Chapter Twenty
My vision clouded over with stars as Liam’s tongue swirled around my nipple and his hands cupped my breasts.
“Please,” the word fell past my lips, incoherent with no real meaning. “Please.” I had no idea what I was begging for. Just more. More of Liam. More of everything.
“You are so beautiful, Jess.”
Liam continued to mutter praise against my skin as he kissed his way down my body.
“You are the most beautiful person I have ever met,” he said as his tongue trailed down my stomach. “I love your eyes. Your hair—I always wondered if it was as soft as it looked. And, god, your smile. You have the most breathtaking smile.”
“Liam.”
My eyes stung from the unshed tears that threatened to fall. The emotion of it all, of wanting this for so long, and never letting myself have it, was overwhelming.
“But I think you look the most beautiful like this.” Liam propped himself up on his forearms as he met my gaze. “In my bed, crying my name, with that look in your pretty blue eyes.”
I had no idea how to reply, so I simply said again, “I love you.”
Liam smiled. “I love you too, Jessa.”
Then he moved even lower.
A gasp was forced out of me as he pressed a soft kiss to my clit.
“So beautiful,” Liam whispered.
My legs shook as he continued kissing and licking. “Liam,” I cried out. It was almost too much.
I threaded my fingers through his hair. My stomach flipped as I looked down at him. Liam was staring at me with those brown-gold, amber eyes as he continued to work his tongue against me.
The most intense sensation of pleasure I had ever felt came crashing over me. “Liam,” I cried out his name again, reflexively tugging on his hair as I rode out my orgasm against his tongue.
Just when it had begun to feel too sensitive, he pulled away. Liam crawled back over my body and pulled me into a heated kiss.
The press of his hard erection against me only made me want him more. Our kiss was broken by him gasping into my mouth when I reached down and grabbed his cock.
“What are you—” he began to ask as I gave it a gentle squeeze and started to move my hand up and down. “Jessa—”
“I want this, Liam. I want you. Please.”
“Have you ever done this before?” he asked.
A warm flush of embarrassment painted my cheeks. “No. I’ve never even kissed anyone besides you,” I confessed.
Liam’s eyes darkened, and his lips twitched upward into a smile. “Me too. I’ve never wanted anyone else, Jess. It’s always been you.”
That confession sent a hot wave of pleasure coursing through me. If it were even possible to love him more than I already did, then those words would have done it.
“I’m on the pill. So you don’t have to…” I trailed off. After all we had done, it felt so silly getting flustered over a few words.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” I said before crashing my lips against his once more and lining up his cock with my entrance. The feel of his erection sliding against my sensitive clit sent a jolt of pleasure through me.
Liam slowly pressed his hips forward. I reached up, clutching his shoulders and digging my nails into them as he slowly slid into me, inch by inch.
My face screwed up in discomfort as he stretched a part of me that had never been touched before by more than my own fingers. After a few moments, Liam was fully inside me, impossibly deep and closer than ever.
“Does it hurt?” he asked softly, his lips brushing against my ear. Concern was evident in his voice.
“No,” I admitted. It certainly wasn’t the indescribable pleasure I had always heard about when it comes to sex, but pain wasn’t the right descriptor either. “Start moving,” I said. “Just go slow.”
Liam pulled his hips back and slowly thrust them toward me. Then again and again until a broken moan fell past my lips. “Do that again,” I begged.
“Why don’t you ask me nicely?” he teased.
“Why don’t you—” I tried to argue, but the words morphed into a breathy whine as he snapped his hips forward.
Liam did it again, and with it came an undeniable wave of pleasure rushing through me in a way I had never felt before.
“You feel so good,” Liam said into my ear as he thrust into me. His voice was so deep and breathy, and I relished the thought that no one on earth had ever heard him like this—no one had ever felt him like this.
My back arched, and my hips rocked into the movement of his thrusts, trying to match his rhythm. It took a few tries, but finally I got the hang of it, and god if it wasn’t the most incredible thing I had ever felt.
My body writhed, another moan spilling past my lips as Liam grasped my hips and adjusted the angle. Somehow, he was going even deeper now, slamming into me at a pace that had my vision glossing over with tears.
