mouth. A broken, breathless sound.
Gideon pulled back just enough to look at her. His eyebrows drew together.
“What?”
“I just—” She swallowed, trying to find words. “I didn’t know it could be like that.”
Something flickered in his eyes. Surprise, maybe. Or recognition. He brushed a strand of hair from her forehead, his callused fingers gentle against her temple.
“Neither did I,” he said. “Until now.”