42. Finn
Finn
Iwake up and she’s gone.
For one terrible second, my heart stops. The space beside me is empty, and the panic that floods my chest is instant and irrational and all-consuming.
Then I reach across the sheets and they’re still warm where she was lying, and my heartbeat slows, but not by much.
Max is on his back, one arm thrown over his face, breathing deep and even. Ethan is curled on his side at the far edge of the bed, glasses folded neatly on the nightstand, one hand tucked under his cheek like a kid. I’d tease him about it if I wasn’t so focused on the empty space between us.
I slide out of bed and go to find her.
She’s standing by the window in Ethan’s shirt, the hem falling to mid-thigh, one shoulder sliding off to expose the curve of her neck.
She’s holding a glass of water and looking out at the river.
The sight of her in the moonlight catches me off guard—the line of her jaw, the dark hair falling loose over her shoulder, the bare feet on the hardwood floor.
She looks so small standing there. So quiet.
“Hi, sweetheart.”
She turns. And when she sees me, she smiles—soft and sleepy—and it hits me right in the center of my chest.
“Hi.” She lifts the glass. “I was thirsty.”
I cross the room and come up behind her, and she leans back into me immediately. Her shoulders settle against my chest like they’ve always belonged there, and I wrap my arms around her and press my face into her hair. Rain and roses, warm from sleep.
The top of her head barely reaches my chin. My arms swallow her completely. She could kill a man with her bare hands and she fits inside my arms like something I need to be careful with.
We stand there for a while, looking out at the river. The water is black and still, the moon reflected in it like a coin at the bottom of a well.
“You know what this reminds me of?” I say against her hair.
“What?”
“The night we met.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Her thumb traces the rim of the glass.
“It feels like such a long time ago,” she says softly.
“Do you know I came home that night and told Max and Ethan about you?”
She turns in my arms, looking up at me. “You did?”
“I wouldn’t stop talking about you for days.
I tried to find you—asked about you at the gala, described you to everyone I could think of.
Nobody knew who you were.” I brush a strand of hair from her face.
“This woman with dark eyes and a laugh that made me forget my own name, and she vanished like she’d never existed. ”
I tuck her hair behind her ear and study her face. Her eyes are green in the moonlight, pale and clear, nothing like the dark brown I remember from that night. The real ones. The ones she hid from everyone, including me.
“I like these better,” I say.
She blinks. “What?”
“Your eyes. The green.” I trace the edge of her cheekbone with my thumb. “I didn’t think you could get more beautiful. I was wrong.”
She bites her lip. “Finn, I thought about you too. For days after. I even dreamed of you. I couldn’t stop thinking about that kiss.”
Her eyes drop to my mouth, then come back to mine.
I kiss her. My hands cup her face and tilt it back until she rises onto her toes.
Her mouth opens under mine, and her warm, sweet taste pulls a groan from me.
I deepen the kiss, my tongue meeting hers, and the sound she makes into my mouth vibrates through my whole body.
Her hands grip my bare waist, fingers digging into my skin as she pulls me closer.
The glass of water is still in her hand. I take it from her without breaking the kiss, set it on the windowsill—and then both my hands are in her hair and both of hers are on my chest and the kiss deepens into something that isn’t slow anymore.
My hands find the hem of Ethan’s shirt. I pull it up and over her head, and she’s bare underneath—just smooth skin and the breasts I’ve been thinking about since the kitchen, and the sight of her in nothing but underwear and moonlight makes my hands shake.
“God, Sophie. You’re perfect.”
I cup her breasts in both hands and roll her nipples between my fingers, gently, and the moan that comes out of her goes straight to my cock. I kiss her jaw, her neck, my mouth open against her pulse while my hands move over her slowly, taking my time with every inch.
My hand slides lower. Down her stomach, over the soft curve of her hip, and between her legs. She’s already soaked—slick and hot and swollen through the fabric.
“Sweetheart.” My hand goes still on her. “You’re soaked.”
I slide a finger through her folds and she gasps, her hips rolling against my hand.
“Finn—”
I kiss her before she can finish.
