Chapter 41
Chapter Forty-One
Hadley
I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror.
This should do it.
Thank you, Grandma.
I open the door and step into the room.
Easton is leaned along the headboard in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, his legs stretched out in front of him, the remote in his hand as he flips through channels.
“You know what I hate about hotels…” He glances my way and stops talking. His gaze roams down and back up my body. A slow, easy smirk makes his lips quirk. “You think that’s going to change anything?”
I glance down. “I think this should do it.”
The floor-length, pale-yellow quilted zip-up night coat with flowers embroidered around the neckline doesn’t exactly scream seduce me.
My grandmother bought it for me at a little boutique in Lake Geneva one Christmas and laughed when she gifted it to me.
I remember her saying, “For the cold nights, darling, wherever you end up.”
I haven’t worn it until this moment, but as I was packing my bag, I figured if I went to bed wearing this, there would be less of a chance I’d end up sleeping with Easton.
Now, seeing the way he’s looking at me, I know it wouldn’t matter what I wore. The tension between us isn’t going anywhere.
“First of all, I can restrain myself. Second of all, you could wear a suit of armor and my dick will still salute you.”
I shrug. “I figured it was my best shot.”
He’s still looking at me in that way he does that I can never fully decode, and tonight I’m too tired to try to figure out where his mind is.
The entire room is set up for romance. The champagne his parents ordered is still sitting in its bucket, the city lights reflecting through the window and the enormous bed between us.
I move toward my suitcase to grab my charger, ignoring that Easton hasn’t taken his eyes off me. He goes to his suitcase to get his own.
I turn to walk back, but the hem catches under my foot. It happens so fast—one second, I’m upright, and the next I’m pitching forward with nothing to grab. Then his hands are on me, and I’m not falling anymore. I’m in his arms.
My hands are on his chest, fingers curling into the soft cotton of his T-shirt. His hands grip my arms, steadying me, and we’re close. So close.
My eyes slowly lift, and he’s already looking at me.
Say something funny. Thank him. Step away. You’re good at running.
But I don’t have it in me. The last of my fight was putting on this ridiculous old lady night coat.
I lift on my tiptoes, never stripping my gaze off Easton’s, and kiss him. It’s soft at first, tentative, a question lingering. His hands tighten on my arms, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t push me away or pull me closer, leaving me as the decision-maker.
I’m done. Done pretending this is nothing.
I press closer, and his hands slide from my arms to my waist, and the kiss deepens, dissolving the question between us.
He pulls back a fraction of space, just enough to look at me.
I open my eyes.
His hand slowly rises and lands on the zipper at my throat. He only holds it between his fingers and thumb, drawing in a deep breath.
I nod.
He lowers it slowly, all the way down until my night coat parts.
“Fuck, Hadley,” he says, his eyes filled with desire I’ve missed. He pushes the coat off my shoulders, and it falls to the floor.
I stand in front of him in a thin cami and shorts, and he looks at me the way he looked at me in the bookstore—as though I’m his.
“You’re so stunning,” he says quietly.
“I tried,” I say. “I really tried.”
“Me too.” Our gazes hold. “I guess we’re just too hot for one another.”
I laugh, but he swallows it down by kissing me again.
This time there’s nothing tentative about his lips. His hands find my hips, and he walks me backward until my knees hit the bed and we go down together, his weight settling over me in a way that is so familiar and so completely new at the same time.
“You have no idea how hard I’ve fought.” His mouth moves to my jaw, my neck, the place below my ear. He remembers all my favorite spots. Of course he does. He’s the one man with a roadmap to my body. “You still like this?”
“Yes,” I breathe.
His hands find the hem of my cami, and he looks at me once more before slowly raising it up my chest and over my head. I reach for his shirt, and he helps me pull it off by grabbing the back collar.
My fingertips run down his bare chest, and I rise up to give the hollow of his neck a kiss.
Nothing about this is new, but maybe the pace. We’ve had two years of getting to know each other’s bodies, of finding what works and coming back to one another, mastering what gets one another off every time. But tonight feels nothing like what’s come before it.
We both know it, but neither of us will address it. Because that would make it too real.
He takes his time in a way he never has before. His mouth moves over my collarbone, the curve of my shoulder. I run my hands through his hair, and he exhales against my skin as though he’s been holding his breath for weeks.
Maybe he has. I think we both have.
“Hadley.” My name falls from his lips, quiet and rough, and it undoes my last scrap of control.
“I know.” He doesn’t need to finish the sentence. I know. I feel it too.
Whatever this is, it’s not nothing, and it hasn’t been for a while. Eventually, we’re going to have to talk about it.
But not right now.
Right now his hands are on my skin, and his mouth is at my throat, and I pull him closer with the hopes my mind shuts off and I can just be in my body with him.
I don’t want him to rush. I want every second of this moment with him to linger. The weight of him over me, the warmth of his skin against mine, the way he says my name when he pulls my shorts off my hips and down my legs.
He stares at me, lifting one of my legs and trailing kisses down my inner thigh. His body lowers an inch at a time until he’s between my thighs, still looking at me through his thick eyelashes.
“I’ve missed your taste.” He tongues my clit.
My pelvis rises off the mattress, and he chuckles into my pussy, one arm holding me down.
