Chapter 17 #2
“Let me wash you first.”
I closed my eyes and let him. He reached for the soap and washed my shoulders, my arms, the small of my back, his hands careful and thorough.
When his fingers glided through my folds, I almost came on the spot.
I took the soap from him and did the same, working around his bruises, rinsing the last of the mission off his skin until the water ran clean.
When I grazed his cock, a groan crawled up his throat and he smoothly took the bar from my hand.
I watched with a laser-focused desire as he wrapped his soapy hand around himself, finished what I’d wanted to do with swift precision.
I wanted him. I wanted him inside me. Above me. Around me.
We dried off and walked into his bedroom, this place just as stark as everywhere else in the house.
A bed with a dark comforter pulled military-tight.
A nightstand with a lamp. No photographs.
No books. Nothing that revealed who lived here except the faint indentation on one side of the mattress that said a person slept in this bed alone, every night, in a room he’d stripped of everything personal because personal was a luxury he’d stopped allowing himself.
I dropped the towel.
Travis crossed to me and took my face in his hands and kissed me, and this time it was slow.
So slow that I felt every point of contact separately.
His thumbs on my cheekbones. His mouth gentle on mine.
The warmth of his body an inch from my skin but not touching, not yet, holding back on purpose because the shower had been desperate, and this was going to be something else.
I could feel the difference, and it terrified me. Desperation I could handle. Desperation was simple. This was deliberate.
This was a man choosing, with his eyes open, to be tender with me, and tenderness from Travis Hale was something I had no defenses against.
“You’re shaking,” he said against my mouth.
“I know.”
“Are you cold?”
“No.” I pulled back enough to look at him. “I’m not cold.”
He searched my face. Whatever he found there made him kiss me again, slower, his hands sliding into my hair, and the care in it cracked something in my chest that I wasn’t going to be able to put back together.
He walked me backward until my legs hit the bed.
I sat and he followed me down, settling over me, and the full length of his body against mine was warm and heavy and real.
I pulled him closer with my arms around his neck, and he began kissing me the way he did everything that mattered to him: thoroughly.
My throat. My collarbone. The swell of my breast, where his mouth closed over my nipple and my back arched off the mattress. His hand cupped the other breast, his thumb moving in slow circles, and the dual sensation pulled a sound out of me that would have embarrassed me an hour ago but didn’t now.
I was past embarrassment. I was past everything except the feeling of his mouth on my body and the slow, relentless way he was learning every part of me.
“You’re beautiful.” He said it against my ribs, his mouth moving lower. Not performative. More like it was a fact he’d verified and was entering into record.
He moved down my stomach. Pressed his mouth to the soft skin below my navel, the part of my body I’d always been self-conscious about, and kissed it like it was something worth lingering over.
Then his shoulders were between my thighs, his breath was warm against me, and I twisted my hands in the sheets because I knew what was coming, and the anticipation alone was almost enough to undo me.
“Wait it’s your turn.”
He kissed up my thigh. “Not yet. I have to taste you. You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to.”
I had no idea what that meant but then his tongue found my clit, and it didn’t matter.
My hips bucked and he pinned them down with one arm, firm, holding me in place, and settled into a steady, devastating rhythm.
He flicked, he sucked, he swirled his tongue.
Each movement driving me higher than the last.
I’d been touched before. By men who were fine, who were adequate, who treated sex like a checklist they were trying to complete before the credits rolled. This was nothing like that.
Travis’s focus on the most sensitive part of my body was almost unbearable. He didn’t change what was working. He didn’t try something new. He found the exact pressure and rhythm that made me fall apart and he stayed there with a patience that made me want to scream.
The pleasure built slowly. Not the sharp, compressed urgency of the shower but something deeper, waves that rolled through me and receded and came back stronger, and I could feel him reading every shift in my breathing, every involuntary movement of my hips, responding without ever breaking the rhythm.
I came with my hands fisted in the sheets and his name in my mouth and my body bowing off the mattress.
He held me through it, his hands steady on my hips, and the orgasm rolled through me in long, shuddering waves that left me boneless and trembling and staring at the ceiling trying to remember how language worked.