I couldn’t speak, couldn’t think as I lay there, trying to match Liam’s rhythm and speed. All I could do was helplessly arch into him and cry out broken moans that sounded almost like Liam’s name.
“Liam,” his name fell from my lips once more. It felt as if he had thrust every other word from my mind until the only one that I knew was his name. “Liam—”
“Keep saying my name like that, and this isn’t going to last very long,” he said with a soft laugh that had me once more arching into him.
I whimpered in response, releasing my iron grip on his shoulders to instead grab his face. My hands on his cheeks, the same way he had done to me time and time again. His eyes met mine, and there was a hunger in them that had me pulling him down into another kiss.
The kiss was messy. I wasn’t sure if it could even be classified as a kiss—I was just desperately licking into his mouth, each of us having to pull away occasionally to gasp for breath. Sweat beaded on his chest, and his skin was flushed.
The pleasure built and built, tension pooling in my stomach. Until Liam’s hips slammed against mine once more, and it all came crashing down.
His lips didn’t leave mine as I moaned into his mouth. My whole body writhed against his, and my thighs shook as he rode me through the waves of another orgasm. As I reached the last of those waves, I felt his movements grow uncoordinated. “I love you,” he groaned as he came inside me.
Our chests heaved together as Liam collapsed some of his weight onto me. My arms found their way around his neck, fingers threading through his hair as I held him close. We stayed that way for a while until his cock grew soft inside me and then finally slipped out.
“Come here,” he said as he shifted to lie beside me.
I obeyed, scooting over until my head rested on his still-racing chest. I allowed my eyes to flutter shut, enjoying the feeling of his fingers raking through my hair.
The last thing I heard him say before I drifted off to sleep was a quiet whisper, “So beautiful.”
* * *
I awoke an hour or so later to Liam gently shaking me awake.
“What?” I groaned.
“Have you eaten?” he asked.
“What?” I asked, scrunching up my face in confusion.
I could hear Liam huff out a laugh. I still hadn’t bothered to open my eyes. “Dinner. Have you eaten? I assume not, since you’ve been here all evening.”
“I had that donut.”
“That doesn’t count.”
“Do you count? Because technically—”
Liam tsked. “That does not count.”
I finally opened my eyes to see the splotchy bloom of warmth that crept across his face. “Then, no, I guess not.”
“Come on,” Liam said with a smile. “I’ll make you dinner.”
After prying myself out of his bed, which was far more comfortable than my own, I followed behind him as he led the way to his kitchen.
“So,” Liam said slowly. “I’m going to be completely honest, I have not gone to the grocery store in probably two weeks.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah. So the best I can offer you is pancakes and maybe some eggs if they haven’t gone bad.”
“Lucky for you, pancakes are one of my top five favorite breakfast foods.”
He exhaled through his nose, not quite a laugh, but there was certainly a hint of amusement to it.
My gaze trailed over the front of his refrigerator as he opened the door and began to rummage through it. It was decorated with an array of magnets. So many that I could hardly see the actual fridge beneath them all.
“I didn’t know you collected magnets,” I said, examining them all.
One from the local zoo, another from an amusement park states away, several from different locations up north near where the majority of his extended family lived.
Most seemed to be local. One from the coffee shop up the street, another from the museum at the heart of town, at least one for every local sports team.
“I started collecting them in college,” Liam explained absentmindedly as he retrieved a carton of eggs and a near-empty gallon of milk from the fridge.
“What else do I not know about you?” I asked, leaning my back against the countertop. He had begun to crack his last remaining eggs into a bowl.
“What is it that you want to know?” The look in his eyes when he glanced over at me sent a jolt of something straight through me.
“Everything,” I admitted with a raw sense of honesty that felt almost unfamiliar to me.
In almost an instant, Liam’s hands were tucked beneath my thighs, hitching me up once more. Lifting me up and carrying me around seemed to be his new favorite thing to do.
He set me down on the counter. The t-shirt he had given me to wear, which crept down halfway to my thighs, offered little protection between me and the cool granite. It felt like ice compared to the heat of Liam’s warm hands.
Liam didn’t move back, flush with the countertop as he stood between my legs. “What are you doing?” I asked. “What about my pancakes?”
