13. Ryan #4
She looked out for a long moment, taking it in. The scale of it, the intimacy of standing this high up with the whole city below us. Then she turned her head to look at me and I could see her deciding. “You’ve thought about this.”
“Since the moment you walked through the door.”
Heat moved through her face and she didn’t try to hide it while her cheeks turned slightly pink.
I ran my hands through her hair once, feeling it, and watched her eyes go soft as I inhaled the beachy scent she always seemed to have.
Standing behind her still, I buried my face in her neck and licked gently where it met her shoulder.
I settled them there and gently ran my fingers down her arms and to her waist, I asked.
“Can I take this off you?” My fingers curled at the hem of her shirt.
“Yes,” she said. No hesitation.
I slowly pulled it past her ribs, over her head, and dropped it so she was standing in the window light in just her jeans and a lacy red bra, the whole city in front of her, and I took a moment to look at her.
Deliberately, without hurrying, because she was worth looking at and I wanted her to know I thought so.
She held still for it. That was the thing I noticed. Not posing, not performing—just standing there in the city light and letting herself be looked at, by me. Her chin came up, garnering my attention.
I placed her palms against the glass.
She gasped at the cold—sharp and involuntary—and I pressed my mouth to the back of her neck and felt her shiver move all the way through her.
My hands found her waist and stayed there, feeling her breathe, feeling the warmth of her skin through the thin fabric still between us.
She’d worn this under her clothes at the bar all evening without my knowing it.
Hours across a table from her, her laughing and texting me with her eyes bright and her drink in her hand, and underneath all of it—this.
Red lace. Her own. Not for me, not planned, just hers—and she was going to ruin me for every other view in the world.
“I can feel you staring,” she said.
“Yeah.” The word came out rough. “Give me a second.”
She laughed and it went straight through my chest and down, and I unclasped her bra and let it fall.
Her hands stayed against the glass. She didn’t cover herself or turn.
She stood bare in the city light and let me look, and my blood went entirely animal about it—the long line of her spine, the curve of her shoulders, the way the Phoenix skyline blazed in front of her like the whole city had arranged itself to frame what was mine.
I’d had my hands on her last night and I was still not prepared for her.
I didn’t think I was ever going to be prepared for her.
I slid my hands up her ribcage, slow, feeling every rib, every breath she took, and covered her breasts with my palms. Warm weight, soft skin, the press of her nipples against my hands hardening instantly.
She arched into me before she’d finished deciding to.
“Oh—”
“Good?”
“Really good.” Her voice had dropped to a level I felt in my spine. “Don’t stop.”
I didn’t stop. I learned what made her fingers curl against the glass and what made her hips push back and what made her say my name in the register that bypassed my brain entirely and went somewhere more fundamental.
The smell of her hair against my face. The warmth coming off her skin.
The sound of her breathing going uneven in the quiet of the apartment.
I was so hard it was a physical problem and I had exactly one thing I needed and it was her falling apart, and I intended to get there.
When she was trembling faintly and had entirely stopped pretending she wasn’t, I turned her around.
She came willingly, hands dropping from the glass. I kissed her once, deep enough that she made a sound against my mouth. Then I worked the button of her jeans open and dragged them down while she braced a hand on my shoulder and stepped out of them. Then I dropped to my knees in front of her.
She looked down at me and an expression crossed her face that I felt in the back of my throat.
Want and heat and the slight undone quality she kept every room she walked into at arm’s length and had decided, for me, to stop.
I was going to dismantle every last brick of that composure until there was nothing left standing but her.
“Ryan—”
“I’ve been thinking about this since last night,” I said. It came out exactly as wrecked as I felt. “I need to taste you. Let me.”
Her hand moved into my hair and gripped.
“Yes,” she said. Not okay, not yeah. Just yes, immediate, like she was done pretending to think it over.
I reached up and took the red lace at her hips.
Worked it down slowly, my palms dragging the full length of her thighs, feeling the softness of her skin under my hands, and I watched her face the whole time.