Then I lift her. Her legs wrap around my waist and I carry her to the couch, kissing her the whole way.
I sit down and pull her into my lap. I stroke her cheek and look at her—flushed cheeks, swollen lips, those green eyes fixed on mine, wanting and disbelieving at once, like she still can’t quite trust that this is real.
I kiss her again. Every time she shifts against me, my cock presses harder into my boxers, but I don’t rush her.
“Finn?”
“Yeah?”
She pulls back just enough to look at me.
“Why were you so cold to me in the beginning?”
The question lands in my gut. Because I remember. I could hardly look at her then, and I barely spoke to her. For a moment, I just hold her and try to figure out how to explain something I barely understood myself.
“Because every time I looked at you, I felt like I was losing my mind.” I say it against her hair.
“From the first day you showed up at Synthera. I walked into that conference room and there you were, and I thought I was hallucinating. The woman from the gala. The one I’d been looking for.
” My arms tighten around her. “And I couldn’t say anything.
You were our operative. You were there to do a job.
And I was standing there with my heart in my throat, wanting you so badly I couldn’t think straight. ”
She lifts her head to look at me. Her green eyes are soft in the low light.
“I thought you hated me,” she says quietly.
“I was terrified of you.” I brush my thumb across her cheekbone.
“Not of you—of what I felt. Because it wasn’t just attraction, Soph.
It’s never been just attraction. Since the gala, since that first night, it’s felt like something so much bigger than that.
” I swallow. “Like I’d been waiting for you my whole life and didn’t know it until you were standing right in front of me. ”
Her chin trembles. Her hand presses flat against my chest, over my heart.
“I love you, Finn.”
The words go through me like electricity. I’ve imagined hearing them. I’ve wanted them. But nothing comes close to hearing them now—quiet, steady, certain, from a woman who doesn’t say things she doesn’t mean.
“Say it again,” I whisper.
“I love you.”
I kiss her. Slow, deep, my hand cradling the back of her head, and I let her feel all of it—the months of wanting, the nights I lay awake thinking about her, the fear that I’d never get to have this.
When I pull back, her eyes are bright and her lips are swollen and she’s looking at me like I’m the only thing in the room.
“I love you too, Soph,” I say. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to say that.”
She gives me a small, trembling smile and shifts in my lap.
My cock is still hard against her thigh, straining against my boxers, and we both feel it at the same time.
Her breath catches. Her eyes drop between us, then come back to mine, and the look in them has changed—darker, hungrier, the softness from a moment ago still there but layered now with something that makes my pulse spike.
“Finn.” Her voice is husky. “I want to see you.”
I stand and pull my boxers down, watching her face as she takes me in. Her lips part, her tongue sweeping across her lower lip, and the way she looks at me makes my hands curl into fists at my sides.
She reaches out and wraps her hands around my shaft. Her fingers don’t close all the way and the length of me extends beyond both of her fists. She grips experimentally, testing the weight, and the breath that leaves me is shattered.
“Fuck, Sophie.” My hand moves to her hair, fingers tangling at the base of her skull. “I might come just from this.”
“Finn,” she whispers. “I want to suck your cock.”
“Fuck, Soph. Those words from your mouth.”
She leans forward and licks the tip tentatively. Then she licks my shaft from the base to the tip, one long, slow, flat stroke that makes my knees nearly buckle. Her eyes are half-closed and she makes a small sound of pleasure in her throat like she’s enjoying this as much as I am.
“Take all of me, sweetheart.”
She takes me into her mouth a little at a time, her cheeks hollowing. She can barely fit me—my girth stretches her lips wide—but she doesn’t pull back. She pushes further, working me deeper, and the sight of her trying so hard to take all of me makes my hips jerk forward.
“Fuck, Soph, yes, that’s it. Grip me with your hands where I don’t fit.”
Her hands move, gripping me, and she keeps going until I hit the back of her throat and my vision goes white.
“Jesus Christ, Sophie—” My hand tightens in her hair. She moves tentatively, as if finding her rhythm, and the wet sounds filling the quiet space are going to be seared into my memory forever.
Sophie moans around me and the vibration travels up my spine.
