Chapter 9-Deposition #2
He pulled back long enough to look at me — really look, eyes dark, chest heaving — and the wanting on his face was so unguarded it almost melted me before he'd even touched me again.
"Tell me what you want," he said. The same words as before. Except this time I didn't hesitate.
"I want you," I managed.
He didn't stop.
His hands found the waist of my slacks. Mine found his, and somewhere in the next few seconds, the distance between dressed and naked collapsed entirely.
Then he pulled me closer to him, turned me, and walked me backward.
Slowly. Hands on my hips, steering me, and I went…
back into the kitchen, until I met the edge of the counter.
He turned me toward the counter and pushed me until I was bending over it, opening my legs.
He pressed in close behind me, his mouth at the back of my neck, and I understood what he was doing, and I didn't stop him.
I just leaned forward and let my palms find the counter and felt myself unravel beneath him.
He took his time.
Even with both of us already late and my pulse pounding in my throat, he took his time with me.
Like this mattered.
Like I mattered.
His mouth moved down the back of my neck, slow enough that I felt every inch of it, and I exhaled against the counter and stopped pretending I was holding anything together.
One hand spread flat against my stomach, lifting my aching core up to him, steadying me, grounding me.
The other slid down my stomach, lower — unhurried, deliberate — and I gasped at the first contact, giving in to how good it felt just to be touched by him.
The same sound he'd already learned to draw out of me. Except like this, bent over my own kitchen counter with nowhere to look but down, it felt rawer. More exposed. Like there was nothing between me and exactly how much I wanted him.
He knew what he was doing. He'd always known.
His fingers moved in slow, precise circles, and I closed my eyes and stopped trying to stay quiet.
The sounds I made were raw, carnal. They were the sounds of someone who had given up controlling herself. Sounds that were low and unguarded and entirely his — and I'd think about that later with something between shame and want and wouldn't care.
He wasn't rushing. He was taking what he wanted and moving on.
He remembered what I liked, and he used it.
Every place I caught my breath. Every time my hips shifted.
Every small broken sound he drew out of me with that patient, relentless attention.
He used all of it — and I felt it differently from this angle, deeper somehow, more present in my body and less in my head, until I stopped being able to think about anything except his hands and his mouth and the heat of him pressed against me.
"Richard—"
"I know." His voice was rough against my ear. "I've got you."
His fingers worked me until I was shaking, until I was pressing back against him with something that wasn't patience at all, and my legs had gone unsteady. The only thing keeping me upright was his palm flat against my stomach.
Then his hand shifted, and I felt him — hard and ready — and I exhaled a sound that was his name.
He pushed inside slowly. I knew how this felt, and it still undid me — the thick stretch of him filling me inch by inch, his stillness once he was all the way in, seated deep, giving me every second of it. Waiting. His palm still flat against my stomach. Giving me the choice of when.
I moved first.
A slow roll of my hips, just to feel him shift inside me, and the sound he made against the back of my neck released something I hadn't known was still tight.
He moved with me. Deep and unhurried, finding the rhythm he already knew worked — deliberate, thorough, nothing like someone who was rushing through this to get to his release.
His fingers found me again, and I braced against the counter and let him, let myself be as exactly as loud and unguarded as I wanted to be.
There was something enormous in it — not just the sensation but the fact of it.
The fact that I was here, in my own kitchen, hands braced on the same counter where he'd made me eggs twenty minutes ago, my whole careful life suspended, and I was not pretending anything for anyone.
Not managing how I looked, how I sounded, or what it meant.
This was only mine. Only his. Nothing I had to hold together after.
When I finally let go, it wasn't quiet or controlled. His name broke in my throat, and I gripped the counter, and he held my hips through it, steady, like he'd known exactly how to catch me.
He didn't stop. He kept moving — slower now, deeper, wringing every last tremor out of me — and I felt the change in him building. The rhythm that had been so controlled, finally fraying at the edges.
His breath roughened against the back of my neck. His grip on my hips tightened. The deliberateness gave way to something rawer, something that wasn't about me anymore — and somehow that shook me almost as much as everything else had.
Knowing he was right there. Knowing I'd done that to him.
"Blaire—" My name in his mouth, low and broken, nothing like his usual control.
Then he drove deep and held, his whole body going rigid against mine, a rough exhale pressed into the curve of my neck. I felt him pulse inside me, and I closed my eyes and let myself have that — the weight of him, the heat, the proof that whatever this was, it wasn't one-sided. It had never been.
When it was over, he stayed pressed against me for a long moment, his forehead dropped to the back of my neck, both of us breathing.
Then I turned.
I wasn't sure why. Maybe because facing the counter was something I'd needed during, and facing him was something I needed after.
We stayed like that — close enough that I had to tilt my head back to look at him, my hands fisting in his half-open shirt. Neither of us speaking.
Then my phone buzzed against the entryway table.
Morrison contracts. Partner meeting in twenty minutes.
I felt him almost-smile against my shoulder.
"Go," he said. Quiet. No edge in it.
I pulled back enough to look at him. His collar was crooked. His hair was not. He looked exactly like a man who knew how to put himself back together, and I didn't know why that made me want to pull him closer instead of letting go.
"I—" I stopped. I had no idea what I'd been going to say.
He reached out. Straightened the strap of my bra with two fingers, matter-of-fact, like it was something he did every day.
"I know," he said.
I made sure I put myself back together as if nothing had happened.
Blazer buttoned. Posture squared. The practiced lift of the chin meant I had this handled. I built it piece by piece, the way I had been doing since law school, and by the time the doors opened to the lobby, I looked exactly like someone who hadn't just come apart against her own kitchen counter.
My hands didn't shake.
That should have felt like victory. Instead, it felt like I'd shown him something I couldn't hide again.
Richard was waiting by the door. He took one look at me and said nothing, which was somehow worse than if he had. We walked to the car in silence.
In the car, he drove. I watched Boston move past the window and pressed two fingers against the inside of my wrist without meaning to — the sharp, steady beat of my pulse, the closest thing I had to a lock to check.
I'd let him in. Not just that morning — though that morning had been its own kind of reckless. Years ago, too, in a conference room too small for four lawyers and a court reporter, and whatever was already happening between us.
I'd shown him exactly who I was beneath the surface without realizing I was doing it. Without understanding that some things, once shown, can't be taken back.
I thought about the Mercer files. The shell company pattern I'd almost recognized the day before — familiar in the way old case work sometimes was, buried under years of other cases, someone else's playbook running under the surface of all of it. I hadn't placed it yet. But I would.
And when I did, I thought I'd understand why Crowe had chosen me specifically.
I'd handed people ammunition before without knowing it.
The thought settled somewhere cold and quiet beneath everything else.
Richard's hand moved across the center console. Didn't reach for me. Just rested there, close enough.
I didn't move away.
Fifteen minutes later, we were walking into the building.
I made it to the elevator before I realized I'd forgotten to check the lock.
Two days in a row now.
Richard stood beside me. Close enough that our shoulders nearly brushed. He didn't say anything. Didn't have to.
And when his voice kept replaying in my head, no matter how hard I tried to think about literally anything else?—
I didn't shove it down.
I let it sit there. Unexamined. Unsolved.
Stopping long enough to examine why that morning had shaken something loose inside me felt dangerous in a way I wasn't ready for.
The difference was that I wasn't sure anymore that untouched was what I wanted.