Chapter 20 TESSA #2
His patience should be studied. He circles and strokes and learns me first, and only when my hips are chasing it does he finally slip one finger into me, watching my face while my body takes it.
Then a second, slower still, a careful stretch that pulls a gasp out of me—and then he crooks them and finds a spot inside me I didn’t know existed, and rubs over it in relentless passes until the pleasure winds so tight I’m gripping the sheets with both hands.
“Ronan—” It comes out as a warning.
He pulls his fingers free, and I nearly sob.
“Not on my hand,” he says.
He moves down the bed and settles between my knees, and there’s no firelight this time and no wind to steal anything from him. He looks at me the same as he looked at me by the windows, and I feel it everywhere his eyes go.
“I’ve wanted this since the beach,” he says. “I didn’t get to see you.”
Then his mouth is on me.
The fire was blind and freezing and it still undid me.
This is daylight. He can see every single thing he’s doing, and he does it slowly, using what he learned on that blanket and improving on it, and every time I get close he eases off and starts again, gentler, until I’m swearing at him with both hands in his hair.
“Ronan. Please.”
Then his fingers come back, two of them, curling into that spot while his mouth keeps working, and between them there’s no decision left for me to make.
It breaks with his eyes on mine and one low command against my thigh.
“Come for me, Tessa.”
I do.
He works me through it, and then he kisses his way back up me while I’m still shaking—my hip, my ribs, the underside of my breast—and when he reaches my mouth he takes it like he’s owed it. I taste myself on him, and I want him more for it.
Then he shifts over me, his weight braced on the good arm.
He holds himself above me, breathing with me, hard everywhere and keeping all of it in check, and his eyes find mine and stay.
“Still with me?” Low. Rough. The same words from the fire.
I’m the one who reaches between us and wraps my hand around him—hot and heavy, thicker than my fingers want to believe, and the breath he pulls in through his teeth is the best sound I’ve heard all day. I’m the one who guides him.
“Yes,” I whisper.
He pushes into me, slow and careful, and it hurts.
A stretch that becomes a burn that punches the breath clean out of me, and my whole body locks up, nails biting into his back. And he stops dead, still inside me, his arms shaking with what it costs him to hold there, and his lips go to my temple, my cheek, my jaw.
“Breathe, Tessa.” My own words, handed straight back to me.
I breathe.
He lifts his head and looks at me, searching my face. “Okay?”
I don’t answer. I pull him down and kiss him instead.
He holds me—the good arm planted beside my head, carrying his weight so I don’t have to, his other hand cradling the back of my head, holding me to him.
“That’s it,” he murmurs, a kiss pressed to my brow.
And little by little, my body opens around him.
The burn banks itself down. And when my hips finally move against his, he lets out a breath he’s been holding since he pushed in, and starts to move.
Gently. Unbearably gently. Slow strokes.
His eyes never leave my face, reading everything that crosses it and adjusting to what he finds—an angle, a pace, a tenderness so absolute it undoes me more than the pleasure does.
It still aches, low and constant, somewhere underneath.
But over the ache is him. Everywhere. Filling senses I didn’t know I had.
“You have no idea,” he says against my ear, “how long I’ve wanted this. Wanted you.”
His rhythm falters, half a second. “I’ve never—”
He stops the sentence with his mouth on mine, and I taste every word he didn’t say.
Somewhere in it, the ache stops mattering.
Somewhere after that, it stops being ache at all, and I’m moving with him, meeting him, past caring how loud I am—and then I feel his control begin to slip.
The rhythm roughening at its edges. His breath breaking.
It is the most beautiful thing I have ever watched, this man coming apart inside his own restraint, because of me.
“Tessa.” My name, wrecked.
“I know,” I whisper. “Let go.”
“Not without you.”
His hand goes between us, and his thumb finds exactly the right place, and the rhythm changes—deeper, harder, every last piece of careful gone out of him.
“I can’t again—”
“You can.” His mouth at my ear, his voice absolutely certain. “Eyes on me when you do.”
So I’m looking right at him when it takes me under, and it’s nothing like the first one—this one tears through me with him buried inside me and my name in his mouth, and he watches every second of it with his jaw set and his eyes black.
And then the man who never lets go of anything lets go, deep, his forehead dropping to mine, and he doesn’t stop moving until there’s nothing left of either of us.
After, he doesn’t roll away. He gathers me in, my ear over his heart, his hand moving slow up and down my back like he’s memorizing the shape of my spine. The sun has moved all the way across the floor. My body aches in places that have never been touched, and I have never felt this taken care of.
He shifts back so he can see my face.
“Are you okay?”
“Better than okay.” He’s still watching me, waiting for the rest. “It was perfect. You were—” There is no word the right size, so I kiss the scar along his jaw instead, and feel his breath catch.
We’re quiet for a while. His fingers move through my hair. The ocean keeps going outside the windows like nothing changed, when everything did.
“So that’s what I’ve been missing,” I say finally, soft, half to myself.
His arms tighten. He presses a kiss into my hair, and when he answers, his voice is rough, rougher than I have ever heard it.
“No,” he says. “That’s what I’ve been missing.”
The man who could have anyone. The man who, by every tabloid’s count, has. And I hear what he’s telling me—that whatever just happened in this bed, he’s never had it either. That we were both new at this today, in the only way that counts.
I fall asleep in a patch of afternoon sun, held against the heartbeat of a man who climbed a staircase to get me here.
Somewhere downstairs, a cane is lying in the middle of the kitchen floor.
Nobody is going anywhere.