My breath hitched as a finger brushed my outer thigh. “You’ll get your pancakes.”
“I better.”
Liam pressed a kiss to my cheek before shifting his attention back to the eggs. I watched him silently as he sprinkled in seasonings and whisked them around.
When he finally poured them into a pan, I said, “I know.”
“You know what?”
“What I want to know about you.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“I want to know what you plan to do about your terribly stupid decision to cancel your lease.”
Liam turned to face me.
“What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
His face was screwed up into a grimace.
“I’m not sure if there’s anything I can do.”
“What? What’s that supposed to mean? All you have to do is call the leasing office and—”
“They told me that they had someone who had expressed a lot of interest in my storefront specifically.”
“Are you kidding? There are at least thirty vacant shops on the street.”
Liam moved closer until he was standing between my legs again. “I know. It’s probably because those are all ancient and haven’t been renovated in decades.” He slid a warm hand up my thigh. “But it’ll be okay. I’m sure I can find another shop on the street that’ll work.”
I frowned. “But you won’t be right next door anymore.”
“I know,” he sighed. “But I’ll be close enough—”
“If you’re not right next door, then you aren’t close enough,” I complained. “We’ll figure this out. Tomorrow we’ll call the leasing office and sort it out.”
“We can try,” Liam agreed before pulling me into a kiss.
I realized that I was quickly becoming addicted to having his lips on mine. To the way his tongue expertly drew circles inside my mouth and the way he groaned into the kiss. It was addictive.
Fingers pressed gently into my chin, adjusting the angle of my head to deepen the kiss further.
In a brief moment of clarity, I realized that my hands were still resting idly on the countertop behind me.
I reached up, tangling my fingers in Liam’s curls—something I had fantasized about more times than I would ever dare to admit.
I was now free to do it as much as I pleased.
I tugged a little, drawing out another one of those delicious groans that sent a jolt of arousal straight through me like a lightning strike.
Pressing my tongue against his and then past his lips, I licked deeper, exploring every inch of the mouth that I had spent the last several months daydreaming about.
His fingers dug into my thighs, sending yet another one of those lightning strikes straight through me. I arched my back, pressing closely into Liam. My legs twisted around him, and a gasp escaped both our lips as his cock, already hard, pressed against me.
My breath was coming out in quick, short gasps, and the lack of oxygen felt downright dizzying. I arched my back again, pressing into Liam harder this time as I chased that incredible feeling of friction.
“Jessa,” Liam groaned against my lips as I ground into him once more. His fingers dug into my thighs in a way that I was sure would leave bruises. That thought sent a wave of boiling hot pleasure rushing through me. I wanted him to mark me.
“Liam,” I said his name slowly, licking his lower lip.
“We should stop.” There didn’t seem to be a hint of conviction in those words.
“Why?”
“Because—” Liam began to say. The words died on his tongue the moment I pressed my lips to his neck and rubbed my hand against his cock over his sweatpants.
I licked slowly from the base of his collarbone to just below his ear. Leaning in, I whispered, “Because?” Mimicking the teasing tone I was so used to hearing from him.
It felt exhilarating. I had spent all my life feeling like Liam was miles ahead of me, believing that he was destined to have power over me in every scenario. Not this time, though. This time, I was the one in control.
Before he could respond, we were interrupted by the sound of the smoke detector going off.
“The eggs,” he said as we parted.
The scrambled eggs were burnt to the pan and releasing a steady stream of smoke. The pancakes, which he had going in another pan, looked even worse.
I let out a giggle as Liam desperately scraped at the eggs with his spatula. He eventually gave up and discarded the entire pan into the sink.
“It’s the great grilled cheese disaster all over again. I have got to stop trusting you—”
Liam scoffed, but turned to me with a bright smile. “Please. This was all just part of my plan.”
I snickered. “Yeah, right.”
“I’m telling you the truth. Now that every ingredient in this apartment is inedible, I have the perfect excuse to take you out on a real date.”
He was clearly making up the excuse right then and there, but my heart skipped a beat anyway.
“A date?”
Liam nodded. “Let’s go get you some pancakes.”