7. Lili
Lili
I was moving before I consciously decided. He stood in the doorway as rain pelted the window behind him, hands at his side, face cracking open. And I was drawn to him.
"Everyone's on the ground," I said. "It's over."
He exhaled all the tension from earlier and, I thought, all his resistance. We felt inevitable in that moment his shoulders dropped and his jaw unclenched.
I put my hand on his chest. I’d never made time for men, never done any of the things I knew were coming next. But I was powerless to stop.
Conrad flinched, toward me. His body pulled toward my palm before his brain caught up and I felt his heart hammer under the cotton. I understood that Conrad Holt had not felt the touch of another person in a very long time.
“Come in,” I heard my voice instruct, though I wasn’t in charge. “Close the door.”
He reached behind him and pulled it shut. The latch clicked and the sound of the storm got quieter from the hallway and louder against the window, the building groaning in a gust that rattled the blinds.
The whole building was empty. Diaz gone. Sharon gone. Pilots grounded, crew dispersed. Just us and the storm and the fluorescent light buzzing overhead and his heartbeat under my hand.
"Here's what's going to happen," I said.
"I'm going to copy every requisition record in that file room.
Every substitution. Every discrepancy between what you ordered and what arrived.
I'm going to cross-reference the parts logs against manufacturer specs and build a case that cannot be buried or explained away by a team of lawyers in Boston. "
He was watching me. Green eyes steady. He hadn't blinked.
"When it's done, I'll bring it to someone who isn't my father."
His voice rasped. “That'll cost you everything. Your job. Your family."
"I know."
The wind hit the window hard enough to make the blinds jump. Somewhere in the building, a door banged open and shut.
"You're sure," he said.
"I've never been more sure of anything."
He leaned forward, elbows to his knees, head dropped. I watched the back of his neck — dark hair cut short, skin tan from working outside — and I wanted to put my mouth there so badly my teeth ached.
"I'm not asking your permission," I said. "I'm telling you what I'm going to do."
"I hear you."
The lights flickered once, held. The storm pushed against the building like it was trying to get in. "Now stand up."
He did, and moved close enough that I had to tilt my head to see his face. He smelled of engine grease and rain and plain soap and underneath it just him, the warm fact of his body.
"I am going to do something that has nothing to do with the file room or my father or your guilt".
His fists were clenched at his sides. I could see the cords in his forearms, the grease under his nails, the scar on his left knuckle I'd noticed the first day.
I put both hands on his chest and pushed him backward until his shoulders hit the wall.
The thud went straight down through the framing of the building, matching the baseline of the wind outside.
He didn't move. He didn't resist. He stood against the drywall with my palms flat against his chest and he looked down at me with his jaw set so hard a muscle was jumping below his ear.
"Lili," he said.
"Shut up, Conrad."
I stepped in until the tips of my boots touched his. Enough to see his face. Enough to see the raw hunger etched into his features. "No one has ever... I've never felt anything like that before," I whispered, the confession tearing out of me.
He went still, his entire muscular frame locking up as his eyes blazed down at me. "What do you mean, Lili? Tell me."
"I mean no one's ever — I haven't —" I held his gaze. "I'm… yours. Completely. You're the first man to ever touch me like this."
He didn't move. His hands flexed against my thighs, a fierce, protective growl vibrating in his chest. His mouth was still wet from our kiss, and the realization that he was the sole ruler of this territory transformed him from a man in love to a protector prepared to kill for me.
Something moved behind his eyes — the last wall, the last excuse — and I watched it fall.
The sound he made when my body pressed against his was low and rough and not entirely human.
I felt the length of him hard against my stomach and heat flooded low and immediate between my legs.
His hands clamped into my hair, tilting my head, his tongue sliding against mine.
I grabbed fistfuls of his henley and pulled him closer and he groaned into my mouth and his hips pressed forward and I gasped at the thickness of his cock against me through our clothes.
His mouth went to my neck. My jaw. The place behind my ear where I stopped thinking. His rough palms slid under my shirt onto the bare skin of my stomach and I arched into him.
He pulled back. Reached behind his neck.
Pulled the henley over his head in one motion.
His chest was broad and hard, dark hair across his pectorals, a scar along his ribs I'd ask about later. His body was the most beautiful thing I had ever imagined. I realized every fantasy I’d ever had, every night alone in the dark with my hand wandering down my own body… it was all for him.
I put my mouth on his collarbone. He made a sound like I'd wounded him.
His hands found the button of my jeans. He looked at me — checking — and I lifted my hips and he pulled them down and off, work boots with them. He dropped to his knees.
Conrad Holt on his knees in front of me with the storm shaking the building. I would remember this image for the rest of my life.
He pressed his mouth to the inside of one thigh. Then the other. His hands slid up my legs, thumbs tracing the stretch marks on my skin. I flinched — an old reflex, the instinct to close up and cover the places where my body had dared to be soft and wide and too much.
He stopped. He pulled back far enough to look up at me, his rough hands still bracketing my thighs, and said, "You were made for me. Every inch. Don't hide from me."
My throat closed. I nodded.
He hooked his fingers in the waistband of my underwear and pulled them down until I was bare on the desk in front of him and his eyes moved over me with a focus I recognized from the hangar — the way he looked at a machine he was about to take apart and put back together better.
His mouth found me.
His tongue slid through my folds, slow, deliberate, and my hand shot to his hair and gripped.
This was new and foreign, yet with Conrad it felt natural, inevitable.
He groaned against me and the vibration made my hips buck and he pressed one hand into the soft rise of my stomach to hold me still.
He worked me steadily, attentive, reading every response, adjusting pressure and speed and angle with the same concentration he gave a torque wrench.
His tongue circled my clit and I bit my own hand to keep from screaming.
He pulled my hand away from my mouth, expression dark and powerful. Wanting and commanding all at once. "Let me hear you."
I stopped trying to be quiet.
He licked into me deeper, his tongue pushing inside, and then back to my clit, two fingers sliding into me while his mouth stayed where it was, and I could feel the calluses on those fingers, the roughness of a working man's hands inside the softest part of me, and I shook.
He pulled back just far enough to speak against my skin. "You taste like freedom. Like forever."
I couldn't answer. His mouth was back on me and his fingers curled and found a spot that whited out my vision at the edges and I came with his name in my mouth, my back arching off the desk, my thighs clamping around his head, my hand pulling his hair hard enough that it had to hurt.
He held me through it — his free hand at the small of my back, steadying me — and when the aftershocks released their grip and I opened my eyes he was still on his knees, looking up at me like I was the first sunrise he'd seen in five years.
I was panting. The lights had gone out at some point — who could keep track — and the emergency light in the hall threw a thin red line through the gap under the door. Enough to see his face. Enough to see everything.
"I've been waiting my whole life to feel that," I said.
He purred—not like a cat. Like a panther.
I looked into his face and moaned. “I need you, Conrad.”