The small sound she made when the fabric cleared her ankles—barely there, almost swallowed, entirely involuntary—went straight into the part of me that was keeping score of every sound she made that she hadn’t planned on.
I was going to earn every single one before this night was over.
I pressed her back against the glass.
Her spine met the cool surface and she gasped again, sharper this time—the temperature against her bare skin, the height, the whole glittering grid of the city spread out fourteen floors below her—and I looked up at her from my knees and waited until her eyes came down to mine.
She looked down.
Her chest was rising and falling fast. Her lower lip was parted. Her fingers were still loose in my hair and she was looking at me like she already knew what was about to happen and couldn’t believe it was real.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yes,” she breathed out the word. “Please.”
I lifted her right leg over my shoulder.
Her fingers locked in my hair. Her thigh was warm and smooth against my cheek and I could feel her pulse there, fast and getting faster, and I put my mouth on her.
I started slow. Because she deserved slow.
Because I’d been thinking about exactly this since the moment I left her house this morning and I was not going to rush it for anything in the world.
The taste of her, warm and clean and—hers, only hers—and the way her hips pushed forward a fraction before she caught them, and the soft catch of her breath when I found the pressure she wanted.
I learned all of it with full attention, no shortcuts, nothing withheld.
The tremor running through the thigh hooked over my shoulder.
The way the sounds she was trying to suppress were getting shorter and harder to hold back.
She tried to stay quiet.
She kept trying, and every time she lost—every sharp intake of breath, every soft broken sound that escaped before she could stop it, every time my name came out fractured and low in the register of a woman well past managing anything—I gave her more.
More pressure, more heat, more of exactly what was taking her apart, because she earned it.
Every sound she made that she hadn’t meant to make, she earned.
Her thigh tightened hard over my shoulder. I slid two fingers inside her and felt the grip of her around them—hot and tight and absolutely devastating—and with my other hand gripped her hip to hold her against the glass because she was moving and I was nowhere near done.
“Ryan—”
Just my name. Nothing attached to it. The most honest thing she’d said all night.
I kept the rhythm exactly where it was. Slow and relentless, reading every shift in her breathing the way I read everything that mattered—where she was chasing more, where she needed me to hold back and make her wait, the exact place that made the grip in my hair go from wanting to desperate. I found it and I stayed there.
“Please,” she breathed.
I didn’t change anything.
“Please.” The word coming apart. Nothing left behind it, nothing held back, the last of everything she managed in every other room completely gone. “Ryan. Fuck. Please.”
I gave her everything, sucking her clit into my mouth, pumping my fingers inside her, tasting her. I could have done it all night long.
She came with her back against the glass and both hands fisted in my hair and my name shattering in her throat, her whole body pulling taut and releasing in waves, and I worked her through every single one—not letting up, not rushing her past it, staying exactly where she needed me until she was trembling and making small helpless sounds she’d given up trying to contain, her fingers gone slack, her weight leaning into the glass behind her.
I pressed my mouth once to the inside of her thigh.
The skin there was soft and warm and tasted faintly of salt and I stayed a moment longer than I needed to, just that, just breathing her in.
Then I looked up at her.
Flushed and wrecked and open in a way she wasn’t anywhere else, with anyone else. Her hair loose around her shoulders. Her eyes dark and heavy. The whole city blazing fourteen floors below like it hadn’t noticed what just happened here.
She reached for me before I’d fully stood.
I was breathing hard. She was breathing harder.
She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then—“Okay. That’s—” She exhaled and didn’t finish the sentence.
She didn’t need to. I knew what it was.
“I could eat your pussy all night,” I said against her mouth.
A blush crept over her cheeks and all it did was spur me on.
“Okay,” she said, from somewhere above me. Her voice was wrecked. “Okay. I need—”
“Bedroom,” I said.
“Yes. Bedroom. Now.”
I picked her up because it was the fastest way to get her there. She wrapped her legs around me and laughed into my shoulder, bright and startled, and I carried her down the hall, leaving all her clothes on the floor by the windows.