He kissed the inside of my thigh. Then my hip.
I felt the mattress slightly shift, a quick tug of a towel, then his skin sliding against mine.
He moved up my body slowly, and when I could see his face the expression on it broke something open in my chest. He looked at me like I was the best thing he’d ever seen.
I pushed him onto his back and straddled his thighs. He reached for the nightstand drawer, found what he needed, and I watched him roll the condom on with hands that were still steady. Even now. Even after everything.
His hands gripped my hips as I settled over his cock, and I sank down onto him slowly, watching his face the entire time.
His lips parted. His eyes went half-closed.
His fingers dug into my skin, and I wanted that.
I wanted his hands on me hard enough to leave marks, wanted evidence of this on my flesh, wanted proof in the morning that tonight had been real.
All I could feel was the stretch of him. The fullness. I moved slowly at first, my hands on his chest, feeling his heart slam against my palms. Then faster, because his hips were rising to meet mine and the angle was perfect and the sounds he was making were wrecking me.
Low, involuntary, the sounds of a man who had stopped trying to control anything at all.
I’d never seen Travis lose control. Not really.
Not like this. He was always so contained, so precisely assembled, every part of his life organized and labeled and accounted for.
But underneath me his composure dissolved, and what was left was raw and open and devastating, and I wanted to live in this version of him forever.
His grip on my hips tightened, and he took over. I let him. His hands guided my rhythm, faster now, harder, pulling me down onto him the way he wanted, and the shift sent a jolt through me because this wasn’t careful, measured Travis.
This was a man taking what he needed, and the fact that he needed it from me, that I was the one who could give him this, was its own kind of undoing.
His head pressed back into the pillow and the tendons in his neck went taut and his breathing broke apart into sounds that were barely sounds at all.
I watched every second of it. I wanted to remember every second of it.
The way his jaw clenched and then released.
The way his hands gripped my hips like I was the only solid thing in his world.
The way he said my name when he came, not a groan, not a shout, just my name, rough and wrecked and real.
His arms locked around my waist and pulled me down against his chest, and I buried my face in his neck and held on, and we lay there, tangled together, our breathing ragged and slowing.
After a long time, I rolled off him and on to my back. I turned my head and looked at him.
I reached over and traced the line of his jaw with my fingertip. He turned his head and looked at me, and the green of his eyes in the dim room was the softest thing about him.
A scratching sound came from the other side of the bedroom door. Small, insistent, accompanied by a high, thin mew that escalated into a second and then a third. A chorus of tiny complaints from three animals who had no concept of timing.
Travis looked at the door. Then at me. His lips twitched. Barely.
I pressed my face into his shoulder and laughed.
Helpless, the kind that shook my whole body.
A former CIA operative and an FBI contractor lying naked in an underground bunker while three foster kittens demanded entry like the world’s smallest, furriest chaperone committee arriving fifteen minutes too late.
He rolled his eyes and detoured to the bathroom to dispose of the condom before he walked over to the door. I couldn’t help but admire his striking physique along the way.
The white kitten entered first, tail high, radiating the confidence of an animal that believed every room existed for its personal use. The gray followed. The black one hung back, assessed the situation, and bolted under the bed before either of us could react.
The gray kitten climbed up the mattress, walked across the pillow, and settled on Travis’s chest when he lay back down. It turned twice and dropped into a purring heap against his sternum.
He looked down at it. Then at me. “Don’t say anything.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
The white kitten clawed its way up the foot of the bed and wedged itself between us with a purr. I curled onto my side and Travis’s arm came to rest on my hip.
The black kitten, not wanting to be left out, had made its way up to my pillow and curled behind my head. Its quiet purrs became a tingling vibration in my hair.
I closed my eyes, taking it all in. His breathing was slow and even and the kittens purred and the compound droned its quiet hum around us.
I thought about the way he’d said my name. Both times. In the shower, like he needed the word to prove I was real. In the bedroom, when he came, like it was the only word left in him.
Not Naomi’s name. Mine.
I fell asleep with his arm around me and three small, warm lives pressed against us in the dark.