He knows how to get me off with his mouth. He can probably get me there in two seconds, especially after all the months of sexual tension, but he doesn’t rush. He increases the pressure of his tongue on my clit and runs it down and back up. He teases me, playing a game.
“You do know I’ll pay you back.” My hand dives into his hair, the wavy threads slipping through my fingers.
“I’m counting on it.” He presses his entire face into my pussy.
I lift my knees, opening myself wider, and his finger plays with my opening as he licks me, sucks me, and blows on my clit in the most torturous but glorious way.
“East—” My hand clenches the comforter as my other one clings to his hair.
He doesn’t relent, increasing his pace, getting me right to the brink. And I fear he’s going to stop and tease me again, but his hand grabs my breast, his callused thumb running along my nipple, and that’s all it takes for me to bolt off the mattress on a moan.
He slows his pace but doesn’t abandon me, his tongue circling my clit, his finger slipping out of me.
When I finally come back to myself, he’s staring up at me with my juices on his lips.
Fuck, he’s so hot.
“Come here,” I whisper.
He kisses his way up my body, hovering over me, and I wrap my hand around the back of his neck, pulling him down to me. His tongue wastes no time diving through my lips, and I open for him. I taste myself on his tongue, and it only fuels my desire.
“I need you to get these off.” I push with my feet at the waist of his shorts.
Easton helps me, his muscles flexing as he lifts up and uses one hand to get them off. He sits back afterward, his glorious length hard and proudly erect.
Then his smile dims. “We have a problem.”
I still. “No…”
“Much like your night coat theory, I didn’t bring condoms for the same reason.”
My head falls back onto the pillows, and I want to scream no because it’s taken us so long to get here and I need him.
Then I think, what if… which is probably a bad idea, but my pussy is aching and all my senses are on the brink of the orgasm I’m in desperation for.
“When is the last time you were tested?”
Hope fills his eyes, and his hands run along my outer thighs. “Right before Tanner, and I’ve slept with no one else since. You?”
Well, this is embarrassing.
“I haven’t been with anyone but you in the past year.”
His eyes bulge. “Really?”
I nod, my cheeks heating and not from the orgasm he just gave me.
“Fuck, you were waiting for me.” He smiles that one that says he’s joking, but there’s a note of satisfaction behind it.
“If you want to have sex tonight, I suggest you get that smug look off your face.”
He slides down on top of me, the tip of his cock between my thighs. “I don’t blame you. Afraid no man would compare? I’m sorry for being such a great lover.”
I playfully smack his arm. “I’ll push you off right now.”
He laughs and kisses me, pulling back before it gets too heated. “And you’re still on the pill?”
I shake my head.
Disappointment fills his eyes. “How do we make sure not to make another Tanner?”
“I put an IUD in a couple months ago, but is that good enough for you?”
He stills, and I see his mind working behind those hazel eyes. I’m sure the whole Lollapalooza thing is in the forefront of his thoughts.
“I want this,” he says.
“Easton, are you sure? You can run down to the drugstore…”
“No, I want this, and I trust you.” He presses his lips to mine.
There’s not much else he could’ve said that would break all those walls around me.
“So?” He arches an eyebrow.
I laugh. “So we’re good.”
He lifts, his cock pressing at my opening, sliding in an inch. Easton watches my face as he slips through my wetness, and I meet his gaze, which is new for me. Tonight I don’t have the energy to guard my heart.
He waits a second, allowing me to get used to his girth, then slowly slips out and back in.
His chin drops to his chest. “Fuck, I hope I don’t embarrass myself.”
I laugh, but it’s cut off when his mouth finds mine.
Just like every other time, we know each other too well for anything to feel too new, but it’s all the more satisfying because as he rocks in and out of me, I know that he loves the feel of my short nails along his back. He knows I love it when he nibbles on my ear.
He takes my hips, flipping us so I’m on top because he knows I get off faster in this position.
Using his chest for leverage, I move. He plays with my breasts while our eyes are locked on one another.
When I get close and my pace increases, he grips my waist, pulling me up and down.
My eyes close, and he whispers all the things I love.
How fucking hot I am, how wet I am, how he loves watching me get off, how he’ll beat off about this image during his next away series, how no one ever gets him as hot as I do.
My orgasm crests with his name slipping past my lips, and my body loses all tension.
I know he hasn’t come yet, so I clench down on his length, allowing him to manipulate the pace, and he brings me down, sucking my nipple as he grabs my ass and thrusts up and down until he finds his own release, cursing into my ear.
As we come down, my face presses to the curve of his neck, and he holds me as though he doesn’t want this to end.
Easton’s hand drifts slowly up and down my back.
I inhale his scent, never wanting to forget this moment.
I pull my chest off him, and our gazes meet.
“Hey.” His voice is gravelly in a way it only ever is after sex.
“Hey.”
Neither of us says anything else. Neither of us says what it means or asks what comes next or whether this changes the arrangement or complicates it or any of the other hundred practical things we’re going to have to address at some point.
He pulls me down, and I let him tuck me against his chest. I listen to his heartbeat slow back to normal while his hands run along my naked body.
Sometimes you have to live in the moment even when you know it’s going to cost you later.