Her hand slides lower, past the base of my shaft, and her fingers find my knot—already starting to swell, throbbing at the base—and she wraps her hand around it and squeezes gently.
Then she pulls her mouth off my cock and dips her head lower and licks the knot, her tongue hot and wet, circling it, sucking the swollen flesh into her mouth.
“Fuck, Soph—” My voice cracks. My thighs are shaking. “You’re going to make me come if you keep doing that.”
She pulls off and looks up at me with those green eyes, glazed and dark, her lips wet and swollen.
“Finn,” she breathes. “Knot me.”
I sit back on the couch, my cock hard and straining upward, and hold out my hand to her.
“Come here, sweetheart. Take what you want.”
Sophie steps between my knees and I hook my fingers into her underwear, sliding them down her legs. She steps out of them, then climbs into my lap, her knees on either side of my hips, and kisses me.
I hold her waist, guiding her back until the tip of my cock finds her entrance, and I stop.
I can feel the heat of her, her slick dripping onto me before I’ve even pushed in.
“Fuck, Sophie. Your pussy is dripping on my cock.”
I look at her—flushed, trembling, pupils blown, her body arched toward me—and I have never wanted anything the way I want this.
“Are you sure, sweetheart?” I manage against her lips.
“I need you, Finn. Please. I need to feel all of you inside me.”
Slowly, I lower her onto my cock.
She gasps and her hands fly to my shoulders, gripping hard. I watch her face as she sinks down onto me, feeling her stretch around me, her slick easing the way but the length of my cock still making her eyes go wide.
“Oh my God—Finn—you’re so—”
“I know, sweetheart.” I kiss the spot behind her ear, my arms trembling. “Take your time. Take all of me.”
She sinks down until I bottom out and we both moan. She grips me from base to tip, every inch of me buried inside her.
“Finn,” she says, and my name has never sounded like that before. “Please.”
“I’ve got you, sweetheart,” I say, and I lift my hips once, deep, and she moans.
Then she starts to move.
Her hips roll against mine, slow at first, finding the angle, finding the rhythm, and I let her take over.
I dip my head and take her nipple into my mouth.
I suck and she gasps and her hips stutter, so I switch to the other one, my tongue flicking the hardened peak while my hands stroke down her thighs.
She grinds down onto me with my entire cock buried inside her, her hands braced on my shoulders, and when she hits the right spot her head falls back and a moan rips out of her.
“There?” I ask, rolling my hips up to meet hers, hitting that same spot, and her whole body seizes.
“Finn—yes—that’s it,” she moans.
I drive into her with everything I have, hitting the spot over and over again, deep and hard and relentless, my hands gripping her waist, and the sound of my cock inside her fills the room alongside her cries and the low, guttural sounds coming from my own chest that I don’t recognize.
“That’s it, sweetheart. Let go for me,” I say, and my voice breaks on it. “Let me feel you.”
She shatters. Her walls clamp down on me so hard I lose my grip on everything, her body convulsing around my cock, her slick flooding around me.
My hands grab her ass and pull her harder against me, burying myself as deep as I can go, and the rhythmic clench of her orgasm pulls mine out of me like a tide.
I come with her name tearing out of me and my knot starts to swell.
It pulses at the base, stretching her wider and locking me inside her, each movement sending waves of sensation through both of us. Sophie cries out, her body arching, and the feeling of her tightening around my knot is the most intense thing I’ve ever felt.
“Finn—oh God—I can feel it—”
“I know, sweetheart.” My hand slides up her back, holding her closer. “Feel me. I’m right here.”
Her arms wrap around my neck and she kisses me, her heart pounding against my chest.
She tucks her face into my neck. I kiss her hair, her forehead, her cheek. My hand traces the curve of her hip, the dip of her waist, comes up to cup her breast, then settles flat over her heart.
I listen to her breathe. I feel my knot pulse inside her, tying us together, and I think about the night we met and how I spent weeks looking for her and how it was through the smallest sliver of luck that we ever found each other again.
“Sweetheart?”
“Mm?”
“I’m really glad it was you.”
She smiles against my neck. “Me too, Finn. Me too.”